There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a glass of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later--later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool--that she'll realize he hasn't added a single page to the manuscript of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he's currently using, she'll find one piece of paper--a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top--upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It's only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she'll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It's only later that she'll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she's able to give herself a pass, because those empties were well-hidden.
4
The first couple of days of 1996 are unseasonably warm; it is what the oldtimers call the January Thaw. But as early as January third, the weather forecasters begin warning of a big change, an awesome cold wave rolling down from the white wastes of central Canada. Mainers are told to make sure their fuel-oil tanks are topped up, that their waterpipes are insulated, and that they have plenty of "warm space" for their animals. Temperatures are going to drop to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the temperatures are going to be the very least of it. They're going to be accompanied by gale-force winds that will drive the chill-factor to sixty or seventy below.
Lisey is frightened enough to call their general contractor after failing to raise any real concern in Scott. Gary assures her that the Landons have got the tightest house in Castle View, tells her he'll keep a close eye on Lisey's kinfolk (especially on Amanda, it almost goes without saying), and reminds her that cold weather is just a part of living in Maine. A few three-dog nights and we'll be on the way to spring, he says.
But when the subzero cold and screaming winds finally roll in on the fifth of January, it's worse than anything Lisey can remember, even casting her mind back to childhood, when every thunderbuster she rode out gleefully as a child seemed magnified into a great tempest and every snow flurry was a blizzard. She keeps all the thermostats in the house turned up to seventy-five and the new furnace runs constantly, but between the sixth and ninth, the temperature inside never rises above sixty-two. The wind doesn't just hoot around the eaves, it screams like a woman being gutted an inch at a time by a madman: one with a dull knife. The snow left on the ground by the January thaw is lifted by those forty-mile-an-hour winds (the gusts kick up to sixty-five, high enough to knock down half a dozen radio towers in central Maine and New Hampshire) and blown across the fields like dancing ghosts. When they hit the storm windows, the granular particles rattle like hail.
On the second night of this extravagant Canadian cold, Lisey wakes up at two in the morning and Scott is gone from their bed once more. She finds him in the guest room, again bundled up in Good Ma's yellow african, once more watching The Last Picture Show. Hank Williams warbles "Kaw-Liga"; Sam the Lion is dead. She has difficulty rousing him, but at last Lisey manages. She asks him if he's all right and Scott says yeah he is. He tells her to look out the window, tells her it's beautiful but to be careful, not to look too long. "My Daddy said it would burn your eyes when it's that bright," he advises.
She gasps for the beauty of it. There are great drifting theater curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn't it, exactly; she thinks no one has ever named the shade she's seeing. When Scott twitches the back of her nightgown and tells her that's enough, she ought to stop, she's stunned to look at the digital clock built into the VCR and discover that she's been looking out the frost-framed window at the northern lights for ten minutes.
"Don't look anymore," he says, in the nagging, dragging tones of one who speaks in his sleep. "Come back to bed with me, little Lisey."
She's glad enough to go, glad enough to kill that somehow awful movie, to get him out of the rocker and the chilly back room. But as she leads him up the hall by the hand, he says something that makes her skin prickle. "The wind sounds like the tractor-chain and the tractor-chain sounds like my Daddy," he says. "What if he's not dead?"
"Scott, that's bullshit," she replies, but things like that don't sound like bullshit in the middle of the night, do they? Especially when the wind screams and the sky is so full of colors it seems to be screaming back.
When she wakes up the following night the wind is still howling and this time when she goes down to the guest room the TV isn't on but he's in there watching it anyway. He's in the rocking chair and bundled up in the african, Good Ma's yellow african, but he won't answer her, won't even look at her. Scott is there, but Scott is also gone.
He's gone gomer.
5
Lisey rolled over on her back in Scott's study and looked up at the skylight directly overhead. Her breast throbbed. Without thinking about it, she pressed the yellow knitted square against it. At first the pain was even worse . . . but then there was a small measure of comfort. She looked into the skylight, panting. She could smell the sour brew of sweat, tears, and blood in which her skin was marinating. She moaned.
All the Landons are fast healers, we had to be. If it was true--and she had reason to believe it was--then she had never so much wanted to be a Landon as she did now. No more Lisa Debusher from Lisbon Falls, Mama and Daddy's afterthought, Li'l Tag-Along.
You are who you are, Scott's voice responded patiently. You're Lisey Landon. My little Lisey. But it was hot and she hurt so much, now she was the one who wanted ice, and voice or no voice, Scott Landon had never seemed so smucking dead.
SOWISA, babyluv, he insisted, but that voice was far.
Far.
Even the phone on Dumbo's Big Jumbo, from which she could theoretically summon help, seemed far. And what seemed close? A question. A simple one, actually. How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?
I did remember, her mind whispered to her mind as she lay looking up at the skylight with the yellow knitted square turning red against her breast. I did. But to remember Scott in the rocker was to remember The Antlers; to remember The Antlers was to remember what happened when we went from under the yum-yum tree out into the snow; to remember that was to face the truth about his brother Paul; to face the true memory of Paul meant doubling back to that cold guest room with the northern lights filling the sky as the wind boomed down from Canada, from Manitoba, all the way from Yellowknife. Don't you see, Lisey? It was all connected, it always has been, and once you allowed yourself to make the first connection, to push over the first domino--
"I would have gone crazy," she whimpered. "Like them. Like the Landons and the Landreaus and whoever else knows about this. No wonder they went nuts, to know there's a world right next door to this one . . . and the wall between is so thin . . ."
But not even that was the worst. The worst was the thing that had so haunted him, the mottled thing with the endless piebald side--
"No!" she shrieked at the empty study. She shrieked even though it hurt her all the way down. "Oh, no! Stop! Make it stop! Make these things STOP!"
But it was too late. And too true to deny any longer, no matter how great the risk of madness. There really was a place where food turned bad, sometimes outright poisonous, after dark and where that piebald thing, Scott's long boy
(I'll ma
ke how it sounds when it looks around)
might be real.
"Oh, it's real, all right," Lisey whispered. "I saw it."
In the empty, haunted air of the dead man's study, she began to weep. Even now she didn't know for sure if this was true, and exactly when she had seen it if it was . . . but it felt true. The kind of hope-ending thing cancer patients glimpse in their bleary bedside waterglasses when all the medicine is taken and the morphine pump reads 0 and the hour is none and the pain is still in there, eating its steady way deeper into your wakeful bones. And alive. Alive, malevolent, and hungry. The kind of thing she was sure her husband had tried, and failed, to drink away. And laugh away. And write away. The thing she had almost seen in his empty eyes as he sat in the chilly guest room with the TV this time blank and silent. He sat in
6
He sits in the rocking chair, wrapped to his staring eyes in Good Ma's hellaciously cheery yellow african. He looks both at her and through her. He doesn't respond to her increasingly frantic repetitions of his name and she doesn't know what to do.
Call someone, she thinks, that's what, and hurries back down the hall to their bedroom. Canty and Rich are in Florida and will be until the middle of February, but Darla and Matt are just down the road and it's Darla's number she intends to dial, she's far past worrying about waking them up in the middle of the night, she needs to talk to someone, she needs help.
She doesn't get it. The bitter gale, the one that's making her cold even in her flannel nightgown with a sweater thrown on top for good measure, the one that's making the furnace in the cellar run constantly as the house creaks and groans and sometimes even crrracks alarmingly, that big cold wind down from Canada, has torn a line down somewhere on the View and all she hears when she picks up the phone is an idiot mmmmm. She diddles the phone's cutoff button a couple of times with the tip of her finger anyway, because that's what you do, but she knows it will do no good, and it doesn't. She's alone in this big old converted Victorian house on Sugar Top Hill as the skies bloom with crazy-jane curtains of color and the temperatures drop to regions of cold best left unimagined. If she tries going next door to the Galloways, she knows the chances are good she'll lose an earlobe or a finger--maybe a couple--to frostbite. She might actually freeze to death on their stoop before she can rouse them. This is the kind of cold you absolutely do not fool with.
She returns the useless phone to its cradle and hurries back down the hall to him, her slippers whispering. He is as she left him. The whining '50s-vintage country-music soundtrack of The Last Picture Show in the middle of the night was bad but the silence is worse, worse, worst. And just before a giant gust of wind seizes the house and threatens to push it off its foundations (she can hardly believe they haven't lost the electric, surely they will before much longer), she realizes why even the big wind is a relief: she can't hear him breathing. He doesn't look dead, there's even some color in his cheeks, but how does she know he's not?
"Honey?" she murmurs, going to him. "Hon, can you talk to me? Can you look at me?"
He says nothing, and he doesn't look at her, but when she puts her chilly fingers against his neck, she finds that the skin there is warm and she feels the beat of his heart in the big vein or artery that lies just beneath the skin. And something else. She can feel him reaching out to her. In daylight, even cold daylight, windy daylight (like the kind that seems to pervade all the exteriors in The Last Picture Show, now that she thinks of it), she's sure she would scoff at that, but not now. Now she knows what she knows. He needs help, just as much as he did on that day in Nashville, first when the madman shot him and then as he lay shivering on the hot pavement, begging for ice.
"How do I help you?" she murmurs. "How do I help you now?"
It's Darla who answers, Darla as she was as a teenager--"Full of young tits n mean," Good Ma had once said, an uncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.
You aren't gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She's been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He's off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he's riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone's working again. Lisey hears Darla's laugh--that laugh of perfect teenage contempt--deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wideeyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.
And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there's a way.
The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She's honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths--the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance--behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There's a certain sound
(the chuffing, dear God that low nasty grunting)
behind there, and certain sights
(the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight)
as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don't-think zone behind it. They should. It's handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights. There's all sorts of dusty old crapola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'other t'ing. All in all, it's quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott . . . and what do the kids say?
"Don't goinzee there," Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there . . . wherever there is.
Oh, but it's right next door.
That's the horror of it.
"You know, don't you?" she says, beginning to weep, but it isn't Scott she's asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness. She had protested--she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same--and he had said, You don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.
But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.
7
Lying on her back in her dead husband's study, holding the bloody delight against her breast, Lisey said: "I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it." She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn't trust herself to get up, not just yet. "His hand was warm but the floor
8
The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn't holding Scott's, but it's small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the floorboards . . . and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber's pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.
Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your ass turns blue. If you can do something for him, do it.
But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?
The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.
"He-never-told-me-about-that-because-I-never-asked." This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.
If so, it's an exotic one-word lie. He answered her question about the tea-cure that night at The Antlers. In bed, after love. She asked him two or three questions, but the one that mattered, the key question, turned out to be that first one. Simple, too. He could have answered with a plain old yes or no, b
ut when had Scott Landon ever answered anything with a plain old yes or no? And it turned out to be the cork in the neck of the bottle. Why? Because it returned them to Paul. And the story of Paul was, essentially, the story of his death. And the death of Paul led to--
"No, please," she whispers, and realizes she's squeezing his hand far too tight. Scott, of course, makes no protest. In the parlance of the Landon family, he has gone gomer. Sounded funny when you put it that way, almost like a joke on Hee-Haw.
Say, Buck, where's Roy?
Well, I tell yew, Minnie--Roy's gone gomer!
{Audience howls with laughter.}
But Lisey isn't laughing, and she doesn't need any of her interior voices to tell her Scott has gone to gomerland. If she wants to fetch him back, first she must follow him.
"Oh God no," she moans, because what that means is already looming in the back of her mind, a large shape wrapped in many sheets. "Oh God, oh God, do I have to?"
God doesn't answer. Nor does she need Him to. She knows what she needs to do, or at least how she needs to start: she must remember their second night at The Antlers, after love. They had been drowsing toward sleep, and she had thought What's the harm, it's Saintly Big Brother you want to know about, not Old Devil Daddy. Go ahead and ask him. So she did. Sitting on the floor with his hand (it's cooling now) folded into hers and the wind booming outside and the sky filled with crazy color, she peers around the curtain she's put up to hide her worst, most perplexing memories and sees herself asking him about the tea-cure. Asking him
9
"After that thing on the bench, did Paul soak his cuts in tea, the way you soaked your hand that night in my apartment?"
He's lying in bed next to her, the sheet pulled up to his hips, so she can see the beginning curl of his pubic hair. He's smoking what he calls the always fabulous post-coital cigarette, and the only light in the room is cast down on them by the lamp on his side of the bed. In the rose-dusty glow of that lamp the smoke rises and disappears into the dark, making her wonder briefly