Lisey’s Story (21 page)

Once, at around twenty past six, Lisey actually got her off the bed and
into a kind of half-assed crouch. She felt the way she had when she'd had her first car, a 1974 Pinto, and after two endless minutes of grinding the starter the motor would finally catch and run just before the battery died. But instead of straightening up and letting Lisey lead her into the bathroom, Amanda fell back onto the bed—fell crooked, too, so that Lisey had to lunge, catch her under the arms, and shove her, cursing, to keep her from going on the floor.

“You're faking, you bitch!”
she shouted at Amanda, knowing perfectly well that Amanda wasn't.
“Well, go on! Go on and—”
She heard how loud she'd gotten—she'd wake up Mrs. Jones across the road if she didn't look out—and made herself lower her voice. “Go on and lie there. Yeah. But if you think I'm going to spend the whole morning dancing attendance around you, you're full of shite. I'm going downstairs to make coffee and oatmeal. If any of it smells good to Your Royal Majesty, give me a holler. Or, I don't know, send down your smucking footman for take-out.”

She didn't know if it smelled good to big sissa Manda-Bunny, but it smelled fine to Lisey, especially the coffee. She had one cup of straight black before her bowl of oatmeal, another with double cream and sugar afterward. Sipping that one, she thought:
All I need now is a ciggy and I could ride this day like a pony. A smucking Salem Light.

Her mind tried to turn toward her dreams and memories of the night just past (
SCOTT AND LISEY THE EARLY YEARS
for sure,
she thought), and she wouldn't let it. Nor would she let it try to examine what had happened to her on waking. There might be time later to think about it, but not now. Now she had big sissa to deal with.

And suppose big sissa's found a nice pink disposable razor on top of the medicine cabinet and decided to slit her wrists with it? Or her throat?

Lisey got up from the table in a hurry, wondering if Darla had thought to clean the sharps out of the upstairs bathroom . . . or any of the upstairs rooms, for that matter. She took the stairs at a near-run, dreading what she might discover in the master bedroom, nerving herself to find nothing in the bed but a pair of dented pillows.

Amanda was still there, still staring up at the ceiling. She appeared not to have moved so much as an inch. Lisey's relief was replaced by foreboding. She sat on the bed and took her sister's hand in her own. It was
warm but unresponsive. Lisey willed Manda's fingers to close on her own but they remained limp. Waxy.

“Amanda, what are we going to do with you?”

There was no response.

And then, because they were alone except for their reflections in the mirror, Lisey said: “Scott didn't do this, did he, Manda? Please say Scott didn't do it by . . . I don't know . . . by coming in?”

Amanda said nothing one way or the other, and after a little while Lisey went prospecting in the bathroom for sharp objects. She guessed that Darla had indeed been here before her, because all she found was a single pair of nail-scissors at the back of the lower drawer in Manda's small, not-very-vain vanity. Of course, even those would have been enough, in a dedicated hand. Why, Scott's own father

(
hush Lisey no Lisey
)

“All right,” she said, alarmed by the panic that flooded her mouth with the taste of copper, the purple light that seemed to bloom behind her eyes, and the way her hand clenched on the tiny pair of scissors. “Okay, never mind. Pass it.”

She hid the scissors behind a clutch of dusty shampoo samples high up in Amanda's towel cupboard, and then—because she could think of nothing else—took a shower herself. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw that a large wet patch had spread around Amanda's hips, and understood this was something the Debusher sisters weren't going to be able to work through on their own. She got a towel under Amanda's soaked bottom. Then she glanced at the clock on the night-table, sighed, picked up the telephone, and dialed Darla's number.

Lisey had heard Scott in her head the day before, loud and clear:
I left you a note, babyluv.
She'd dismissed it as her own interior voice, mimicking his. Maybe it had been—
probably
had been—but by three o'clock on that long, hot Thursday afternoon, as she sat in Pop's Café in Lewiston with Darla, she knew one thing for sure: he'd left her one hell of a posthumous
gift. One hell of a bool-prize, in Scott-talk. It had been a bitch-kitty of a day, but it would have been a lot worse without Scott Landon, two years dead or not.

Darla looked every bit as tired as Lisey felt. Somewhere along the way she'd found time to put on a little makeup, but she didn't have enough ammo in her purse to hide the circles under her eyes. Certainly there was no sign of the angry thirtysomething who had in the late nineteen-seventies made it her business to call Lisey once a week and hector her about her family duties.

“Penny for em, little Lisey,” she said now.

Lisey had been reaching for the caddy containing the packets of Sweet'n Low. At the sound of Darla's voice she changed direction, reached for the old-fashioned sugar-shaker instead, and poured a hefty stream into her cup. “I was thinking this has been Coffee Thursday,” she said. “Mostly Coffee With Real Sugar Thursday. This must be my tenth shot.”

“You and me both,” Darla said. “I've been to the john half a dozen times, and I plan to go again before we leave this charming establishment. Thank God for Pepcid AC.”

Lisey stirred her coffee, grimaced, then sipped again. “Sure you want to pack up a suitcase for her?”

“Well, someone has to do it, and you look like death on a cracker.”

“Thanks a pantload.”

“If your sister won't tell you the truth, no one will.”

Lisey had heard this from her many times, along with
Duty doesn't ask permission
and, Number One on the All-Time Darla Hit Parade,
Life isn't fair.
Today it didn't sting. It even raised the ghost of a smile. “If you want to do it, Darl, I won't arm-rassle you for the privilege.”

“Didn't say I wanted to, just said I would. You stayed with her last night and got up with her this morning. I'd say you did your share. Excuse me, I've got to spend a penny.”

Lisey watched her go, thinking
There's another one.
In the Debusher family, where there was a saying for everything, urinating was
spending a penny
and moving one's bowels was—odd but true—
burying a Quaker.
Scott had loved that, said it was probably an old Scots derivation.
Lisey supposed it was possible; most of the Debushers came from Ireland and all the Andersons from England, or so Good Ma said, but there were a few stray dogs in every family, weren't there? And that hardly interested her. What interested her was that
spending a penny
and
burying a Quaker
were catches from the pool, Scott's pool, and ever since yesterday he seemed so smucking close to her . . .

That was a dream this morning, Lisey . . . you know that, don't you?

She wasn't sure what she knew or didn't know about what had happened in Amanda's bedroom this morning—it all seemed like a dream, even trying to get Amanda to stand up and go into the bath-room—but one thing she could be sure of: Amanda was now booked into Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation for at least a week, it had all been easier than she and Darla could have hoped, and they had Scott to thank. Right now and

(
rah-cheer
)

right here, that seemed like enough.

Darla had gotten to Manda's cozy little Cape Cod before seven AM, her usually stylish hair barely combed, one button of her blouse unbuttoned so that the pink of her bra peeked cheekily through. By then Lisey had confirmed that Amanda wouldn't eat, either. She allowed Lisey to insert a spoonful of scrambled eggs into her mouth after being tugged into a sitting position and propped against the head of the bed, and that gave Lisey some hope—Amanda was swallowing, after all, so maybe she'd swallow the eggs—but it was hope in vain. After simply sitting there for perhaps thirty seconds with the eggs peeping out from between her lips (to Lisey that peep of yellow had a rather gruesome look, as if her sister had tried to eat a canary), Amanda simply ejected the eggs with her tongue. A few bits stuck to her chin. The rest tumbled down the front of her nightgown. Amanda's eyes continued to stare serenely off into the distance. Or into the mystic, if you were a Van Morrison fan. Scott certainly had been, although his pash for Van the Man
had tapered off quite a bit in the early nineties. That was when Scott had begun drifting back to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.

Darla had refused to believe Amanda wouldn't eat until she tried the egg experiment for herself. She had to scramble fresh ones to do it; Lisey had scraped the remains of the first pair down the garbage disposal. Amanda's thousand-yard stare had robbed her of any appetite she might have had for big sissa's leftovers.

By the time Darla marched into the room, Amanda had slid back down from her propped-up position—
oozed
back down—and Darla helped Lisey get her back up again. Lisey was grateful for the help. Her back already hurt. She could barely imagine the mounting cost of caring for a person like this day in and day out, for an unlimited run.

“Amanda, I want you to eat these,” Darla said in the forbidding, I-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer tone Lisey remembered from a great many telephone conversations in her younger years. The tone, combined with the jut of Darla's jaw and the set of Darla's body, made it clear she thought Amanda was shamming.
Fakin like a brakeman,
Dandy would have said; just one of his hundred or so cheerful, colorful, nonsensical phrases. But (Lisey mused) hadn't that almost always been Darla's judgment when you weren't doing what Darla wanted? That you were
fakin like a brakeman?

“I want you to eat these eggs, Amanda—
right now!
”

Lisey opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. They would get to where they were going more quickly if Darla saw for herself. And where were they going? Greenlawn, very likely. Greenlawn Recovery and Rehab in Auburn. The place she and Scott had looked into briefly after Amanda's last outletting, in the spring of 2001. Only it turned out that Scott's dealings with Greenlawn had gone a little further than his wife had suspected, and thank God for that.

Darla got the eggs into Amanda's mouth and turned to Lisey with the beginnings of a triumphant smile. “There! I think she just needed a firm h—”

At this point Amanda's tongue appeared between her slack lips, once more pushing canary-colored eggs before it, and
plop.
Onto the front of her nightgown, still damp from its last sponging-off.

“You were saying?” Lisey asked mildly.

Darla took a long, long look at her older sister. When she turned her eyes back to Lisey, the jut-jawed determination was gone. She looked like what she was: a middle-aged woman who'd been harried out of bed too early by a family emergency. She wasn't crying, but she was close; her eyes, the bright blue all the Debusher girls shared, swam with tears. “This isn't like before, is it?”

“No.”

“Did anything happen last night?”

“No.” Lisey didn't hesitate.

“No crying fits or tantrums?”

“No.”

“Oh, hon, what are we going to do?”

Lisey had a practical answer for that, and no surprise there; Darla might think differently, but Lisey and Jodi had always been the practical ones. “Lay her back down, wait for business hours, then call that place,” she said. “Greenlawn. And hope she doesn't piss the bed again in the meantime.”

While they waited, they drank coffee and played cribbage, a game each of the Debusher girls had learned from Dandy long before they'd taken their first rides on the big yellow Lisbon Falls schoolbus. Every third or fourth hand, one of them would check on Amanda. She was always the same, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. In the first game, Darla skunked her younger sister; in the second she skipped out with a run of three in the crib, leaving Lisey stuck in the mudhole. That this should put her in a good humor even with Manda gorked out upstairs gave Lisey something to think about . . . but nothing she wanted to say right out loud. It was going to be a long day, and if Darla started it with a smile on her face, terrific. Lisey declined a third game and the two of them watched some country singer on the last segment of the
Today
show. Lisey could almost hear Scott saying,
He ain't gonna put Ole
Hank out of business.
By whom he meant, of course, Hank Williams. When it came to country music, for Scott there had been Ole Hank . . . and then all the rest of them.

At five past nine, Lisey sat down in front of the telephone and got the Greenlawn number from Directory Assistance. She gave Darla a wan and nervous smile. “Wish me luck, Darl.”

“Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.”

Lisey dialed. The phone on the other end rang exactly once. “Hello,” a pleasant female voice said. “This is Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation, a service of Fedders Health Corporation of America.”

“Hello, my name is—” Lisey got this far before the pleasant female voice began enumerating all the possible destinations one could reach . . . if, that was, one were possessed of a touch-tone phone. It was a recording. Lisey had been booled.

Yeah, but they've gotten so good,
she thought, punching 5 for Patient Intake Information.

“Please hold while your call is processed,” the pleasant female voice told her, and was replaced by the Prozac Orchestra playing something that vaguely resembled Paul Simon's “Homeward Bound.”