Lisey’s Story (17 page)

After that she hadn't wanted the slice of cheesecake she'd brought home from the restaurant for dessert, and she certainly hadn't wanted to go to any Ingmar Bergman movie . . . but she had wanted Scott. Yes. Because over the last couple of months, and especially over the last four or five weeks, she's come to depend on Scott in a funny way. Maybe it's corny—
probably
—but there's a feeling of safety when he puts his arms around her that wasn't there with any of her other guys; what she felt
with and for most of them was either impatience or wariness. (Sometimes fleeting lust.) But there is kindness in Scott, and from the first she felt interest coming from him—interest in
her
—that she could hardly believe, because he's so much
smarter
and so talented. (To Lisey, the kindness means more than either.) But she
does
believe it. And he speaks a language she grasped greedily from the beginning. Not the language of the Debushers, but one she knows very well, just the same—it's as if she's been speaking it in dreams.

But what good is talk, and a special language, if there's no one to talk
to?
Someone to
cry
to, even? That's what she needed tonight. She's never told him about her crazy fucked-up family—oh, pardon me, that's crazy
smucked-up
family, in Scott-talk—but she meant to tonight. Felt she
had
to or explode from pure misery. So of course he picked tonight of all nights not to show up. As she waited she tried to tell herself that
Scott
certainly didn't know she'd just had the world's worst fight with her bitch of an older sister, but as six became seven became eight, do I hear nine, come nine, someone gimme nine, as she picked at the cheesecake a little more and then threw it away because she was just too smucking . . . no, too
fucking
mad to eat it, we got nine, anybody gimme ten, I got ten o'clock and still no '73 Ford with one flickery headlight pulling up in front of her North Main Street apartment, she became angrier still, can anybody gimme
furious.

She was sitting in front of the TV with a barely tasted glass of wine beside her and an unwatched nature program before her by the time her anger passed over into a state of fury, and that was also when she became positive that Scott would not stand her up completely. He would
make the scene,
as the saying was. In hopes of
getting his end wet.
Another one of Scott's catches from the word-pool where we all go down to cast our nets, and how charming it was! How charming they all were! There was also
getting your ashes hauled, dipping your wick, making the beast with two backs, choogling,
and the very elegant
ripping off a piece.
How very Never-NeverLand they all were, and as she sat there listening for the sound of her particular Lost Boy's '73 Ford Fairlane—you couldn't miss that throaty burble, there was a hole in the muffler or something—she thought of Darla saying,
Do what you want, you always do.
Yes, and here
she was, little Lisey, queen of the world, doing what she wanted, sitting in this cruddy apartment, waiting for her boyfriend who'd turn up drunk as well as late—but still wanting a piece because they all wanted that, it was even a joke,
Hey waitress, bring me the Sheepherder's Special, a cup of cumoffee and a piece of ewe.
Here she was, sitting in a lumpy thrift-shop chair with her feet aching at one end and her head throbbing at the other, while on the TV—snowy, because the K-mart rabbit-ears brought in smuck-all for reception—she was watching a hyena eat a dead gopher. Lisey Debusher, queen of the world, leading the glamorous life.

And yet as the hands of the clock crept past ten, had she not also felt a kind of low, crabby happiness creeping in? Now, looking anxiously down the shadowed lawn, Lisey thinks the answer is yes.
Knows
the answer is yes. Because sitting there with her headache and a glass of harsh red wine, watching the hyena dine on the gopher while the narrator intoned, “The predator knows he may not eat so well again for many days,” Lisey was pretty sure she loved him and knew things that could hurt him.

That he loved her too? Was that one of them?

Yes, but in this matter his love for her was secondary. What mattered here was how she saw him: dead level. His other friends saw his talent, and were dazzled by it. She saw how he sometimes struggled to meet the eyes of strangers. She understood that, underneath all his smart (and sometimes brilliant) talk, in spite of his two published novels, she could hurt him badly, if she wanted to. He was, in her Dad's words,
cruising for a bruising.
Had been his whole charmed smucking—no, check that—his whole charmed fucking life. Tonight the charm would break. And who would break it? She would.

Little Lisey.

She had turned off the TV, gone into the kitchen with her glass of wine, and poured it down the sink. She no longer wanted it. It now tasted sour in her mouth as well as harsh.
You're turning it sour,
she thought.
That's how pissed-off you are.
She didn't doubt it. There's an old radio placed precariously on the window-ledge over the sink, an old Philco with a cracked case. It had been Dandy's; he kept it out in the barn and listened
to it while he was a-choring. It's the only thing of his Lisey still has, and she keeps it in the window because it's the only place where it will pick up local stations. Jodotha gave it to him one Christmas, and it was secondhand even then, but when it was unwrapped and he saw what it was, he grinned until it seemed his face would crack and how he thanked her! Over and over! It was ever Jodi who was his favorite, and it was Jodi who sat at the dinner-table one Sunday and announced to her parents—hell, announced to all of them—that she was pregnant and the boy who'd gotten her that way had run off to enlist in the Navy. She wanted to know if maybe Aunt Cynthia over in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, could take her in until the baby was
put out for adoption
—that was how Jodi said it, as though it were an old china cabinet at a yard sale. Her news had been greeted by an unaccustomed silence at the dinner-table. For one of the few times in Lisey's memory—maybe for the
only
time in Lisey's memory—the constant chattering conversation of knives and forks against plates as seven hungry Debushers raced the roast to the bone had stopped. At last Good Ma had asked,
Have you talked to God about this, Jodotha?
And Jodi—right back atcha, Good Ma:
It was Don Cloutier got me in the family way, not God.
That was when Dad left the table and his favorite daughter behind without a word or backward look. A few moments later Lisey had heard the sound of his radio coming from the barn, very faint. Three weeks later he'd had the first of his strokes. Now Jodi's gone (although not yet to Miami, that is years in the future) and it's Lisey who bears the brunt of Darla's outraged calls, little Lisey, and why? Because Canty is on Darla's side and calling Jodi does neither of them any good. Jodi is different from the other Debusher girls. Darla calls her cold, Canty calls her selfish, and they both call her uncaring, but Lisey thinks it's something else—something better and finer. Of the five girls, Jodi is the one true survivor, completely immune to the fumes of guilt rising from the old family teepee. Once Granny D generated those fumes, then their mother, but Darla and Canty stand ready to take over, already understanding that if you call that poisonous, addictive smoke “duty,” nobody tells you to put the fire out. As for Lisey, she only wishes she were more like Jodi, that when Darla calls she could laugh and say
Blow it out your ass, Darla-darlin; you made your bed, so go on and sleep in it.

Standing in the kitchen doorway. Looking into the long, sloping backyard. Wanting to see him come walking back out of the darkness. Wanting to holler him back—yes, more than ever—but stubbornly holding his name behind her lips. She waited for him all evening. She will wait a little longer.

But only a little.

She is beginning to be so frightened.

Dandy's radio is strictly AM. WGUY's a sundowner and long off the air, but WDER was playing the oldies when she rinsed her wineglass—some fifties hero singing about young love—and went back into the living room and bingo, there he was, standing in the doorway with a can of beer in one hand and his slanted smile on his face. Probably she hadn't heard the sound of his Ford pulling up because of the music. Or the beat of her headache. Or both.

“Hey, Lisey,” he said. “Sorry I'm late.
Really
sorry. A bunch of us from David's Honors seminar got arguing about Thomas Hardy, and—”

She turned away from him without a word and went back into the kitchen, back into the sound of the Philco. Now it was a bunch of guys singing “Sh-Boom.” He followed her. She knew he would follow her, it was how these things went. She could feel all the things she had to say to him crowding up in her throat, acid things, poison things, and some lonely, terrified voice told her not to say them, not to this man, and she slang that voice away. In her anger she could do nothing else.

He cocked a thumb at the radio and said, stupidly proud of his useless knowledge: “That's The Chords. The original black version.”

She turned to him and said, “Do you think I give a rat's ass who's singing on the radio after I worked eight hours and waited for you another five? And you finally show up at quarter of eleven with a grin
on your face and a beer in your hand and a story about how some dead poet ended up being more important to you than I am?”

The grin on his face was still there but it was getting smaller, fading until it was little more than a quirk and one shallow dimple. Water, meanwhile, had risen in his eyes. The lost scared voice tried to call its warning again and she ignored it. This was a cutting party now. In both the fading grin and the growing hurt in his eyes she saw how he loved her, and knew this increased her power to hurt him. Still, she would cut. And why? Because she could.

Standing in the kitchen door and waiting for him to come back, she can't remember all the things she said, only that each one was a little worse, a little more perfectly tailored to hurt. At one point she was appalled to hear how much she sounded like Darla at her worst—just one more hectoring Debusher—and by then his smile was no longer even hanging in there. He was looking at her solemnly and she was terrified by how large his eyes were, magnified by the wetness shimmering on their surfaces until they seemed to eat up his face. She stopped in the middle of something about how his fingernails were always dirty and he gnawed on them like a rat when he was reading. She stopped and at that moment there were no engine sounds from in front of The Shamrock and The Mill downtown, no screeching tires, not even the faint sound of this weekend's band playing at The Rock. The silence was enormous and she realized she wanted to go back and had no idea how to do it. The simplest thing—
I love you anyway, Scott, come to bed
—will not occur to her until later. Not until after the bool.

“Scott . . . I—”

She had no idea where to go from there, and it seemed there was no need. Scott raised the forefinger of his left hand like a teacher who means to make a particularly important point, and the smile actually resurfaced on his lips. Some sort of smile, anyway.

“Wait,” he said.

“Wait?”

He looked pleased, as if she had grasped a difficult concept. “Wait.”

And before she could say anything else he simply walked off into the dark, back straight, walk straight (no drunk in him now), slim hips
slinging in his jeans. She said his name once—“Scott?”—but he only raised that forefinger again:
wait.
Then the shadows swallowed him.

Now she stands looking anxiously down the lawn. She has turned off the kitchen light, thinking that may make it easier to see him, but even with the help of the pole-light in the yard next door, the shadows take over halfway down the hill. In the next yard, a dog barks hoarsely. That dog's name is Pluto, she knows because she has heard the people over there yelling at it from time to time, fat lot of good it does. She thinks of the breaking-glass sound she heard a minute ago: like the barking, the breaking sounded close. Closer than the other sounds that populate this busy, unhappy night.

Why oh why did she have to tee off on him like that? She didn't even want to see the stupid Swedish movie in the first place! And why had she felt such joy in it? Such mean and filthy joy?

To that she has no answer. The late-spring night breathes around her, and exactly how long
has
he been down there in the dark? Only two minutes? Five, maybe? It seems longer. And that sound of breaking glass, did that have anything to do with Scott?

The greenhouse is down there. Parks.

There's no reason that should make her heart beat faster, but it does. And just as she feels that increased rhythm she sees motion beyond the place where her eyes lose their ability to see much of anything. A second later the moving thing resolves itself into a man. She feels relief, but it doesn't dissipate her fear. She keeps thinking about the sound of breaking glass. And there's something wrong with the way he's moving. His limber, straight walk is gone.

Now she
does
call his name, but what comes out is little more than a whisper: “Scott?” At the same time her hand is scrabbling around on the wall, feeling for the switch that turns on the light over the stoop.

Her call is low, but the shadowy figure plodding up the lawn—yes, that's a plod, all right, not a walk but a plod—raises its head just as
Lisey's curiously numb fingers find the light-switch and flick it. “
It's a bool, Lisey!
” he shouts as the light springs on, and could he have planned it better if he had stage-managed it? She thinks not. In his voice she hears mad jubilant relief, as if he has fixed everything.
“And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!”