Read Bag of Bones for Free Online

never lost a minute’s sleep over it. But I called her at the inn where she and her friend Bryn were staying; I told her I had finished, and listened as she said the words I’d called to hear—words that slipped into an Irish telephone line, travelled to a microwave transmitter, rose like a prayer to some satellite, and then came back down to my ear: “Well, then that’s all right, isn’t it?”
    This custom began, as I say, after the second book. When we’d each had a glass of champagne and a refill, I took her into the office, where a single sheet of paper still stuck out of my forest-green Selectric. On the lake, one last loon cried down dark, that call that always sounds to me like something rusty turning slowly in the wind.
    â€œI thought you said you were done,” she said.
    â€œEverything but the last line,” I said. “The book,such as it is, is dedicated to you, and I want you to put down the last bit.”
    She didn’t laugh or protest or get gushy, just looked at me to see if I really meant it. I nodded that I did, and she sat in my chair. She had been swimming earlier, and her hair was pulled back and threaded through a white elastic thing. It was wet, and two shades darker red than usual. I touched it. It was like touching damp silk.
    â€œParagraph indent?” she asked, as seriously as a girl from the steno pool about to take dictation from the big boss.
    â€œNo,” I said, “this continues.” And then I spoke the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to pour the champagne. “‘He slipped the chain over her head, and then the two of them walked down the steps to where the car was parked.’”
    She typed it, then looked around and up at me expectantly. “That’s it,” I said. “You can write The End, I guess.”
    Jo hit the RETURN button twice, centered the carriage, and typed The End under the last line of prose, the IBM’s Courier type ball (my favorite) spinning out the letters in their obedient dance.
    â€œWhat’s the chain he slips over her head?” she asked me.
    â€œYou’ll have to read the book to find out.”
    With her sitting in my desk chair and me standing beside her, she was in perfect position to put her face where she did. When she spoke, her lips moved against the most sensitive part of me. There were a pair of cotton shorts between us and that was all.
    â€œVe haff vays off making you talk,” she said.
    â€œI’ll just bet you do,” I said.
    *   *   *
    I at least made a stab at the ritual on the day I finished All the Way from the Top. 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 Top, 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