4
While they waited, they drank coffee and played cribbage, a game each of the Debusher girls had learned from Dandy long before they'd taken their first rides on the big yellow Lisbon Falls schoolbus. Every third or fourth hand, one of them would check on Amanda. She was always the same, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. In the first game, Darla skunked her younger sister; in the second she skipped out with a run of three in the crib, leaving Lisey stuck in the mudhole. That this should put her in a good humor even with Manda gorked out upstairs gave Lisey something to think about . . . but nothing she wanted to say right out loud. It was going to be a long day, and if Darla started it with a smile on her face, terrific. Lisey declined a third game and the two of them watched some country singer on the last segment of the Today show. Lisey could almost hear Scott saying, He ain't gonna put Ole Hank out of business. By whom he meant, of course, Hank Williams. When it came to country music, for Scott there had been Ole Hank . . . and then all the rest of them.
At five past nine, Lisey sat down in front of the telephone and got the Greenlawn number from Directory Assistance. She gave Darla a wan and nervous smile. "Wish me luck, Darl."
"Oh, I do. Believe me, I do."
Lisey dialed. The phone on the other end rang exactly once. "Hello," a pleasant female voice said. "This is Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation, a service of Fedders Health Corporation of America."
"Hello, my name is--" Lisey got this far before the pleasant female voice began enumerating all the possible destinations one could reach . . . if, that was, one were possessed of a touch-tone phone. It was a recording. Lisey had been booled.
Yeah, but they've gotten so good, she thought, punching 5 for Patient Intake Information.
"Please hold while your call is processed," the pleasant female voice told her, and was replaced by the Prozac Orchestra playing something that vaguely resembled Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound."
Lisey looked around to tell Darla she was on hold, but Darla had gone up to check on Amanda.
Bullshit, she thought. She just couldn't take the susp--
"Hello, this is Cassandra, how may I help you?"
A name of ill omen, babyluv, opined the Scott who kept house in her head.
"My name is Lisa Landon . . . Mrs. Scott Landon?"
She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn't hard to understand why she had done so now. It was what Scott called "the fame-card," and he himself had played it sparingly. Partly, he said, because doing so made him feel like a conceited asshole, and partly because he was afraid it wouldn't work; that if he murmured some version of Don't you know who I am? in the headwaiter's ear, the headwaiter would murmur back, Non, Monsieur--who ze fuck air you?
As Lisey spoke, recounting her sister's previous episodes of self-mutilation and semi-catatonia and this morning's great leap forward, she heard the soft clitter of computer keys. When Lisey paused, Cassandra said: "I understand your concern, Mrs. Landon, but Greenlawn is very full at the present time."
Lisey's heart sank. She instantly pictured Amanda in a closet-sized room at Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, wearing a foodstained johnnie and looking out a barred window at the blinker-light where Route 117 crossed 19. "Oh. I see. Um . . . are you sure? This wouldn't be Medicaid or Blue Cross or any of those things--I'd be paying cash, you see . . ." Grasping at straws. Sounding dumb. When all else fails, chuck money. "If that makes a difference," she finished lamely.
"It really doesn't, Mrs. Landon." She thought she detected a faint frost in Cassandra's voice now, and Lisey's heart sank even farther. "It's a question of space and commitments. You see, we only have--"
Lisey heard a faint bing! then. It was very close to the sound her toaster-oven made when the Pop-Tarts or breakfast burritos were done.
"Mrs. Landon, can I put you on hold?"
"If you need to, of course."
There was a faint click and the Prozac Orchestra returned, this time with what might once have been the theme from Shaft. Lisey listened with a mild sense of unreality, thinking that if Isaac Hayes heard it, he would probably crawl into his bathtub with a plastic bag over his head. The time on hold lengthened until she began to suspect she'd been forgotten--God knew it had happened to her before, especially when trying to buy airline tickets or change rental car arrangements. Darla came downstairs and held her hands out in a What's happening? Give! gesture. Lisey shook her head, indicating both Nothing and I don't know.
At that moment the horrific holdmusic was gone and Cassandra was back. The frost was gone from her voice, and for the first time she sounded to Lisey like a human being. In fact, she sounded familiar, somehow. "Mrs. Landon?"
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but I had a note on my computer to get in touch with Dr. Alberness if either you or your husband called. Dr. Alberness is actually in his office now. May I transfer you?"
"Yes," Lisey told her. Now she knew where she was, exactly where she was. She knew that before he told her anything else, Dr. Alberness would tell her how sorry he was for her loss, as if Scott had died last month or last week. And she would thank him. In fact, if Dr. Alberness promised to take the troublesome Amanda off their hands in spite of Greenlawn's current booked-up state, Lisey would probably be happy to get on her knees and give him a nice juicy hummer. A wild laugh threatened to surge out of her at that, and she had to clamp her lips tightly shut for a few seconds. And she knew why Cassandra had suddenly sounded so familiar: it was how people had sounded when they suddenly recognized Scott, realized they were dealing with someone who'd been on the cover of smucking Newsweek magazine. And if that famous person had his famous arm around someone, why she must be famous, too, if only by association. Or, as Scott himself had once said, by injection.
"Hello?" a pleasantly rough male voice said. "This is Hugh Alberness. Am I speaking to Mrs. Landon?"
"Yes, Doctor," Lisey said, motioning for Darla to sit down and stop pacing circles in front of her. "This is Lisa Landon."
"Mrs. Landon, let me begin by saying how sorry I am for your loss. Your husband signed five of his books for me, and they are among my most treasured possessions."
"Thank you, Dr. Alberness," she said, and to Darla she made an It's-in-the-bag circle with her thumb and forefinger. "That's so very kind of you."
5
When Darla got back from using the Pop's Cafe ladies' room, Lisey said she thought she had better make a visit, as well--it was twenty miles to Castle View, and often the afternoon traffic was slow. For Darla, that would just be the first leg. After packing a bag for Amanda--a chore they'd both forgotten that morning--she'd have to drive back to Greenlawn with it. Once it was delivered, a second return trip to Castle View. She'd be turning into her own driveway for good around eight-thirty, and only that early if luck--and traffic--was with her.
"I'd take a deep breath and hold your nose while you go," Darla said.
"Bad?"
Darla shrugged, then yawned. "I've been in worse."
So had Lisey, especially during her travels with Scott. She went with her thighs tensed and her bottom hovering over the seat--the well-remembered Book Tour Crouch--flushed, washed her hands, splashed water on her face, combed her hair, then looked at herself in the mirror. "New woman," she told her reflection. "American Beauty." She bared a great deal of expensive dental work at herself. The eyes above this gator grin, however, looked doubtful.
"Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask--"
Be quiet about that, leave it be.
"I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse--"
"Only Scott never said fooled," she told her reflection.
Shut up, little Lisey!
"--how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville."
"Scott said booled. Didn't he?"
That coppery taste was in her mo
uth again, the taste of pennies and panic. Yes, Scott had said booled. Sure. Scott had said that Dr. Alberness should ask Lisey (if he ever met her) how Scott booled the nurse that time in Nashville, Scott knowing perfectly well that she would get the message.
Had he been sending her messages? Had he, even then?
"Leave it alone," she whispered at her reflection, and left the ladies' room. It would have been nice to leave that voice trapped inside, but now it always seemed to be there. For a long time it had been quiet, either sleeping or agreeing with Lisey's conscious mind that there were some things one simply did not speak about, not even among the various versions of one's self. What the nurse had said on the day after Scott had been shot, for instance. Or
(hush do hush)
what had happened in
(Hush!)
the winter of 1996.
(YOU HUSH NOW!)
And for a blue-eyed wonder that voice did . . . but she sensed it watching and listening, and she was afraid.
6
Lisey exited the ladies' room just in time to see Darla hanging up the pay telephone.
"I was calling that motel across from Greenlawn," she said. "It looked clean, so I booked a room for tonight. I really don't want to drive all the way back to Castle View, and this way I can see Manda first thing tomorrow morning. All I'll have to do is be like the chicken and cross the road." She looked at her younger sister with an apprehensive expression Lisey found rather surreal, given all the years she'd spent listening to Darla lay down the law, usually in a strident, take-no-prisoners tone of voice. "Do you think that's silly?"
"I think it's a great idea." Lisey gave Darla's hand a squeeze, and Darla's relieved smile broke her heart a little. She thought: This is also what money does. It makes you the smart one. It makes you the boss. "Come on, Darl--I'll drive back, how's that?"
"Works for me," Darla said, and followed her younger sister out into the latening day.
7
The drive back to Castle View was as slow as Lisey had feared it might be; they got behind an overloaded, waddling pulp truck, and on the hills and curves there was no place to pass. The best Lisey could do was hang back so they didn't have to eat too much of the guy's half-cooked exhaust. It gave her time to reflect on the day. At least there was that.
Speaking with Dr. Alberness had been like getting to a baseball game in the bottom of the fourth inning, but that was nothing new; playing catch-up had always been part of life with Scott. She remembered the day a furniture van from Portland had shown up with a two-thousand-dollar sectional sofa. Scott had been in his study, writing with the music cranked to its usual deafening levels--she could faintly hear Steve Earle singing "Guitar Town" in the house even with the soundproofing--and interrupting him was apt to do another two thousand dollars' worth of damage to her ears, in Lisey's opinion. The furniture guys said "the mister" told them she'd let them know where to put the new piece of furniture. Lisey had briskly directed them to carry the current sofa--the perfectly good current sofa--out to the barn, and place the new sectional where it had been. The color was at least a fair match for the room, and that was a relief. She knew she and Scott had never discussed a new sofa, sectional or otherwise, just as she knew Scott would declare--oh yes, most vehemently--that they had. She was sure he'd discussed it with her in his head; he just sometimes forgot to vocalize those discussions. Forgetting was a skill he had honed.
His luncheon with Hugh Alberness might have been only another case in point. He might have meant to tell Lisey all about it, and if you'd asked him six months or a year later, he might well have told you he had told her all about it: Lunch with Alberness? Sure, filled her in that very night. When what he'd really done that very night was go out to his study, put on the new Dylan CD, and work on a new short story.
Or maybe this time it had been different--not Scott just forgetting (as he'd once forgotten they'd had a date, as he'd forgotten to tell her about his extremely smucked-up childhood), but Scott hiding clues for her to find after a death he had already foreseen; laying out what he himself would have called "stations of the bool."
In either case, Lisey had caught up with him before, and she got most of the blanks filled in on the phone, saying Uh-huh and Oh, really! And You know, I forgot about that! in all the right places.
When Amanda had tried to excise her navel in the spring of 2001 and then lapsed into a week-long state of sludge her shrink called semi-catatonia, the family had discussed the possibility of sending her to Greenlawn (or some mental care facility) at a long, emotional, and sometimes rancorous family dinner that Lisey remembered well. She also remembered that Scott had been unusually quiet through most of the discussion, and had only picked at his food that day. When the discussion began to wind down, he said that if nobody objected, he'd pick up some pamphlets and brochures they could all look at.
"You make it sound like a vacation cruise," Cantata had said--rather snidely, Lisey thought.
Scott had shrugged, Lisey remembered as she followed the pulp truck past the bullet-pocked sign reading CASTLE COUNTY WELCOMES YOU. "She's away, all right," he had said. "It might be important for someone to show her the way home while she still wants to come."
Canty's husband had snorted at that. The fact that Scott had made millions from his books had never kept Richard from regarding him as your basic dewy-eyed dreamer, and when Rich nominated an opinion, Canty Lawlor could be depended upon to second it. It had never occurred to Lisey to tell them that Scott knew what he was talking about, but now that she thought back, she hadn't eaten much herself that day.
In any case, Scott had brought home a number of Greenlawn brochures and folders; Lisey remembered finding them spread out on the kitchen counter. One, bearing a photograph of a large building that looked quite a bit like Tara in Gone With the Wind, had been titled Mental Illness, Your Family, and You. But she didn't remember any further discussion of Greenlawn, and really, why would she? Once Amanda began to get better, she had improved quickly. And Scott had certainly never mentioned his lunch with Dr. Alberness, which had come in October of '01--months after Amanda had resumed what in her passed for normality.
According to Dr. Alberness (this Lisey got over the phone, in response to her appreciative little Uh-huhs and Oh, reallys and I'd forgottens), Scott had told him at this lunch of theirs that he was convinced Amanda Debusher was headed for a more serious break with reality, perhaps a permanent one, and after reading the brochures and touring the facility with the good doctor, he believed Greenlawn would be exactly the right place for her, if it happened. That Scott had extracted Dr. Alberness's promise of a place for his sister-in-law when and if the time came--all in exchange for a single lunch and five signed books--didn't surprise Lisey at all. Not after the years she'd spent observing the liquorish way fame worked on some people.
She reached for the car radio, wanting some nice loud country music (there was another bad habit Scott had taught her in the last few years of his life, one she hadn't yet given up), then glanced over at Darla and saw that Darla had gone to sleep with her head resting against the passenger window. Not the right time for Shooter Jennings or Big & Rich. Sighing, Lisey dropped her hand from the radio.
8
Dr. Alberness had wanted to reminisce at length about his lunch with the great Scott Landon, and Lisey had been willing to let him do so in spite of Darla's repeated hand-signals, most of which meant Can't you hurry him up?
Lisey probably could have, but she thought doing so might have been bad for their cause. Besides, she was curious. More, she was hungry. For what? News of Scott. In a way, listening to Dr. Alberness had been like looking at those old memories hidden away in the study booksnake. She didn't know if Alberness's entire recollections constituted one of Scott's "stations of the bool"--she suspected not--but she knew they raised a dry yet compelling hurt in her. Was that what remained of grief after two years? That hard and ashy sadness?
First Scott had called Alberness on the phone. Had he
known in advance that the doctor was a puffickly huh-yooge fan, or was that just a coincidence? Lisey didn't believe it had been a coincidence, thought that was just a little, ahem, too coincidental, but if Scott had known, how had he known? She hadn't been able to think of a way to ask without breaking into the doctor's flood of reminiscence, and that was all right; probably it didn't matter. In any case, Alberness had been intensely flattered to receive that call (pretty much bowled over, as the saying was), and more than receptive both to Scott's enquiries about his sister-in-law and his suggestion that they have lunch. Would it be all right, Dr. Alberness had asked, if he brought along a few of his favorite Landons for signature? More than all right, Scott had replied, he'd be pleased to do it.
Alberness had brought his favorite Landons; Scott had brought Amanda's medical records. Which led Lisey, now less than a mile from Amanda's little Cape Cod, to yet another question: how had Scott gotten hold of them? Had he charmed Amanda into handing them over? Had he charmed Jane Whitlow, the shrink with the beads? Had he charmed both of them? Lisey knew it was possible. Scott's ability to charm wasn't universal--Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, was a case in point--but many people had been susceptible. Certainly Amanda had felt it, although Lisey was sure that her sister had never fully trusted Scott (Manda had read all of his books, even Empty Devils . . . after which, Amanda said, she had slept with the lights on for an entire week). About Jane Whitlow Lisey had no idea.
How Scott had obtained the records might be another point upon which Lisey's curiosity would never be satisfied. She might have to content herself with knowing that he had, and that Dr. Alberness had willingly studied them, and had concurred with Scott's opinion: Amanda Debusher was probably headed for more trouble down the line. And at some point (probably long before they'd finished their dessert), Alberness had promised his favorite writer that if the feared break came, he would find a place for Ms. Debusher at Greenlawn.