Lisey’sStory Read online

  “Lisa Landon,” he says. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a keeper. It’s…what do you call it when all the words start with the same sound?”

  “Alliteration.”

  “Yeah, that.” Now she says it. “Lisa Landon.” Like the eggs, it tastes good.

  “Little Lisey Landon,” he says, and flips his egg in the air. It turns over twice and lands square in the bacon-grease, splat.

  “Do you, Scott Landon, promise to strap it on and keep the mothersmucker strapped?” she asks.

  “Strapped in sickness, strapped in health,” he agrees, and they begin laughing like mad bastards while the radio plays in the sunshine.

  22

  With Scott, she always laughed a lot. And a week later the cuts on his hand, even the one on his forearm, were pretty much healed.

  They didn’t even scar.

  23

  When Lisey wakes again, she no longer knew when she was—then or now. But enough of morning’s first light had crept into the room so she can see the cool blue wallpaper and the seascape on the wall. So it was Amanda’s bedroom, and that seemed right, but it also seems wrong; it seems to her that this is a dream of the future she’s having in her narrow apartment bed, the one she still shares with Scott on most nights, and will until the wedding in November.

  What wakened her?

  Amanda was turned away from her and Lisey was still fitted against her like a spoon, her breasts against Manda’s back, her belly against Manda’s scant bottom, and just what has wakened her? She doesn’t need to pee…not badly, anyway, so what…?

  Amanda, did you say something? Do you want something? Drink of water, maybe? Piece of greenhouse glass to slit your wrists with?

  These things passed through her mind, but Lisey didn’t really want to say anything, because an odd idea has come to her. The idea is that, although she can see the rapidly graying mop of Amanda’s hair and the frill around the neck of Amanda’s nightgown, she was actually in bed with Scott. Yes! That at some point in the night Scott has…what? Crept through the lens of Lisey’s memories and into Amanda’s body? Something like that. It’s a funny idea, all right, and yet she doesn’t want to say anything, because she’s afraid that if she did, Amanda might answer in Scott’s voice. And what would she do then? Would she scream? Would she scream to wake the dead, as the saying is? Surely the idea is absurd, but—

  But look at her. Look how she’s sleeping, with her knees pulled up and her head bent. If there was a wall, her forehead would be touching it. No wonder you think—

  And then, in that pre-dawn ditch of five o’clock, with her face turned away so Lisey cannot see it, Amanda spoke.

  “Baby,” she says.

  There is a pause.

  Then: “Babyluv.”

  If Lisey’s interior temperature seemed to drop thirty degrees the evening before, now it seems to drop sixty, for although the voice which spoke the word was undeniably female, it is also Scott’s. Lisey lived with him for over twenty years. She knows Scott when she hears him.

  This is a dream, she told herself. That’s why I can’t even tell if it’s then or now. If I look around I’ll see the PILLSBURY’S BEST magic carpet floating in the corner of the room.

  But she couldn’t look around. For a long time she couldn’t move at all. What finally impels her to speak is the strengthening light. Night is almost over. If Scott has come back—if she was really awake and not just dreaming this—then there must be a reason. And it wouldn’t be to harm her. Never to harm her. At least…not on purpose. But she finds she can speak neither his name nor Amanda’s. Neither seems right. Both seemed wrong. She saw herself grabbing Amanda’s shoulder and rolling her over. Whose face would she see under Manda’s graying bangs? Suppose it was Scott’s? Oh sweet God, suppose.

  Daylight is coming. And she was suddenly sure that if she let the sun come up without speaking, the door between the past and the present will close and any chance of getting answers will be gone.

  Never mind the names, then. Never mind just who the hell is inside the nightgown.

  “Why did Amanda say bool?” she asked. Her voice in the bedroom—still dim but brightening, brightening—sounds hoarse, dusty.

  “I left you a bool,” remarks the other person in the bed, the person against whose bottom Lisey’s belly lies.

  Oh God oh God oh God this is the bad-gunky if there ever was bad-gunky, this is it—

  And then: Get hold of yourself. You strap it the fuck on. Do it right now.

  “Is it…” Her voice was drier and dustier than ever. And now the room seems to be brightening too fast. The sun will clear the eastern horizon any second now. “Is it a blood-bool?”

  “You have a blood-bool coming,” the voice tells her, sounding faintly regretful. And oh it sounds so much like Scott. Yet now it sounded more like Amanda, too, and this scared Lisey more than ever.

  Then the voice brightened. “The one you’re on is a good bool, Lisey. It goes behind the purple. You’ve already found the first three stations. A few more and you’ll get your prize.”

  “What’s my prize?” she asks.

  “A drink.” The reply was prompt.

  “A Coke? An RC?”

  “Be quiet. We want to watch the hollyhocks.”

  The voice spoke with strange and infinite longing, and what is familiar about that? Why does it seem like a name for something instead of just bushes? Is it another thing that’s hidden behind the purple curtain which sometimes keeps her own memories away from her? There was no time to think about it, let alone ask about it, because a slant of red light fingered in through the window. Lisey felt time come back into focus, and, frightened as she had been, she felt an intense pang of regret.

  “When is the blood-bool coming?” she asked. “Tell me that.”

  There was no answer. She knew there would be no answer, and still her frustration grew, filling the place where her terror and her perplexity had been before the sun peeped over the horizon, casting its dispelling rays.

  “When is it coming? Damn you, when?” She was shouting now, and shaking the white-nightgowned shoulder hard enough to make the hair flop…and still no answer. Lisey’s fury broke. “Don’t tease me like that, Scott, when?”

  This time she yanked on the nightgowned shoulder instead of just shaking, and the other body on the bed rolled limply over. It was Amanda, of course. Her eyes were open and she still breathed, there was even some dull color in her cheeks, but Lisey recognized that thousand-yard stare from big sissa Manda-Bunny’s other breaks with reality. And not only hers. Lisey no longer had any idea if Scott had actually come to her or if she had only been fooling herself while in a semi-waking state, but of one thing she was quite sure: at some point during the night, Amanda had gone away again. This time maybe for good.

  Part 2: Sowisa

  “She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.”

  —D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

  V. Lisey and The Long, Long Thursday (Stations of the Bool)

  1

  It didn’t take Lisey long to realize this was far worse than Amanda’s three previous breaks with reality—her periods of “passive semi-catatonia,” to use the shrink’s phrase. It was as if her usually irritating and sometimes troublesome sister had become a large breathing doll. Lisey managed (with considerable effort) to tug Amanda into a sitting position and swivel her around so she was sitting on the edge of the bed, but the woman in the white cotton nightgown—who might or might not have spoken in the voice of Lisey’s dead husband a few moments before dawn—would not respond to her name when it was spoken, or called, or shouted, almost desperately, into her face. She only sat with her hands in her lap, looking fixedly at h
er younger sister. And when Lisey stepped away, Amanda looked fixedly into the space where she had been.

  Lisey went into the bathroom to wet a cloth with cold water, and when she came back, Amanda had subsided into a prone position again with her upper half on the bed and her feet on the floor. Lisey began to pull her back up, then stopped when Amanda’s buttocks, already close to the bed’s edge, began to slide. If she persisted, Amanda would end up on the floor.

  “Manda-Bunny!”

  No response to the childhood nickname this time. Lisey decided to go whole hog.

  “Big sissa Manda-Bunny!”

  Nothing. Instead of being frightened (that would come shortly), Lisey was swept by the sort of rage Amanda had hardly ever been able to provoke in her younger sister when she had actually tried.

  “Stop this! Stop it and scoot your ass back on the bed so you can sit up!”

  Zip. Zero. She bent, wiped Amanda’s expressionless face with the cold washcloth, and got more nothing. The eyes didn’t blink even when the washcloth passed over them. Now Lisey did begin to be scared. She looked at the digital clock-radio beside the bed and saw it had just gone six. She could call Darla with no worries of waking Matt, who would be sleeping the sleep of the just up in Montreal, but she didn’t want to do that. Not yet. Calling Darla would be the same as admitting defeat, and she wasn’t ready to do that.

  She circled the bed, grabbed Amanda under the armpits, and hauled her backward. It was harder to do than she expected, given Amanda’s scrawny bod.

  Because she’s dead weight now, babyluv. That’s why.

  “Shut up,” she said, with no idea who she was talking to. “Just shut it.”

  She got on the bed herself with her knees on either side of Amanda’s thighs and her hands planted on either side of Amanda’s neck. In this position, that of the lover superior, she could look directly down into her sister’s upturned, staring face. During Manda’s previous breaks, she had been biddable…almost the way a person under hypnosis is biddable, Lisey had thought at the time. This seemed very different. She could only hope it wasn’t, because there were certain things a person had to do in the morning. If, that was, the person wanted to go on living a private life in her little Cape Cod home.

  “Amanda!” she yelled down into her sister’s face. Then, for good measure, and feeling only slightly ridiculous (it was only the two of them, after all): “Big…sissa…Manda-Bunny! I want you…to stand up…stand UP!…and go into the shithouse…and use the TOIDY! Use the TOIDY, Manda-Bunny! On three! ONE…and TWO!…and THREE!” On THREE Lisey again yanked Amanda to a sitting position, but Amanda still wouldn’t stand.

  Once, at around twenty past six, Lisey actually got her off the bed and into a kind of half-assed crouch. She felt the way she had when she’d had her first car, a 1974 Pinto, and after two endless minutes of grinding the starter the motor would finally catch and run just before the battery died. But instead of straightening up and letting Lisey lead her into the bathroom, Amanda fell back onto the bed—fell crooked, too, so that Lisey had to lunge, catch her under the arms, and shove her, cursing, to keep her from going on the floor.

  “You’re faking, you bitch!” she shouted at Amanda, knowing perfectly well that Amanda wasn’t. “Well, go on! Go on and—” She heard how loud she’d gotten—she’d wake up Mrs. Jones across the road if she didn’t look out—and made herself lower her voice. “Go on and lie there. Yeah. But if you think I’m going to spend the whole morning dancing attendance around you, you’re full of shite. I’m going downstairs to make coffee and oatmeal. If any of it smells good to Your Royal Majesty, give me a holler. Or, I don’t know, send down your smucking footman for take-out.”

  She didn’t know if it smelled good to big sissa Manda-Bunny, but it smelled fine to Lisey, especially the coffee. She had one cup of straight black before her bowl of oatmeal, another with double cream and sugar afterward. Sipping that one, she thought: All I need now is a ciggy and I could ride this day like a pony. A smucking Salem Light.

  Her mind tried to turn toward her dreams and memories of the night just past (SCOTT AND LISEY THE EARLY YEARS for sure, she thought), and she wouldn’t let it. Nor would she let it try to examine what had happened to her on waking. There might be time later to think about it, but not now. Now she had big sissa to deal with.

  And suppose big sissa’s found a nice pink disposable razor on top of the medicine cabinet and decided to slit her wrists with it? Or her throat?

  Lisey got up from the table in a hurry, wondering if Darla had thought to clean the sharps out of the upstairs bathroom…or any of the upstairs rooms, for that matter. She took the stairs at a near-run, dreading what she might discover in the master bedroom, nerving herself to find nothing in the bed but a pair of dented pillows.

  Amanda was still there, still staring up at the ceiling. She appeared not to have moved so much as an inch. Lisey’s relief was replaced by foreboding. She sat on the bed and took her sister’s hand in her own. It was warm but unresponsive. Lisey willed Manda’s fingers to close on her own but they remained limp. Waxy.

  “Amanda, what are we going to do with you?”

  There was no response.

  And then, because they were alone except for their reflections in the mirror, Lisey said: “Scott didn’t do this, did he, Manda? Please say Scott didn’t do it by…I don’t know…by coming in?”

  Amanda said nothing one way or the other, and after a little while Lisey went prospecting in the bathroom for sharp objects. She guessed that Darla had indeed been here before her, because all she found was a single pair of nail-scissors at the back of the lower drawer in Manda’s small, not-very-vain vanity. Of course, even those would have been enough, in a dedicated hand. Why, Scott’s own father

  (hush Lisey no Lisey)

  “All right,” she said, alarmed by the panic that flooded her mouth with the taste of copper, the purple light that seemed to bloom behind her eyes, and the way her hand clenched on the tiny pair of scissors. “Okay, never mind. Pass it.”

  She hid the scissors behind a clutch of dusty shampoo samples high up in Amanda’s towel cupboard, and then—because she could think of nothing else—took a shower herself. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw that a large wet patch had spread around Amanda’s hips, and understood this was something the Debusher sisters weren’t going to be able to work through on their own. She got a towel under Amanda’s soaked bottom. Then she glanced at the clock on the night-table, sighed, picked up the telephone, and dialed Darla’s number.

  2

  Lisey had heard Scott in her head the day before, loud and clear: I left you a note, babyluv. She’d dismissed it as her own interior voice, mimicking his. Maybe it had been—probably had been—but by three o’clock on that long, hot Thursday afternoon, as she sat in Pop’s Café in Lewiston with Darla, she knew one thing for sure: he’d left her one hell of a posthumous gift. One hell of a bool-prize, in Scott-talk. It had been a bitch-kitty of a day, but it would have been a lot worse without Scott Landon, two years dead or not.

  Darla looked every bit as tired as Lisey felt. Somewhere along the way she’d found time to put on a little makeup, but she didn’t have enough ammo in her purse to hide the circles under her eyes. Certainly there was no sign of the angry thirtysomething who had in the late nineteen-seventies made it her business to call Lisey once a week and hector her about her family duties.

  “Penny for em, little Lisey,” she said now.

  Lisey had been reaching for the caddy containing the packets of Sweet’n Low. At the sound of Darla’s voice she changed direction, reached for the old-fashioned sugar-shaker instead, and poured a hefty stream into her cup. “I was thinking this has been Coffee Thursday,” she said. “Mostly Coffee With Real Sugar Thursday. This must be my tenth shot.”

  “You and me both,” Darla said. “I’ve been to the john half a dozen times, and I plan to go again before we leave this charming establishment. Thank God for Pepcid AC.”

&nb
sp; Lisey stirred her coffee, grimaced, then sipped again. “Sure you want to pack up a suitcase for her?”

  “Well, someone has to do it, and you look like death on a cracker.”

  “Thanks a pantload.”

  “If your sister won’t tell you the truth, no one will.”

  Lisey had heard this from her many times, along with Duty doesn’t ask permission and, Number One on the All-Time Darla Hit Parade, Life isn’t fair. Today it didn’t sting. It even raised the ghost of a smile. “If you want to do it, Darl, I won’t arm-rassle you for the privilege.”

  “Didn’t say I wanted to, just said I would. You stayed with her last night and got up with her this morning. I’d say you did your share. Excuse me, I’ve got to spend a penny.”

  Lisey watched her go, thinking There’s another one. In the Debusher family, where there was a saying for everything, urinating was spending a penny and moving one’s bowels was—odd but true—burying a Quaker. Scott had loved that, said it was probably an old Scots derivation. Lisey supposed it was possible; most of the Debushers came from Ireland and all the Andersons from England, or so Good Ma said, but there were a few stray dogs in every family, weren’t there? And that hardly interested her. What interested her was that spending a penny and burying a Quaker were catches from the pool, Scott’s pool, and ever since yesterday he seemed so smucking close to her…

  That was a dream this morning, Lisey…you know that, don’t you?

  She wasn’t sure what she knew or didn’t know about what had happened in Amanda’s bedroom this morning—it all seemed like a dream, even trying to get Amanda to stand up and go into the bathroom—but one thing she could be sure of: Amanda was now booked into Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation for at least a week, it had all been easier than she and Darla could have hoped, and they had Scott to thank. Right now and

  (rah-cheer)

  right here, that seemed like enough.

  3

  Darla had gotten to Manda’s cozy little Cape Cod before seven AM, her usually stylish hair barely combed, one button of her blouse unbuttoned so that the pink of her bra peeked cheekily through. By then Lisey had confirmed that Amanda wouldn’t eat, either. She allowed Lisey to insert a spoonful of scrambled eggs into her mouth after being tugged into a sitting position and propped against the head of the bed, and that gave Lisey some hope—Amanda was swallowing, after all, so maybe she’d swallow the eggs—but it was hope in vain. After simply sitting there for perhaps thirty seconds with the eggs peeping out from between her lips (to Lisey that peep of yellow had a rather gruesome look, as if her sister had tried to eat a canary), Amanda simply ejected the eggs with her tongue. A few bits stuck to her chin. The rest tumbled down the front of her nightgown. Amanda’s eyes continued to stare serenely off into the distance. Or into the mystic, if you were a Van Morrison fan. Scott certainly had been, although his pash for Van the Man had tapered off quite a bit in the early nineties. That was when Scott had begun drifting back to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.