Lisey’sStory Read online

  “That’s not true,” Lisey said. It always hurt her when Darla or Canty (or even Jodotha, over the telephone) said crap like that. She knew it was crazy, but crazy or not, there it was. “That’s just Scott’s money.”

  “No, Lisey. It’s you. Always you.” Darla paused a second, then shook her head. “Never mind. Point is, I thought we could get through it, just the two of us. I was wrong.”

  Lisey kissed her sister on the cheek, gave her a hug, then went to Amanda and sat down next to her on the couch.

  5

  “Manda.”

  Nothing.

  “Manda-Bunny?” What the smuck, it had worked before.

  And yes, Amanda raised her head. “What. Do you want.”

  “We have to take you to the hospital, Manda-Bunny.”

  “I. Don’t. Want. To go there.”

  Lisey was nodding halfway through this short but tortured speech, and starting to unbutton Amanda’s blood-spattered blouse. “I know, but your poor old hands need more fixing than Darl and I can give them. Now the question is whether or not you want to come back here or spend the night at the hospital over in No Soapa. If you want to come back here, you get me for a roommate.” And maybe we’ll talk about bools in general and blood-bools in particular. “What do you say, Manda? Do you want to come back here or do you think you need to be in St. Steve’s for awhile?”

  “Want. To. Come back. Here.” When Lisey urged Amanda to her feet so she could get Amanda’s cargo pants off, Amanda stood up willingly enough, but she appeared to be studying the room’s light-fixture. If this wasn’t what her shrink had called “semi-catatonia,” it was too close for Lisey’s comfort, and she felt sharp relief when Amanda’s next words came out sounding more like those of a human being and less like those of a robot: “If we’re going…somewhere…why are you undressing me?”

  “Because you need a run through the shower,” Lisey said, guiding her in the direction of the bathroom. “And you need fresh clothes. These are…dirty.” She glanced back and saw Darla gathering up the shed blouse and pants. Amanda, meanwhile, padded toward the bathroom docilely enough, but the sight of her going away squeezed Lisey’s heart. It wasn’t Amanda’s scabbed and scarred body that did it, but rather the seat of her plain white Boxercraft underpants. For years Amanda had worn boy-shorts; they suited her angular body, were even sexy. Tonight the right cheek of the boxers she wore was smeared a muddy maroon.

  Oh Manda, Lisey thought. Oh my dear.

  Then she was through the bathroom door, an antisocial X-ray dressed in bra, pants, and white tube socks. Lisey turned to Darla. Darla was there. For a moment all the years and clamoring Debusher voices were, too. Then Lisey turned and went into the bathroom after the one she’d once called big sissa Manda-Bunny, who only stood there on the mat with her head bent and her hands dangling, waiting to be undressed the rest of the way.

  Lisey was reaching for the hooks of Manda’s bra when Amanda suddenly turned and grabbed her by the arm. Her hands were horribly cold. For a moment Lisey was convinced big sissa Manda-Bunny was going to spill the whole thing, blood-bools and all. Instead she looked at Lisey with eyes that were perfectly clear, perfectly there, and said: “My Charles has married another.” Then she put her waxy-cool forehead against Lisey’s shoulder and began to cry.

  6

  The rest of that evening reminded Lisey of what Scott used to call Landon’s Rule of Bad Weather: when you slept in, expecting the hurricane to go out to sea, it hooked inland and tore the roof off your house. When you rose early and battened down for the blizzard, you got only snow flurries.

  What’s the point then? Lisey had asked. They had been lying in bed together—some bed, one of the early beds—snug and spent after love, him with one of his Herbert Tareytons and an ashtray on his chest and a big wind howling outside. What bed, what wind, what storm, or what year she no longer remembered.

  The point is SOWISA, he had replied—that she remembered, although at first thought she’d either misheard or misunderstood.

  Soweeza? What’s soweeza?

  He’d snuffed his cigarette and put the ashtray on the table next to the bed. He had taken her face in his hands, covering her ears and shutting out the whole world for a minute with the palms of his hands. He kissed her lips. Then he took his hands away so she could hear him. Scott Landon always wanted to be heard.

  SOWISA, babyluv—Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate.

  She had turned this over in her mind—she wasn’t fast like he was, but she usually got there—and realized that SOWISA was what he called an agronim. Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate. She liked it. It was quite silly, which made her like it even more. She began to laugh. Scott laughed with her, and pretty soon he was as inside her as they were inside the house while the big wind boomed and shook outside.

  With Scott she had always laughed a lot.

  7

  His saying about how the blizzard missed you when you really battened down for the storm recurred to her several times before their little excursion to the ER was over and they had once more returned to Amanda’s weather-tight Cape Cod between Castle View and the Harlow Deep Cut. For one thing, Amanda helped matters by brightening up considerably. Morbid or not, Lisey kept thinking about how sometimes a dimming lightbulb will flash bright for an hour or two before burning out forever. This change for the better began in the shower. Lisey undressed and got in with her sister, who initially just stood there with her shoulders slumped and her arms dangling apishly. Then, in spite of using the hand-held attachment and being as careful as she could, Lisey managed to spray warm water directly onto Manda’s slashed left palm.

  “Ow! Ow!” Manda cried, snatching her hand away. “That hurts, Lisey! Watch where you’re pointin that thing, willya, okay?”

  Lisey rejoined in exactly the same tone—Amanda would have expected no less, even with both of them buckass naked—but rejoiced at the sound of her sister’s anger. It was awake. “Well pardon me all the way to Kittery, but I wasn’t the one who took a piece of the damn Pottery Barn to my hand.”

  “Well, I couldn’t get at him, could I?” Amanda asked, and then unleashed a flood of stunning invective aimed at Charlie Corriveau and his new wife—a mixture of adult obscenity and childish poopie-talk that filled Lisey with amazement, amusement, and admiration.

  When she paused for breath, Lisey said: “Shitmouth motherfucker, huh? Wow.”

  Amanda, sullen: “Fuck you too, Lisey.”

  “If you want to come back home, I wouldn’t use a lot of those words on the doc who treats your hands.”

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t. It’s just…saying you were mad at him will be enough.”

  “My hands are bleeding again.”

  “A lot?”

  “Just a little bit. I think you better put some Vaseline on em.”

  “Really? Won’t it hurt?”

  “Love hurts,” Amanda said solemnly…and then gave a little snort of laughter that lightened Lisey’s heart.

  By the time she and Darla bundled her into Lisey’s BMW and got on the road to Norway, Manda was asking about Lisey’s progress in the study, almost as if this were the end of a normal day. Lisey didn’t mention “Zack McCool”’s call, but she told them about “Ike Comes Home” and quoted the single line of copy: “Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine. BOOL! THE END!” She wanted to use that word, that bool, in Mandy’s presence. Wanted to see how she’d respond.

  Darla responded first. “You married a very strange man, Lisa,” she said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, darlin.” Lisey glanced in the rearview mirror to see Amanda sitting alone in the back seat. In solitary splendor, Good Ma would have said. “What do you think, Manda?”

  Amanda shrugged, and at first Lisey thought that was going to be her only response. Then came the flood.

  “It was just him, that’s all. I hooked a ride with him up the city once—he needed t
o go to the office-supply store and I needed new shoes, you know, good walking shoes I could wear in the woods for hiking, stuff like that. And we happened to drive by Auburn Novelty. He’d never seen it before and nothing would do but he had to park and go right in. He was like a ten-year-old! I needed Eddie Bauer shitkickers so I could walk in the woods without getting poison ivy all over me and all he wanted to do was buy out that whole freakin store. Itchy-powder, joy buzzers, pepper gum, plastic puke, X-ray glasses, you name it, he had it piled up on the counter next to these lollipops, when you sucked em down there was a naked woman inside. He must have bought a hundred dollars’ worth of that crazy made-in-Taiwan shite, Lisey. Do you remember?”

  She did. Most of all she remembered how he had looked coming home that day, his arms full of bags with laughing cartoon faces and the words LAFF RIOT printed all over them. How full of color his cheeks had been. And shite was what he’d called it, not shit but shite, that was one word he picked up from her, could you believe it. Well, turnabout was fair play, so Good Ma had liked to claim, although shite had been their Dad’s word, as it had been Dandy Dave who would sometimes tell folks a thing was no good, so I slang it forth. How Scott had loved it, said it had a weight coming off the tongue that I threw it away or even I flung it away could never hope to match.

  Scott with his catches from the word-pool, the story-pool, the myth-pool.

  Scott smucking Landon.

  Sometimes she’d go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he’d often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

  8

  Amanda brightening up was the first good thing. Munsinger, the doctor on duty, was no grizzled vet, that was the second good thing. He didn’t look as young as Jantzen, the doc Lisey met during Scott’s final illness, but if he was much beyond thirty, she’d be surprised. The third good thing—although she’d never have believed it if anyone had told her in advance—was the arrival of the car-accident folks from down the road in Sweden.

  They weren’t there when Lisey and Darla escorted Amanda into the Stephens Memorial ER; then the waiting room was empty except for a kid of ten or so and his mother. The kid had a rash and his mother kept snapping at him not to scratch it. She was still snapping when the two of them were called back to one of the examining rooms. Five minutes later the kid reappeared with bandages on his arms and a glum look on his face. Mom had some sample tubes of ointment and was still yapping.

  The nurse called Amanda’s name. “Dr. Munsinger will see you now, dear.” She pronounced the last word in the Maine fashion, so that it rhymed with Leah.

  Amanda gave first Lisey, then Darla her haughty, red-cheeked, Queen Elizabeth look. “I prefer to see him alone,” she said.

  “Of course, your Grand High Mysteriousness,” Lisey said, and stuck her tongue out at Amanda. At that moment she didn’t care if they kept the scrawny, troublesome bitch a night, a week, or a year and a day. Who cared what Amanda might have whispered at the kitchen table when Lisey had been kneeling beside her? Probably it had been boo, as she’d told Darla. Even if it had been the other word, did she really want to go back to Amanda’s house, sleep in the same room with her, and breathe her crazy vapors when she had a perfectly good bed of her own at home? Case smucking closed, babyluv, Scott would have said.

  “Just remember what we agreed on,” Darla said. “You got mad and you cut yourself because he wasn’t there. You’re better now. You’re over it.”

  Amanda gave Darla a look Lisey absolutely could not read. “That’s right,” she said. “I’m over it.”

  9

  The car-accident folks from the little town of Sweden arrived shortly thereafter. Lisey wouldn’t have counted it a good thing if any of them had been seriously hurt, but that did not appear to be the case. All of them were ambulating, and two of the men were actually laughing about something. Only one of them—a girl of about seventeen—was crying. She had blood in her hair and snot on her upper lip. There were six of them in all, almost certainly from two different vehicles, and a strong smell of beer was coming from the two laughing men, one of whom appeared to have a sprained arm. The sextet was shepherded in by two med-techs wearing East Stoneham Rescue jackets over civilian clothes, and two cops: a State Policeman and a County Mounty. All at once the little ER waiting room seemed absolutely stuffed. The nurse who had called Amanda dear popped her startled head out for a look, and a moment later young Dr. Munsinger did the same. Not long after that the teenage girl went into a noisy fit of hysterics, announcing to all and sundry that her stepmom was gonna murdalize her. A few moments after that the nurse came to get her (she didn’t call the hysterical teenager dear, Lisey noted), and then Amanda came out of EXAMINATION ROOM 2, clumsily carrying her own sample-sized tubes. There were also a couple of folded prescription slips poking from the left pocket of her baggy jeans.

  “I think we may go,” Amanda said, still in haughty Grand Lady mode.

  Lisey thought that was too good to be true even with the relative youth of the doctor on duty and the fresh influx of patients, and she was right. The nurse leaned out of EXAMINATION ROOM 1 like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and said, “Are you two ladies Miss Debusher’s sisters?”

  Lisey and Darla nodded. Guilty as charged, judge.

  “Doctor would like to speak to you for a minute before you go.” With that she pulled her head back into the room, where the girl was still sobbing.

  On the other side of the waiting room, the two beer-smelling men burst out laughing again, and Lisey thought: Whatever may be wrong with them, they must not have been responsible for the accident. And indeed, the cops seemed to be concentrating on a white-faced boy of about the same age as the girl with the blood in her hair. Another boy had commandeered the pay phone. He had a badly gashed cheek which Lisey was sure would take stitches. A third waited his turn to make a call. This boy had no visible injuries.

  Amanda’s palms had been coated with a whitish cream. “He said stitches would only pull out,” she told them, almost proudly. “And I guess bandages won’t stay put. I’m supposed to keep this stuff on them—ugh, doesn’t it stink?—and soak them three times a day for the next three days. I have one ’scrip for the cream and one for the soak. He said to try and not bend my hands too much. To pick things up between my fingers, like this.” She tweezed a prehistoric copy of People between the first two fingers of her right hand, lifted it a little way, then dropped it.

  The nurse appeared. “Dr. Munsinger could see you now. One or both.” Her tone made it clear there was little time to waste. Lisey was sitting on one side of Amanda, Darla on the other. They looked at each other across her. Amanda didn’t notice. She was studying the people on the other side of the room with frank interest.

  “You go, Lisey,” Darla said. “I’ll stay with her.”

  10

  The nurse showed Lisey into EXAMINATION ROOM 2, then went back to the sobbing girl, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. Lisey sat in the room’s one chair and gazed at the room’s one picture: a fluffy cocker spaniel in a field filled with daffodils. After only a few moments (she was sure she would have had to wait longer, had she not been something that needed getting rid of), Dr. Munsinger hurried in. He closed the door on the sound of the teenage girl’s noisy sobs and parked one skinny buttock on the examination table.

  “I’m Hal Munsinger,” he said.

  “Lisa Landon.” She extended her hand. Dr. Hal Munsinger shook it briefly.

  “I’d
like to get a lot more information on your sister’s situation—for the record, you know—but as I’m sure you see, I’m in a bit of a bind here. I’ve called for backup, but in the meantime, I’m having one of those nights.”

  “I appreciate your making any time at all,” Lisey said, and what she appreciated even more was the calm voice she heard issuing from her own mouth. It was a voice that said all this is under control. “I’m willing to certify that my sister Amanda isn’t a danger to herself, if that’s troubling you.”

  “Well, you know that troubles me a little, yep, a little, but I’m going to take your word for that. And hers. She’s not a minor, and in any case this was pretty clearly not a suicide attempt.” He had been looking at something on his clipboard. Now he looked up at Lisey, and his gaze was uncomfortably penetrating. “Was it?”

  “No.”

  “No. On the other hand, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see this isn’t the first case of self-mutilation with your sister.”

  Lisey sighed.

  “She told me she’s been in therapy, but her therapist left for Idaho.”

  Idaho? Alaska? Mars? Who cares where, the bead-wearing bitch is gone. Out loud she said, “I believe that’s true.”

  “She needs to get back to working on herself, Mrs. Landon, okay? And soon. Self-mutilation isn’t suicide any more than anorexia is, but both are suicidal, if you take my meaning.” He took a pad from the pocket of his white coat and began to scribble. “I want to recommend a book to you and your sister. It’s called Cutting Behavior, by a man named—”

  “—Peter Mark Stein,” Lisey said.

  Dr. Munsinger looked up, surprised.

  “My husband found it after Manda’s last…after what Mr. Stein calls…”

  (her bool her last blood-bool)

  Young Dr. Munsinger was looking at her, waiting for her to finish.

  (go on then Lisey say it say blood-bool)

  She grasped her flying thoughts by main force. “After what Stein would call her last outletting. That’s the word he uses, isn’t it? Outletting?” Her voice was still calm, but she could feel little nestles of sweat in the hollows of her temples. Because that voice inside her was right. Call it an outletting or a blood-bool, both came to the same. Everything the same.