"That was so wonderful of you," Lisey had told him warmly, and now--turning in to Amanda's driveway for the second time that day--she wondered at what point in the conversation the doctor had asked Scott where he got his ideas. Had it been early or late? With the appetizers or the coffee?
"Wake up, Darla-darlin," she said, turning off the engine. "We're here."
Darla sat up, looked at Amanda's house, and said: "Oh, shit."
Lisey burst out laughing. She couldn't help it.
9
Packing for Manda turned out to be an unexpectedly sad affair for both of them. They found her bags in the third-floor cubby that served as her attic. There were just two Samsonite suitcases, battered and still bearing MIA tags from the Florida trip she'd taken to see Jodotha . . . when? Seven years ago?
No, Lisey thought, ten. She regarded them sadly, then pulled out the larger of the two.
"Maybe we ought to take both," Darla said doubtfully, then wiped her face. "Whoo! Hot up here!"
"Let's just take the big one," Lisey said. She almost added that she didn't think Amanda would be going to the Catatonics' Ball this year, then bit her tongue. One look at Darla's tired, sweaty face told her this was absolutely the wrong time to try and be witty. "We can get enough in it for a week, at least. She won't be going far. Remember what the doc said?"
Darla nodded and wiped her face again. "Mostly in her room, at least to start with."
Under ordinary circumstances, Greenlawn would have sent a physician out to examine Amanda in situ, but thanks to Scott, Alberness had cut right to the chase. After ascertaining that Dr. Whitlow was gone and Amanda either could not or would not walk (and that she was incontinent), he had told Lisey he would send out a Greenlawn ambulance--unmarked, he emphasized. To most folks it looked like just another delivery van. Lisey and Darla had followed it to Greenlawn in Lisey's BMW, and both of them had been extremely grateful--Darla to Dr. Alberness, Lisey to Scott. The wait while Alberness examined her, however, had seemed much longer than forty minutes, and his report had been far from encouraging. The only part of it Lisey wanted to concentrate on right now was what Darla had just mentioned: Amanda would be spending most of her first week under close observation, in her room or on the little terrace outside her room if she could be persuaded to ambulate that far. She wouldn't even be visiting the Hay Common Room at the end of the corridor unless she showed sudden and drastic improvement. "Which I don't expect," Dr. Alberness had told them. "It happens, but it's rare. I believe in telling the truth, ladies, and the truth is that Ms. Debusher is probably in for the long haul."
"Besides," Lisey said, examining the bigger of the two suitcases, "I want to buy her some new luggage. This stuff is beat to shit."
"Let me do it," Darla said. Her voice had gone thick and wavery. "You do so much, Lisey. Dear little Lisey." She took Lisey's hand, lifted it to her lips, and planted a kiss on it.
Lisey was surprised--almost shocked. She and Darla had buried their ancient quarrels, but this sort of affection was still very unlike her older sister.
"Do you really want to, Darl?"
Darla nodded vehemently, started to speak, and settled for scrubbing her face again.
"Are you okay?"
Darla began to nod, then shook her head. "New luggage!" she cried. "What a joke! Do you think she's ever going to need new luggage? You heard him--no response to the snap test, no response to the clap test, no response to the pin test! I know what the nurses call people like her, they call em gorks, and I don't give a shit what he says about therapy and wonder drugs, if she ever comes back it'll be a blue-eyed miracle!"
As the saying is, Lisey thought, and smiled . . . but only inside, where it was safe to smile. She led her tired, slightly weepy sister down the short, steep flight of attic steps and below the worst of the heat. Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught the man whose last name she had taken for her own--that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.
10
Lisey asked again if Darla didn't want company on the ride back to Greenlawn, and Darla shook her head. She had an old Michael Noonan novel on cassette tapes, she said, and this would be a good chance to dig into it. By then she had washed her face in Amanda's bathroom, re-applied her makeup, and tied her hair back. She looked good, and in Lisey's experience, a woman who looked good usually felt that way. So she gave Darla's hand a little squeeze, told her to drive carefully, and watched her out of sight. Then she made a slow tour of Amanda's house, first inside and then out, making sure everything was locked up: windows, doors, cellar bulkhead, garage. She left two of the garage windows a quarter-inch open to keep the heat from building up. This was a thing Scott had taught her, a thing he'd learned from his father, the redoubtable Sparky Landon . . . along with how to read (at the precocious age of two), how to sum on the little blackboard that was kept beside the stove in the kitchen, how to jump from the bench in the front hall with a cry of Geronimo! . . . and about blood-bools, of course.
"Stations of the bool--like stations of the cross, I guess."
He says this and then he laughs. It's a nervous laugh, an I'm-looking-over-my-shoulder laugh. A child's laugh at a dirty joke.
"Yeah, exactly like that," Lisey murmured, and shivered in spite of the late afternoon heat. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
That's a bad way to think, thinking that way will get you in the badgunky.
"I don't doubt it," Lisey said, and gave her own nervous laugh. She headed for her car with Amanda's key-ring--surprisingly heavy, heavier than her own, although Lisey's house was far bigger--hung over the forefinger of her right hand. She had a feeling she was already in the badgunky. Amanda in the nutbarn was just the beginning. There was also "Zack McCool" and that detestable Incunk, Professor Woodbody. The events of the day had driven the latter two out of her mind, but that didn't mean they'd ceased to exist. She felt too tired and dispirited to take on Woodbody this evening, too tired and dispirited even to track him to his lair . . . but she thought she'd better do it just the same, if only because her phone-pal "Zack" had sounded as though he could really be dangerous.
She got into her car, put big sissa Manda-Bunny's keys into the glove compartment, and backed down the driveway. As she did, the lowering sun cast a bright net of reflections off something behind her and up onto the roof. Startled, Lisey pressed the brake, looked over her shoulder--and saw the silver spade. COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. Lisey reached back, touched the wooden handle, and felt her mind calm a bit. She looked in both directions along the blacktop, saw nothing coming, and turned toward home. Mrs. Jones was sitting on her front stoop, and raised her hand in a wave. Lisey raised hers in return. Then she reached between the BMW's bucket seats again, so she could grasp the shaft of the spade.
11
If she was honest with herself, she thought as she began her short ride home, then she had to admit she was more frightened by these returning memories--by the sense that they were happening again, happening now--than she was by what might or might not have happened in bed just before sunrise. That she could dismiss (well . . . almost) as the half-waking dream of an anxious mind. But she hadn't thought of Gerd Allen Cole for ever so long, and if asked for the name of Scott's father or where he had worked, she would have said she honestly didn't remember.
"U.S. Gypsum," she said. "Only Sparky called it U.S. Gyppum." And then, low and fierce, almost growling it: "Stop, now. That's enough. You stop."
But could she? That was the question. And it was an important question,
because her late husband wasn't the only one who had squirreled away certain painful and frightening memories. She'd put up some sort of mental curtain between LISEY NOW and LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!, and she had always thought it was strong, but this evening she just didn't know. Certainly there were holes in it, and if you looked through them, you ran the risk of seeing things in the purple haze beyond that you maybe didn't want to see. It was better not to look, just as it was better not even to glance at yourself in a mirror after dark unless all the lights in the room were on, or eat
(nightfood)
an orange or a bowl of strawberries after sundown. Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous. It was best to live in the present. Because if you got hold of the wrong memory, you might--
"Might what?" Lisey asked herself in an angry, shaky voice, and then, immediately: "I don't want to know."
A PT Cruiser going the other way came out of the declining sun, and the guy behind the wheel tipped her a wave. Lisey tipped him one right back, although she couldn't think of anyone of her acquaintance who owned a PT Cruiser. It didn't matter, out here in Sticksville you always waved back; it was plain country courtesy. Her mind was elsewhere, in any case. The fact was, she did not have the luxury of refusing all her memories just because there were some things
(Scott in the rocker, nothing but eyes while the wind howls outside, a killer gale all the way down from Yellowknife)
she didn't feel capable of looking at. Not all of them were lost in the purple, either; some were just tucked away in her own mental booksnake, all too accessible. The business of the bools, for instance. Scott had given her the complete lowdown on bools once, hadn't he?
"Yes," she said, lowering her visor to block the declining sun. "In New Hampshire. A month before we got married. But I don't remember exactly where."
It's called The Antlers.
All right, okay, big deal. The Antlers. And Scott had called it their early honeymoon, or something like that--
Frontloaded honeymoon. He calls it their frontloaded honeymoon. Says "Come on, babyluv, pack it up and strap it on."
"And when babyluv asked where we were going--" she murmured.
--and when Lisey asks where they're going he says "We'll know when we get there." And they do. By then the sky is white and the radio says snow is coming, incredible as that might seem with the leaves still on the trees and only starting to turn . . .
They'd gone there to celebrate the paperback sale of Empty Devils, the horrible, scary book that put Scott Landon on the bestseller lists for the first time and made them rich. They were the only guests, it turned out. And there was a freak early autumn snowstorm. On Saturday they donned snowshoes and walked a trail into the woods and sat under
(the yum-yum tree)
a tree, a special tree, and he lit a cigarette and said there was something he had to tell her, something hard, and if it changed her mind about marrying him he'd be sorry . . . hell, he'd be broken-smucking-hearted, but--
Lisey swerved abruptly over to the side of Route 17 and stopped, scrunching up a cloud of dust behind her. The light was still bright, but its quality was changing, edging toward the silky extravagant dream-light that is the exclusive property of June evenings in New England, the summerglow adults born north of Massachusetts remember most clearly from their childhoods.
I don't want to go back to The Antlers and that weekend. Not to the snow we thought was so magical, not under the yum-yum tree where we ate the sandwiches and drank the wine, not to the bed we shared that night and the stories he told--benches and bools and lunatic fathers. I'm so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see. Please, no more.
Lisey became aware that she was saying this out loud in a low voice, over and over: "No more. No more. No more."
But she was on a bool hunt, and maybe it was already too late to say no more. According to the thing in bed with her this morning, she'd already found the first three stations. A few more and she could claim her prize. Sometimes a candybar! Sometimes a drink, a Coke or an RC! Always a card reading BOOL! The End!
I left you a bool, the thing in Amanda's nightgown had said . . . and now that the sun was going down, she was once more finding it hard to believe that thing had really been Amanda. Or only Amanda.
You have a blood-bool coming.
"But first a good bool," Lisey murmured. "A few more stations and I get my prize. A drink. I'd like a double whiskey, please." She laughed, rather wildly. "But if the stations go behind the purple, how the hell can it be good? I don't want to go behind the purple."
Were her memories stations of the bool? If so, she could count three vivid ones in the last twenty-four hours: cold-cocking the madman, kneeling with Scott on the broiling pavement, and seeing him come out of the dark with his bloody hand held out to her like an offering . . . which was exactly what he'd meant it to be.
It's a bool, Lisey! And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!
Lying on the pavement, he'd told her his long boy--the thing with the endless piebald side--was very close. I can't see it, but I hear it taking its meal, he'd said.
"I don't want to think about this stuff anymore!" she heard herself almost scream, but her voice seemed to come from a terrible distance, across an awful gulf; suddenly the real world felt thin, like ice. Or a mirror into which one dared not look for more than a second or two.
I could call it that way. It would come.
Sitting behind the wheel of her BMW, Lisey thought of how her husband had begged for ice and how it had come--a kind of miracle--and put her hands over her face. Invention at short notice had been Scott's forte, not Lisey's, but when Dr. Alberness had asked about the nurse in Nashville, Lisey had done her best, making up something about Scott holding his breath and opening his eyes--playing dead, in other words--and Alberness had laughed as though it were the funniest thing he'd ever heard. It didn't make Lisey envy the staff under the guy's command, but at least it had gotten her out of Greenlawn and eventually here, parked at the side of a country highway with old memories barking around her heels like hungry dogs and nipping at her purple curtain . . . her hateful, precious purple curtain.
"Boy, am I lost," she said, and dropped her hands. She managed a weak laugh. "Lost in the deepest, darkest smucking woods."
No, I think the deepest darkest woods are still ahead--where the trees are thick and their smell is sweet and the past is still happening. Always happening. Do you remember how you followed him that day? How you followed him through the strange October snow and into the woods?
Of course she did. He broke trail and she followed, trying to clap her snowshoes into her perplexing young man's tracks. And this was very like that, wasn't it? Only if she was going to do it, there was something else she needed first. Another piece of the past.
Lisey dropped the gearshift into Drive, looked into her rearview mirror for oncoming traffic, then turned around and drove back the way she had come, making her BMW really scat.
12
Naresh Patel, owner of Patel's Market, was himself on duty when Lisey came in at just past five o'clock on that long, long Thursday. He was sitting behind the cash register in a lawn chair, eating a curry and watching Shania Twain gyrate on Country Music Television. He put his curry aside and actually stood up for Lisey. His tee-shirt read I DARK SCORE LAKE.
"I'd like a pack of Salem Lights, please," Lisey said. "Actually, you better make that two."
Mr. Patel had been keeping store--first as an employee in his father's New Jersey market, then as owner of his own--for nearly forty years, and he knew better than to comment on apparent teetotalers who suddenly began buying booze or apparent non-smokers who suddenly began buying cigarettes. He simply found this lady's particular poison in his well-stocked racks of the stuff, put it on the counter, and commented on the beauty of the day. He affected not to notice Mrs. Landon's expression of near shock at the price of her poison. It only showed how long her pause had been between cessation and resumpt
ion. At least this one could afford her poison; Mr. Patel had customers who took food out of their children's mouths to buy this stuff.
"Thank you," she said.
"Very welcome, please come again," Mr. Patel said, and settled back to watch Darryl Worley sing "Awful, Beautiful Life." It was one of his favorites.
13
Lisey had parked beside the store so not to block access to any of the gas pumps--there were fourteen, on seven spanking-clean islands--and once she was behind the wheel of her car again, she started the engine so she could roll down her window. The XM radio under the dash (how Scott would have loved all those music channels) came on at the same time, playing low. It was tuned to The 50s on 5, and Lisey wasn't exactly surprised to hear "Sh-Boom." Not The Chords, though; this was the cover version, recorded by a quartet Scott had insisted on calling The Four White Boys. Except when he was drunk. Then he called them The Four Cleancut Honkies.
She tore the top off one of her new packs and slipped a Salem Light between her lips for the first time in . . . when was the last time she'd slipped? Five years ago? Seven? When the BMW's lighter popped, she applied it to the tip of her cigarette and took a cautious drag of mentholated smoke. She coughed it back out at once, eyes watering. She tried another drag. That one went a little better, but now her head was starting to swim. A third drag. Not coughing at all now, just feeling like she was going to faint. If she fell forward against the steering wheel, the horn would start blaring and Mr. Patel would rush out to see what was wrong. Maybe he'd be in time to keep her from burning her stupid self up--was that kind of death immolation or defenestration? Scott would have known, just as he'd known who had done the black version of "ShBoom"--The Chords--and who'd owned the pool hall in The Last Picture Show--Sam the Lion.
But Scott, The Chords, and Sam the Lion were all gone.
She butted the cigarette in the previously immaculate ashtray. She couldn't remember the name of the motel in Nashville, either, the one she'd gone back to when she'd finally left the hospital ("Yea, you returneth like a drunkard to his wine and a dog to its spew," she heard the Scott in her head intone), only that the desk clerk had given her one of the crappy rooms in back with nothing to look at but a high board fence. It seemed to her that every dog in Nashville had been behind it, barking and barking and barking. Those dogs made the long-ago Pluto seem like a piker. She had lain in one of the twin beds knowing she'd never get to sleep, that every time she got close she'd see Blondie swiveling the muzzle of his cunting little gun toward Scott's heart, would hear Blondie saying I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias, and snap wide-awake again. But eventually she had gone to sleep, had gotten just enough to stagger through the next day on--three hours, maybe four--and how had she managed that remarkable feat? With the help of the silver spade, that was how. She'd laid it on the floor next to the bed where she could reach down and touch it any old time she began to think she had been too late and too slow. Or that Scott would take a turn for the worse in the night. And that was something else she hadn't thought of in all the years since. Lisey reached back and touched the spade now. She lit another Salem Light with her free hand and made herself remember going in to see him the next morning, climbing up to the third-floor ICU wing in the already sweltering heat because there was a sign in front of the only two patient elevators on that side of the hospital reading OUT OF SERVICE. She thought about what had happened as she approached his room. It was silly, really, just one of those