“Lisey opened her eyes, thinking she had drifted away from some daytime task or moment and had had a brief but amazingly detailed dream in which Scott was dead and she was engaged in the Herculean job of cleaning out his writing stables. With them open she immediately understood that Scott indeed was dead; she was asleep in her own bed after delivering Manda home, and this was her dream.”

Even two years after his death, Lisey still struggles to comprehend the loss of her husband. This moment situates the journey that she will undergo throughout the text with The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past. Now, she struggles to acknowledge her husband’s death; by the end of the text, she will be forced to grieve and begin to heal.

“In the end Scott’s thing had come back for him, anyway—that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy. Lisey looked around the study fearfully for just a moment, and wondered if it was watching her now.”

This moment marks the first moment of tension and a tone of danger in the text. Although the reader does not know what the “long boy” is or what killed Scott, it nonetheless induces anxiety surrounding what happened to him and what will happen to Lisey. This moment foreshadows the danger she will face as she uncovers what happened to Scott.

“So now come the things they will never speak of later, not to others or between themselves. Too awful. Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret. She leans close to him on the baking pavement, sure he is dying, nevertheless determined to hold onto him if she can. If it means fighting the long boy for him—with nothing but her fingernails, if it comes to that—she will.”

Lisey uses a metaphor to describe her marriage to Scott: There is the public version that people see and the secrets they hide, represented in the form of two parts of a heart. This metaphor alludes to another of King’s works, The Dark Half, which explores the life of author Thad Beaumont, who embodies his dark, murderous alter ego to become a successful writer. This allusion, as well as Lisey’s metaphor, ties both stories to The Tensions Between Private Suffering and Artistic Creation, as an author’s public persona is portrayed as a mask for what they endure to produce their work.

“And behind the door across the way, the one wearing the HIGH VOLTAGE! sign, the telephone began to shout again. Lisey froze where she was, feeling more goosebumps. And yet there was also a sense of inevitability, as if this was what she’d come out here for, not the silver spade at all but to take a call.”

Up until this point in the story, the danger Lisey faces is entirely internal, as she reflects on what killed Scott and her memories that trouble her. However, this moment, where Dooley calls her for the first time, marks the first sense of external danger. The diction, such as the “HIGH VOLTAGE!” and the use of the word “shout” to describe the phone, evokes a sense of dread and foreshadows the danger that will come with Dooley’s call.

“Dear God, don’t let this be another one of those, she thought. Don’t let it be another Blondie. Yet she saw she once more had the silver spade in her hand—she’d grasped its wooden shaft without thinking when she picked up the phone—and that seemed to promise her that it was, it was.”

Here, as Lisey talks with Dooley on the phone for the first time, she draws a parallel between Dooley and Cole, whom she refers to as “Blondie.” This comparison furthers the sense of dread surrounding the call, while emphasizing the way that the past continues to impact Lisey. Even years after Scott was shot, she still fears people who seek his work, underscoring The Tensions Between Private Suffering and Artistic Creation. It also foreshadows the threat that Dooley will indeed become.

“[N]ot only is this man in love with her, he’s half in love with death and more than ready to agree with every mean and hurtful thing anyone says about him.

Anyone?

No, not quite. He’s not quite that vulnerable. Just anyone he loves. And Lisey suddenly realizes she’s not the only one who has said almost nothing about her past.”

Lisey has these thoughts after she and Scott fight, then Scott harms himself by punching the greenhouse wall. Her realization is that she and Scott only have a superficial relationship, as they know little about each other’s past. This recognition underscores the theme of Love as Involving Shared Hardship and Burdens: For them to truly love each other, they will need to accept each other’s histories and trauma.

“But [Lisey] couldn’t look around. For a long time she couldn’t move at all. What finally impels her to speak is the strengthening light. Night is almost over. If Scott has come back—if she was really awake and not just dreaming this—then there must be a reason. And it wouldn’t be to harm her. Never to harm her. At least…not on purpose.”

As Lisey lies in bed with Amanda and hears her speak with Scott’s words and inflection, she questions whether it is real and, if it is, what it means that he is speaking to her. It is important to note her diction, as she insists that Scott would “never” harm her, then pauses, then notes, “not on purpose.” This fact foreshadows the troubled and violent past that will be revealed about Scott’s past throughout the text.

“[She] looked at herself in the mirror. ‘New woman,’ she told the reflection. ‘American Beauty.’ She bared a great deal of expensive dental work at herself. The eyes above this gator grin, however, looked doubtful.

‘Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask—’

Be quiet about that, leave it be.

‘I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse—’

‘Only Scott never said fooled,’ she told her reflection.

Shut up, little Lisey!

—how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.”

As Lisey prepares to take Amanda to Greenlawn, she stands before the mirror and assesses her features. The mirror serves as a metaphorical representation of Lisey’s internal conflict, as two parts of her battle over the past. This conflict is reflected in the quote’s structure, as words from the past threaten to invade her thoughts and she desperately tries to push them away, not yet ready to truly face it.

“I don’t want to go back to The Antlers that weekend. Not to the snow we thought was so magical, not under the yum-yum tree where we ate the sandwiches and drank the wine, not to the bed we shared that night and the stories he told—benches and bools and lunatic fathers. I’m so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see. Please, no more.”

As Lisey thinks about her memories of The Antlers, where she first learned about Scott’s dark past, the good and bad memories are juxtaposed in her mind as she wrestles with The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past. She thinks of the things she enjoyed, like being with Scott and the “magic” of the tree, then quickly equates them with Boo’ya Moon, Sparky, and Scott’s troubling past. This quote also develops the theme of Love as Involving Shared Hardship and Burdens, as it directly compares the two parts of Lisey’s marriage—both the good and the bad that she accepts as part of being in love with Scott.

“‘If Dooley had shown up with a truckload of Scott’s stories, would that have kept you from taking them?’

‘I don’t know.’

That, [Lisey] thought, was actually honest, and so she asked him something else. ‘Do you know what you’ve done? What you’ve set in motion?’”

Lisey’s rhetorical questions, where she asks Woodbody if he knows “what [he’s] done” by encouraging Dooley, force Woodbody to take accountability for discussing Lisey and Scott’s work. This moment reinforces The Tensions Between Private Suffering and Artistic Creation, as Woodbody gave little thought to Lisey as a person or how Scott’s work impacts her. Instead, he was selfishly focused on wanting Scott’s writings, a fact which now forces him to deal with his lack of empathy.

“As she whirls around and around, a tornado now for sure, she screams his name again and again, screams Scott and Scott and Scott, crying for grief, crying for loss, crying for rage; crying for him to explain how he could leave her so, crying for him to come back, oh to come back. Never mind everything the same, nothing is the same without him.”

In this moment, Lisey looks through the cedar box at memories of her marriage with Scott. The metaphor, comparing Lisey to a “tornado,” underscores the grief and pain of loss that she feels. This point marks a shift in Lisey’s character, as she begins to grieve in the act of acknowledging—and eventually accepting—the past.

“She could close the box. She could draw the curtain. She could let the past be the past. […] She sighed—it was a wretched, lonely sound to her own ears—and decided to go on. To play Pandora after all.”

This moment marks a turning point for Lisey’s character. Moments before, she grieved at the initial memories from her marriage. Now, she must choose whether to continue down that path, actualizing the theme of The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past, or to turn back and continue to repress it. She uses an allusion, comparing herself to Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology who opened her box and released evil into the world. In Lisey’s mind, continuing to open her own box will release dangerous memories she is not sure she is capable of facing.

“[Lisey] was dismayed by [Dooley’s] ordinariness. Even standing in the doorway of her little never-was barn office with a gun in one hand (he had what looked like a lunch-sack in the other), she wasn’t sure she could have picked him out of a police lineup.”

The first time Lisey sees Dooley, she remarks on how “ordinary” he is. This fact underscores his danger as the novel’s primary antagonist. Instead of being someone violent, angry, or clearly dangerous, he instead seems like just another person. This makes it even more difficult for Lisey to understand how dangerous she is and defeat him.

“Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he’ll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that’s one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix).”

After Paul attacks Scott, his father subdues him, then sends Scott into the yard to get chains to bind him. As Scott returns with them, he drops one on his foot, an injury that he notes remains with him forever. The “place” he refers to that cannot heal it is Boo’ya Moon. The fact that Boo’ya Moon’s power cannot heal him is a metaphorical representation of grief and trauma: Completely healing is rarely possible; instead, it is a journey of acknowledgement and acceptance.

“‘In the winter of 1996 I went again. I went to bring him back.’

There it was, and the world did not end. […] In fact she thought she even felt a little better, and maybe that wasn’t so surprising. Maybe when you got right down to where the short hairs grew, truth was a bool, and all it wanted was to come out.”

Lisey speaks aloud as she remembers, putting into words that she went to Boo’ya Moon in 1996, a fact which she has avoided saying because it would be a form of concrete remembering. Her reaction to these words, surprised that it made her “feel a little better,” emphasizes the theme of The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past: She begins to heal when she directly confronts her traumatic past.

“Two things have tied [Scott] to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.”

This thought from Lisey after she saves him from Boo’ya Moon and his catatonic state provides insight into his character and his mental health episodes. Love is a key part of Scott’s ability to survive for two reasons: The “waist” he can touch represents physical support, while the “ear” represents the outlet Lisey provides for him to acknowledge, address, and grapple with his past. This passage speaks to Love as Involving Shared Hardship and Burdens.

“She glanced at the clock on the nightstand as she peeled off her soaked shorts and smiled, not because there was anything intrinsically funny about ten minutes to twelve on a morning in June, but because one of Scrooge’s lines from A Christmas Carol occurred to her: ‘The spirits have done it all in one night.’”

This quote is an allusion to the novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. In that story, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts on Christmas night—past, present, and future—which forces him to reconcile with what he has done and where he is headed if he does not change. His journey illuminates Lisey’s, as she takes a similar path with regard to The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past. She confronts her past memories, grieves and accepts them, then moves forward into a healthier life.

“But while [Amanda] was bent over, she took the opportunity to rub Charlie Corriveau’s card briskly over her green-clad fanny. No longer caring if Jim Dooley might be watching from the woods, no longer thinking of Jim Dooley at all, Lisey collapsed to a sitting position on the porch, now wheezing with laughter because she had almost no breath left. She might have laughed so hard once or twice with Scott, but maybe not. Maybe not even then.”

This moment of levity, as Lisey and Amanda prepare to confront Dooley, emphasizes the change that they have both undergone in the text. For Amanda, she has recovered from the thing that caused her mental health episode: the return of her ex-boyfriend. For Lisey, she is able to laugh despite the trauma she has been through, conveying that she has already begun to heal.

“[W]hat conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn’t waiting for her along the path in Boo’ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn’t wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo’ya Moon behind.”

This version of Lisey stands in stark contrast to the one from the beginning of the text. Before, she woke up from a dream where Scott was still alive, and questioned what her reality was. Now, she bluntly states and accepts Scott’s death, an important step in understanding The Value of Confronting and Accepting the Past.

“Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine’s gone and the hour is none.

All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.

And now—

In the always perfect, never-ending moment of now. […] Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair.”

Here, Lisey leads Dooley into the forest and prepares to hit him with the shovel. Her change in the text is clear as she repeats the word “now” and emphasizes its importance. As she has grappled with her past, she now uses it to inform the present, remembering the last time she used the shovel 18 years ago and finding the strength to defeat Dooley.

“[Lisey] looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman’s high firm breasts. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn’t ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

‘I have always loved you, Scott,’ she told the empty study.”

Lisey’s final moments in the study convey her acceptance of the past and her grief, creating a tone of contentment. She remembers when she met Scott but reflects on it fondly, accepting everything that she has been through as a tradeoff for years of happiness with him. This moment underscores the theme of Love as Involving Shared Hardship and Burdens, as she finally accepts that she wouldn’t change the past if it meant losing Scott.

“Scott had written in the present tense, that what he had written seemed ouched in occasionally childish prose, and that the story seemed to start in the middle. The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn’t know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn’t save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn’t know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky.”

Before Lisey begins reading Scott’s story to her, she reflects on the in medias res nature of his writing. However, she anchors this understanding of his writing to the past. Her insistence that it doesn’t truly “start in the middle” underscores the value of her newfound acceptance of his history, emphasizing how all of these things inform this moment.

“Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death’s door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea.”

As Scott reflects on the tense moment where Sparky’s boss comes to their door, his writing style reflects the feeling of danger and fear that encapsulate this moment. He writes quickly, using no punctuation, and in stream-of-consciousness sentences. This technique reflects the panic that he feels as he believes he moves closer to his father killing someone.