was the opposite. It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed?
He shut down at one o’clock. He had written two pages, and the feeling that he was reverting to the nervous and neurotic man who’d almost burned down his house three years ago was getting harder to dismiss. He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.
Was it possible that he was coming down with Alzheimer’s? Could that be it?
“Don’t be dumb,” he said, and was dismayed at how nasal he sounded. Also hoarse. Pretty soon he’d lose his voice entirely. Not that there was anyone out here to talk to except himself.
Get your ass home. You’ve got a wife and two fine kids to talk to.
But if he did that, he would lose the book. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. After four or five days, when he was back in Falmouth and feeling better, he would open the Bitter River documents and the prose there would look like something someone else had written, an alien story he would have no idea how to finish. Leaving now would be like throwing away a precious gift, one that might never be given again.
Had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia, Roy DeWitt’s daughter had said, the subtext being just another damn fool. And was he going to do the same?
The lady or the tiger. The book or your life. Was the choice really that stark and melodramatic? Surely not, but he surely felt like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, there was no doubt about that.
Nap. I need a nap When I wake up, I’ll be able to decide.
So he took another knock of Dr. King’s Magic Elixir—or whatever it was called—and climbed the stairs to the bedroom he and Lucy had shared on other trips out here. He went to sleep, and when he woke up, the rain and wind had arrived and the choice was made for him. He had a call to make. While he still could.
19
“Hey, honey, it’s me. I’m sorry I pissed you off. Really.”
She ignored this completely. “It doesn’t sound like allergies to me, Mister. It sounds like you’re sick.”
“It’s just a cold.” He cleared his throat, or tried to. “A pretty bad one, I guess.”
The throat-clearing provoked coughing. He covered the mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone, but he supposed she heard it anyway. The wind gusted, rain slapped against the windows, and the lights flickered.
“So now what? You just hole up?”
“I think I have to,” he said, then rushed on. “It’s not the book, not now. I’d come back if I thought it was safe, but that storm is here already. The lights just flickered. I’m going to lose the power and the phone before dark, practically guaranteed. Here I’ll pause so you can say I told you so.”
“I told you so,” she said. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, how bad are you?”
“Not that bad,” he said, which was a far bigger lie than telling her the satellite dish didn’t work. He thought he was quite bad indeed, but if he said that, it was hard to gauge how she might react. Would she call the Presque Isle cops and request a rescue? Even in his current condition, that seemed like an overreaction. Not to mention embarrassing.
“I hate this, Drew. I hate you being up there and cut off. Are you sure you can’t drive out?”
“I might have been able to earlier, but I took some cold medicine before I laid down for a nap and overslept. Now I don’t dare chance it. There are still washouts and plugged culverts from last winter. A hard rain like this is apt to put long stretches of the road underwater. The Suburban might make it, but if it didn’t, I could be stranded six miles from the cabin and nine miles from the Big 90.”
There was a pause, and in it Drew fancied he could hear what she was thinking: Had to be a man about it, didn’t you, just