Lisey’s Story (39 page)

(
hush
)

to her mouth. She remembered thinking how strange it was that they should be dressed for winter in such a tropical place, and she saw he was afraid. Then they had been outside in the snow. That crazy downpouring October snow.

How long had they been in the between-place? Three seconds? Maybe even less. But now, crawling because she was too weak and shocked to stand, Lisey was at last willing to own up to the truth of it. By the time they made it back to The Antlers that day, she'd gotten a fair distance toward convincing herself it hadn't happened, but it had.

“Happened again, too,” she said. “Happened that night.”

She was so smucking thirsty. Wanted another drink of water in the worst way, but of course the bar alcove was behind her, she was going the wrong way for water and she could remember Scott singing one of Ole Hank's songs as they drove back that Sunday, singing
All day I've faced the barren waste, Without a single taste of water, cool water.

You'll get your drink, babyluv.

“Will I?” Still nothing but a crow-croak. “A drink of water would surely help. This hurts so bad.”

To this there was no reply, and perhaps she didn't need one. She had finally reached the scatter of objects around the overturned cedar box. She reached out for the yellow square, plucked it off the purple menu, and closed it tight in her hand. She lay on her side—the one that didn't hurt—and looked at it closely: the little lines of knits and purls, those tiny locks. There was blood on her fingers and it smeared on the wool, but she hardly noticed. Good Ma had knitted dozens of afghans out of squares like this, afghans of rose and gray, afghans of blue and gold, afghans of green and burnt orange. They were Good Ma's specialty and spilled from her needles, one after the other, as she sat in front of the chattering TV at night. Lisey remembered how, as a child, she had thought such knitted blankets were called “africans.” Their female cousins (Angletons, Darbys, Wiggenses, and Washburns as well as Debushers almost beyond counting) had all been gifted with africans when they married; each of the Debusher girls had gotten at least three. And with each african came one extra square in the same shade or pattern. Good Ma called these extra squares “delights.” They were meant as table decorations, or to be framed and hung on the wall. Because the yellow african had been Good Ma's wedding present to Lisey and Scott, and because Scott had always loved it, Lisey had saved the accompanying delight in the cedar box. Now she lay bleeding on his carpet, holding the square, and gave up trying to forget. She thought,
Bool! The End!
, and began to cry. She understood she was incapable of coherence, but maybe that was all right; order would come later, if it was needed.

And, of course, if there was a later.

The gomers and the bad-gunky. For the Landons and the Landreaus before them, it's always been one or the other. And it always comes out.

It was really no surprise Scott had recognized Amanda for what she was—he'd known about cutting behavior firsthand. How many times had he cut himself? She didn't know. You couldn't read his scars the way you could read Amanda's, because . . . well, because. The one incidence of self-multilation she knew about for sure—the night of the greenhouse—had been spectacular, however. And he had learned about cutting from his father, who only turned his knife on his boys when his own body would not suffice to let the bad-gunky out.

Gomers and bad-gunky. Always one or the other. It always comes out.

And if Scott had missed the worst of the bad-gunky, what did that leave?

In December of 1995, the weather had turned rottenly cold. And something started going wrong with Scott. He had a number of speaking gigs planned after the turn of the year at schools in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (what he referred to as The Scott Landon 1996 Western Yahoo Tour), but called his literary agent and had him cancel the whole deal. The booking agency screamed blue murder (no surprise there, that was three hundred thousand dollars' worth of speaking dates he was talking about flushing down the commode), but Scott held firm. He said the tour was impossible, said he was sick. He was sick, all right; as that winter sank its claws in deeper, Scott Landon had been a sick man, indeed. Lisey knew as early as November that something

She knows
something's
wrong with him, and it isn't bronchitis, as he's been claiming. He has no cough, and his skin's cool to the touch, so even though he won't let her take his temperature, won't even let her put one of those fever-strip thingies on his forehead, she's pretty sure he's not running a fever. The problem seems to be mental rather than physical, and that scares the hell out of her. The one time she gets up enough courage to suggest he go see Dr. Bjorn, he just about
tears her head off
, accuses her of being a doctor-junkie “like the rest of your nutbox sisters.”

And how is she supposed to respond to that? What, exactly, are the symptoms he's displaying? Would any doctor—even a sympathetic one like Rick Bjorn—take them seriously? He's stopped listening to music when he writes, that's one thing. And he's not writing much, that's another, much bigger, thing. Forward progress on his new novel—which Lisey Landon, admittedly no great book critic, happens to love—has slowed from his usual all-out sprint to a labored crawl. Bigger still . . .
dear Christ, where's his sense of humor? That boisterous sense of good humor can be wearing, but its sudden absence as fall gives way to cold weather is downright spooky; it's like the moment in one of those old jungle movies where the native drums suddenly fall silent. He's drinking more, too, and later into the night. She has always gone to bed earlier than he does—usually much earlier—but she almost always knows when he turns in and what she smells on his breath when he does. She also knows what she sees in his trashcans up in his study, and as her worries grow, she makes a special point to look every two or three days. She's used to seeing beer cans, sometimes a great lot of them, Scott has always liked his beer, but in December of 1995 and early January of 1996 she also begins to see Jim Beam bottles. And Scott is suffering hangovers. For some reason this bothers her more than all the rest. Sometimes he wanders the house—pale, silent, ill—until the middle of the afternoon before finally perking up. On several occasions she has heard him vomiting behind the closed bathroom door, and she knows by the speed with which the aspirin is disappearing that he's suffering bad headaches. Nothing unusual in that, you might say; drink a case of beer or a bottle of Beam between nine and midnight, you're gonna pay the price, Patrick. And maybe that's all it is, but Scott has been a heavy drinker since the night she met him in that University lounge, when he had a bottle squirreled away in his jacket pocket (he shared it with her), and he's never suffered more than the mildest of hangovers. Now when she sees the empties in his wastebasket and that only a page or two has been added to the
Outlaw's Honeymoon
manuscript on his big desk (some days there are no new pages at all), she wonders just how much more he's drinking than what she knows about.

For a little while she's able to forget her worries in the round of year-end holiday visiting and the jostle of Christmas shopping. Scott has never been much of a shopper even when things are slow and the stores are empty, but this season he throws himself into it with hectic good cheer. He's out with her every smucking day, doing battle at either the Auburn Mall or the Main Street shops in Castle Rock. He's recognized often but cheerfully refuses the frequent autograph requests from people who smell the chance for a one-of-a-kind gift, telling them that if he
doesn't stick with his wife, he probably won't see her again until Easter. He may have lost his sense of humor but she never sees him lose his temper, not even when some of the folks who want autographs get pushy, and so for awhile there he seems
sort of
all right, sort of himself in spite of the drinking, the canceled tour, and his slow progress on the new book.

Christmas itself is a happy day, with lots of presents exchanged and an energetic midday tumble in the sack. Christmas dinner is at Canty and Rich's, and over dessert Rich asks Scott when he's going to produce one of the movies made from his novels. “That's where the
big
money is,” Rich says, seemingly ignorant of the fact that of four film adaptations so far, three have bombed. Only the movie version of
Empty Devils
(which Lisey has never seen) made money.

On the way home, Scott's sense of humor swoops back in like a big old B-1 bomber and he does a killer imitation of Rich that has Lisey laughing until her belly cramps up. And when they arrive back at Sugar Top Hill, they proceed upstairs for a
second
tumble in the sack. In the afterglow Lisey finds herself thinking that if Scott is sick, maybe more people should catch what he has, the world would be a better place.

She wakes around two AM on Boxing Day, needing to use the bathroom, and—talk about
déjà vu
all over again—he's not in bed. But this time not
gone.
She has come to know the difference without even letting herself know what she means when she thinks

(
gone
)

about that thing he sometimes does, that place he sometimes goes.

She urinates with her eyes shut, listening to the wind outside the house. It sounds cold, that wind, but she doesn't know what cold is. Not yet. Let another couple of weeks pass and she will. Let another couple of weeks pass and she'll know all sorts of things.

When she's done with the toilet, she peeks out the bathroom window. This looks toward the barn and Scott's study in the converted hayloft. If he was up there—and when he gets restless in the middle of the night, that is where he usually goes—she'd see the lights, perhaps even hear the happy carnival sounds of his rock-and-roll music, very faint. Tonight the barn is dark, and the only music she hears is the
pitchpipe of the wind. This makes her a little uneasy; hatches thoughts in the back of her brain

(
heart attack stroke
)

that are too unpleasant to completely consider, yet a little too strong, given how . . . how
off
he's been lately . . . to completely dismiss. So instead of sleepwalking back to the bedroom, she goes to the bathroom's other door, the one that gives on the upstairs hall. She calls his name and gets no answer, but she sees a slim gold bar of light shining beneath the closed door at the far end. And now, very faint, she hears the sound of music coming from down there. Not rock and roll but country. It's Hank Williams. Ole Hank is singing “Kaw-Liga.”

“Scott?” she calls again, and when there's no answer she goes down there brushing the hair out of her eyes, bare feet whispering on a carpet that will later wind up in the attic, frightened for no reason she can articulate, except it has something to do with

(
gone
)

things that are either finished or should be.
All done and buttoned up
, Dad Debusher might have said; that was one old Dandy caught from the pool, the one where we all go down to drink, the one where we cast our nets.

“Scott?”

She stands before the guest-room door for a moment and a horrible premonition comes to her: he's sitting dead in the rocking chair in front of the television, dead by his own hand, why has she not seen this coming, haven't all the symptoms been on display for a month or more? He has held out until Christmas, held out for her sake, but now—

“Scott?”

She turns the knob and pushes the door open and he's in the rocking chair just as she has imagined him, but very much alive, swaddled in his favorite Good Ma african, the yellow one. On the television, the sound turned low, is his favorite movie:
The Last Picture Show.
His eyes don't move from it to her.

“Scott? Are you okay?”

His eyes don't move, don't blink. She begins to be very afraid then, and in the back of her mind one of Scott's strange words

(
gomer
)

pops off a haunted assembly line, and she swats it back into her subconscious with a barely articulated

(
Smuck it!
)

curse. She steps into the room and speaks his name again. This time he
does
blink—thank God—and turns his head to look at her, and smiles. It's the Scott Landon smile she fell in love with the first time she saw it. Mostly the way it makes his eyes turn up at the corners.

“Hey, Lisey,” he says. “What're you doing up?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she says. She looks for booze—a can of beer, maybe a half-finished bottle of Beam—and doesn't see any. That's good. “It's late, don't you know, late.”

There is a long pause during which he seems to think this over very carefully. Then he says, “The wind woke me. It was rattling one of the gutters against the side of the house and I couldn't go back to sleep.”

She starts to speak, then doesn't. When you've been married a long time—she supposes
how
long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years—a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it's telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she's right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it—a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He cocks his head toward it . . . smiles a little . . . not a nice smile . . . the smile of someone who has a secret . . . and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges—a very
young
Jeff Bridges—and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.