“None of this is happening,” she repeated firmly.

“You sound like a broken record!” He was genuinely angry for the first time. “Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that ‘none of this is happening’ shit. You have to wise up, ’Detta.”

“Don’t call me that! I hate that!” she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.

“Sorry. Jesus! I didn’t know.”

“I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!”

“But your memories don’t stop in Oxford,” he said softly.

“W-What?” Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.

“If you got whacked in Oxford, how come your memories don’t stop there?”

“There isn’t always a lot of logic to things like this.” She was rubbing her temples again. “And now, if it’s all the same to you, Eddie, I’d just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It’s quite bad.”

“I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy’s, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don’t do things like that, but you also told me you don’t wear jewelry. You told me that even though you’d looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn’t see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” she shouted. “My head hurts!”

“All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn’t in Oxford.”

“Leave me alone,” she said dully.

Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full waterskins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.

“I wish I could help you,” Eddie said, “but to do that, I guess I’d have to be real.”

He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.

Eddie went to meet Roland.

8

“Sit down.” Eddie took the bags. “You look all in.”

“I am. I’m getting sick again.”

Eddie looked at the gunslinger’s flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. “I hoped it wouldn’t happen, but I’m not that surprised, man. You didn’t bat for the cycle. Balazar didn’t have enough Keflex.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“If you don’t take a penicillin drug long enough, you don’t kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We’ll need more, but at least there’s a door to go. In the meantime you’ll just have to take it easy.” But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta’s missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn’t see how.