Lisey’sStory Page 18

  “Boy, am I lost,” she said, and dropped her hands. She managed a weak laugh. “Lost in the deepest, darkest smucking woods.”

  No, I think the deepest darkest woods are still ahead—where the trees are thick and their smell is sweet and the past is still happening. Always happening. Do you remember how you followed him that day? How you followed him through the strange October snow and into the woods?

  Of course she did. He broke trail and she followed, trying to clap her snowshoes into her perplexing young man’s tracks. And this was very like that, wasn’t it? Only if she was going to do it, there was something else she needed first. Another piece of the past.

  Lisey dropped the gearshift into Drive, looked into her rearview mirror for oncoming traffic, then turned around and drove back the way she had come, making her BMW really scat.

  12

  Naresh Patel, owner of Patel’s Market, was himself on duty when Lisey came in at just past five o’clock on that long, long Thursday. He was sitting behind the cash register in a lawn chair, eating a curry and watching Shania Twain gyrate on Country Music Television. He put his curry aside and actually stood up for Lisey. His tee-shirt read I DARK SCORE LAKE.

  “I’d like a pack of Salem Lights, please,” Lisey said. “Actually, you better make that two.”

  Mr. Patel had been keeping store—first as an employee in his father’s New Jersey market, then as owner of his own—for nearly forty years, and he knew better than to comment on apparent teetotalers who suddenly began buying booze or apparent non-smokers who suddenly began buying cigarettes. He simply found this lady’s particular poison in his well-stocked racks of the stuff, put it on the counter, and commented on the beauty of the day. He affected not to notice Mrs. Landon’s expression of near shock at the price of her poison. It only showed how long her pause had been between cessation and resumption. At least this one could afford her poison; Mr. Patel had customers who took food out of their children’s mouths to buy this stuff.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Very welcome, please come again,” Mr. Patel said, and settled back to watch Darryl Worley sing “Awful, Beautiful Life.” It was one of his favorites.

  13

  Lisey had parked beside the store so not to block access to any of the gas pumps—there were fourteen, on seven spanking-clean islands—and once she was behind the wheel of her car again, she started the engine so she could roll down her window. The XM radio under the dash (how Scott would have loved all those music channels) came on at the same time, playing low. It was tuned to The 50s on 5, and Lisey wasn’t exactly surprised to hear “Sh-Boom.” Not The Chords, though; this was the cover version, recorded by a quartet Scott had insisted on calling The Four White Boys. Except when he was drunk. Then he called them The Four Cleancut Honkies.

  She tore the top off one of her new packs and slipped a Salem Light between her lips for the first time in…when was the last time she’d slipped? Five years ago? Seven? When the BMW’s lighter popped, she applied it to the tip of her cigarette and took a cautious drag of mentholated smoke. She coughed it back out at once, eyes watering. She tried another drag. That one went a little better, but now her head was starting to swim. A third drag. Not coughing at all now, just feeling like she was going to faint. If she fell forward against the steering wheel, the horn would start blaring and Mr. Patel would rush out to see what was wrong. Maybe he’d be in time to keep her from burning her stupid self up—was that kind of death immolation or defenestration? Scott would have known, just as he’d known who had done the black version of “Sh-Boom”—The Chords—and who’d owned the pool hall in The Last Picture Show—Sam the Lion.

  But Scott, The Chords, and Sam the Lion were all gone.

  She butted the cigarette in the previously immaculate ashtray. She couldn’t remember the name of the motel in Nashville, either, the one she’d gone back to when she’d finally left the hospital (“Yea, you returneth like a drunkard to his wine and a dog to its spew,” she heard the Scott in her head intone), only that the desk clerk had given her one of the crappy rooms in back with nothing to look at but a high board fence. It seemed to her that every dog in Nashville had been behind it, barking and barking and barking. Those dogs made the long-ago Pluto seem like a piker. She had lain in one of the twin beds knowing she’d never get to sleep, that every time she got close she’d see Blondie swiveling the muzzle of his cunting little gun toward Scott’s heart, would hear Blondie saying I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, and snap wide-awake again. But eventually she had gone to sleep, had gotten just enough to stagger through the next day on—three hours, maybe four—and how had she managed that remarkable feat? With the help of the silver spade, that was how. She’d laid it on the floor next to the bed where she could reach down and touch it any old time she began to think she had been too late and too slow. Or that Scott would take a turn for the worse in the night. And that was something else she hadn’t thought of in all the years since. Lisey reached back and touched the spade now. She lit another Salem Light with her free hand and made herself remember going in to see him the next morning, climbing up to the third-floor ICU wing in the already sweltering heat because there was a sign in front of the only two patient elevators on that side of the hospital reading OUT OF SERVICE. She thought about what had happened as she approached his room. It was silly, really, just one of those

  14

  It’s one of those silly things where you scare the living hell out of someone without meaning to. Lisey’s coming down the hall from the stairs at the end of the wing, and the nurse is coming out of room 319 with a tray in her hands, looking back over her shoulder into the room with a frown on her face. Lisey says hello so the nurse (who can’t be a day over twenty-three and looks even younger) will know she’s there. It’s a mild greeting, a little-Lisey hello for sure, but the nurse gives out a tiny high-pitched scream and drops the tray. The plate and coffee cup both survive—they are tough old cafeteria birds—but the juice-glass shatters, spraying oj on the linoleum and the nurse’s previously immaculate white shoes. She gives Lisey a wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights glance, seems for a moment about to take to her heels, then grabs hold of herself and says the conventional thing: “Oh, sorry, you startled me.” She squats, the hem of her uniform pulling up over her white-stockinged Nancy Nurse knees, and puts the plate and cup back on the tray. Then, moving with a grace that is both swift and careful, she begins plucking up the pieces of broken glass. Lisey squats and begins to help.

  “Oh, ma’am, you don’t have to,” the nurse says. She speaks with a deep southern twang. “It was entirely my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “That’s okay,” Lisey says. She manages to beat the young nurse to a few shards and deposits them on the tray. Then she uses the napkin to begin blotting up the spilled juice. “That’s my husband’s breakfast tray. I’d feel guilty if I didn’t help.”

  The nurse gives her a funny look—akin to the You’re married to HIM? stare Lisey has more or less gotten used to—but it’s not exactly that look. Then she drops her gaze back to the floor and begins hunting for any pieces of glass she might have missed.

  “He ate, didn’t he?” Lisey says, smiling.

  “Yes, ma’am. He did very well, considering what he’s been through. Half a cup of coffee—all he’s allowed right now—a scrambled egg, some applesauce, and a cup of Jell-O. The juice he didn’t finish. As you see.” She stands up with the tray. “I’ll get a hand-towel from the nurses’ station and mop up the rest of that.”

  The young nurse hesitates, then gives a nervous little laugh.

  “Your husband’s a little bit of a magician, isn’t he?”

  For no reason at all Lisey thinks: SOWISA: Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate. But she only smiles and says, “He has a bag of tricks, all right. Sick or well. Which one did he play on you?” And somewhere deep down is she remembering the night of the first bool, sleepwalking to the bathroom in her Cleaves Mills
apartment, saying Scott, hurry up as she goes? Saying it because he must be in there, he’s sure not in bed with her anymore?

  “I went in to see how he was doing,” the nurse says, “and I could have sworn the bed was empty. I mean, the IV pole was there, and the bags were still hanging from it, but…I thought he must have pulled out the needle and gone to the bathroom. Patients do all kinds of weird stuff when they’re doped up, you know.”

  Lisey nods, hoping the same small expectant smile is on her face. The one that says I have heard this story before but I’m not tired of it yet.

  “So I went into the bathroom and that was empty. Then, when I turned around—”

  “There he was,” Lisey finishes for her. She speaks softly, still with the little smile. “Presto change-o, abracadabra.” And bool, the end, she thinks.

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Well,” Lisey says, still smiling, “Scott has a way of blending in with his surroundings.”

  This should sound exquisitely stupid—the bad lie of a person without much imagination—but it doesn’t. Because it’s not a lie at all. She’s always losing track of him in supermarkets and department stores (places where he for some reason almost always goes unrecognized), and once she hunted for him for nearly half an hour in the University of Maine Library before spying him in the Periodicals Room, which she had checked twice before. When she scolded him for keeping her waiting and making her hunt for him in a place where she couldn’t even raise her voice to call his name, Scott had shrugged and protested that he’d been in Periodicals all along, browsing the new poetry magazines. And the thing was, she didn’t think he was even stretching the truth, let alone lying. She had just somehow…overlooked him.

  The nurse brightens and tells her, “That’s exactly what Scott said—he just kind of blends in.” She blushes. “He told us to call him Scott. Practically demanded it. I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. Landon.” From this young southern nurse, Mrs. comes out Miz, but her accent doesn’t grate on Lisey the way Dashmiel’s did.

  “Perfectly okay. He tells that to all the girls, especially the pretty ones.”

  The nurse smiles and blushes harder. “He said he saw me go by and look right at him. He said something like, ‘I always was one of your whiter white men, but since I lost all of that blood, I must be in the top ten.’”

  Lisey laughs politely, her stomach churning.

  “And of course with the white sheets and the white johnny he’s wearing…” The young nurse is starting to slow down. She wants to believe it, and Lisey has no doubt she did believe it when Scott was actually talking to her and gazing at her with his bright hazel eyes, but now she’s starting to sense the absurdity which lurks just beneath what she’s saying.

  Lisey jumps in and helps her out. “Also, he’s got a way of being so still,” she says, although Scott is just about the jumpiest man she knows. Even when he’s reading a book he’s constantly shifting in his chair, gnawing at his nails (a habit he stopped for awhile after her tirade and then resumed again), scratching his arms like a junkie in need of a fix, sometimes even doing curls with the little five-pound hand-weights that are always parked under his favorite easy chair. She has only known him to be quiet in deep sleep and when he’s writing and the writing’s going exceptionally well. But the nurse still looks doubtful, so Lisey forges ahead, speaking in a gay tone that sounds horribly false to her own ear. “Sometimes I swear he’s like a piece of furniture. I’ve walked right past him myself, plenty of times.” She touches the nurse’s hand. “I’m sure that’s what happened, dear.”

  She’s sure of no such thing, but the nurse gives her a grateful smile and the subject of Scott’s absence is dropped. Or rather we pass it, Lisey thinks. Like a small kidney stone.

  “He’s ever so much better today,” the nurse says. “Dr. Wendlestadt was in for early rounds, and he was absolutely amazed.”

  Lisey bets. And she tells the nurse what Scott told her all those years ago, in her Cleaves Mills apartment. She thought back then it was just one of those things you say, but now she believes it. Oh yes, now she believes it completely.

  “All the Landons are fast healers,” she says, and then goes in to see her husband.

  15

  He’s lying there with his eyes closed and his head turned to one side, a very white man in a very white bed—that much is certainly true—but it’s impossible to miss that mop of shoulder-length dark hair. The chair she sat in last night is where she left it, and she resumes her position beside his bed. She takes out her book—Savages, by Shirley Conran. She’s removing the matchbook cover that marks her place when she feels Scott’s eyes on her and looks up.

  “How are you this morning, dear one?” she asks him.

  He says nothing for a long time. His breath is wheezing, but no longer screaming as it did while he lay in the parking lot begging for ice. He really is better, she thinks. Then, with some effort, he moves his hand until it’s over hers. He squeezes. His lips (which look dreadfully dry, she’ll get a Chap Stick or Carmex for them later) part in a smile.

  “Lisey,” he says. “Little Lisey.”

  He goes back to sleep with his hand still covering hers, and that’s perfectly okay with Lisey. She can turn the pages of her book with one hand.

  16

  Lisey stirred like a woman awaking from a doze, looked out the driver’s-side window of her BMW, and saw the shadow of her car had grown noticeably longer on Mr. Patel’s clean black pavement. There was not one butt in her ashtray, or two, but three. She looked out through the windshield and saw a face looking back at her from one of the small windows at the rear of the Market, in what had to be the storage area. It was gone before she could tell if it was Mr. Patel’s wife or one of his two teenage daughters, but she had time to mark the expression: curiosity or concern. Either way it was time to move on. Lisey backed out of her space, glad she had at least butted her cigarettes in her own ashtray instead of tossing them out onto that weirdly clean asphalt, and once again turned for home.

  Remembering that day in the hospital—and what the nurse said—that was another station of the bool.

  Yes? Yes.

  Something had been in bed with her this morning, and for now she would go on believing it had been Scott. He had for some reason sent her on a bool hunt, just like the ones his big brother Paul had made for him when they were a pair of unhappy boys growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only instead of little riddles leading her from one station to the next, she was being led…

  “You’re leading me into the past,” she said in a low voice. “But why would you do that? Why, when that’s where the bad-gunky is?”

  The one you’re on is a good bool. It goes behind the purple.

  “Scott, I don’t want to go behind the purple.” Approaching the house now. “I’ll be smucked if I want to go behind the purple.”

  But I don’t think I have any choice.

  If that was true, and if the next station of the bool meant reliving their weekend visit to The Antlers—Scott’s frontloaded honeymoon—then she wanted Good Ma’s cedar box. It was all she had of her mother now that the

  (africans)

  afghans were gone, and Lisey supposed it was her more humble version of the memory nook in Scott’s office. It was a place where she’d stored all sorts of mementos from

  (SCOTT AND LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!)

  the first decade of their marriage: photos, postcards, napkins, matchbooks, menus, drink-coasters, stupid stuff like that. How long had she collected those things? Ten years? No, not that long. Six at most. Probably less. After Empty Devils, the changes had come thick and fast—not just the Germany experiment but everything. Their married life had become something like the berserk merry-go-round (sort of a pun there, she thought—merry-go-round, marry-go-round) at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. She’d quit saving things like cocktail napkins and souvenir matchbooks because there’d been too many lounges and too many restaurants in too many h
otels. Pretty soon she’d quit saving everything. And Good Ma’s cedar box that smelled so sweet when you opened it, where was that? Somewhere in the house, she was sure of it, and she meant to find it.

  Maybe it’ll turn out to be the next station of the bool, she thought, and then she saw her mailbox up ahead. The door was down and a clutch of letters was rubber-banded to it. Curious, Lisey pulled up next to the pole. She’d often come home to a full mailbox when Scott was alive, but since then her mail tended to be on the thin side, and more often than not addressed to OCCUPANT or MR. AND MRS. HOME OWNER. In truth, this current sheaf looked pretty thin: four envelopes and a postcard. Mr. Simmons, the RFD 3 mailman, must have tucked a package in the box, although on fair days he was more apt to use a rubber band or two to attach them to the sturdy metal flag. Lisey glanced at the letters—bills, advertising come-ons, a postcard from Cantata—and then reached into the mailbox. She touched something soft, furry, and wet. She screamed in surprise, yanked her hand back, saw the blood on her fingers, and screamed again, this time in horror. In that first moment she was positive she’d been bitten: something had climbed the cedar mailbox pole and then wormed its way inside. Maybe a rat, maybe something even worse—something rabid, like a woodchuck or a baby coon.

  She wiped her hand on her blouse, breathing in audible gasps that weren’t quite moans, then reluctantly raised her hand to see how many wounds there were. And how deep. For a moment her conviction that she must have been bitten was so strong that she actually saw the marks. Then she blinked her eyes and reality re-asserted itself. There were smears of blood, but no cuts or bites or breaks in the skin. Something was in her mailbox, all right, some horrible furry surprise, but its biting days were done.