Lisey’s Story (9 page)

And then, a kind of miracle. The girl with the bows on her shoulders and the new scrapes on her palms fights her way to the front of the crowd. She's gasping like someone who has just run a race and sweat is running down her cheeks and neck, but she's holding two big waxed paper cups in her hands. “I spilled half the fucking Coke getting back here,” she says, throwing a brief, baleful glance over her shoulder at the crowd, “but I got the ice okay. Ice is ni—” Then her eyes roll up almost to the whites and she reels backward, all loosey-goosey in her sneakers. The campus cop—oh bless him with many blessings, huhyooge batch of orifice and all—grabs her, steadies her, and takes one of the cups. He hands it to Lisey, then urges the other Lisa to drink from the remaining cup. Lisey Landon pays no attention. Later, replaying all this, she'll be a little in awe of her own single-mindedness. Now she only thinks
Just keep her from falling on top of me again if she faints, Officer Friendly,
and turns back to Scott.

He's shivering worse than ever and his eyes are dulling out, losing their grasp on her. And still, he tries. “Lisey . . . so hot . . . ice . . .”

“I have it, Scott. Now will you for once just shut your everlasting mouth?”

“One went north, one went south,” he croaks, and then he does what she asks. Maybe he's all talked out, which would be a Scott Landon first.

Lisey drives her hand deep into the cup, sending Coke all the way to the top and splooshing over the edge. The cold is shocking and utterly wonderful. She clutches a good handful of ice-chips, thinking how ironic this is: whenever she and Scott stop at a turnpike rest area and she uses a machine that dispenses cups of soda instead of cans or bottles, she always hammers on the
NO ICE
button, feeling righteous—others may allow the evil soft drink companies to shortchange them by dispensing half a cup of soda and half a cup of ice, but not Dave Debusher's baby girl Lisa. What was old Dandy's saying?
I didn't fall off a hayrick yesterday!
And now here she is, wishing for even more ice and less Coke . . . not that she thinks it will make much difference. But on that one she's in for a surprise.

“Scott, here. Ice.”

His eyes are half-closed now, but he opens his mouth and when she first rubs his lips with her handful of ice and then pops one of the melting shards onto his bloody tongue, his shivering suddenly stops. God, it's magic. Emboldened, she rubs her freezing, leaking hand along his right cheek, his left cheek, and then across his forehead, where drops of Coke-colored water drip into his eyebrows and then run down the sides of his nose.

“Oh Lisey, that's heaven,” he says, and although still screamy, his voice sounds more with-it to her . . . more
there.
The ambulance has pulled up on the left side of the crowd with a dying growl of its siren and a few seconds later she can hear an impatient male voice shouting,
“Paramedics! Let us through! Paramedics, c'mon, people, let us through so we can do our jobs, whaddaya say?”

Dashmiel, the southern-fried asshole, chooses this moment to speak in Lisey's ear. The solicitude in his voice, given the speed with which he jackrabbitted, makes her want to grind her teeth. “How is he, darlin?”

Without looking around, she replies: “Trying to live.”

“Trying to live,” she murmured, running her palm over the glossy page in the
U-Tenn Nashville Review.
Over the picture of Scott with his foot poised on that dopey silver shovel. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the dusty back of the booksnake. Her appetite for pictures—for
memories
—was more than sated for one day. There was a nasty throb starting up behind her right eye. She wanted to take something for it, not that sissy Tylenol but what her late husband had called head-bonkers. A couple of his Excedrin would be just the ticket, if they weren't too far off the shelf-date. Then a little lie-down in their bedroom until the incipient headache passed. She might even sleep awhile.

I'm still thinking of it as our bedroom,
she mused, going to the stairs that lead down to the barn, which was now not really a barn at all but just a series of storage cubbies . . . though still redolent of hay and rope and tractor-oil, the old sweet-stubborn farm smells.
Still as ours, even after two years.

And so what? What of that?

She shrugged. “Nothing, I suppose.”

She was a little shocked at the mumbly, half-drunk sound of the words. She supposed all that vivid remembering had worn her out. All that relived stress. There was one thing to be grateful for: no other picture of Scott in the belly of the booksnake could call up such violent memories, he'd only been shot once and none of those colleges would have sent him photos of his fa—

(
shut up about that just hush
)

“That's right,” she agreed as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and with no real idea of what she'd been on the edge

(
Scoot you old Scoot
)

of thinking about. Her head was hanging and she felt sweaty all over, like someone who has just missed being in an accident. “Shut-upsky, enough is enough.”

And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn's main downstairs passage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses. Now the sign on it simply said
HIGH VOLTAGE!
This had been Lisey's idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had—and she still had—a full-time money-manager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery). She'd gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets . . . and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number
21
had been in the gadget's window. Messages one through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-one
had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called “phone-lice.” The eighteenth (this didn't surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. “Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this damn thing up,” she'd said. “You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died.” Pause. “I guess you did.” Pause. “Hook it up, I mean.” Pause. Then, in a rush: “But there was a
very
long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the damn things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something.” Pause. “Well . . . g'bye.”

Now, standing outside the closed office door, feeling pain pulse in sync with her heartbeat behind her right eye, she listened to the telephone ring a third time, and a fourth. Halfway through the fifth ring there was a click and then her own voice, telling whoever was on the other end that he or she had reached 727-5932. There was no false promise of a callback, not even an invitation to leave a message at the sound of what Amanda called the bleep. Anyway, what would be the point? Who would call
here
to talk to
her?
With Scott dead, the motor was out of this place. The one left was really just little Lisey Debusher from Lisbon Falls, now the widow Landon. Little Lisey lived alone in a house far too big for her and wrote grocery lists, not novels.

The pause between the message and the beep was so long that she thought the tape for replies had to be full. Even if it wasn't, the caller would get tired and hang up, all she'd hear through the closed office door would be that most annoying of recorded phone voices, the woman who tells you (
scolds
you), “If you'd like to make a call . . . please hang up and dial your
operator!
” She doesn't add
smuckhead
or
shit-for-brains,
but Lisey always sensed it as what Scott would have called “a subtext.”

Instead she heard a male voice speak three words. There was no reason for them to chill her, but they did. “I'll try again,” it said.

There was a click.

Then there was silence.

This is a much nicer present,
she thinks, but knows it's neither past
nor
present; it's just a dream. She was lying on the big double bed in the

(
our our our our our
)

bedroom, under the slowly paddling fan; in spite of the one hundred and thirty milligrams of caffeine in the two Excedrin (expiration date:
OCT
07) she took from the dwindling supply of Scott-meds in the bathroom cabinet, she had fallen asleep. If she has any doubt of it, she only has to look at where she is—the third-floor ICU wing of the Nashville Memorial Hospital—and her unique means of travel: she's once more locomoting upon a large piece of cloth with the words
PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR
printed on it. Once more she's delighted to see that the corners of this homely magic carpet, where she sits with her arms regally folded beneath her bosom, are knotted like hankies. She's floating so close to the ceiling that when
PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR
slips beneath one of the slowly paddling overhead fans (in her dream they look just like the one in their bedroom), she has to lie flat to avoid being whacked and cracked by the blades. These varnished wooden oars say
shoop, shoop, shoop
over and over as they make their slow and somehow stately revolutions. Below her, nurses come and go on squeak-soled shoes. Some are wearing the colorful smocks that will come to dominate the profession, but most of these still wear white dresses, white hose, and those caps that always make Lisey think of stuffed doves. Two doctors—she supposes they must be doctors, although one doesn't look old enough to shave—chat by the drinking fountain. The tile walls are cool green. The heat of the day cannot seem to take hold in here. She supposes there is air-conditioning as well as the fans, but she can't hear it.

Not in my dream, of course not,
she tells herself, and this seems reasonable. Up ahead is room 319, which is where Scott went to recuperate after they took the bullet out of him. She has no trouble reaching the door, but discovers she's too high to get through once she arrives. And she wants to get in there. She never got around to telling him
You can take care of the rest of this mess later,
but was that even necessary? Scott Landon
did not, after all,
fall off a hayrick yesterday.
The real question, it seems to her, is what's the correct magic word to make a magic
PILLSBURY'S BEST
carpet go down?

It comes to her. It's not a word she wants to hear emerging from her own mouth (it's a Blondie word), but needs must when the devil drives—as Dandy
also
said—and so . . .

“Freesias,” Lisey says, and the faded cloth with the knotted corners obediently drops three feet from its hoverpoint below the hospital ceiling. She looks in the open door and sees Scott, now maybe five hours post-op, lying in a narrow but surprisingly pretty bed with a gracefully curved head and foot. Monitors that sound like answering machines queep and bleep. Two bags of something transparent hang on a pole between him and the wall. He appears to be asleep. Across the bed from him, 1988-Lisey sits in a straight-backed chair with her husband's hand folded into one of her own. In 1988-Lisey's other hand is the paperback novel she brought to Tennessee with her—she never expected to get through so much of it. Scott reads people like Borges, Pynchon, Tyler, and Atwood; Lisey reads Maeve Binchy, Colleen McCullough, Jean Auel (although she is growing a bit impatient with Ms. Auel's randy cave people), Joyce Carol Oates, and, just lately, Shirley Conran. What she has in room 319 is
Savages,
the newest novel by the latter, and Lisey likes it a lot. She has come to the part where the women stranded in the jungle learn to use their bras as slingshots. All that Lycra. Lisey doesn't know if the romance-readers of America are ready for this latest from Ms. Conran, but she herself thinks it's brave and rather beautiful, in its way. Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful?

The last light of day pours through the room's window in a flood of red and gold. It's ominous and lovely. 1988-Lisey is very tired: emotionally, physically, and of being in the South. She thinks if one more person calls her y'all she'll scream. The good part? She doesn't think she's going to be here as long as
they
do, because . . . well . . . she has reason to know Scott's a fast healer, leave it at that.

Soon she'll go back to the motel and try to rent the same room they had earlier in the day (Scott almost always rents them a hideout, even if the gig is just what he calls “the old in-out”). She has an idea she won't be
able to do it—they treat you a lot different when you're with a man, whether he's famous or not—but the place is fairly handy to the hospital as well as to the college, and as long as she gets
something
there, she doesn't give a smuck. Dr. Sattherwaite, who's in charge of Scott's case, has promised her she can dodge reporters by going out the back tonight and for the next few days. He says Mrs. McKinney in Reception will have a cab waiting back by the cafeteria loading dock “as soon as you give her the high sign.” She would have gone already, but Scott has been restless for the last hour. Sattherwaite said he'd be out at least until midnight, but Sattherwaite doesn't know Scott the way she does, and Lisey isn't much surprised when he begins surfacing for brief intervals as sunset approaches. Twice he has recognized her, twice he has asked her what happened, and twice she has told him that a mentally deranged person shot him. The second time he said, “Hi-yo-smuckin-Silver” before closing his eyes again, and that actually made her laugh. Now she wants him to come back one more time so she can tell him she's not going back to Maine, only to the motel, and that she'll see him in the morning.