Lisey’sStory Page 17

  According to Dr. Alberness (this Lisey got over the phone, in response to her appreciative little Uh-huhs and Oh, reallys and I’d forgottens), Scott had told him at this lunch of theirs that he was convinced Amanda Debusher was headed for a more serious break with reality, perhaps a permanent one, and after reading the brochures and touring the facility with the good doctor, he believed Greenlawn would be exactly the right place for her, if it happened. That Scott had extracted Dr. Alberness’s promise of a place for his sister-in-law when and if the time came—all in exchange for a single lunch and five signed books—didn’t surprise Lisey at all. Not after the years she’d spent observing the liquorish way fame worked on some people.

  She reached for the car radio, wanting some nice loud country music (there was another bad habit Scott had taught her in the last few years of his life, one she hadn’t yet given up), then glanced over at Darla and saw that Darla had gone to sleep with her head resting against the passenger window. Not the right time for Shooter Jennings or Big & Rich. Sighing, Lisey dropped her hand from the radio.

  8

  Dr. Alberness had wanted to reminisce at length about his lunch with the great Scott Landon, and Lisey had been willing to let him do so in spite of Darla’s repeated hand-signals, most of which meant Can’t you hurry him up?

  Lisey probably could have, but she thought doing so might have been bad for their cause. Besides, she was curious. More, she was hungry. For what? News of Scott. In a way, listening to Dr. Alberness had been like looking at those old memories hidden away in the study booksnake. She didn’t know if Alberness’s entire recollections constituted one of Scott’s “stations of the bool”—she suspected not—but she knew they raised a dry yet compelling hurt in her. Was that what remained of grief after two years? That hard and ashy sadness?

  First Scott had called Alberness on the phone. Had he known in advance that the doctor was a puffickly huh-yooge fan, or was that just a coincidence? Lisey didn’t believe it had been a coincidence, thought that was just a little, ahem, too coincidental, but if Scott had known, how had he known? She hadn’t been able to think of a way to ask without breaking into the doctor’s flood of reminiscence, and that was all right; probably it didn’t matter. In any case, Alberness had been intensely flattered to receive that call (pretty much bowled over, as the saying was), and more than receptive both to Scott’s enquiries about his sister-in-law and his suggestion that they have lunch. Would it be all right, Dr. Alberness had asked, if he brought along a few of his favorite Landons for signature? More than all right, Scott had replied, he’d be pleased to do it.

  Alberness had brought his favorite Landons; Scott had brought Amanda’s medical records. Which led Lisey, now less than a mile from Amanda’s little Cape Cod, to yet another question: how had Scott gotten hold of them? Had he charmed Amanda into handing them over? Had he charmed Jane Whitlow, the shrink with the beads? Had he charmed both of them? Lisey knew it was possible. Scott’s ability to charm wasn’t universal—Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, was a case in point—but many people had been susceptible. Certainly Amanda had felt it, although Lisey was sure that her sister had never fully trusted Scott (Manda had read all of his books, even Empty Devils…after which, Amanda said, she had slept with the lights on for an entire week). About Jane Whitlow Lisey had no idea.

  How Scott had obtained the records might be another point upon which Lisey’s curiosity would never be satisfied. She might have to content herself with knowing that he had, and that Dr. Alberness had willingly studied them, and had concurred with Scott’s opinion: Amanda Debusher was probably headed for more trouble down the line. And at some point (probably long before they’d finished their dessert), Alberness had promised his favorite writer that if the feared break came, he would find a place for Ms. Debusher at Greenlawn.

  “That was so wonderful of you,” Lisey had told him warmly, and now—turning in to Amanda’s driveway for the second time that day—she wondered at what point in the conversation the doctor had asked Scott where he got his ideas. Had it been early or late? With the appetizers or the coffee?

  “Wake up, Darla-darlin,” she said, turning off the engine. “We’re here.”

  Darla sat up, looked at Amanda’s house, and said: “Oh, shit.”

  Lisey burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it.

  9

  Packing for Manda turned out to be an unexpectedly sad affair for both of them. They found her bags in the third-floor cubby that served as her attic. There were just two Samsonite suitcases, battered and still bearing MIA tags from the Florida trip she’d taken to see Jodotha…when? Seven years ago?

  No, Lisey thought, ten. She regarded them sadly, then pulled out the larger of the two.

  “Maybe we ought to take both,” Darla said doubtfully, then wiped her face. “Whoo! Hot up here!”

  “Let’s just take the big one,” Lisey said. She almost added that she didn’t think Amanda would be going to the Catatonics’ Ball this year, then bit her tongue. One look at Darla’s tired, sweaty face told her this was absolutely the wrong time to try and be witty. “We can get enough in it for a week, at least. She won’t be going far. Remember what the doc said?”

  Darla nodded and wiped her face again. “Mostly in her room, at least to start with.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, Greenlawn would have sent a physician out to examine Amanda in situ, but thanks to Scott, Alberness had cut right to the chase. After ascertaining that Dr. Whitlow was gone and Amanda either could not or would not walk (and that she was incontinent), he had told Lisey he would send out a Greenlawn ambulance—unmarked, he emphasized. To most folks it looked like just another delivery van. Lisey and Darla had followed it to Greenlawn in Lisey’s BMW, and both of them had been extremely grateful—Darla to Dr. Alberness, Lisey to Scott. The wait while Alberness examined her, however, had seemed much longer than forty minutes, and his report had been far from encouraging. The only part of it Lisey wanted to concentrate on right now was what Darla had just mentioned: Amanda would be spending most of her first week under close observation, in her room or on the little terrace outside her room if she could be persuaded to ambulate that far. She wouldn’t even be visiting the Hay Common Room at the end of the corridor unless she showed sudden and drastic improvement. “Which I don’t expect,” Dr. Alberness had told them. “It happens, but it’s rare. I believe in telling the truth, ladies, and the truth is that Ms. Debusher is probably in for the long haul.”

  “Besides,” Lisey said, examining the bigger of the two suitcases, “I want to buy her some new luggage. This stuff is beat to shit.”

  “Let me do it,” Darla said. Her voice had gone thick and wavery. “You do so much, Lisey. Dear little Lisey.” She took Lisey’s hand, lifted it to her lips, and planted a kiss on it.

  Lisey was surprised—almost shocked. She and Darla had buried their ancient quarrels, but this sort of affection was still very unlike her older sister.

  “Do you really want to, Darl?”

  Darla nodded vehemently, started to speak, and settled for scrubbing her face again.

  “Are you okay?”

  Darla began to nod, then shook her head. “New luggage!” she cried. “What a joke! Do you think she’s ever going to need new luggage? You heard him—no response to the snap test, no response to the clap test, no response to the pin test! I know what the nurses call people like her, they call em gorks, and I don’t give a shit what he says about therapy and wonder drugs, if she ever comes back it’ll be a blue-eyed miracle!”

  As the saying is, Lisey thought, and smiled…but only inside, where it was safe to smile. She led her tired, slightly weepy sister down the short, steep flight of attic steps and below the worst of the heat. Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog’s ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was
best. That was one of the things she had taught the man whose last name she had taken for her own—that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.

  10

  Lisey asked again if Darla didn’t want company on the ride back to Greenlawn, and Darla shook her head. She had an old Michael Noonan novel on cassette tapes, she said, and this would be a good chance to dig into it. By then she had washed her face in Amanda’s bathroom, re-applied her makeup, and tied her hair back. She looked good, and in Lisey’s experience, a woman who looked good usually felt that way. So she gave Darla’s hand a little squeeze, told her to drive carefully, and watched her out of sight. Then she made a slow tour of Amanda’s house, first inside and then out, making sure everything was locked up: windows, doors, cellar bulkhead, garage. She left two of the garage windows a quarter-inch open to keep the heat from building up. This was a thing Scott had taught her, a thing he’d learned from his father, the redoubtable Sparky Landon…along with how to read (at the precocious age of two), how to sum on the little blackboard that was kept beside the stove in the kitchen, how to jump from the bench in the front hall with a cry of Geronimo!…and about blood-bools, of course.

  “Stations of the bool—like stations of the cross, I guess.”

  He says this and then he laughs. It’s a nervous laugh, an I’m-looking-over-my-shoulder laugh. A child’s laugh at a dirty joke.

  “Yeah, exactly like that,” Lisey murmured, and shivered in spite of the late afternoon heat. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything was still happening.

  That’s a bad way to think, thinking that way will get you in the bad-gunky.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Lisey said, and gave her own nervous laugh. She headed for her car with Amanda’s key-ring—surprisingly heavy, heavier than her own, although Lisey’s house was far bigger—hung over the forefinger of her right hand. She had a feeling she was already in the bad-gunky. Amanda in the nutbarn was just the beginning. There was also “Zack McCool” and that detestable Incunk, Professor Woodbody. The events of the day had driven the latter two out of her mind, but that didn’t mean they’d ceased to exist. She felt too tired and dispirited to take on Woodbody this evening, too tired and dispirited even to track him to his lair…but she thought she’d better do it just the same, if only because her phone-pal “Zack” had sounded as though he could really be dangerous.

  She got into her car, put big sissa Manda-Bunny’s keys into the glove compartment, and backed down the driveway. As she did, the lowering sun cast a bright net of reflections off something behind her and up onto the roof. Startled, Lisey pressed the brake, looked over her shoulder—and saw the silver spade. COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. Lisey reached back, touched the wooden handle, and felt her mind calm a bit. She looked in both directions along the blacktop, saw nothing coming, and turned toward home. Mrs. Jones was sitting on her front stoop, and raised her hand in a wave. Lisey raised hers in return. Then she reached between the BMW’s bucket seats again, so she could grasp the shaft of the spade.

  11

  If she was honest with herself, she thought as she began her short ride home, then she had to admit she was more frightened by these returning memories—by the sense that they were happening again, happening now—than she was by what might or might not have happened in bed just before sunrise. That she could dismiss (well…almost) as the half-waking dream of an anxious mind. But she hadn’t thought of Gerd Allen Cole for ever so long, and if asked for the name of Scott’s father or where he had worked, she would have said she honestly didn’t remember.

  “U.S. Gypsum,” she said. “Only Sparky called it U.S. Gyppum.” And then, low and fierce, almost growling it: “Stop, now. That’s enough. You stop.”

  But could she? That was the question. And it was an important question, because her late husband wasn’t the only one who had squirreled away certain painful and frightening memories. She’d put up some sort of mental curtain between LISEY NOW and LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!, and she had always thought it was strong, but this evening she just didn’t know. Certainly there were holes in it, and if you looked through them, you ran the risk of seeing things in the purple haze beyond that you maybe didn’t want to see. It was better not to look, just as it was better not even to glance at yourself in a mirror after dark unless all the lights in the room were on, or eat

  (nightfood)

  an orange or a bowl of strawberries after sundown. Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous. It was best to live in the present. Because if you got hold of the wrong memory, you might—

  “Might what?” Lisey asked herself in an angry, shaky voice, and then, immediately: “I don’t want to know.”

  A PT Cruiser going the other way came out of the declining sun, and the guy behind the wheel tipped her a wave. Lisey tipped him one right back, although she couldn’t think of anyone of her acquaintance who owned a PT Cruiser. It didn’t matter, out here in Sticksville you always waved back; it was plain country courtesy. Her mind was elsewhere, in any case. The fact was, she did not have the luxury of refusing all her memories just because there were some things

  (Scott in the rocker, nothing but eyes while the wind howls outside, a killer gale all the way down from Yellowknife)

  she didn’t feel capable of looking at. Not all of them were lost in the purple, either; some were just tucked away in her own mental booksnake, all too accessible. The business of the bools, for instance. Scott had given her the complete lowdown on bools once, hadn’t he?

  “Yes,” she said, lowering her visor to block the declining sun. “In New Hampshire. A month before we got married. But I don’t remember exactly where.”

  It’s called The Antlers.

  All right, okay, big deal. The Antlers. And Scott had called it their early honeymoon, or something like that—

  Frontloaded honeymoon. He calls it their frontloaded honeymoon. Says “Come on, babyluv, pack it up and strap it on.”

  “And when babyluv asked where we were going—” she murmured.

  —and when Lisey asks where they’re going he says “We’ll know when we get there.” And they do. By then the sky is white and the radio says snow is coming, incredible as that might seem with the leaves still on the trees and only starting to turn…

  They’d gone there to celebrate the paperback sale of Empty Devils, the horrible, scary book that put Scott Landon on the bestseller lists for the first time and made them rich. They were the only guests, it turned out. And there was a freak early autumn snowstorm. On Saturday they donned snowshoes and walked a trail into the woods and sat under

  (the yum-yum tree)

  a tree, a special tree, and he lit a cigarette and said there was something he had to tell her, something hard, and if it changed her mind about marrying him he’d be sorry…hell, he’d be broken-smucking-hearted, but—

  Lisey swerved abruptly over to the side of Route 17 and stopped, scrunching up a cloud of dust behind her. The light was still bright, but its quality was changing, edging toward the silky extravagant dream-light that is the exclusive property of June evenings in New England, the summerglow adults born north of Massachusetts remember most clearly from their childhoods.

  I don’t want to go back to The Antlers and that weekend. Not to the snow we thought was so magical, not under the yum-yum tree where we ate the sandwiches and drank the wine, not to the bed we shared that night and the stories he told—benches and bools and lunatic fathers. I’m so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see. Please, no more.

  Lisey became aware that she was saying this out loud in a low voice, over and over: “No more. No more. No more.”

  But she was on a bool hunt, and maybe it was already too late to say no more. According to the thing in bed with her this morning, she’d already found the fi
rst three stations. A few more and she could claim her prize. Sometimes a candybar! Sometimes a drink, a Coke or an RC! Always a card reading BOOL! The End!

  I left you a bool, the thing in Amanda’s nightgown had said…and now that the sun was going down, she was once more finding it hard to believe that thing had really been Amanda. Or only Amanda.

  You have a blood-bool coming.

  “But first a good bool,” Lisey murmured. “A few more stations and I get my prize. A drink. I’d like a double whiskey, please.” She laughed, rather wildly. “But if the stations go behind the purple, how the hell can it be good? I don’t want to go behind the purple.”

  Were her memories stations of the bool? If so, she could count three vivid ones in the last twenty-four hours: cold-cocking the madman, kneeling with Scott on the broiling pavement, and seeing him come out of the dark with his bloody hand held out to her like an offering…which was exactly what he’d meant it to be.

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

  Lying on the pavement, he’d told her his long boy—the thing with the endless piebald side—was very close. I can’t see it, but I hear it taking its meal, he’d said.

  “I don’t want to think about this stuff anymore!” she heard herself almost scream, but her voice seemed to come from a terrible distance, across an awful gulf; suddenly the real world felt thin, like ice. Or a mirror into which one dared not look for more than a second or two.

  I could call it that way. It would come.

  Sitting behind the wheel of her BMW, Lisey thought of how her husband had begged for ice and how it had come—a kind of miracle—and put her hands over her face. Invention at short notice had been Scott’s forte, not Lisey’s, but when Dr. Alberness had asked about the nurse in Nashville, Lisey had done her best, making up something about Scott holding his breath and opening his eyes—playing dead, in other words—and Alberness had laughed as though it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. It didn’t make Lisey envy the staff under the guy’s command, but at least it had gotten her out of Greenlawn and eventually here, parked at the side of a country highway with old memories barking around her heels like hungry dogs and nipping at her purple curtain…her hateful, precious purple curtain.