14
It's one of those silly things where you scare the living hell out of someone without meaning to. Lisey's coming down the hall from the stairs at the end of the wing, and the nurse is coming out of room 319 with a tray in her hands, looking back over her shoulder into the room with a frown on her face. Lisey says hello so the nurse (who can't be a day over twenty-three and looks even younger) will know she's there. It's a mild greeting, a little-Lisey hello for sure, but the nurse gives out a tiny high-pitched scream and drops the tray. The plate and coffee cup both survive--they are tough old cafeteria birds--but the juice-glass shatters, spraying oj on the linoleum and the nurse's previously immaculate white shoes. She gives Lisey a wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights glance, seems for a moment about to take to her heels, then grabs hold of herself and says the conventional thing: "Oh, sorry, you startled me." She squats, the hem of her uniform pulling up over her white-stockinged Nancy Nurse knees, and puts the plate and cup back on the tray. Then, moving with a grace that is both swift and careful, she begins plucking up the pieces of broken glass. Lisey squats and begins to help.
"Oh, ma'am, you don't have to," the nurse says. She speaks with a deep southern twang. "It was entirely my fault. I wasn't looking where I was going."
"That's okay," Lisey says. She manages to beat the young nurse to a few shards and deposits them on the tray. Then she uses the napkin to begin blotting up the spilled juice. "That's my husband's breakfast tray. I'd feel guilty if I didn't help."
The nurse gives her a funny look--akin to the You're married to HIM? stare Lisey has more or less gotten used to--but it's not exactly that look. Then she drops her gaze back to the floor and begins hunting for any pieces of glass she might have missed.
"He ate, didn't he?" Lisey says, smiling.
"Yes, ma'am. He did very well, considering what he's been through. Half a cup of coffee--all he's allowed right now--a scrambled egg, some applesauce, and a cup of Jell-O. The juice he didn't finish. As you see." She stands up with the tray. "I'll get a hand-towel from the nurses' station and mop up the rest of that."
The young nurse hesitates, then gives a nervous little laugh.
"Your husband's a little bit of a magician, isn't he?"
For no reason at all Lisey thinks: SOWISA: Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate. But she only smiles and says, "He has a bag of tricks, all right. Sick or well. Which one did he play on you?" And somewhere deep down is she remembering the night of the first bool, sleepwalking to the bathroom in her Cleaves Mills apartment, saying Scott, hurry up as she goes? Saying it because he must be in there, he's sure not in bed with her anymore?
"I went in to see how he was doing," the nurse says, "and I could have sworn the bed was empty. I mean, the IV pole was there, and the bags were still hanging from it, but . . . I thought he must have pulled out the needle and gone to the bathroom. Patients do all kinds of weird stuff when they're doped up, you know."
Lisey nods, hoping the same small expectant smile is on her face. The one that says I have heard this story before but I'm not tired of it yet.
"So I went into the bathroom and that was empty. Then, when I turned around--"
"There he was," Lisey finishes for her. She speaks softly, still with the little smile. "Presto change-o, abracadabra." And bool, the end, she thinks.
"Yes, how did you know?"
"Well," Lisey says, still smiling, "Scott has a way of blending in with his surroundings."
This should sound exquisitely stupid--the bad lie of a person without much imagination--but it doesn't. Because it's not a lie at all. She's always losing track of him in supermarkets and department stores (places where he for some reason almost always goes unrecognized), and once she hunted for him for nearly half an hour in the University of Maine Library before spying him in the Periodicals Room, which she had checked twice before. When she scolded him for keeping her waiting and making her hunt for him in a place where she couldn't even raise her voice to call his name, Scott had shrugged and protested that he'd been in Periodicals all along, browsing the new poetry magazines. And the thing was, she didn't think he was even stretching the truth, let alone lying. She had just somehow . . . overlooked him.
The nurse brightens and tells her, "That's exactly what Scott said--he just kind of blends in." She blushes. "He told us to call him Scott. Practically demanded it. I hope you don't mind, Mrs. Landon." From this young southern nurse, Mrs. comes out Miz, but her accent doesn't grate on Lisey the way Dashmiel's did.
"Perfectly okay. He tells that to all the girls, especially the pretty ones."
The nurse smiles and blushes harder. "He said he saw me go by and look right at him. He said something like, 'I always was one of your whiter white men, but since I lost all of that blood, I must be in the top ten.'"
Lisey laughs politely, her stomach churning.
"And of course with the white sheets and the white johnny he's wearing . . ." The young nurse is starting to slow down. She wants to believe it, and Lisey has no doubt she did believe it when Scott was actually talking to her and gazing at her with his bright hazel eyes, but now she's starting to sense the absurdity which lurks just beneath what she's saying.
Lisey jumps in and helps her out. "Also, he's got a way of being so still," she says, although Scott is just about the jumpiest man she knows. Even when he's reading a book he's constantly shifting in his chair, gnawing at his nails (a habit he stopped for awhile after her tirade and then resumed again), scratching his arms like a junkie in need of a fix, sometimes even doing curls with the little five-pound hand-weights that are always parked under his favorite easy chair. She has only known him to be quiet in deep sleep and when he's writing and the writing's going exceptionally well. But the nurse still looks doubtful, so Lisey forges ahead, speaking in a gay tone that sounds horribly false to her own ear. "Sometimes I swear he's like a piece of furniture. I've walked right past him myself, plenty of times." She touches the nurse's hand. "I'm sure that's what happened, dear."
She's sure of no such thing, but the nurse gives her a grateful smile and the subject of Scott's absence is dropped. Or rather we pass it, Lisey thinks. Like a small kidney stone.
"He's ever so much better today," the nurse says. "Dr. Wendlestadt was in for early rounds, and he was absolutely amazed."
Lisey bets. And she tells the nurse what Scott told her all those years ago, in her Cleaves Mills apartment. She thought back then it was just one of those things you say, but now she believes it. Oh yes, now she believes it completely.
"All the Landons are fast healers," she says, and then goes in to see her husband.
15
He's lying there with his eyes closed and his head turned to one side, a very white man in a very white bed--that much is certainly true--but it's impossible to miss that mop of shoulder-length dark hair. The chair she sat in last night is where she left it, and she resumes her position beside his bed. She takes out her book--Savages, by Shirley Conran. She's removing the matchbook cover that marks her place when she feels Scott's eyes on her and looks up.
"How are you this morning, dear one?" she asks him.
He says nothing for a long time. His breath is wheezing, but no longer screaming as it did while he lay in the parking lot begging for ice. He really is better, she thinks. Then, with some effort, he moves his hand until it's over hers. He squeezes. His lips (which look dreadfully dry, she'll get a Chap Stick or Carmex for them later) part in a smile.
"Lisey," he says. "Little Lisey."
He goes back to sleep with his hand still covering hers, and that's perfectly okay with Lisey. She can turn the pages of her book with one hand.
16
Lisey stirred like a woman awaking from a doze, looked out the driver's-side window of her BMW, and saw the shadow of her car had grown noticeably longer on Mr. Patel's clean black pavement. There was not one butt in her ashtray, or two, but three. She looked out through the windshield and saw a face looking back at her from one of the small
windows at the rear of the Market, in what had to be the storage area. It was gone before she could tell if it was Mr. Patel's wife or one of his two teenage daughters, but she had time to mark the expression: curiosity or concern. Either way it was time to move on. Lisey backed out of her space, glad she had at least butted her cigarettes in her own ashtray instead of tossing them out onto that weirdly clean asphalt, and once again turned for home.
Remembering that day in the hospital--and what the nurse said--that was another station of the bool.
Yes? Yes.
Something had been in bed with her this morning, and for now she would go on believing it had been Scott. He had for some reason sent her on a bool hunt, just like the ones his big brother Paul had made for him when they were a pair of unhappy boys growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only instead of little riddles leading her from one station to the next, she was being led . . .
"You're leading me into the past," she said in a low voice. "But why would you do that? Why, when that's where the badgunky is?"
The one you're on is a good bool. It goes behind the purple.
"Scott, I don't want to go behind the purple." Approaching the house now. "I'll be smucked if I want to go behind the purple."
But I don't think I have any choice.
If that was true, and if the next station of the bool meant reliving their weekend visit to The Antlers--Scott's frontloaded honeymoon--then she wanted Good Ma's cedar box. It was all she had of her mother now that the
(africans)
afghans were gone, and Lisey supposed it was her more humble version of the memory nook in Scott's office. It was a place where she'd stored all sorts of mementos from
(SCOTT AND LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!)
the first decade of their marriage: photos, postcards, napkins, matchbooks, menus, drink-coasters, stupid stuff like that. How long had she collected those things? Ten years? No, not that long. Six at most. Probably less. After Empty Devils, the changes had come thick and fast--not just the Germany experiment but everything. Their married life had become something like the berserk merry-go-round (sort of a pun there, she thought--merry-go-round, marry-go-round) at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. She'd quit saving things like cocktail napkins and souvenir matchbooks because there'd been too many lounges and too many restaurants in too many hotels. Pretty soon she'd quit saving everything. And Good Ma's cedar box that smelled so sweet when you opened it, where was that? Somewhere in the house, she was sure of it, and she meant to find it.
Maybe it'll turn out to be the next station of the bool, she thought, and then she saw her mailbox up ahead. The door was down and a clutch of letters was rubber-banded to it. Curious, Lisey pulled up next to the pole. She'd often come home to a full mailbox when Scott was alive, but since then her mail tended to be on the thin side, and more often than not addressed to OCCUPANT or MR. AND MRS. HOME OWNER. In truth, this current sheaf looked pretty thin: four envelopes and a postcard. Mr. Simmons, the RFD 3 mailman, must have tucked a package in the box, although on fair days he was more apt to use a rubber band or two to attach them to the sturdy metal flag. Lisey glanced at the letters--bills, advertising come-ons, a postcard from Cantata--and then reached into the mailbox. She touched something soft, furry, and wet. She screamed in surprise, yanked her hand back, saw the blood on her fingers, and screamed again, this time in horror. In that first moment she was positive she'd been bitten: something had climbed the cedar mailbox pole and then wormed its way inside. Maybe a rat, maybe something even worse--something rabid, like a woodchuck or a baby coon.
She wiped her hand on her blouse, breathing in audible gasps that weren't quite moans, then reluctantly raised her hand to see how many wounds there were. And how deep. For a moment her conviction that she must have been bitten was so strong that she actually saw the marks. Then she blinked her eyes and reality re-asserted itself. There were smears of blood, but no cuts or bites or breaks in the skin. Something was in her mailbox, all right, some horrible furry surprise, but its biting days were done.
Lisey opened the glove compartment and her unopened pack of cigarettes fell out. She rummaged until she came up with the little disposable flashlight that she had transferred from the glove compartment of her last car, a Lexus she had driven for four years. It had been a fine car, that Lexus. She had only traded it because she associated it with Scott, who called it Lisey's Sexy Lexus. It was surprising how much small things could hurt when someone close to you died; talk about the princess and the smucking pea. Now she only hoped there was some juice left in the flashlight.
There was. The beam shone out bright and steady and confident. Lisey shifted sideways, took a deep breath, and shone it into the mailbox. She was distantly aware that she'd folded her lips over her teeth and was pressing them together so tightly that it hurt. At first she saw only a darkish shape and a green glimmer, like light reflecting off a marble. And wetness on the corrugated metal floor of the mailbox. She supposed that was the blood she'd gotten on her fingers. She shifted farther left, settling her side all the way against the driver's door, gingerly pushing the flashlight farther into the mailbox. The darkish shape grew fur, and ears, and a nose that probably would have been pink in daylight. There was no mistaking the eyes; even dulled in death, their shape was distinctive. There was a dead cat in her mailbox.
Lisey began to laugh. It was not exactly normal laughter, but it wasn't entirely hysterical, either. There was genuine humor in it. She didn't need Scott to tell her that a slaughtered cat in the mailbox was too, too Fatal Attraction. That had been no Swedish-meatball movie with subtitles, and she had seen it twice. What made it funny was that Lisey didn't own a cat.
She let the laughter run its course, then lit a Salem Light and pulled into her driveway.
VI. Lisey and The Professor (This Is What It Gets You)
1
Lisey felt no fear now, and her momentary lapse into amusement had been replaced by hard clean rage. She left the BMW parked in front of the locked barn doors and strode stilt-legged to the house, wondering if she would find her new friend's missive at the kitchen door or the one in front. She never doubted there would be a missive, and she was right. It was in the back, a white business-length envelope sticking out from between the screen door and the jamb. Cigarette clamped between her front teeth, Lisey tore the envelope open and unfolded a single sheet of paper. The message was typewritten.
Mrs: I am sorry to do this as I love aminals but btter your Cat than You. I don't want to hurt You. I don't want to but you need to call 412-298-8188 and tell "The Man" that you are donatinf those papers we talked about to the school library by way of Him. We don't want to let any grass grow under our feet on this Mrs, so call him by 8 PM tonight ald he'll get in touch with me. Let us finisg this business with no one hut except for your poor Pet about which I am so SORRY.
Your freind,
Zack
PS: I'm not a bit mad you told me to go "F" myself. I know you were upsert.
Z
Lisey looked at the Z which was "Zack McCool"'s final bit of communication to her and thought of Zorro, galloping through the night with his cape billowing out behind him. Her eyes were watering. She thought for a moment that she was crying, then realized it was smoke. The cigarette between her teeth had burned down to the filter. She spat it to the brickwork of the walk and ground it grimly beneath her heel. She looked up at the high board fence that went all the way around their backyard . . . though solely for the sake of symmetry, as their only neighbors were on the south side, to Lisey's left as she stood by her kitchen door with "Zack McCool"'s infuriating, poorly typed missive--his smucking ultimatum--in her hand. It was the Galloways on the other side of the board fence, and the Galloways had half a dozen cats--what were called "barncats" in this neck of the woods. They sometimes foraged in the Landons' yard, especially when no one was home. Lisey had no doubt it was a Galloway barncat in her mailbox, just as she had no doubt it had been Zack in the PT Cruiser that had p
assed her not long after she finished locking up and left Amanda's house. Mr. PT Cruiser had been heading east, coming almost directly out of the lowering sun, so she hadn't been able to get a good look at him. The bastard had even had the balls to tip her a wave. Howdy, there, Missus, left you a little something in your mailbox! And she had waved back, because that was what you did out here in Sticksville.
"You bastard," she murmured, so angry she didn't even know which one she was cursing, Zack or the crazed Incunk who had sicced Zack on her. But since Zack had so considerately provided her with Woodbody's phone number (she had recognized the Pittsburgh area code instantly), she knew which one she intended to deal with first, and she found she was looking forward to it. But before she dealt with anyone, she had a distasteful housekeeping chore to perform.