The first time Lester wakes up, he stares at the gray-mint hospital ceiling, and inwardly unravels as he understands that this is not a dream.
Pearl is dead and he is a murderer and there is so, so much evidence, and if she'd just done as he asked and taken it back—
—he might have done it anyway, he realizes, as he stares into nothing and tries not to know what he is.
Eventually he falls asleep again, to the roar and clunk and rage of the washing-machine that he thinks he will hear for as long as he ever lives.
—-
The second time Lester wakes up, he feels someone staring at him, feels it like ice down the back of his neck. He opens his eyes to a familiar, calm, gentle smile, and friendly brown eyes that bite like a snake and look and look him all through and out the other side.
He huddles further into the white sheets. They don't lessen the cold at all.
"Hi, Lester," says the man whose name he doesn't know. Heck, heck, what was he thinking, risking everything on the advice of a man whose darn name he doesn't know—
"What d'you want?" he slurs. They've had him on sedatives, apparently, judging by the IV bag and the fogginess of his brain.
The man leans forward in his chair. He is already perched strangely, like he always does, a bird ready to take flight at any moment. "I was thinking we could go for some coffee later," he says, in that grindingly calm, reasonable tone of his, "and then we've got some cleaning up to do."
"What, yer goin' to fix everything?" Lester spits. "Jus' like that?"
"No," says the man with the bowlcut. "I'm going to teach you how."
And then he is adjusting a needle stuck in the IV, and Lester feels like maybe he should say something about it, but he's so sleepy and it's such a small needle and geez, he just wants to go back to sleep, geez—
There is no accusing clunk and roar as he slips back into unconsciousness. There is only the snake in the man's eyes as it crawls down his throat and bites at his insides and promises to give him fangs, too, if he'll only just listen, if he'll only just be reasonable.
If there's anything Lester has always been good at, as a necessary survival skill, it's being reasonable.
When the nurse comes back in to start her shift, he is asleep, and there is no sign that Lorne Malvo was ever there.