Lisey’s Story (64 page)

“Mrs. Landon, by the time we admitted him, your husband was running a fever of a hundred and six.”

Now she can only look at Dr. Jantzen, he of the untrustworthy adolescent face, with silent horror and what is not quite disbelief. In time, however, a picture will begin to form. There's enough testimony, combined with certain memories that will not stay completely buried, to show her all she needs to see.

Scott took a charter flight from Portland to Boston, then flew United from Boston to Kentucky. A stew on the United flight who got his autograph later told a reporter that Mr. Landon had been coughing “almost constantly” and his skin was flushed. “When I asked if he was all right,” she told the reporter, “he said it was just a summer cold, he'd taken a couple of aspirin and would be fine.”

Frederic Borent, the grad student who met his plane, also reported the cough, and said Scott had gotten him to swing into a Nite Owl to pick up a bottle of Nyquil. “I think I might be getting the flu,” he told Borent. Borent said he'd really been looking forward to the reading and wondered if Scott would be able to do it. Scott said, “You might be surprised.”

Borent was. And delighted. So was most of Scott's audience that night. According to the Bowling Green
Daily News
, he gave a reading that was “little short of mesmerizing,” only stopping a few times for the politest of small coughs, which seemed easily quelled by a sip of water from the glass beside him on the podium. Speaking to Lisey hours later, Jantzen remained amazed by Scott's vitality. And it was his amazement, coupled with a message relayed by the head of the English Department during his phone call, that caused a rift in Lisey's carefully maintained curtain of repression, at least for awhile. The last thing Scott said to Meade, after the reading and just before the reception began, was “Call my wife, would you? Tell her she may have to fly out here. Tell her I may have eaten the wrong thing after sunset. It's kind of a joke between us.”

Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it. “Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?”

Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. “I want you to see him,” he says after a moment that seems very long. “And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?”

Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male
nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading—
Modern Geriatrics
. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.

“He's waiting for her,” the male nurse says.

At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange:

ALTON ISOLATION UNIT

SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING

OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS

FOR
YOUR
SAKE

FOR
THEIR
SAKE

MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED

To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with
FITS ALL SIZES
stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.

“Isolation,” she says. “Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain.”

Jantzen hedges. “We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is, we haven't been able to identify it, and it's . . .”

He doesn't finish, doesn't seem to know how, so Lisey helps him. “It's really doing a number on him. As the saying is.”

“Just a mask should be enough, Mrs. Landon, unless you have cuts. I didn't notice while you were—”

“I don't think I have to worry about cuts and I won't need a mask.” She pushes open the lefthand door before he can object. “If it was communicable, I'd already have it.”

Jantzen follows her into the Alton IU, slipping one of the green cloth masks over his own mouth and nose.

There are only four rooms at the end of the fifth-floor hallway, and only one of the TV monitors is lit; only one of the rooms is producing the beeping sounds of hospital machinery and the soft, steady rush of flowing oxygen. The name on the monitor beneath the dreadfully fast pulse—178—and the dreadfully low blood-pressure—79 over 44—is LANDON-
SCOTT
.

The door stands half-open. On it is a sign that shows an orange flame-shape with an X drawn across it. Below, in bright red letters, is this message:
NO LIGHT, NO SPARK
. She's no writer, certainly no poet, but in those words she reads all she needs to know about how things end; it is the line drawn under her marriage the way you draw a line under numbers that need adding up.
No light, no spark
.

Scott, who left her with his usual impudent cry of “Seeya later, Lisey-gator!” and a blast of Flamin' Groovies retro-rock from the CD player of his old Ford, now lies looking at her from a face as pale as milk-water. Only his eyes are fully alive, and they're too hot. They burn like the eyes of an owl trapped in a chimney. He's on his side. The ventilator has been pushed away from the bed, but she can see the slime of phlegm on its tube and knows

(
hush little Lisey
)

that there are germs or microbes or both in that green crap that no one will ever be able to identify, not even with the world's best electron microscope and every database under the eye of heaven.

“Hey, Lisey . . .”

There's almost nothing to that whisper—
No more'n a puff of wind under the door
, old Dandy might have said—but she hears him and goes to him. A plastic oxygen mask hangs around his neck, hissing air. Two plastic tubes sprout from his chest, where a couple of freshly stapled incisions look like a child's drawing of a bird. The tubes jutting from his back seem almost grotesquely large in comparison to the ones in front. To Lisey's dismayed eye they look as big as radiator hoses. They're transparent, and she can see cloudy fluid and bloody bits of tissue coursing down
them to some sort of suitcase-thing that stands on the bed behind him. This isn't Nashville; this is no .22 bullet; although her heart clamors against it, one look is enough to convince her mind that Scott will be dead by the time the sun comes up.

“Scott,” she says, going onto her knees beside the bed and taking his hot hand in her cold ones. “What the smuck have you done to yourself now?”

“Lisey.” He manages to squeeze her hand a little. His breathing is a loose and screamy wheeze that she remembers all too well from the parking lot that day. She knows exactly what he will say next, and Scott doesn't disappoint. “I'm so hot, Lisey. Ice? . . . Please?”

She glances at his table but there's nothing on it. She looks over her shoulder at the doctor who's brought her up here, now the Masked Redhaired Avenger. “Doctor . . .” she begins, and realizes she's drawing a complete blank. “I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

“Jantzen, Mrs. Landon. And that's perfectly all right.”

“Can my husband have some ice? He says he's—”

“Yes, of course. I'll get it myself.” He's gone at once. Lisey realizes he's only wanted a reason to leave them alone.

Scott squeezes her hand again. “Going,” he says in that same barely there whisper. “Sorry. Love you.”

“Scott, no!” And absurdly: “The ice! The ice is coming!”

With what must be a tremendous effort—his breath screams louder than ever—he raises his hand and strokes her cheek with one hot finger. Lisey's tears begin to fall then. She knows what she must ask him. The panicky voice that never calls her Lisey but always
little
Lisey, the secret-keeper down below, clamors again that she must not, but she thrusts it aside. Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. Here again is the dark heart of theirs.

She leans closer, into the dying heat of him. She can smell the last palest ghost of the Foamy he shaved with yesterday morning and the Tea Tree he shampooed with. She leans in until her lips touch the burning cup of his ear. She whispers: “
Go
, Scott.
Drag
yourself to that smucking pool, if that's what it takes. If the doctor comes back and finds the bed empty I'll make something up, it doesn't matter, but get to the pool and make yourself better, do it, do it for me, goddam you!”

“Can't,” he whispers, and commences a papery coughing that makes her draw back a little. She thinks it will kill him, just tear him apart, but somehow he manages to get it under control. And why? Because he means to have his say. Even here, on his deathbed, in a deserted isolation unit at one o'clock in the morning in a backwater Kentucky town, he means to have his say. “Won't . . . work.”

“Then
I'll
go! Just help me!”

But he shakes his head. “Lying across the path . . . to the pool.
It
.”

She knows what he's talking about at once. She glances helplessly toward one of the waterglasses, where the piebald thing can sometimes be glimpsed. There, or in a mirror, or the corner of your eye. Always late at night. Always when one is lost, or in pain, or both. Scott's old boy. Scott's
long
boy.

“Slee . . . ping.” A weird noise arises from Scott's decomposing lungs. She thinks he's choking and reaches for the call-bell, then observes the mordant shine in his feverish eyes and realizes he's either laughing or trying to. “Sleeping on . . . the path. Side . . . high . . . sky . . .” His eyes roll up to the ceiling and she's sure he's trying to say that its side is as high as the sky.

Scott plucks at the oxygen mask on his chest but can't lift it. She does it for him, placing it over his mouth and nose. Scott takes several deep breaths, then signals for her to take the mask off again. She does, and for a little while—perhaps as long as a minute—his voice is stronger.

“Went to Boo'ya Moon from the airplane,” he says with a kind of wonder. “Never tried anything like that. Thought I might fall, but I came out on Sweetheart Hill, like always. Went again from a stall . . . airport bathroom. Last time . . . greenroom, just before the reading. Still there. Ole Freddy. Still right there.”

Christ, he even has a name for the smucking thing
.

“Couldn't get to the pool, so I ate some berries . . . they're usually all right, but . . .”

He can't finish. She gives him the mask again.

“It was too late,” she says as he breathes. “It was too late, wasn't it? You ate them after sundown.”

He nods.

“But it was all you could think of to do.”

He nods again. Motions for her to pull the mask down again.

“But you were all right at the reading!” she says. “That Professor Meade said you were smucking
great!
”

He's smiling. It just may be the saddest smile she's ever seen. “Dew,” he says. “Licked it off the leaves. The last time, when I went . . . from the greenroom. Thought it might . . .”

“You thought it might be healing. Like the pool.”

He says
yes
with his eyes. His eyes never leave her.

“And that made you better. For a little while?”

“Yeah. Little while. Now . . .” He gives a sorry little shrug and turns his head aside. This time the coughing is worse, and she observes with horror that the flow into the tubes is a thicker, richer red. He gropes out and takes her hand again. “I was lost in the dark,” he whispers. “You found me.”

“Scott, no—”

He nods.
Yes
.

“You saw me whole. Everything . . .” He uses his free hand to make a weak circling gesture:
Everything the same
. He is smiling a little now as he looks at her.

“Hang on, Scott! Just hang on!”

He nods as if she finally gets it. “Hang on . . . wait for the wind to change.”

“No, Scott, the ice!” It's all she can think of to say. “Wait for the
ice!
”

He says
baby
. He calls her
babyluv
. And then the only sound is the steady hiss of oxygen from the mask around his neck. Lisey puts her hands to her face

and took them away dry. She was both surprised and not surprised. Certainly she was relieved; it seemed that she might finally be finished with her grieving. She guessed she still had a lot of work to do up here in
Scott's office—she and Amanda had barely made a dent—but she thought she'd made some unexpected progress in cleaning up her own shit over these last two or three days. She touched her wounded breast and felt almost no pain at all.
This is taking self-healing to a new level
, she thought, and smiled.

In the other room Amanda cried indignantly to the TV, “Oh, you dumbass! Leave that bitch alone, can't you see she's no good?” Lisey cocked an ear in that direction and deduced that Jacy was about to wheedle Sonny into marrying her. The movie was almost over.

She must have fast-forwarded through some of it
, Lisey thought, but when she looked at the dark pressing against the skylight above her, she knew that wasn't so. She'd been sitting at Dumbo's Big Jumbo and reliving the past for over an hour and a half.
Doing a little work on herself
, as the New Agers liked to say. And what conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn't waiting for her along the path in Boo'ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn't wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo'ya Moon behind. Like Huck, he'd lit out for the Territories.