No, she assured Darla, she hadn't been wrong to call Canty. Yes, she had been right to tell Canty to stay put down there in Boston. And yes indeed, Lisey would be up to visit Amanda later on that day.
"It's horrible," Darla said, and in spite of her own preoccupation, Lisey heard the misery in Darla's voice. "She's horrible." Then, immediately, in a rush: "I don't mean that, she's not, of course she's not, but it's horrible to see her. She only sits there, Lisey. The sun was hitting the side of her face when I was in, the morning sun, and her skin looks so gray and old . . ."
"Take it easy, hon," Lisey said, running the tips of her fingers over the smooth, lacquered surface of Good Ma's box. Even closed she could smell its sweetness. When she opened it, she would bend forward into that aroma and it would be like inhaling the past.
"They're feeding her through a tube," Darla said. "They put it in and then take it out. If she doesn't start to eat on her own, I suppose they'll just leave it in all the time." She gave a huge, watery sniff. "They're feeding her through a tube and she's already so thin and she won't talk and I spoke to a nurse who said sometimes they go on this way for years, sometimes they never come back, oh Lisey, I don't think I can stand it!"
Lisey smiled a little at this as her fingers moved to the hinges at the back of the box. It was a smile of relief. Here was Darla the Drama Queen, Darla the Diva, and that meant they were back on safe ground, two sisters with well-worn scripts in hand. At one end of the wire is Darla the Sensitive. Give her a hand, ladies and gentlemen. At the other end, Little Lisey, Small But Tough. Let's hear it for her.
"I'll be up this afternoon, Darla, and I'll have another talk with Dr. Alberness. They'll have a clearer picture of her condition by then--"
Darla, doubtful: "Do you really think so?"
Lisey, with no smucking idea: "Absolutely. And what you need is to go home and put your feet up. Maybe take a nap."
Darla, in tones of dramatic proclamation: "Oh, Lisey, I could never sleep!"
Lisey didn't care if Darla ate, busted a joint, or took a shit in the begonias. She just wanted to get off the phone. "Well, you come on back, honey, and take it easy for a little while, anyway. I have to get off the phone--I've got something in the oven."
Darla was instantly delighted. "Oh, Lisey! You?" Lisey found this extremely annoying, as if she had never cooked anything more strenuous in her life than . . . well, Hamburger Helper. "Is it banana bread?"
"Close. Cranberry bread. I've got to go check it."
"But you'll be coming to see Manda later, right?"
Lisey felt like screaming. Instead she said, "Right. This afternoon."
"Well, then . . ." Doubt was back. Convince me, it said. Stay on the phone another fifteen minutes or so and convince me. "I guess I'll come on home."
"Good deal. Bye, Darl."
"And you really don't think I was wrong to call Canty?"
No! Call Bruce Springsteen! Call Hal Holbrook! Call Condi Smucking Rice! Just LEAVE ME ALONE!
"Not at all. I think it's good that you did. Keep her . . ." Lisey thought of Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions. "Keep her in the loop, you know."
"Well . . . okay. Goodbye, Lisey. I guess I'll see you later."
"Bye, Darl."
Click.
At last.
Lisey closed her eyes, opened the box, and inhaled the strong scent of cedar. For a moment she allowed herself to be five again, wearing a pair of Darla's hand-me-down shorts and her own scuffed but beloved Li'l Rider cowboy boots, the ones with the faded pink swoops up the sides.
Then she looked into the box to see what there was, and where it would take her.
2
On top was a foil packet, six or eight inches long, maybe four inches wide and two inches deep. Two lumps poked out of it, rounding the foil. She didn't know what it was as she lifted it out, caught a ghostly whiff of peppermint--had she been smelling it already, along with the cedarscent of the box?--and remembered even before she unfolded one side and saw the rock-hard slice of wedding cake. Embedded in it were two plastic figures: a boy-doll in morning-coat and top-hat, a girl-doll in a white wedding dress. Lisey had meant to save this for a year and then share it with Scott on their first anniversary. Wasn't that the superstition? If so, she should have put it in the freezer. Instead, it had wound up here.
Lisey chipped off a piece of the frosting with her nail and put it in her mouth. It had almost no taste, just a ghost of sweetness and a last fading whisper of peppermint. They had been married in the Newman Chapel at the University of Maine, in a civil ceremony. All of her sisters had come, even Jodi. Lincoln, Dad Debusher's surviving brother, came up from Sabbatus to give away the bride. Scott's friends from Pitt and UMO had been there, and his literary agent had done the best-man honors. No Landon family, of course; Scott's family was dead.
Below the petrified slice of cake was a pair of wedding invitations. She and Scott had hand-written them, each doing half, and she had saved one of Scott's and one of her own. Below those was a souvenir matchbook. They had discussed having both the invitations and matchbooks printed, it was an expense they probably could have managed even though the money from the Empty Devils paperback sale hadn't begun to flow yet, but in the end they had decided on handmade as more intimate (not to mention funkier). She remembered buying a fifty-count box of plain paper matches at the Cleaves Mills IGA and hand-lettering them herself, using a red pen with a fine-point ball. The matchbook in her hand was quite likely the last of that tribe, and she examined it with the curiosity of an archaeologist and the ache of a lover.
Scott and Lisa Landon
November 19th, 1979
"Now we are two."
Lisey felt tears prick her eyes. Now we are two had been Scott's idea, he said it was a riff on a Winnie-the-Pooh title. She remembered the one he meant at once--how many times had she pestered either Jodotha or Amanda into reading her away to the Hundred-Acre Wood?--and thought Now we are two was brilliant, perfect. She had kissed him for it. Now she could hardly bear to look at the matchbook with its foolishly brave motto. This was the other end of the rainbow, now she was one, and what a stupid number it was. She tucked the matchbook away in the breast pocket of her blouse and then wiped tears from her cheeks--some few had spilled after all. It seemed investigating the past was wet work.
What's happening to me?
She would have given the price of her pricey Beemer and more to know the answer to that question. She had seemed so all right! Had mourned him and gone on; had put away her weeds and gone on. For over two years now the old song seemed to be true: I get along without you very well. Then she had begun the work of cleaning out his study, and that had awakened his ghost, not in some ethery out-there-spirit-world, but in her. She even knew when and where it had begun: at the end of the first day, in that not-quite-triangular corner Scott liked to call his memory nook. That was where the literary awards hung on the wall, citations under glass: his National Book Award, his Pulitzer for fiction, his World Fantasy Award for Empty Devils. And what had happened?
"I broke," Lisey said in a small, frightened voice, and sealed the foil back over the fossilized slice of wedding cake.
There was no other word for it. She broke. Her memory of it wasn't terribly clear, only that it started because she was thirsty. She went to get a glass of water in that stupid smucking bar alcove--stupid because Scott no longer used the booze, although his adventures with alcohol had lasted years longer than his love-affair with the smokes--and the water wouldn't come, nothing came but the maddening sound of chugging pipes blowing up blasts of air, and she could have waited for the water, it would have come eventually, but instead she turned off the faucets and went back to the doorway between the alcove and the so-called memory nook, and the overhead light was on, but it was the kind on a rheostat and dialed low. With the light like that everything looked normal--everything the same, ha-ha. You almost expected him to open the door from the outside stairway, walk in, crank the tunes, and sta
rt to write. Just like he hadn't come unstrapped forever. And what had she expected to feel? Sadness? Nostalgia? Really? Something as polite, as dear-dear-lady, as nostalgia? If so, that was a real knee-slapper, because what had come over her then, both fever-hot and freezing cold, was
3
What comes over her--practical Lisey, Lisey who always stays cool (except maybe on the day she had to swing the silver spade, and even on that day she flatters herself that she did okay), little Lisey who keeps her head when those all about her are losing theirs--what comes over her is a kind of seamless and bulging rage, a divine fury that seems to push her mind aside and take control of her body. Yet (she doesn't know if this is a paradox or not) this fury also seems to clarify her thinking, must, because she finally understands. Two years is a long time, but the penny finally drops. She gets the picture. She sees the light.
He has kicked the bucket, as the saying is. (Do you like it?)
He has popped off. (Do you love it?)
He is eating a dirt sandwich. (It's a big one I caught in the pool where we all go down to drink and fish.)
And when you boil it down, what's left? Why, he has jilted her. Done a runner. Put an egg in his shoe and beat it, hit the road, Jack, took the Midnight Special out of town. He lit out for the Territories. He left the woman who loved him with every cell in her body and every brain in her not-so-smart head, and all she has is this shitty . . . smucking . . . shell.
She breaks. Lisey breaks. As she bolts forward into his stupid smucking memory nook she seems to hear him saying SOWISA, babyluv--Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate, and then that is gone and she begins tearing his plaques and pictures and framed citations from the walls. She picks up the bust of Lovecraft the World Fantasy Award judges gave him for Empty Devils, that hateful book, and throws it the length of the study, screaming "Fuck you, Scott, fuck you!" It's one of the few times she's used the word in its unvarnished form since the night he put his hand through the greenhouse glass, the night of the blood-bool. She was angry with him then but never in her life has she been so angry with him as she is now; if he were here, she might kill him all over again. She's on a full-bore rampage, tearing all that useless vanity crap off the walls until they are bare (few of the things she throws down break on the floor because of the deep-pile carpet--lucky for her, she'll think later on, when sanity returns). As she whirls around and around, a tornado now for sure, she screams his name again and again, screams Scott and Scott and Scott, crying for grief, crying for loss, crying for rage; crying for him to explain how he could leave her so, crying for him to come back, oh to come back. Never mind everything the same, nothing is the same without him, she hates him, she misses him, there's a hole in her, a wind even colder than the one that blew all the way down from Yellowknife now blows through her, the world is so empty and so loveless when there's no one in it to holler your name and holler you home. At the end she seizes the monitor of the computer that sits in the memory nook and something in her back gives a warning creak as she lifts it but smuck her back, the bare walls mock her and she is raging. She spins awkwardly with the monitor in her arms and heaves it against the wall. There is a hollow shattering noise--POOMP!, it sounds like--and then silence again.
No, there are crickets outside.
Lisey collapses to the littered carpet, sobbing weakly, all in. And does she call him back somehow? Does she call him back into her life by the very force of her angry delayed grief? Has he come like water through a long-empty pipe? She thinks the answer to that is
4
"No," Lisey murmured. Because--crazy as it seemed--Scott seemed to have been at work placing the stations of this bool hunt for her long before he died. Getting in touch with Dr. Alberness, for instance, who happened to have been such a puffickly huh-yooge fan. Somehow laying hands on Amanda's medical records and bringing them to lunch, for heaven's sake. And then the kicker: Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.
And . . . when had he put Good Ma's cedar box under the Bremen bed out in the barn? Because surely it had been Scott, she knew she had never put it there.
1996?
(hush)
In the winter of 1996, when Scott's mind had broken and she had
(YOU HUSH NOW LISEY!)
All right . . . all right, she would hush about the winter of '96--for now--but that felt about right. And . . .
A bool hunt. But why? To what purpose? To allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once? Maybe. Probably. Scott would know about such things, would surely sympathize with a mind that would want to hide its most terrible memories behind curtains or squirrel them away in sweet-smelling boxes.
A good bool.
Oh Scott, what's good about this? What's good about all this pain and sorrow?
A short bool.
If so, the cedar box was either the end or close to the end, and she had an idea that if she looked much further, there would be no going back.
Baby, he sighed . . . but only in her head. There were no ghosts. Only memory. Only the voice of her dead husband. She believed that; she knew it. She could close the box. She could draw the curtain. She could let the past be past.
Babyluv.
He would always have his say. Even dead, he would have his say.
She sighed--it was a wretched, lonely sound to her own ears--and decided to go on. To play Pandora after all.
5
The only other thing she'd squirreled away in here from their cut-rate, non-religious (but it had held for all that, had held very well) wedding day was a photograph taken at the reception, which had been held at The Rock--Cleaves Mills's raunchiest, rowdiest, lowdown-and-dirtiest rock-and-roll bar. It showed her and Scott out on the floor as they began the first dance. She was in her white lace dress, Scott in a plain black suit--My undertaker's suit, he'd called it--which he'd bought special for the occasion (and had worn again and again on the Empty Devils book-tour that winter). In the background she could see Jodotha and Amanda, both of them impossibly young and pretty, their hair up, their hands frozen in mid-clap. She was looking at Scott and he was smiling down at her, his hands on her waist, and oh God, look how long his hair had been, almost brushing his shoulders, she had forgotten that.
Lisey brushed the surface of the photograph with the tips of her fingers, slipping them across the people they'd been back at SCOTT AND LISEY, THE BEGINNING! and found she could even remember the name of the band from Boston (The Swinging Johnsons, pretty funny) and the song to which they had danced in front of their friends: a cover of "Too Late to Turn Back Now," by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose.
"Oh Scott," she said. Another tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away absently. Then she put the photo on the sunny kitchen table and prospected deeper. Here was a thin stack of menus, bar-napkins, and matchbooks from motels in the Midwest, also a program from Indiana University in Bloomington, announcing a reading from Empty Devils, by Scott Linden. She remembered saving that one for the misprint, telling him it would be worth a fortune someday, and Scott replying Don't hold your breath, babyluv. The date on the program was March 19th, 1980 . . . so where were her souvenirs from The Antlers? Had she taken nothing? In those days she almost always took something, it was a kind of hobby, and she could have sworn--
She lifted out the "Scott Linden" program and there beneath it was a dark purple menu with The Antlers and Rome, New Hampshire stamped on it in gold. And she could hear Scott as clearly as if he were speaking in her ear: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. He'd said it that night in the dining room (empty except for them and a single waitress), ordering the Chef's Special for both of them. And again, later, in bed, as he covered her naked body with his own.
"I offered to pay for this," she murmured, holding the menu up to her sunny, empty kitchen, "and the guy said I could just take it. Because we were their only guests. And because of the snowstorm."
That weird October snowstorm. They
had stayed two nights instead of just the one that had been in the plan, and on the second she had remained awake long after Scott had gone to sleep. Already the cold front that had brought the unusual snow was moving out and she could hear it melting, dripping from the eaves. She had lain there in that strange bed (the first of so many strange beds she'd shared with Scott), thinking about Andrew "Sparky" Landon, and Paul Landon, and Scott Landon--Scott the survivor. Thinking about bools. Good bools and blood-bools.
Thinking about the purple. Thinking about that, too.
At some point the clouds had broken open and the room had been flooded with windy moonlight. In that light she had at last fallen asleep. The next day, a Sunday, they had driven through countryside that was reverting back from winter to fall, and less than a month later they had been dancing to The Swinging Johnsons: "Too Late to Turn Back Now."
She opened the gold-stamped menu to see what the Chef's Special had been that long-ago night, and a photograph fell out. Lisey remembered it at once. The owner of the place had taken it with Scott's little Nikon. The guy had scrounged up two pairs of snowshoes (his cross-country skis were still in storage up in North Conway, he said, along with his four snowmobiles), and insisted that Scott and Lisey take a hike along the trail behind the inn. The woods are magical in the snow, Lisey remembered him telling them, and you'll have them all to yourselves--not a single skier or snow machine. It's the chance of a lifetime.
He had even packed them a picnic lunch with a bottle of red wine on the house. And here they were, togged out in snowpants and parkas and the earmuffs which the guy's amiable wife had found for them (Lisey's parka comically too big, the hem drooping all the way to her knees), standing for their portrait outside a country bed-and-breakfast in what looked like a Hollywood special-effects blizzard, wearing snowshoes and grinning like a couple of cheerful nitwits. The pack Scott wore to hold their lunch and the bottle of vino was another loaner. Scott and Lisey, bound for the yum-yum tree, although neither had known it then. Bound for a trip down Memory Lane. Only for Scott Landon, Memory Lane was Freak Alley, and it was no wonder he didn't choose to go there often.