Lisey’s Story (48 page)

What's silly about it? You stopped Blondie, didn't you? Maybe you didn't get the credit, but you were the one who did it.

“That was different.” She stood looking up the stairs with the white plastic basin under her right arm, held against her hip so the box of tea and the piece of knitting wouldn't fall out. The stairs looked approximately eight miles high. Lisey thought there really ought to be clouds swirling around the top.

If it was different, why are you going upstairs?

“Because that's where the Vicodin is!” she cried to the empty house. “The damned old feel-better pills!”

The voice said one more thing and fell silent.

“SOWISA, babyluv is right,” Lisey agreed. “You better believe it.” And she began the long, slow trek up the stairs.

Halfway up the wings came back, darker than ever, and for a moment Lisey was sure she was going to black out. She was telling herself to fall forward,
onto
the stairs, rather than backward into space, when her vision
cleared again. She sat down with the basin drawn across her legs and stayed that way, head hung over, until she had counted to a hundred with a
Mississippi
between each number. Then she got up again and finished her climb. The second floor was cross-drafted and even cooler than the kitchen, but by the time Lisey got there she was sweating profusely again. The sweat ran into the laceration across her breast, and soon there was a maddening salt-sting on top of the deeper ache. And she was thirsty again. Thirsty all the way down her throat and into her stomach, it seemed. That, at least, could be remedied, and the sooner the better.

She glanced into the guest room as she made her slow way by. It had been redone since 1996—twice, actually—but she found it was all too easy to see the black rocking chair with the University of Maine seal on the back . . . and the blank eye of the television . . . and the windows filled with frost that changed color as the lights in the sky changed . . .

Let it go, little Lisey, it's in the past.

“It's all in the
past
but none of it's
done!
” she cried irritably. “That's the smucking
trouble!
”

To that there was no answer, but here, at long last, was the master bedroom and its adjacent bathroom—what Scott, never known for his delicacy, had been wont to call Il Grande Poopatorium. She set down the basin, dumped out the toothglass (still two brushes, now both of them hers, alas), and filled the tumbler to the brim with cold water. This she drank off greedily, then she
did
take a moment to look at herself. At her face, anyway.

What she saw was not encouraging. Her eyes were glittering blue sparks peering out of dark caves. The skin beneath them had gone a dark blackish brown. Her nose was canted to the left. Lisey didn't think it was broken, but who knew? At least she could breathe through it. Below her nose was a great crust of dried blood that had broken both right and left around her mouth, giving her a grotesque Fu Manchu mustache.
Look, Ma, I'm a biker
, she tried to say, but the words wouldn't quite come out. It was a shitty joke, anyway.

Her lips were so severely swollen they actually turned out from the inside, giving her battered face a grotesquely exaggerated come-and-kiss-me pout.

Was I thinking of going up to Greenlawn, home of the famous Hugh Alberness, in this condish? Was I really? Pretty funny—they'd get one look and then call for an ambulance to take me to a real hospital, the kind where they've got an ICU.

That
isn't
what you were thinking. What you were thinking
—

But she closed that off, remembering something Scott used to say:
Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.
Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but for the time being she'd do well to take this as she had the stairs: head down and one step at a time.

Lisey had another bad moment when she couldn't find the Vicodin. She almost gave up, thinking one of the three spring-cleaning girls might have walked away with the bottle, before finding it hiding behind Scott's multi-vitamins. And, wonder of wonders, the expiration on these babies was this very month.

“Waste not, want not,” Lisey said, and washed down three of them. Then she filled the plastic basin with lukewarm water and threw in a handful of teabags. She watched the clear water begin to stain amber for a moment or two, then shrugged and dumped in the rest of the teabags. They settled to the bottom of the darkening water and she thought of a young man saying
It stings a little but it works really really good.
In another life, that had been. Now she would see for herself.

She took a clean washcloth from the rod beside the sink, dropped it into the basin, and wrung it out gently.
What are you doing, Lisey?
she asked herself . . . but the answer was obvious, wasn't it? She was still following the trail her dead husband had left her. The one that led into the past.

She let the tatters of her blouse slip to the bathroom floor, and, with a grimace of anticipation, applied the tea-soaked washcloth to her breast. It
did
hurt, but compared to the nettlesome sting of her own sweat, it was almost pleasant, in an astringent mouthwash-on-the-canker kind of way.

It works. It really really works, Lisey.

Once she had believed that—sort of—but once she had been twenty-two and willing to believe lots of things. What she believed in now was
Scott. And Boo'ya Moon? Yes, she guessed she believed in that, too. A world that was waiting right next door, and behind the purple curtain in her mind. The question was whether or not it might be in reach for the celebrated writer's gal pal now that he was dead and she was on her own.

Lisey wrung blood and tea out of the washcloth, dipped it again, replaced it on her wounded breast. This time the sting was even less.
But it's no cure
, she thought.
Just another marker on the road into the past.
Out loud she said, “Another bool.”

Holding the washcloth gently against her and taking the bloody square of african—Good Ma's delight—in the hand folded beneath her breast, Lisey went slowly into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, looking at the silver spade with
COMMENCEMENT, SHIP-MAN LIBRARY
incised on the scoop. Yes, she really could see a small dent where she'd connected first with Blondie's gun and then with Blondie's face. She had the spade, and although the yellow african in which Scott had wrapped himself on those cold nights in 1996 was long gone, she did have this remnant, this delight.

Bool, the end.

“I
wish
it was the end,” Lisey said, and lay back with the washcloth still on her breast. The pain was funneling away, but that was just Amanda's Vicodin taking hold, doing what neither Paul's tea-cure nor Scott's out-of-date aspirin could. When the Vicodin wore off, the pain would be back. So would Jim Dooley, author of the pain. The question was, what was
she
going to do in the meantime?
Could
she do something?

The one thing you absolutely
cannot
do is drift off to sleep.

No, that would be bad.

I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse
, Dooley had told her, and Dooley had set things up so she was in a lose-lose situation. He had also told her to tend herself and not tell anyone he'd been here. So far she'd done that, but not because she was afraid of being killed. In a way, knowing that he meant to kill her anyway gave her a leg up. She didn't have to worry anymore about trying to reason with him, at least. But if she called the Sheriff's Department . . . well . . .

“You can't go on a bool hunt when the house is full of great big clutterbugging deputies,” she said. “Also . . .”

Also, I believe that Scott's still having his say. Or trying to.

“Honey,” she told the empty room, “I only wish I knew what it was.”

She looked over at the digital clock on the bedside table and was astounded to see it was only twenty to eleven. Already this day seemed a thousand years long, but she suspected that was because she had spent so much of it re-living the past. Memories screwed up perspective, and the most vivid ones could annihilate time completely while they held sway.

But enough about the past; what was happening right now?

Well
, Lisey thought,
let's see. In the Kingdom of Pittsburgh, the former King of the Incunks is no doubt suffering the sort of terror my late husband used to call Stinky Testicle Syndrome. Deputy Alston's over in Cash Corners, inspecting a little house-fiah. Aaaason suspected, deah. Jim Dooley? Maybe laid up in the woods near here, whittling on a stick with my Oxo can opener in his pocket, waiting for the day to pass. His PT Cruiser could be tucked away in any one of a dozen deserted barns or sheds on the View, or in the Deep Cut, across the Harlow town line. Darla's probably on her way to the Portland Jetport to pick up Canty. Good Ma would say she's gone tooting. And Amanda? Oh, Amanda's
gone,
baby-luv. Just as Scott knew she would, sooner or later. Didn't he do everything but reserve her a smucking room? Because it takes one to know one. As the saying is.

Out loud she said: “Am I supposed to go to Boo'ya Moon? Is that the next station of the bool? It is, isn't it? Scott, you goon, how do I do that with you dead?”

You're getting ahead of yourself again, aren't you?

Sure—carrying on about her inability to reach a place she had as yet not given herself permission to fully remember.

You've got to do a lot more than lift that curtain and peep under the hem.

“I've got to rip it down,” she said dismally. “Don't I?”

No answer. Lisey took that for a yes. She rolled over on her side and
picked up the silver spade. The inscription winked in the morning sunlight. She wrapped the bloody piece of african around the handle, then took hold of it that way.

“All right,” she said, “I'll rip it down. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said all right. I said Geronimo.”

Lisey paused, thinking.

“No. I didn't. I said it his way. I said
Geromino.
And what happened? What happened then?”

She closed her eyes, saw only brilliant purple, and could have cried for frustration. Instead she thought
SOWISA, babyluv: strap on when it seems appropriate
, and tightened her grip on the handle of the spade. She saw herself swinging it. She saw it glitter in the hazy August sun. And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. That light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus. Most of all what pierced her was the memory of his skin on her skin, the beat of his blood running in counterpoint against the beat of her own, for they had been lying naked in their bed at The Antlers and now knelt naked in the purple lupin near the top of the hill, naked in the thickening shadows of the sweetheart trees. And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

Lying on her widow's bed with the spade clamped in her hands, a much older Lisey cried out in joy for what was remembered and grief for what was gone. Her heart was mended even as it was broken again. Cords stood out on her neck. Her swollen lips drew down and broke open, exposing her teeth and spilling fresh blood into the gutters of her gums. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and slipped down her cheeks to her ears, where they hung like exotic jewelry. And the only
clear thought in her mind was
Oh Scott, we were never made for such beauty, we were never made for such beauty, we
should
have died then, oh my dear, we
should
have, naked and in each other's arms, like lovers in a story.

“But we didn't,” Lisey murmured. “He held me and said we couldn't stay long because it was getting dark and it wasn't safe after dark, even most of the sweetheart trees turned bad then. But he said there was something he wanted

“There's something I want to show you before we go back,” he says, and pulls her to her feet.

“Oh, Scott,” she hears herself saying, very faint and weak. “Oh, Scott.” It seems to be the only thing she can manage. In a way this reminds her of the first time she felt an orgasm approaching, only this is drawn out and drawn out and drawn out, it's like all coming and no arrival.

He's leading her someplace. She feels high grass whispering against her thighs. Then it's gone and she realizes they're on a well-worn path cutting through the drifts of lupin. It leads into what Scott calls the sweetheart trees, and she wonders if there are people here.
If there are, how do they stand it?
Lisey wonders. She wants to look again at that ascending goblin moon, but doesn't dare.

“Be quiet under the trees,” Scott says. “We should be okay a little longer, but better safe than sorry is a good rule to follow even on the edge of the Fairy Forest.”

Lisey doesn't think she could talk much above a whisper even if he demanded it. She's doing well to manage
Oh, Scott.