Lisey’s Story (20 page)

All the Landons are fast healers. We had to be.

Meanwhile, Scott's forking crisp bacon out of the pan and onto a double fold of paper towels. As far as Lisey's concerned, he may be a good writer, but he's a
great
fry cook. At least when he really sets his mind to it. He needs new underwear, though; the seat of this pair sags rather comically, and the elastic waistband is on life-support. She'll see what she can do about getting him to buy new ones when the royalty check he's been promised comes in, and of course underwear isn't what's on her mind, not actually; her mind wants to compare what she saw last night—those deep and sickening gills, pink shading to liverish red—with what's on offer this morning. It's the difference between mere cuts
and gashes, and does she really think
anyone
heals that fast, outside of a Bible story? Does she really? It wasn't a
window
-pane he stuck his hand through, after all, it was a pane of
greenhouse
glass, which reminds her, they'll have to do something about that, Scott will have to—

“Lisey.”

She's jerked out of her reverie to find herself sitting at the kitchen table, nervously knitting her tee-shirt together between her thighs. “What?”

“One egg or two?”

She considers it. “Two. I guess.”

“Over easy or want em lookin atcha?”

“Over,” she says.

“Will we marry?” he asks in exactly the same tone, cracking both eggs in his good right hand and dropping them into the pan, kerplunk.

She smiles a little, not at his matter-of-fact tone but at the faintly archaic turn of phrase, and realizes she's not surprised at all. She has expected this . . . this what-do-you-call-it, this resumption; must have been turning his proposal over in some deep part of her mind even as she slept.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Sure shot,” he says. “What do you think, babyluv?”

“Babyluv thinks that sounds like a plan.”

“Good,” he says. “That's good.” He pauses. Then: “Thank you.”

For a minute or two neither of them says anything. On the windowsill, the old cracked Philco plays the sort of music Dad Debusher never listened to. In the pan, the eggs snap. She's hungry. And she's happy.

“In the fall,” she says.

He nods, reaching for a plate. “Good. October?”

“Maybe too soon. Say right around Thanksgiving. Are there any eggs left for you?”

“There be one, and one be all I want.”

She says, “I won't marry you if you don't buy some new underwear.”

He doesn't laugh. “Then I'll make it a priority.”

He puts the plate in front of her. Bacon and eggs. She is so hungry. She starts in and he cracks the last egg into the pan.

“Lisa Landon,” he says. “What do you think?”

“I think it's a keeper. It's . . . what do you call it when all the words start with the same sound?”

“Alliteration.”

“Yeah, that.” Now she says it. “Lisa Landon.” Like the eggs, it tastes good.

“Little Lisey Landon,” he says, and flips his egg in the air. It turns over twice and lands square in the bacon-grease,
splat.

“Do you, Scott Landon, promise to strap it on and keep the moth-ersmucker strapped?” she asks.

“Strapped in sickness, strapped in health,” he agrees, and they begin laughing like mad bastards while the radio plays in the sunshine.

With Scott, she always laughed a lot. And a week later the cuts on his hand, even the one on his forearm, were pretty much healed.

They didn't even scar.

When Lisey wakes again, she no longer knew
when
she was—then or now. But enough of morning's first light had crept into the room so she can see the cool blue wallpaper and the seascape on the wall. So it was Amanda's bedroom, and that seemed right, but it also seems wrong; it seems to her that this is a dream of the future she's having in her narrow apartment bed, the one she still shares with Scott on most nights, and will until the wedding in November.

What wakened her?

Amanda was turned away from her and Lisey was still fitted against her like a spoon, her breasts against Manda's back, her belly against Manda's scant bottom, and just what has wakened her? She doesn't need to pee . . . not badly, anyway, so
what
 . . .?

Amanda, did you say something? Do you want something? Drink of water, maybe? Piece of greenhouse glass to slit your wrists with?

These things passed through her mind, but Lisey didn't really want to say anything, because an odd idea has come to her. The idea is that, although she can see the rapidly graying mop of Amanda's hair and the frill around the neck of Amanda's nightgown, she was actually in bed with Scott. Yes! That at some point in the night Scott has . . . what? Crept through the lens of Lisey's memories and into Amanda's body? Something like that. It's a funny idea, all right, and yet she doesn't want to say anything, because she's afraid that if she did, Amanda might answer in Scott's voice. And what would she do then? Would she scream? Would she scream
to wake the dead,
as the saying is? Surely the idea is absurd, but—

But look at her. Look how she's sleeping, with her knees pulled up and her head bent. If there was a wall, her forehead would be touching it. No wonder you think
—

And then, in that pre-dawn ditch of five o'clock, with her face turned away so Lisey cannot see it, Amanda spoke.

“Baby,”
she says.

There is a pause.

Then:
“Babyluv.”

If Lisey's interior temperature seemed to drop thirty degrees the evening before, now it seems to drop sixty, for although the voice which spoke the word was undeniably female, it is also Scott's. Lisey lived with him for over twenty years. She knows Scott when she hears him.

This is a dream,
she told herself.
That's why I can't even tell if it's then or now. If I look around I'll see the
PILLSBURY'S BEST
magic carpet floating in the
corner of the room.

But she couldn't look around. For a long time she couldn't move at all. What finally impels her to speak is the strengthening light. Night is almost over. If Scott has come back—if she was really awake and not just dreaming this—then there must be a reason. And it wouldn't be to harm her. Never to harm her. At least . . . not on purpose. But she finds she can speak neither his name nor Amanda's. Neither seems right. Both
seemed wrong. She saw herself grabbing Amanda's shoulder and rolling her over. Whose face would she see under Manda's graying bangs? Suppose it was Scott's? Oh sweet God,
suppose.

Daylight is coming. And she was suddenly sure that if she let the sun come up without speaking, the door between the past and the present will close and any chance of getting answers will be gone.

Never mind the names, then. Never mind just who the hell is inside the nightgown.

“Why did Amanda say bool?” she asked. Her voice in the bedroom—still dim but brightening, brightening—sounds hoarse, dusty.

“I left you a bool,” remarks the other person in the bed, the person against whose bottom Lisey's belly lies.

Oh God oh God oh God this is the bad-gunky if there ever was bad-gunky, this is it
—

And then:
Get hold of yourself. You strap it the fuck on. Do it right now.

“Is it . . .” Her voice was drier and dustier than ever. And now the room seems to be brightening too fast. The sun will clear the eastern horizon any second now. “Is it a blood-bool?”

“You have a blood-bool coming,” the voice tells her, sounding faintly regretful. And oh it sounds so much like Scott. Yet now it sounded more like Amanda, too, and this scared Lisey more than ever.

Then the voice brightened. “The one you're on is a
good
bool, Lisey. It goes behind the purple. You've already found the first three stations. A few more and you'll get your prize.”

“What's my prize?” she asks.

“A drink.” The reply was prompt.

“A Coke? An RC?”

“Be quiet. We want to watch the hollyhocks.”

The voice spoke with strange and infinite longing, and what is familiar about that? Why does it seem like a name for something instead of just bushes? Is it another thing that's hidden behind the purple curtain which sometimes keeps her own memories away from her? There was no time to think about it, let alone ask about it, because a slant of red light fingered in through the window. Lisey felt time come back into focus, and, frightened as she had been, she felt an intense pang of regret.

“When is the blood-bool coming?” she asked. “Tell me that.”

There was no answer. She knew there would be no answer, and still her frustration grew, filling the place where her terror and her perplexity had been before the sun peeped over the horizon, casting its dispelling rays.

“When is it coming? Damn you, when?”
She was shouting now, and shaking the white-nightgowned shoulder hard enough to make the hair flop . . . and still no answer. Lisey's fury broke.
“Don't tease me like that, Scott, when?”

This time she
yanked
on the nightgowned shoulder instead of just shaking, and the other body on the bed rolled limply over. It was Amanda, of course. Her eyes were open and she still breathed, there was even some dull color in her cheeks, but Lisey recognized that thousand-yard stare from big sissa Manda-Bunny's other breaks with reality. And not only hers. Lisey no longer had any idea if Scott had actually come to her or if she had only been fooling herself while in a semi-waking state, but of one thing she was quite sure: at some point during the night, Amanda had gone away again. This time maybe for good.

“She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.”

—D. H. Lawrence,
The Rainbow

It didn't take Lisey long to realize this was far worse than Amanda's three previous breaks with reality—her periods of “passive semi-catatonia,” to use the shrink's phrase. It was as if her usually irritating and sometimes troublesome sister had become a large breathing doll. Lisey managed (with considerable effort) to tug Amanda into a sitting position and swivel her around so she was sitting on the edge of the bed, but the woman in the white cotton nightgown—who might or might not have spoken in the voice of Lisey's dead husband a few moments before dawn—would not respond to her name when it was spoken, or called, or shouted, almost desperately, into her face. She only sat with her hands in her lap, looking fixedly at her younger sister. And when Lisey stepped away, Amanda looked fixedly into the space where she had been.

Lisey went into the bathroom to wet a cloth with cold water, and when she came back, Amanda had subsided into a prone position again with her upper half on the bed and her feet on the floor. Lisey began to pull her back up, then stopped when Amanda's buttocks, already close to the bed's edge, began to slide. If she persisted, Amanda would end up on the floor.

“Manda-Bunny!”

No response to the childhood nickname this time. Lisey decided to go whole hog.

“Big
sissa
Manda-Bunny!”

Nothing. Instead of being frightened (that would come shortly), Lisey was swept by the sort of rage Amanda had hardly ever been able to provoke in her younger sister when she had actually tried.

“Stop this! Stop it and scoot your ass back on the bed so you can sit up!”

Zip. Zero. She bent, wiped Amanda's expressionless face with the cold washcloth, and got more nothing. The eyes didn't blink even when the washcloth passed over them. Now Lisey
did
begin to be scared. She looked at the digital clock-radio beside the bed and saw it had just gone six. She could call Darla with no worries of waking Matt, who would be sleeping the sleep of the just up in Montreal, but she didn't want to do that. Not yet. Calling Darla would be the same as admitting defeat, and she wasn't ready to do that.

She circled the bed, grabbed Amanda under the armpits, and hauled her backward. It was harder to do than she expected, given Amanda's scrawny bod.

Because she's dead weight now, babyluv. That's why.

“Shut up,” she said, with no idea who she was talking to. “Just shut it.”

She got on the bed herself with her knees on either side of Amanda's thighs and her hands planted on either side of Amanda's neck. In this position, that of the lover superior, she could look directly down into her sister's upturned, staring face. During Manda's previous breaks, she had been biddable . . . almost the way a person under hypnosis is biddable, Lisey had thought at the time. This seemed very different. She could only hope it wasn't, because there were certain things a person had to do in the morning. If, that was, the person wanted to go on living a private life in her little Cape Cod home.

“Amanda!”
she yelled down into her sister's face. Then, for good measure, and feeling only slightly ridiculous (it was only the two of them, after all):
“Big . . . sissa . . . Manda-Bunny! I want you . . . to stand up . . . stand UP! . . . and go into the shithouse . . . and use the TOIDY! Use the TOIDY, Manda-Bunny! On three! ONE . . . and TWO! . . . and THREE!”
On
THREE
Lisey again yanked Amanda to a sitting position, but Amanda still wouldn't stand.