Lisey’sStory Page 8

  (no, Lisey)

  “Quit it,” she whispered, and pushed her plate

  (no, babyluv)

  violently away from her. Christ, but she wanted

  (you know better)

  a cigarette. And even more than a ciggy, she wanted all these old memories to go aw—

  Lisey!

  That was Scott’s voice, on top of her mind for a change and so clear she answered out loud over the kitchen table and with no self-consciousness at all: “What, hon?”

  Find the silver shovel and all this crap will blow away…like the smell of the mill when the wind swung around and blew from the south. Remember?

  Of course she did. Her apartment had been in the little town of Cleaves Mills, just one town east of Orono. There weren’t any actual mills in Cleaves by the time Lisey lived there, but there had still been plenty in Oldtown, and when the wind blew from the north—especially if the day happened to be overcast and damp—the stench was atrocious. Then, if the wind changed…God! You could smell the ocean, and it was like being born again. For awhile wait for the wind to change had become part of their marriage’s interior language, like strap it on and SOWISA and smuck for fuck. Then it had fallen out of favor somewhere along the way, and she hadn’t thought of it for years: wait for the wind to change, meaning hang on in there, baby. Meaning don’t give up yet. Maybe it had been the sort of sweetly optimistic attitude only a young marriage can sustain. She didn’t know. Scott might have been able to offer an informed opinion; he’d kept a journal even back then, in their

  (EARLY YEARS!)

  scuffling days, writing in it for fifteen minutes each evening while she watched sitcoms or did the household accounts. And sometimes instead of watching TV or writing checks, she watched him. She liked the way the lamplight shone in his hair and made deep triangular shadows on his cheeks as he sat there with his head bent over his looseleaf notebook. His hair had been both longer and darker in those days, unmarked by the gray that had begun to show up toward the end of his life. She liked his stories, but she liked how his hair looked in the spill of the lamplight just as much. She thought his hair in the lamplight was its own story, he just didn’t know it. She liked how his skin felt under her hand, too. Forehead or foreskin, both were good. She would not have traded one for the other. What worked for her was the whole package.

  Lisey! Find the shovel!

  She cleared the table, then stored the remaining Cheeseburger Pie in a Tupperware dish. She was certain she’d never eat it now that her madness had passed, but there was too much to scrape down the sink-pig; how the Good Ma Debusher who still kept house in her head would scream at waste like that! Better by far to hide it in the fridge behind the asparagus and the yogurt, where it would age quietly. And as she did these simple chores, she wondered how in the name of Jesus, Mary, and JoJo the Carpenter finding that silly ceremonial shovel could do anything for her peace of mind. Something about the magical properties of silver, maybe? She remembered watching some movie on the Late Show with Darla and Cantata, some supposedly scary thing about a werewolf…only Lisey hadn’t been much frightened, if at all. She’d thought the werewolf more sad than scary, and besides—you could tell the movie-making people were changing his face by stopping the camera every now and then to put on more makeup and then running it again. You had to give them high marks for effort, but the finished product wasn’t all that believable, at least in her humble opinion. The story was sort of interesting, though. The first part took place in an English pub, and one of the old geezers drinking there said you could only kill a werewolf with a silver bullet. And had not Gerd Allen Cole been a kind of werewolf?

  “Come on, kid,” she said, rinsing off her plate and sticking it in the almost empty dishwasher, “maybe Scott could float that downriver in one of his books, but tall stories were never your department. Were they?” She closed the dishwasher with a thump. At the rate it was filling, she’d be ready to run the current load around July Fourth. “If you want to look for that shovel, just go do it! Do you?”

  Before she could answer this completely rhetorical question, Scott’s voice came again—the clear one at the top of her mind.

  I left you a note, babyluv.

  Lisey froze in the act of reaching for a dishtowel to dry her hands. She knew that voice, of course she did. She still heard it three and four times a week, her voice mimicking his, a little bit of harmless company in a big empty house. Only coming so soon after all this shite about the shovel…

  What note?

  What note?

  Lisey wiped her hands and put the towel back to air-dry on its rod. Then she turned around so her back was to the sink and her kitchen lay before her. It was full of lovely summerlight (and the aroma of Hamburger Helper, a lot less yummy now that her low appetite for the stuff had been satisfied). She closed her eyes, counted to ten, then sprang them open again. Late-day summerlight boomed around her. Into her.

  “Scott?” she said, feeling absurdly like her big sister Amanda. Half-nuts, in other words. “You haven’t gone ghost on me, have you?”

  She expected no answer—not little Lisey Debusher, who had cheered on the thunderstorms and sneered at the Late Show werewolf, dismissing him as just bad time-lapse photography. But the sudden rush of wind that poured in through the open window over the sink—belling the curtains, lifting the ends of her still-damp hair, and bringing the heartbreaking aroma of flowers—could almost have been taken for an answer. She closed her eyes again and seemed to hear faint music, not that of the spheres but just an old Hank Williams country tune: Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh…

  Her arms prickled up in goosebumps.

  Then the breeze died away and she was just Lisey again. Not Mandy, not Canty, not Darla; certainly not

  (one went south)

  run-off-to-Miami Jodi. She was Thoroughly Modern Lisey, 2006-Lisey, the widow Landon. There were no ghosts. She was Lisey Alone.

  But she did want to find that silver spade, the one that had saved her husband for another sixteen years and seven novels. Not to mention for the Newsweek cover in ’92 that had featured a psychedelic Scott with MAGICAL REALISM AND THE CULT OF LANDON in Peter Max lettering. She wondered how Roger “The Jackrabbit” Dashmiel had liked them apples.

  Lisey decided she’d look for the spade right away, while the long light of the early-summer evening still held. Ghosts or no ghosts, she didn’t want to be out in the barn—or the study above it—once night had fallen.

  3

  The stalls opposite her never-quite-completed office were dark and musty affairs that had once held tools, tack, and spare parts for farm vehicles and machinery back when the Landon home had been Sugar Top Farm. The largest bay had held chickens, and although it had been swamped out by a professional cleaning company and then whitewashed (by Scott, who did it with many references to Tom Sawyer), it still held the faint, ammoniac reek of long-gone fowl. It was a smell Lisey remembered from her youngest childhood and hated…probably because her Granny D had keeled over and died while feeding the chickens.

  Two of the cubbies were stacked high with boxes—liquor-store cartons, for the most part—but there were no digging implements, silver or otherwise. There was a sheeted double bed in the erstwhile chicken pen, the single leftover from their brief nine-month Germany experiment. They had bought the bed in Bremen and had it shipped back at paralyzing expense—Scott had insisted. She had forgotten all about the Bremen bed until now.

  Talk about what fell out of the dog’s ass! Lisey thought with a kind of miserable exultation, and then said aloud, “If you think I’d ever sleep in a bed after it sat twentysome years out in a goddam chicken pen, Scott—”

  —then you’re crazy! was how she meant to finish, and couldn’t. She burst out laughing instead. Christ, the curse of money! The smucking curse of it! How much had that bed cost? A thousand bucks American? Say a thousand. And how much to ship it back? Another thou? Maybe. And here it sat, rah-cheer, Scott might have said, in the
chickenshit shadows. And rah-cheer it could continue to sit until the world ended in fire or ice, as far as she was concerned. The whole Germany thing had been such a bust, no book for Scott, an argument with the landlord that had come within a hair of degenerating into a fist-fight, even Scott’s lectures had gone badly, the audiences either had no sense of humor or didn’t get his, and—

  And behind the door across the way, the one wearing the HIGH VOLTAGE! sign, the telephone began to shout again. Lisey froze where she was, feeling more goosebumps. And yet there was also a sense of inevitability, as if this was what she’d come out here for, not the silver spade at all but to take a call.

  She turned as the phone rang a second time, and crossed the barn’s dim center aisle. She reached the door as the third ring began. She thumbed the old-fashioned latch and the door opened easily, just screaming a little on its unused hinges, welcome to the crypt, little Lisey, we’ve been dying to meet you, heh-heh-heh. A draft whooshed in around her, flapping her blouse against the small of her back. She felt for the light-switch and flicked it, not sure what to expect, but the overhead went on. Of course it did. As far as Central Maine Power was concerned, all of this was The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road. Upstairs or downstairs, to CMP it was a clear-cut case of everything the same.

  The telephone on the desk rang a fourth time. Before Ring #5 could wake up the answering machine, Lisey snagged the receiver. “Hello?”

  There was a moment of silence. She was about to say hello again when the voice at the other end did it for her. The tone was perplexed, but Lisey recognized who it was, just the same. That one word had been enough. You knew your own.

  “Darla?”

  “Lisey—it is you!”

  “Sure it’s me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Scott’s old study.”

  “No, you’re not. I already tried there.”

  Lisey only had to consider this briefly. Scott had liked his music loud—in truth he’d liked it at levels normal people would have considered ridiculous—and the telephone up there was located in the soundproofed area he had been amused to call My Padded Cell. It wasn’t surprising she hadn’t heard it down here. None of this seemed worth explaining to her sister.

  “Darla, where did you get this number, and why are you calling?”

  There was another pause. Then Darla said, “I’m at Amanda’s. I got the number from her book. She’s got four for you. I just ran through all of them. This was the last.”

  Lisey felt a sinking sensation in her chest and stomach. As children, Amanda and Darla had been bitter rivals. They’d gotten into any number of scratching matches—over dolls, library books, clothes. The last and gaudiest confrontation had been over a boy named Richie Stanchfield, and had been serious enough to land Darla in the Central Maine General ER, where six stitches had been needed to close the deep scratch over her left eye. She still wore the scar, a thin white dash. They got on better as adults only to this extent: there had been plenty of arguments but no more spilled blood. They stayed out of each other’s way as much as possible. The once-or twice-monthly Sunday dinners (with spouses) or sister-lunches at Olive Garden or Outback could be difficult, even with Manda and Darla sitting apart and Lisey and Canty mediating. For Darla to be calling from Amanda’s house was not a good thing.

  “Is something wrong with her, Darl?” Dumb question. The only real question was how wrong.

  “Mrs. Jones heard her screaming and carrying on and breaking stuff. Doing one of her Big Ts.”

  One of her Big Tantrums. Check.

  “She tried Canty first, but Canty and Rich are in Boston. When Mrs. Jones got that message on their answering machine she called me.”

  That made sense. Canty and Rich lived a mile or so north of Amanda on Route 19; Darla lived roughly two miles south. In a way, it was like their father’s old rhyme: one went north, one went south, one couldn’t shut her everlasting mouth. Lisey herself was about five miles away. Mrs. Jones, who lived across the road from Mandy’s weather-tight little Cape Cod, would have known well enough to call Canty first, and not just because Canty was closer in terms of distance, either.

  Screaming and carrying on and breaking stuff.

  “How bad is it this time?” Lisey heard herself asking in a flat, strangely businesslike tone of voice. “Should I come?” Meaning, of course, How fast should I come?

  “She’s…I think she’s okay for now,” Darla said. “But she’s been doing it again. On her arms, also a couple of places high up on her thighs. The…you know.”

  Lisey knew, all right. On three previous occasions, Amanda had lapsed into what Jane Whitlow, her shrink, called “passive semi-catatonia.” It was different from what had happened

  (hush about that)

  (I won’t)

  from what had happened to Scott in 1996, but pretty damned scary, all the same. And each time, the state had been preceded by bouts of excitability—the sort of excitability Manda had been exhibiting up in Scott’s study, Lisey realized—followed by hysteria, then brief spasms of self-mutilation. During one of these, Manda had apparently tried to excise her navel. She had been left with a ghostly fairy-ring of scar-tissue around it. Lisey had once broached the possibility of cosmetic surgery, not knowing if it would be possible but wanting Manda to know she, Lisey, would be willing to pay if Amanda wanted at least to explore the possibility. Amanda had declined with a harsh caw of amusement. “I like that ring,” she’d said. “If I’m ever tempted to start cutting myself again, maybe I’ll look at that and stop.”

  Maybe, it seemed, had been the operant word.

  “How bad is it, Darl? Really?”

  “Lisey…hon…”

  Lisey realized with alarm (and a further sinking in her vital parts) that her older sister was struggling with tears. “Darla! Take a deep breath and tell me.”

  “I’m okay. I just…it’s been a long day.”

  “When does Matt get back from Montreal?”

  “Week after next. Don’t even think about asking me to call him, either—he’s earning our trip to St. Bart’s next winter, and he’s not to be disturbed. We can handle this ourselves.”

  “Can we?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then tell me what it is we’re supposed to be handling.”

  “Okay. Right.” Lisey heard Darla take a breath. “The cuts on her upper arms were shallow. Band-Aid stuff. The ones on her thighs were deeper and they’ll scar, but they clotted over, thank God. No arterial shit. Uh, Lisey?”

  “What? Just str…just spit it out.”

  She’d almost told Darla to just strap it on, which would have meant zip to her big sister. Whatever Darla had to tell her next, it was going to be something rotten. She could tell that by Darla’s voice, which had been in and out of Lisey’s ears from the cradle on. She tried to brace herself for it. She leaned back against the desk, her gaze shifted…and holy Mother of God, there it was in the corner, leaning nonchalantly next to another stack of liquor-store boxes (which were indeed labeled SCOTT! THE EARLY YEARS!). In the angle where the north wall met the east one was the silver spade from Nashville, big as Billy-be-damned. It was a blue-eyed wonder she hadn’t seen it when she came in, surely would have if she hadn’t been in a lather to grab the phone before the answering machine kicked in. She could read the words incised into the silver bowl from here: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. She could almost hear the southern-fried chickenshit telling her husband that Toneh would be rahtin it up for the year-end review, and would he like a copeh. And Scott replying—

  “Lisey?” Darla sounding really distressed for the first time, and Lisey returned to the present in a hurry. Of course Darla sounded distressed. Canty was in Boston for a week or maybe more, shopping while her husband took care of his wholesale auto business—buying program cars, auction cars, and off-lease rental cars in places like Malden and Lynn, Lynn, the City of Sin. Darla’s Matt, meanwhile, was in Canada, lecturing on the migration patterns of variou
s North American Indian tribes. This, Darla had once told Lisey, was a surprisingly profitable venture. Not that money would help them now. Now it was down to just the two of them. To sister-power. “Lise, did you hear me? Are you still th—”

  “I’m here,” Lisey said. “I just lost you for a few seconds, sorry. Maybe it’s the phone—no one’s used this one for a long time. It’s downstairs in the barn. What was going to be my office, before Scott died?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.” Darla sounded completely mystified. Has no smucking idea what I’m talking about, Lisey thought. “Can you hear me now?”

  “Clear as a bell.” Looking at the silver spade as she spoke. Thinking of Gerd Allen Cole. Thinking I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias.

  Darla took a deep breath. Lisey heard it, like a wind blowing down the telephone line. “She won’t exactly admit it, but I think she…well…drank her own blood this time, Lise—her lips and chin were all bloody when I got here, but nothing inside her mouth’s cut. She looked the way we used to when Good Ma’d give us one of her lipsticks to play with.”

  What Lisey flashed on wasn’t those old dress-up and makeup days, those clunk-around-in-Good—

  Ma’s-high-heels days, but that hot afternoon in Nashville, Scott lying on the pavement shivering, his lips smeared with candy-colored blood. Nobody loves a clown at midnight.

  Listen, little Lisey. I’ll make how it sounds when it looks around.

  But in the corner the silver spade gleamed…and was it dented? She believed it was. If she ever doubted that she’d been in time…if she ever woke in the dark, sweating, sure she’d been just a second too late and the remaining years of her marriage had consequently been lost…

  “Lisey, will you come? When she’s in the clear, she’s asking for you.”

  Alarm bells went off in Lisey’s head. “What do you mean, when she’s in the clear? I thought you said she was okay.”