Lisey’sStory Read online

  (hush)

  “I would have believed him, leave it at that,” she whispered, and put her head down, and closed her eyes against tears that did not come. Eyes that had wept at “Zack McCool”’s set speech were now dry as stones. Silly smucking eyes!

  The manuscripts in the crammed drawers of his desks and the main filing cabinet upstairs were most certainly not bools; this Lisey knew. Some were copies of published short stories, some were alternate versions of those stories. In the desk Scott had called Dumbo’s Big Jumbo she had marked at least three unfinished novels and what appeared to be a finished novella—and wouldn’t Woodbody just drool. There were also half a dozen finished short stories Scott had apparently never cared enough to send out for publication, most of them years old from the look of the typefaces. She wasn’t qualified to say what was trash and what was treasure, although she was sure it would all be of interest to Landon scholars. This, however…this bool, to use Scott’s word…

  She was gripping the handle of the silver spade, and hard. It was a real thing in what suddenly felt like a very cobwebby world. She opened her eyes again and said, “Scott, was this just a goof, or are you still messing with me?”

  No answer. Of course. And she had a couple of sisters that needed seeing to. Surely Scott would have understood her shoving all this on the back burner for the time being.

  In any case, she decided to take the spade along.

  She liked the way it felt in her hand.

  6

  Lisey plugged in the phone and then left in a hurry, before the damned thing could start ringing again. Outside the sun was setting and a strong westerly wind had gotten up, explaining the draft that had whooshed past her when she had opened the door to take the first of her two upsetting telephone calls: no ghosts there, babyluv. This day seemed at least a month long, but that wind, lovely and somehow fine-grained, like the one in her dream the night before, soothed and refreshed her. She crossed from the barn to the kitchen without fearing “Zack McCool” was lurking somewhere nearby. She knew how calls from cell phones sounded way out here: crackly and barely there. According to Scott, it was the power-lines (which he liked to call “UFO refueling stations”). Her buddy “Zack” had been coming in clear as a bell. That particular Deep Space Cowboy had been on a landline, and she doubted like hell if her next-door neighbor had loaned him their phone so he could threaten her.

  She got her car-keys and slipped them into the side pocket of her jeans (unaware that she was still carrying Amanda’s Little Notebook of Compulsions in the back pocket—although she would become aware, in the fullness of time); she also got the bulkier ring with all the keys to the Landon kingdom domestic on it, each still labeled in Scott Landon’s neat hand. She locked the house, then trudged back to lock the barn’s sliding doors together and the door to Scott’s study at the top of the outside stairs. Once that was done, she went to her car with the spade on her shoulder and her shadow trailing out long beside her on the dooryard dirt in the last of that day’s fading red Junelight.

  IV. Lisey and The Blood-Bool

  (All the Bad-Gunky)

  1

  Driving to Amanda’s along the recently widened and repaved Route 17 was a matter of fifteen minutes, even slowing for the blinker where 17 crossed the Deep Cut Road to Harlow. Lisey spent more of it than she wanted to thinking about bools in general and one bool in particular: the first. That one had been no joke.

  “But the little idiot from Lisbon Falls went ahead and married him anyway,” she said, laughing, then took her foot off the gas. Here was Patel’s Market on the left—Texaco self-serve pumps on clean black asphalt under blinding white lights—and she felt an amazingly strong urge to pull in and grab a pack of cigarettes. Good old Salem Lights. And while she was there, she could get some of those Nissen doughnuts Manda liked, the squash ones, and maybe some HoHos for herself.

  “You numbah one crazy baby,” she said, smiling, and stepped smartly down on the gas again. Patel’s receded. She was running with her dims on now, although there was still plenty of twilight. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw the silly silver shovel lying on the back seat, and said it again, this time laughing: “You numbah one crazy baby, ah so!”

  And what if she was? Ah so what?

  2

  Lisey parked behind Darla’s Prius and was only halfway to the door of Amanda’s trim little Cape Cod when Darla came out, not quite running and struggling not to cry.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said, and when Lisey saw the blood on Darla’s hands she thought of bools again, thought of her husband-to-be coming out of the dark and holding out his hand to her, only it hadn’t really looked like a hand anymore.

  “Darla, what—”

  “She did it again! That crazy bitch went and cut herself again! All I did was go to use the bathroom…I left her drinking tea in the kitchen…‘Are you okay, Manda,’ I said…and…”

  “Hold on,” Lisey told her, forcing herself to at least sound calm. She’d always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it’s not that bad. Wasn’t that supposed to be the oldest child’s job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.

  “Oh, she’s not gonna die, but what a mess,” Darla said, beginning to cry after all. Sure, now that I’m here you let go, Lisey thought. Never occurs to any of you that little Lisey might have a few problems of her own, does it?

  Darla blew first one side of her nose and then the other onto Amanda’s darkening lawn in a pair of unladylike honks. “What a freakin mess, maybe you’re right, maybe a place like Greenlawn’s the answer…if it’s private, that is…and discreet…I just don’t know…maybe you can do something with her, probably you can, she listens to you, she always has, I’m at my wits’ end…”

  “Come on, Darl,” Lisa said soothingly, and here was a revelation: she didn’t really want cigarettes at all. Cigarettes were yesterday’s bad habit. Cigarettes were as dead as her late husband, collapsed at a reading two years ago and died shortly thereafter in a Kentucky hospital, bool, the end. What she wanted to be holding wasn’t a Salem Light but the handle of that silver spade.

  There was comfort you didn’t even have to light.

  3

  It’s a bool, Lisey!

  She heard it again as she turned on the light in Amanda’s kitchen. And saw him again, walking toward her up the shadowy lawn behind her apartment in Cleaves Mills. Scott who could be crazy, Scott who could be brave, Scott who could be both at the same time, under the right circumstances.

  And not just any bool, it’s a blood-bool!

  Behind the apartment where she taught him to fuck and he taught her to say smuck and they taught each other to wait, wait, wait for the wind to change. Scott wading through the heavy, heady smell of mixed flowers because it was almost summer and Parks Greenhouse was down there and the louvers were open to let in the night air. Scott walking out of all that perfumed exhalation, that late-spring night, and into the light of the back door where she stood waiting. Pissed off at him, but not as pissed; in fact almost ready to make up. She had, after all, been stood up before (although never by him), and she’d had boyfriends turn up drunk before (including him). And oh when she had seen him—

  Her first blood-bool.

  And now here was another. Amanda’s kitchen was daubed and smeared and splattered with what Scott had sometimes been pleased to call—usually in a bad Howard Cosell imitation—“the claret.” Red droplets of it ran across Manda’s cheery yellow Formica counter; a smear of it bleared the glass front of the microwave; there were blips and blots and even a single foot-track on the linoleum. A dishtowel dropped in the sink was soaked with it.

  Lisey looked at all this and felt her heart speed up. It was natural, she told herself; the sight of blood did that to people. Plus, she was at the end of a long and stressful day. The thing you want to remember is that it almost certainly looks worse than it really is. You can
bet she spread it around on purpose—there was never anything wrong with Amanda’s sense of the dramatic. And you’ve seen worse, Lisey. The thing she did to her belly-button, for instance. Or Scott back in Cleaves. Okay?

  “What?” Darla asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Lisey replied. They were standing in the doorway, looking at their unfortunate older sister, who sat at the kitchen table—also surfaced in cheery yellow Formica—with her head bent and her hair hanging in her face.

  “You did, you said okay.”

  “Okay, I said okay,” Lisey replied crossly. “Good Ma used to say people who talk to themselves have money in the bank.” And she did. Thanks to Scott, she had just over or just under twenty million, depending on how the market in T-bills and certain stocks had done that day.

  The idea of money didn’t seem to draw much water when you were in a blood-smeared kitchen, however. Lisey wondered if Mandy had never used shit simply because she’d never thought of it. If so, that was genuine by-God good fortune, wasn’t it?

  “You took away the knives?” she asked Darla, sotto voce.

  “Of course I did,” Darla said indignantly…but in the same low voice. “She did it with pieces of her teacup, Lisey. While I was having a pee.”

  Lisey had figured that out for herself and had already made a mental note to go to Wal-Mart for new ones just as soon as she could. Fun Yellow to match the rest of the kitchen if possible, but the real requirement was that they be the plastic ones with the little stickers reading UNBREAKABLE on the sides.

  She knelt beside Amanda and moved to take her hand. Darla said, “That’s what she cut, Lise. She did both palms.”

  Doing so very gently, Lisey plucked Amanda’s hands out of her lap. She turned them over and winced. The cuts were starting to clot, but they still made her stomach hurt. And of course they made her think again of Scott coming out of the summer darkness and holding out his dripping hand like a goddam love-offering, an act of atonement for the terrible sins of getting drunk and forgetting they had a date. Sheesh, and they called Cole crazy?

  Amanda had cut diagonally from the base of her thumbs to the base of her pinky fingers, severing heartlines, lovelines, and all the other lines along the way. Lisey could understand how she’d done the first one, but the second? That must have been hard cheese indeed (as the saying was). But she had managed, and then she had gone around the kitchen like a woman putting the icing on a madcake—Hey, looka me! Looka me! You not numbah one crazy baby, I numbah one! Manda numbah one crazy baby, you bet! All while Darla had been on the toilet, doing no more than whizzing a little lemonade and blotting the old bush, way to go Amanda, you also numbah one speed-devil baby.

  “Darla—these are beyond Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide, hon. She’s got to go to the Emergency Room.”

  “Oh, ratfuck,” Darla said dismally, and began to cry again.

  Lisey looked into Amanda’s face, which was still barely visible through the screening wings of her hair. “Amanda,” she said.

  Nothing. No movement.

  “Manda.”

  Nothing. Amanda’s head dropped like a doll’s. Damned Charlie Corriveau! Lisey thought. Damned smucking Frenchy Corriveau! But of course if it hadn’t been “Shootin’ Beans,” it would have been someone or something else. Because the Amandas of the world were just made that way. You kept expecting them to fall down and thinking it was a miracle they didn’t, and finally the miracle got tired of happening and fell over and took a seizure and died.

  “Manda-Bunny.”

  It was the childhood name that finally got through. Amanda slowly raised her head. And what Lisey saw in her face wasn’t the bloody, doped-out vacancy she’d expected (yes, Amanda’s lips were all red, and that surely wasn’t Max Factor on them) but rather the sparkling, childish, tripwire expression of hauteur and mischief, the one that meant Amanda had Taken Something On Herself, and tears would follow for someone.

  “Bool,” she whispered, and Lisey Landon’s interior temperature seemed to fall thirty degrees in an instant.

  4

  They got her into the living room, Amanda walking docilely between them, and sat her on the couch. Then Lisey and Darla went back into the kitchen doorway, where they could keep an eye on her and still consult without being overheard.

  “What did she say to you, Lisey? You’re as white as a damn ghost.”

  Lisey wished Darla had said sheet. She didn’t like hearing the word ghost, especially now that the sun had gone down. Stupid but true.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Well…boo. Like, ‘Boo on you, Lisey, I’m covered with blood, how do you like it?’ Look, Darl, you’re not the only one stressing out.”

  “If we take her to the ER, what’ll they do to her? Keep her on suicide watch, or something?”

  “They might,” Lisey admitted. Her head was clearer now. That word, that bool, had worked on her oddly like a slap, or a whiff of smelling salts. Of course it had also scared the hell out of her, but…if Amanda had something to tell her, Lisey wanted to know what it was. She had a sense that all the things that had been happening to her, maybe even “Zack McCool”’s telephone call, were somehow tied together by…what? Scott’s ghost? Ridiculous. By Scott’s blood-bool, then? How about that?

  Or his long boy? The thing with the endless piebald side?

  It doesn’t exist, Lisey, it never did outside of his imagination…which was sometimes powerful enough to cast itself over people who were close to him. Powerful enough to make you uneasy about eating fruit after dark, for instance, even though you knew it was just some childhood superstition he never completely cast away. And the long boy was like that, too. You know it, right?

  Did she? Then why, when she tried to consider the idea, did a kind of mist seem to creep over her thoughts, disrupting them? Why did that interior voice tell her to hush?

  Darla was looking at her oddly. Lisey gathered herself and brought herself back to the present moment, the present people, the present problem. And for the first time noticed how tired Darl looked: the grooved lines around her mouth and the dark circles under her eyes. She took her sister by the upper arms, not liking how bony they felt, or the loose way Darl’s bra-straps slid between her thumbs and the too-deep hollows of Darla’s shoulders. Lisey could remember watching enviously as her big sisters went off to Lisbon High, home of the Greyhounds. Now Amanda was on the cusp of sixty and Darl wasn’t far behind. They had become old dogs, indeed.

  “But listen, hon,” she told Darla, “they don’t call it suicide watch—that’s mean. They just call it observation.” Not sure how she knew this, but almost positive, just the same. “They keep them for twenty-four hours, I think. Maybe forty-eight.”

  “Can they do it without permission?”

  “Unless the person’s committed a crime and the cops have brought them in, I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe you ought to call your lawyer and make sure. The Montana guy.”

  “His name’s Montano, and he’s probably at home by now. That number’s unlisted. I’ve got it in my address book, but my book’s back at the house. I think if we take her to Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, we’ll be okay.”

  No Soapa was how the locals referred to Norway–South Paris in neighboring Oxford County, towns which also happened to be within a day’s drive of such exotic-sounding wide spots in the road as Mexico, Madrid, Gilead, China, and Corinth. Unlike the city hospitals in Portland and Lewiston, Stephens Memorial was a sleepy little place.

  “I think they’ll bandage her hands and let us take her home without too much trouble.” Lisey paused. “If.”

  “If?”

  “If we want to take her home. And if she wants to come. I mean, we don’t lie or make up some big story, okay? If they ask—and I’m sure they will—we tell the truth. Yes, she’s done it before when she’s depressed, but not for a long time.”

  “Five years is not such a long—”

  “Everything’s relative,” Lisey said. “And she ca
n explain that her boyfriend of several years just showed up in town with a brand-new wife and that had her feeling rather pissy.”

  “What if she won’t talk?”

  “If she won’t talk, Darl, I think they’ll probably be keeping her for at least twenty-four hours, and with permission from both of us. I mean, do you want her back here if she’s still touring the outer planets?”

  Darla thought about it, sighed, and shook her head.

  “I think a lot of this depends on Amanda,” Lisey said. “Step one is getting her cleaned up. I’ll get in the shower with her myself, if that’s what it takes.”

  “Yeah,” Darla said, running her hand through her cropped hair. “I guess that’s the way to go.” She suddenly yawned. It was a startlingly wide gawp, one that would have put her tonsils on view if she’d had any left. Lisey took another look at the dark circles under her eyes and realized something she might have gotten much earlier if not for “Zack”’s call.

  She took hold of Darla’s arms again, lightly but insistently. “Mrs. Jones didn’t call you today, did she?”

  Darla blinked at her in owly surprise. “No, honey,” she said. “Yesterday. Late yesterday afternoon. I came over, bandaged her up as well as I could, and sat up with her most of last night. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No. I was thinking it all happened today.”

  “Silly Lisey,” Darla said, and smiled wanly.

  “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

  “Didn’t want to bother you. You do so much for all of us.”