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"All those years your ave up what you wanted… that took h eain and said alenuinely touched to hear his sacrifice acknowledged
Then as if a perverse sense of shame compelled him to discount, if not mock, his virtue, Lanny added, "But all of that doesn’t leave et in the car and drive away
In a silence of vanished sea gulls, the breathless day waned, while the hills and the radually drew hway, the forty-foot woodenwheels of industry or brutal ideology, or ainst the diround of the pilloas Billy’s despair and his hope, his loss and his expectation
She was an anchor in two senses, the first beneficial The sight of her held Billy fast and stable whatever the currents of a day
Less mercifully, every memory of her from the time when she had been not just in the quick of life, but also vivacious, was a link of chain enwrapping him If she sank from coma into full oblivion, the chain would pull taut, and he would sink with her into the darkest waters
He came here not only to keep her conize his presence even in her internal prison, but also to be taught how to care and not to care, how to sit still, and perhaps to find elusive peace This evening, peace was more elusive than usual
His attention shifted often from her face to his watch, and to thebeyond which the acid-yellow day soured slowly toward a bitter twilight
He held his little notebook He paged through it, reading the mysterious words that she had spoken
When he found a sequence that particularly intrigued him, he read it aloud:
"--soft black drizzle--"
"--death of the sun--"
"--the scarecrow of a suit--"
"--livers of fat geese--"
"--narrow street, high houses--"
"--a cistern to hold the fog--"
"--strange for bells--"
His hope was that, hearing her enigmatic coma-talk read back to her, she would be spurred to speak, perhaps to expand upon those utterances and hts his performance had sometimes drawn a reply from her But never did she clarify what previously she had said Instead she delivered a new and different sequence of equally inscrutable words
This evening she responded with silence, and occasionally with a sigh uncolored by emotion, as if she were a machine that breathed in a shallow rhythes After reading aloud two sequences, Billy returned the notebook to his pocket
Agitated, he had read her words with too much force, too ht he sounded angry, which would do Barbara no good
He paced the roo Pines stood adjacent to a gently sloping vineyard Beyond thelay regireen leaves that would be crirapes still many weeks from maturity
The work lanes between the vine roere mottled black with the shadows of the day’s last hour, purple with grape pohty feet from the , a man alone stood in one of those lanes He had no tools with hirower or a vintner out for a walk, he must not be in a hurry He stood in one place, feet planted wide apart, hands in his trouser pockets He see the convalescent hoht, no details of the man’s appearance could be discerned He stood in the lane between vines with his back to the declining sun, which revealed hi feet on hollow stairs, which was in fact the thunder of his heart, Billy warned hiht come, he would need calm nerves and a clear mind to cope
He turned away from theHe went to the bed
Barbara’s eyes moved under her lids The specialists said this indicated a drea that any coma was a far deeper sleep than mere sleep itself, Billy wondered if hers were more intense than ordinary drea with a thunderstorm of sound, drenched in color He worried that her dreahtmares, vivid and perpetual When he kissed her forehead, she murmured, "The wind is in the east"
He waited, but she said no h her eyes darted and rolled from phantom to phantom under her closed lids
Because those words contained no menace and because no sense of peril darkened her voice, he chose to believe that her current dreah he didn’t want it, he took frohtstand a square creamcolored envelope on which his na script He tucked it in a pocket, unread, for he knew that it had been left by Barbara’s doctor, Jordan Ferrier
When medical issues of substance needed to be discussed, the physician always used the telephone He resorted to written es only when he had turned froain, Billy discovered that the watcher in the vineyard had gone
Mo Pines, he half expected to find a third note on his windshield He was spared that discovery
Most likely the ed in honest business Nothingless
Billy drove directly hoe, climbed the back-porch steps, and found his kitchen door unlocked, ajar
Chapter 8
Billy had not been threatened in either of the notes The danger confronting him was not to life and limb He would have preferred physical peril to the moral jeopardy that he faced
Nevertheless, when he found the back door of the house ajar, he considered waiting in the yard until Lanny arrived with Sheriff Palmer That option occupied his consideration only for a utless, but he didn’t want to think it of himself
He went inside No one waited in the kitchen
The draining daylight drizzled down the s hts as he went through the house He found no intruder in any roons of intrusion, either
By the tiun to wonder if he ht have failed to close and lock the door when he had left the house earlier in the day