Lisey’s Story (29 page)

In the attic were at least four expensive Turkish rugs she had once adored and which had at some point, for reasons she did not understand, begun to give her the creeps . . .

At least three sets of retired luggage that had taken everything two dozen airlines, many of them dinky little commuter puddle-jumper outfits, could throw at them; battered warriors that deserved medals and parades, but would have to be content with honorable attic retirement (hell, boys, it beats the town dump) . . .

The Danish-Modern living room furniture that Scott said looked pretentious, and how angry with him she'd been, mostly because she'd thought he was probably right . . .

The rolltop desk, a “bargain” that turned out to have one short leg which had to be shimmed, only the shim was always coming out and then one day the rolltop had unrolled on her fingers and that had been
it
, buddy, up to the smucking attic with you . . .

Ashtrays on stands from their smoking days . . .

Scott's old IBM Selectric, which she had used for correspondence until it started getting hard to find the ribbons and CorrecTapes . . .

Stuff like-a
dis
, stuff like-a
dat
, stuff like-a
d'other-t'ing.
Another world, really, and yet it was all
rah-cheer
, or at least right up
dere.
And somewhere—probably behind a stack of magazines or sitting on top of the rocking chair with the unreliable split back—would be the cedar box. Thinking about it was like thinking about cold water when you were thirsty on a hot day. She didn't know just why that should be so, but it was.

By the time Deputy Boeckman came up from the cellar with his Polaroids, she was impatient for him to be gone. Perversely he hung on (
hung on like a toothache
, Dad Debusher would've said), first telling her it looked like the cat had been stabbed with some sort of tool (possibly a screwdriver), then assuring her he'd be parked right outside. It might not say
TO SERVE AND PROTECT
on their units (he called them units), but the thought was there every minute, and he wanted her to feel perfectly safe. Lisey said she felt so safe she was actually thinking about going to bed—it had been a long day, she'd had a family emergency to deal with as well as this stalker business, and she was utterly whipped. Deputy Boeckman
finally took the hint and left after telling her one final time that she was as safe as could be, safe as houses, and there was no need for any of that sleeping-with-one-eye-open stuff. Then he clumped down her front steps as stolidly as he'd clumped down her cellar stairs, shuffling through his dead-cat photos a final time while he still had light enough to see them. A minute or two later she heard what sounded like a puffickly huh-
yooge
engine rev twice. Headlights washed across the lawn and the house, then abruptly went out. She thought of Deputy Daniel Boeckman sitting across the road with his cruiser parked prominently on the shoulder. She smiled. Then she went upstairs to the attic, with no idea that she would be lying on her bed fully dressed two hours later, exhausted and weeping.

The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it. She'd had no clear reason for wanting the box in the first place, only a strong intuition that something inside, some souvenir from her early marriage, was the next station of the bool. After awhile, however, the box itself became her goal, Good Ma's cedar box. Bools be damned, if she didn't lay hands on that cedar box—a foot long, maybe nine inches wide and six deep—she'd never be able to sleep. She'd only lie there tortured by thoughts of dead cats and dead husbands and empty beds and Incunk warriors and sisters who cut themselves and fathers who cut—

(
hush Lisey hush
)

She'd only lie there, leave it at that.

An hour's search was enough to convince her the cedar box wasn't in the attic, after all. But by then she was sure it was probably in the spare bedroom. It was perfectly reasonable to think it had migrated back there . . . except another forty minutes (including a teetery stepladder exploration
of the top shelf in the closet) convinced her the spare room was another dry hole. So the box was down cellar.
Had
to be. Very likely it had come to rest behind the stairs, where there was a bunch of cardboard boxes containing curtains, rug-remnants, old stereo components, and a few bits of sporting equipment: ice skates, a croquet set, a badminton net with a hole in it. As she hurried down the cellar stairs (not thinking at all of the dead cat now lying beside the pile of petrified moose-meat in her freezer), Lisey began to believe she had even
seen
the box down there. By then she was very tired, but only distantly aware of the fact.

It took her twenty minutes to drag all the cartons from their long-term resting place. Some were damp and split open. By the time she'd finished going through the stuff inside, her limbs were trembling with exhaustion, her clothes were sticking to her, and a nasty little headache had begun thumping at the back of her skull. She shoved back the cartons that were still holding together and left the ones that had split apart where they were. Good Ma's box was in the attic after all. Must be, had been all along. As she wasted time down here among the rusty ice skates and forgotten jigsaw puzzles, the cedar box was waiting patiently up there. Lisey could now think of half a dozen places she'd neglected to search, including the crawlspace all the way back under the eaves. That was the most likely spot. She'd probably put the box there and just forgotten all about—

The thought broke off cleanly as she realized someone was standing behind her. She could see him from the corner of her eye. Call him Jim Dooley or Zack McCool, by either name he would in the next moment drop a hand on her sweaty shoulder and call her Missus. Then she'd
really
have something to worry about.

This sensation was so real that Lisey actually heard the shuffle of Dooley's feet. She wheeled around, hands coming up to protect her face, and had just an instant to see the Hoover vacuum she herself had pulled out from under the stairs. Then she tripped over the moldering cardboard carton with the old badminton net stuffed inside. She waved her arms for balance, almost caught it, lost it, had time to think
shit-a-brick
, and went down. The top of her head missed the underside of the stairs by a whisker, and that was good, because that would have been a nasty crack
indeed, maybe the kind that laid you out unconscious. Laid you out dead, if you came down hard enough on the cement floor. Lisey managed to break her fall with her splayed hands, one knee landing safely on the springy mat of the rotted badminton net, the other suffering a harder landing on the cellar floor. Luckily, she was still wearing her jeans.

The fall was fortunate in another way, she thought fifteen minutes later as she lay on her bed, still fully dressed but with her hard crying over; she was by then down to the isolated sobs and rueful, watery gasps for breath that are strong emotion's hangover. The fall—and the scare that had preceded it, she supposed—had cleared her head. She might have gone on hunting the box for another two hours—longer, if her strength had held out. Back to the attic, back to the spare bedroom, back to the cellar.
Back to the future
, Scott would surely have added; he had a knack for cracking wise at precisely the wrong moment. Or what turned out, later on, to have been precisely the right one.

In any case she might well have gone on until dawn's early light and it would have gotten her a lot of hot air in one hand and a big pile of jack shit in the other. Lisey was now convinced the box was either in a place so obvious she'd already passed it half a dozen times or it was just
gone
, maybe stolen by one of the cleaning women who'd worked for the Lan-dons over the years or by some workman who'd spied it and thought his wife would like a nice box like that and that Mr. Landon's Missus (funny how that word got into your head) would never miss it.

Fiddle-de-dee, little Lisey
, said the Scott who kept his place in her head.
Think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.

“Yep,” Lisey said, then sat up, suddenly aware that she was a sweaty, smelly woman living inside a set of sweaty, dirty clothes. She got out of them as quickly as she could, left them in a heap by the foot of the bed, and headed for the shower. She had scraped the palms of both hands breaking her fall in the cellar, but she ignored their stinging and soaped her hair twice, letting suds run down the sides of her face. Then, after almost dozing under the hot water for five minutes or so, she resolutely turned the shower's control-lever all the way over to
C,
rinsed off under the near-freezing needle-spray, and stepped out, gasping. She used one of the big towels, and as she dropped it into the
hamper she realized she felt like herself again, sane and ready to let this day go.

She went to bed, and her last thought before sleep swatted her into the black was of Deputy Boeckman standing watch. It was a comforting thought, particularly after her scare in the cellar, and she slept deeply, without dreams, until the shrill of the telephone woke her.

It was Cantata, calling from Boston. Of course it was. Darla had called her. Darla always called Canty when there was trouble, usually sooner rather than later. Canty wanted to know if she should come home. Lisey assured her sister that there was absolutely no reason to return from Boston early no matter how distressed Darla might have sounded. Amanda was resting comfortably, and there was really nothing Canty could do. “You can visit, but unless there's been a big change—which Dr. Alberness told us not to expect—you won't be able to tell if she even knows you're there.”

“Jesus,” Canty said. “That's so awful, Lisa.”

“Yes. But she's with people who understand her situation—or understand how to care for people in her situation, at least. And Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loo—”

Lisey had been pacing around the bedroom with the cordless phone. Now she stopped, staring at the notebook that had slid most of the way from the right rear pocket of her discarded blue jeans. It was Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions, only now Lisey was the one who felt compelled.

“Lisa?” Canty was the only one who called her that on a regular basis, and it always made her feel like the sort of woman who showed off the prizes on some TV game show or other—
Lisa, show Hank and Martha what they've won!
“Lisa, are you still there?”

“Yeah, honey.” Eyes on the notebook. Little rings gleaming in the sun. Little steel loops. “I said Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loops.
Loop.
” The notebook was still curved with the shape of the but-tock
against which it had spent so many hours, and as she looked at it, Canty's voice seemed to be fading. Lisey heard herself saying she was sure Canty would have done all the same things if she'd been the one on the spot. She bent over and slipped the notebook the rest of the way out of the jeans pocket. She told Cantata she would call that evening, told Cantata she loved her, told Cantata goodbye and tossed the cordless phone on the bed without so much as a glance. She had eyes only for the battered little notebook, seventy-nine cents at any Walgreen's or Rexall. And why should she be so fascinated? Why, now that it was morning and she was rested? Clean and rested? With fresh sunshine pouring in, her compulsive search for the cedar box the night before seemed silly, nothing but a behavioral externalization of all the day's anxieties, but this notebook didn't seem silly, no, not at all.

And just to add to the fun, Scott's voice spoke to her, more clearly than ever. God, but that voice was clear! And strong.

I left you a note, babyluv. I left you a bool.

She thought of Scott under the yum-yum tree, Scott in the weird October snow, telling her that sometimes Paul would tease him with a hard bool . . . but never
too
hard. She hadn't thought of that in years. Had pushed it away, of course, with all the other things she didn't want to think of; she'd put it behind her purple curtain. But what was so bad about this?

“He was never mean,” Scott had said. There had been tears in his eyes but none in his voice; his voice had been clear and steady. As always when he had a story to tell, he meant to be heard. “When I was little, Paul was never mean to me and I was never mean to him. We stuck together. We had to. I loved him, Lisey. I loved him so.”

By now she had flipped past the pages of numbers—poor Amanda's numbers, all crammed madly together. She found nothing but blank pages beyond. Lisey thumbed through them faster and faster, her certainty that there was something here to find waning, then reached a page near the end with a single word printed on it: