Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

I at least made a stab at the ritual on the day I finished All the Pay from the bp. It felt hollow, form from which the magical substance had departed, but I’d expected that. I didn’t do it out of superstition but out of respect and love. A kind of memorial, if you will. Or, if you will, Johanna’s real funeral service, finally taking place a month after she was in the ground. It was the last third of September, and still hot—the hottest late summer I can remember. All during that final sad push on the book, I kept thinking how much I missed her. . but that never slowed me down. And here’s something else: hot as it was in Derry, so hot I usually worked in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, I never once thought of going to our place at the lake. It was as if my memory of Sara Laughs had been entirely wiped from my mind. Perhaps that was because by the time I finished 3p, that truth was finally sinking in.

She wasn’t just in Ireland this time. My office at the lake is tiny, but has a view. The office in Derry is long, book-lined, and windowless. On this particular evening, the overhead fans—there are three of them—were on and paddling at the soupy air. I came in dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and rubber thong sandals, carrying a tin Coke tray with the bottle of champagne and the two chilled glasses on it. At the far end of that railroad-car room, under an eave so.steep I’d had to almost crouch so as not to bang my head when I got up (over the years I’d also had to withstand Jo’s protests that I’d picked the absolute worst place in the room for a workstation), the screen of my Macintosh glowed with words.

I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief—maybe the worst storm—but I went ahead anyway… and our emotions always surprise us, don’t they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.

I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up.

“I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?”

There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.

I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyone’s favorite loving God.