Lisey’s Story (10 page)

All this 2006-Lisey knows. Remembers. Intuits. Whatever. From where she sits on her
PILLSBURY'S BEST
magic carpet, she thinks:
He opens his eyes. He looks at me. He says, “I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice.”

But is that really what he said? Is it really what happened? Or was that later? And if she's hiding things—hiding them from herself—
why
is she hiding them?

In the bed, in the red light, Scott opens his eyes. Looks at his wife as she reads her book. His breath doesn't scream now, but there's still a windy sound as he pulls air in as deeply as he can and half-whispers, half-croaks her name. 1988-Lisey puts down her book and looks at him.

“Hey, you're awake again,” she says. “So here's your pop quiz. Do you remember what happened to you?”

“Shot,” he whispers. “Kid. Tube. Back. Hurts.”

“You can have something for the pain in a little while,” she says. “For now, would you like—”

He squeezes her hand, telling her she can stop.
Now he'll tell me he was lost in the dark and I gave him ice,
2006-Lisey thinks.

But what he says to his wife—who earlier that day saved his life by braining a madman with a silver shovel—is only this: “Hot, wasn't it?” His tone casual. No special look; just making conversation. Just passing the time while the red light deepens and the machines queep and bleep, and from her hoverpoint in the doorway, 2006-Lisey sees the shudder—subtle but there—run through her younger self; sees the first finger of her younger self's left hand lose its place in her paperback copy of
Savages.

I'm thinking “Either he doesn't remember or he's
pretending
not to remember what he said when he was down—about how he could call it if he wanted to, how he could call the long boy if I wanted to be done with him—and what I said back, about how he should shut up and leave it alone . . . that if he just shut the smuck up it would go away. I'm wondering if this is a real case of forgetting—the way he forgot that he'd been shot—or if it's more of our
special
forgetting, which is more like sweeping the bad shit into a box and then locking it up tight. I'm wondering if it even matters, as long as he remembers how to get better.”

As she lay on her bed (and as she rides the magic carpet in the eternal present of her dream), Lisey stirred and tried to cry out to her younger self, tried to yell that it
did
matter, it
did. Don't let him get away with it!
she tried to yell.
You can't forget forever!
But another saying from the past occurred to her, this one from their endless games of Hearts and Whist at Sabbath Day Lake in the summertime, always yelled out when some player wanted to look at discards more than a single trick deep:
Leave that alone! You can't unbury the dead!

You can't unbury the dead.

Still, she tries one more time. With all her considerable force of mind and will, 2006-Lisey leans forward on her magic carpet and sends
He's faking! SCOTT REMEMBERS EVERYTHING!
at her younger self.

And for a wild moment she thinks she's getting through . . .
knows
she's getting through. 1988-Lisey twitches in her chair and her book actually slides out of her hand and hits the floor with a flat clap. But before that version of herself can look around, Scott Landon stares directly at the woman hovering in the doorway, the version of his wife who will live to be his widow. He purses his lips again, but instead of making the nasty chuffing sound, he
blows.
It's not much of a puff; how
could it be, considering what he's been through? But it's enough to send the
PILLSBURY'S BEST
magic carpet flying backward, dipping and diving like a milkweed pod in a hurricane. Lisey hangs on for dear life as the hospital walls rock past, but the damned thing tilts and she's falling and

Lisey awoke sitting bolt-upright on the bed with sweat drying on her forehead and underneath her arms. It was relatively cool in here, thanks to the overhead fan, but still she was as hot as a . . .

Well, as hot as a suck-oven.

“Whatever
that
is,” she said, and laughed shakily.

The dream was already fading to rags and tatters—the only thing she could recall with any clarity was the otherworldly red light of some setting sun—but she had awakened with a crazy certainty planted in the forefront of her mind, a crazy imperative: she had to find that smucking shovel. That silver spade.

“Why?” she asked the empty room. She picked the clock off the nightstand and held it close to her face, sure it would tell her an hour had gone by, maybe even two. She was astounded to see she had been asleep for exactly twelve minutes. She put the clock back on the nightstand and wiped her hands on the front of her blouse as if she had picked up something dirty and crawling with germs. “Why
that
thing?”

Never mind.
It was Scott's voice, not her own. She rarely heard it with such clarity these days, but oboy, was she ever hearing it now. Loud and clear.
That's none of your business. Just find it and put it where . . . well, you know.

Of course she did.

“Where I can strap it on,” she murmured, and rubbed her face with her hands, and gave a little laugh.

That's right, babyluv,
her dead husband agreed.
Whenever it seems appropriate.

Her vivid dream did nothing at all to free Lisey from her memories of Nashville, and from one memory in particular: Gerd Allen Cole turning the gun from the lung-shot, which Scott might be able to survive, to the heart-shot, which he most certainly would not. By then the whole world had slowed down, and what she kept returning to—as the tongue keeps returning to the surface of a badly chipped tooth—was how utterly
smooth
that movement had been, as if the gun had been mounted on a gimbal.

Lisey vacuumed the parlor, which didn't need vacuuming, then did a wash that didn't half-fill the machine; the laundry basket filled so
slowly
now that it was just her. Two years and she still couldn't get used to it. Finally she pulled on her old tank suit and did laps in the pool out back: five, then ten, then fifteen, then seventeen and winded. She clung to the lip at the shallow end with her legs trailing out behind her, panting, her dark hair clinging to her cheeks, brow, and neck like a shiny helmet, and still she saw the pale, long-fingered hand swiveling, saw the Ladysmith (it was impossible to think of it as just a gun once you knew its lethal cuntish name) swiveling, saw the little black hole with Scott's death tucked inside it moving left, and the silver shovel was so
heavy.
It seemed impossible that she could be in time, that she could outrace Cole's insanity.

She kicked her feet slowly, making little splashes. Scott had loved the
pool, but actually swam in it only on rare occasions; he had been a book, beer, and inner-tube sort of guy. When he wasn't on the road, that was. Or in his study, writing with the music cranked. Or sitting up in the guest-room rocker in the broken heart of a winter night, bundled to the chin in one of Good Ma Debusher's afghans, two in the morning and his eyes wide-wide-wide as a terrible wind, one all the way down from Yellowknife, boomed outside—that was the other Scott; one went north, one went south, and oh dear, she had loved them both the same,
everything
the same.

“Stop it,” Lisey said fretfully. “I was in time, I
was,
so let it go. The lung-shot was all that crazy baby ever got.” Yet in her mind's eye (where the past is always present), she saw the Ladysmith again start its swivel, and Lisey shoved herself out of the pool in an effort to physically drive the image away. It worked, but Blondie was back again as she stood in the changing room, toweling off after a quick rinsing shower, Gerd Allen Cole was back,
is
back, saying
I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias,
and 1988-Lisey is swinging the silver spade, but this time the smucking air in Lisey-time is too thick, she's going to be just an instant too late, she will see
all
of the second flame-corsage instead of just a portion, and a black hole will also open on Scott's left lapel as his sportcoat becomes his deathcoat—

“
Quit
it!” Lisey growled, and slung her towel in the basket. “Give it a
rest!
”

She marched back to the house nude, with her clothes under her arm—that's what the high board fence all the way around the backyard was for.

She was hungry after her swim—famished, actually—and although it was not quite five o'clock, she decided on a big skillet meal. What Darla, second-oldest of the Debusher girls, would have called comfort-food, and what Scott—with great relish—would have called
eatin nasty.
There was a pound of ground beef in the fridge and, lurking on a back shelf in the
pantry, a wonderfully nasty selection: the Cheeseburger Pie version of Hamburger Helper. Lisey threw it together in a skillet with the ground beef. While it was simmering, she mixed herself a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid with double sugar. By five-twenty, the smells from the skillet had filled the kitchen, and all thoughts of Gerd Allen Cole had left her head, at least for the time being. She could think of nothing but food. She had two large helpings of the Hamburger Helper casserole, and two big glasses of Kool-Aid. When the second helping and the second glass were gone (all except for the white dregs of sugar in the bottom of the glass), she burped resoundingly and said: “I wish I had a goddam smucking cigarette.”

It was true; she had rarely wanted one so badly. A Salem Light. Scott had been a smoker when they had met at the University of Maine, where he had been both a grad student and what he called
The World's Youngest Writer in Residence.
She was a part-time student (
that
didn't last long) and a full-time waitress at Pat's Café downtown, slinging pizzas and burgers. She'd picked up the smoking habit from Scott, who'd been strictly a Herbert Tareyton man. They'd given up the butts together, rallying each other along. That had been in '87, the year before Gerd Allen Cole had resoundingly demonstrated that cigarettes weren't the only problem a person could have with his lungs. In the years since, Lisey went for days without thinking of them, then would fall into horrible pits of craving. Yet in a way, thinking about cigarettes was an improvement. It beat thinking about

(I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias,
says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity and turns his wrist slightly
)

Blondie

(
smoothly
)

and Nashville

(
so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith points at the left side of Scott's chest
)

and smuck, here she went, doing it again.

There was store-bought poundcake for dessert, and Cool Whip—perhaps the apex of
eatin nasty
—to put on top of it, but Lisey was too full to consider it yet. And she was distressed to find these rotten old memories
returning even after she'd taken on a gutful of hot, high-calorie food. She supposed that now she had an idea of what war veterans had to deal with. That had been her only battle, but

(
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.