Lisey’s Story (49 page)

He's standing under one of the sweetheart trees now. It looks like a palm, only its trunk is shaggy, green with what looks like fur rather than moss. “God, I hope nothing's knocked it over,” he says. “It was okay the last time I was here, the night you were so mad and I put my hand through that dumb greenhouse—ah, okay, there!” He pulls her off the path to the right. And near one of two outlying trees that seem to guard
the place where the path slips into the woods, she sees a simple cross made of two boards. To Lisey they look like nothing more than crate-slats. There's no burial mound—if anything, the ground here is slightly sunken—but the cross is enough to tell her it's a grave. On the marker's horizontal arm is one carefully printed word:
PAUL.

“The first time I did it in pencil,” he says. His voice is clear, but it seems to be coming from far away. “Then I tried a ballpoint, but of course it didn't work, not on rough wood like that. Magic Marker was better, but it faded. Finally I did it in black paint, from one of Paul's old paint-by-the-numbers kits.”

She looks at the cross in the strange mixed light of the dying day and the rising night, thinking (as much as she is
able
to think),
All of it's true. What seemed to happen when we came out from under the yum-yum tree really
did
happen. It's happening now, only longer and clearer.

“Lisey!” He's hectic with joy, and why the hell not? He hasn't been able to share this place with anyone since Paul's death. The few times he's come here, he's had to come alone. To mourn alone. “There's something else—let me show you!”

Somewhere a bell rings, very faint—a bell that sounds familiar. “Scott?”

“What?” He's kneeling in the grass. “What, babyluv?”

“Did you hear . . .?” But it's stopped. And surely that
was
her imagination. “Nothing. What were you going to show me?” Thinking,
As if you haven't shown me enough.

He's sweeping his hands through the high grass near the foot of the cross, but there seems to be nothing there and slowly his goofy, happy smile begins to fade. “Maybe something took i—” he begins, then breaks off. His face tightens in a momentary wince, then relaxes, and he lets loose a half-hysterical laugh. “Here it is, and damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it, that'd be a joke on me, all right—after all these years!—but the cap's still on! Look, Lisey!”

She would have said nothing could divert her from the wonder of where she is—the red-orange sky in the east and west deepening to a weird greenish-blue overhead, the exotic mixed odors, and somewhere, yes, another faint chime of some lost bell—but what Scott is holding up
to the last fading daylight does the trick. It's the hypodermic needle his father gave him, the one Scott was supposed to stick Paul with once the boys were over here. There are little speckles of rust on the sleeve of metal at its base, but otherwise it looks brand new.

“It was all I had to leave,” Scott says. “I didn't have a picture. The kids who went to Donkey School used to get pictures, at least.”

“You dug the grave . . . Scott, you dug it with your bare hands?”

“I tried. And I did scoop out a little hollow—the ground here is soft—but the grass . . . pulling out the grass slowed me down . . . tough old weeds, boy . . . and then it started getting dark and the laughers started . . .”

“The laughers?”

“Like hyenas, I think, only mean. They live in the Fairy Forest.”

“The Fairy Forest—did Paul name it that?”

“No, me.” He gestures to the trees. “Paul and I never saw the laughers up close, mostly just heard them. But we saw other things . . .
I
saw other things . . . there's this one thing . . .” Scott looks toward the rapidly darkening masses of sweetheart trees, then at the path, which fades away quickly when it enters the forest. There's no mistaking the caution in his voice when he speaks again. “We have to go back soon.”

“But you can take us, can't you?”

“With you to help? Sure.”

“Then tell me how you buried him.”

“I can tell you that when we go back, if you—”

But the slow shake of her head silences him.

“No. I understand about why you don't want to have kids. I get that now. If you ever came to me and said, ‘Lisey, I've changed my mind, I want to take the chance,' we could talk about it because there was Paul . . . and then there was you.”

“Lisey—”

“We could talk about it
then.
Otherwise we're never going to talk about gomers and bad-gunky and this place again, okay?” She sees the way he's looking at her and softens her tone. “It's not about you, Scott—not everything is, you know. This happens to be about
me.
It's
beautiful here . . .” She looks around. And she shivers. “It's
too
beautiful. If I spent too much time here—or even too much time thinking about it—I think the beauty would drive me insane. So if our time is short, for once in your smucking life,
you
be short. Tell me how you buried him.”

Scott half-turns away from her. The orange light of the setting sun paints the line of his body: flange of shoulder-blade, tuck of waist, curve of buttock, the long shallow arc of one thigh. He touches the arm of the cross. In the high grass, barely visible, the glass curve of the hypo glimmers like a forgotten bit of trumpery treasure.

“I covered him with grass, then I went home. I couldn't come back for almos' a week. I was sick. I had a fever. Daddy give me o'meal in the morning and soup when he come home from work. I was ascairt of Paul's ghos, but I never seen his ghos. Then I got better and trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't
go.
Just me. I thought the aminals—
animals
—would have ett'n on him—the laughers and such—but they din't yet, so I went back and trite to come over again, this time with a play-shovel I found in our old toybox in the attic. That went and that's what I dug his grave with, Lisey, a red plastic play-shovel we had for the san'box when we 'us very wee.”

The sinking sun has started to fade to pink. Lisey puts her arm around him and hugs him. Scott's arms encircle her and for a moment or two he hides his face in her hair. “You loved him so very much,” she says.

“He was my brother” is what he replies, and it is enough.

As they stand there in the growing gloom, she sees something else, or thinks she does. Another piece of wood? That's what it looks like, another crate-slat lying just beyond the place where the path leaves the lupin-covered hill (where lavender is now turning a steadily darker purple). No, not just one—two.

Is it another cross, she wonders, one that has fallen apart?

“Scott? Is someone
else
buried here?”

“Huh?” He sounds surprised. “No! There's a graveyard, sure, but it's not here, it's by the—” He catches sight of what she's looking at and gives a little chuckle. “Oh, wow! That's not a cross, it's a
sign!
Paul made
it right around the time of the first bool hunts, back when he could still come on his own sometimes. I forgot all about that old sign!” He pulls free of her and hurries to where it lies. Hurries a little way down the path. Hurries under the trees. Lisey isn't sure she likes that.

“Scott, it's getting dark. Don't you think we better go?”

“In a minute, babyluv, in just a minute.” He picks up one of the boards and brings it back to her. She can make out letters, but they're faint. She has to bring the slat close to her eyes before she can read what's there:

“Pool?” Lisey asks.

“Pool,” he agrees. “Rhymes with bool, don't you know.” And actually laughs. Only that's when, somewhere deep in what he calls the Fairy Forest (where night has surely come already), the first laughers raise their voices.

Only two or three, but the sound still terrifies Lisey more than anything she has ever heard in her life. To her those things don't sound like hyenas, they sound like
people
, lunatics cast into the deepest depths of some nineteenth-century Bedlam. She grasps Scott's arm, digging into his skin with her nails, and tells him in a voice she barely recognizes as her own that she wants to go back, he has to take her back right
now.

Dim and distant, a bell tinkles.

“Yes,” he says, tossing the signboard into the weeds. Above them a dark draft of air stirs the sweetheart trees, making them sigh and give off a perfume that's stronger than the lupin—cloying, almost sickly. “This really isn't a safe place after dark. The pool is safe, and the beach . . . the benches . . . maybe even the graveyard, but—”

More laughers join the chorus. In a matter of moments there are dozens of them. Some of the laughter runs up a jagged scale and turns into broken-glass screams that make Lisey feel like screaming back. Then they descend again, sometimes to guttering chuckles that sound as if they're coming from mud.

“Scott, what
are
those things?” she whispers. Above his shoulder the moon is a bloated gas balloon. “They don't sound like animals at all.”

“I don't know. They run on all fours, but sometimes they . . . never mind. I never saw them close up. Neither of us did.”

“Sometimes they what, Scott?”

“Stand up. Like people. Look around. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting back. You want to go back now, right?”

“Yes!”

“Then close your eyes and visualize our room at The Antlers. See it as well as you can. It will help me. It will give us a boost.”

She closes her eyes and for one terrible second nothing comes. Then she's able to see how the bureau and the tables flanking the bed swam out of the gloom when the moon fought clear of the clouds and this brings back the wallpaper (rambler roses) and the shape of the bedstead and the comic-opera creak of the springs each time one of them moved. Suddenly the terrifying sound of those things laughing in the

(
Forest Fairy Forest
)

darkling woods seems to be fading. The smells are fading, too, and part of her is sad to be leaving this place, but mostly what she feels is relief. For her body (of course) and her mind (most certainly), but most of all for her soul, her immortal smucking
soul
, because maybe people like Scott Landon can jaunt off to places like Boo'ya Moon, but such strangeness and beauty were not made for ordinary folk such as she unless it's between the covers of a book or inside the safe dark of a movie theater.

And I only saw a little
, she thinks.

“Good!” he tells her, and Lisey hears both relief and surprised delight in his voice. “Lisey, you're a champ—”
at this
is how he finishes, but even before he does, before he lets go of her and she opens her eyes, Lisey knows

“I knew that we were home,” she finished, and opened her eyes. The intensity of her recall was so great that for a moment she expected to see the moonshadowy stillness of the bedroom they'd shared for two nights
in New Hampshire twenty-seven years ago. She had been gripping the silver spade so tightly that she had to will her fingers open, one by one. She laid the yellow delight square—blood-crusted but comforting—back on her breast.

And then what? Are you going to tell me that after that, after all that, the two of you just rolled over and went to sleep?

That was pretty much what had happened, yes. She'd been anxious to start forgetting all of it, and Scott had been more than willing. It had taken all his courage to bring his past up in the first place, and no wonder. But she
had
asked him one more question that night, she remembered, and had almost asked another the following day, when they were driving back to Maine, before realizing she didn't have to. The question she'd asked had been about something he'd said just before the laughers started up, scaring all curiosity from her mind. She'd wanted to know what Scott meant when he'd said
Back when he could still come on his own sometimes.
Meaning Paul.

Scott looked startled. “Been long years since I've thought of that,” he said, “but yeah, he could. It was just hard for him, the way hitting a baseball was always hard for me. So mostly he let me do it, and I think after awhile he lost the knack completely.”

The question she'd thought to ask in the car was about the pool to which the broken sign had once pointed the way. Was it the one he always spoke about in his lectures? Lisey didn't ask because the answer was, after all, self-evident. His audiences might believe the myth-pool, the language-pool (to which we all go down to drink, to swim, or perhaps to catch a little fish) was figurative; she knew better. There was a real pool. She knew then because she knew
him.
She knew now because she had been there. You reached it from Sweetheart Hill by taking the path that led into the Fairy Forest; you had to pass both the Bell Tree and the graveyard to get there.