She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. “Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o’clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?”

“Who am I?” she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question—“Who am I?”—even now I don’t think she knows she asked it.

Or when.

Because she had asked before.

Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.

3

Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland’s face.

“How come she doesn’t know?”

“I can’t say. Shock, I suppose.”

“Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy’s? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliff’s left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?”

Roland didn’t answer.

More dazed than ever, the Lady said, “Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?”

Now it was Eddie’s turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?

The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can’t you see she’s in shock?

I know what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn’t wipe out my memory banks.

Speaking of shock, he’d gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland’s inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat . . . but the truth was Eddie couldn’t have used the knife anyway—not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy’s rushed forward—he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy’s, all right. Macy’s for sure.

One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking Jesus, he’s got her, all right, but she sure don’t look happy about it.