Lisey’s Story (15 page)

“Want. To. Come back. Here.” When Lisey urged Amanda to her feet so she could get Amanda's cargo pants off, Amanda stood up willingly enough, but she appeared to be studying the room's light-fixture. If this wasn't what her shrink had called “semi-catatonia,” it was too close for Lisey's comfort, and she felt sharp relief when Amanda's next words came out sounding more like those of a human being and less like those of a robot: “If we're going . . . somewhere . . . why are you
undressing
me?”

“Because you need a run through the shower,” Lisey said, guiding her in the direction of the bathroom. “And you need fresh clothes. These are . . . dirty.” She glanced back and saw Darla gathering up the shed blouse and pants. Amanda, meanwhile, padded toward the bathroom docilely enough, but the sight of her going away squeezed Lisey's heart. It wasn't Amanda's scabbed and scarred body that did it, but rather the seat of her plain white Boxercraft underpants. For years Amanda had worn boy-shorts; they suited her angular body, were even sexy. Tonight the right cheek of the boxers she wore was smeared a muddy maroon.

Oh Manda,
Lisey thought.
Oh my dear.

Then she was through the bathroom door, an antisocial X-ray dressed in bra, pants, and white tube socks. Lisey turned to Darla. Darla was there. For a moment all the years and clamoring Debusher voices were, too. Then Lisey turned and went into the bathroom after the one she'd once called big sissa Manda-Bunny, who only stood there on the mat with her head bent and her hands dangling, waiting to be undressed the rest of the way.

Lisey was reaching for the hooks of Manda's bra when Amanda suddenly turned and grabbed her by the arm. Her hands were horribly cold. For a moment Lisey was convinced big sissa Manda-Bunny was going to spill the whole thing, blood-bools and all. Instead she looked at Lisey with eyes that were perfectly clear, perfectly
there,
and said: “My Charles has married another.” Then she put her waxy-cool forehead against Lisey's shoulder and began to cry.

The rest of that evening reminded Lisey of what Scott used to call Landon's Rule of Bad Weather: when you slept in, expecting the hurricane to go out to sea, it hooked inland and tore the roof off your house. When you rose early and battened down for the blizzard, you got only snow flurries.

What's the point then?
Lisey had asked. They had been lying in bed together—some bed, one of the early beds—snug and spent after love, him with one of his Herbert Tareytons and an ashtray on his chest and a big wind howling outside. What bed, what wind, what storm, or what year she no longer remembered.

The point is SOWISA,
he had replied—
that
she remembered, although at first thought she'd either misheard or misunderstood.

Soweeza? What's soweeza?

He'd snuffed his cigarette and put the ashtray on the table next to the bed. He had taken her face in his hands, covering her ears and shutting out the whole world for a minute with the palms of his hands. He
kissed her lips. Then he took his hands away so she could hear him. Scott Landon always wanted to be heard.

SOWISA, babyluv—Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate.

She had turned this over in her mind—she wasn't fast like he was, but she usually got there—and realized that SOWISA was what he called an agronim.
Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate.
She liked it. It was quite silly, which made her like it even more. She began to laugh. Scott laughed with her, and pretty soon he was as inside her as they were inside the house while the big wind boomed and shook outside.

With Scott she had always laughed a lot.

His saying about how the blizzard missed you when you really battened down for the storm recurred to her several times before their little excursion to the ER was over and they had once more returned to Amanda's weather-tight Cape Cod between Castle View and the Harlow Deep Cut. For one thing, Amanda helped matters by brightening up considerably. Morbid or not, Lisey kept thinking about how sometimes a dimming lightbulb will flash bright for an hour or two before burning out forever. This change for the better began in the shower. Lisey undressed and got in with her sister, who initially just stood there with her shoulders slumped and her arms dangling apishly. Then, in spite of using the hand-held attachment and being as careful as she could, Lisey managed to spray warm water directly onto Manda's slashed left palm.

“Ow!
Ow!
” Manda cried, snatching her hand away. “That
hurts,
Lisey! Watch where you're pointin that thing, willya, okay?”

Lisey rejoined in exactly the same tone—Amanda would have expected no less, even with both of them buckass naked—but rejoiced at the sound of her sister's anger. It was
awake.
“Well pardon me all the way to Kittery, but
I
wasn't the one who took a piece of the damn Pottery Barn to my hand.”

“Well, I couldn't get at
him,
could I?” Amanda asked, and then unleashed a flood of stunning invective aimed at Charlie Corriveau and
his new wife—a mixture of adult obscenity and childish poopie-talk that filled Lisey with amazement, amusement, and admiration.

When she paused for breath, Lisey said: “Shitmouth motherfucker, huh? Wow.”

Amanda, sullen: “Fuck you too, Lisey.”

“If you want to come back home, I wouldn't use a lot of those words on the doc who treats your hands.”

“You think I'm stupid, don't you?”

“No. I don't. It's just . . . saying you were mad at him will be enough.”

“My hands are bleeding again.”

“A lot?”

“Just a little bit. I think you better put some Vaseline on em.”

“Really? Won't it hurt?”

“
Love
hurts,” Amanda said solemnly . . . and then gave a little snort of laughter that lightened Lisey's heart.

By the time she and Darla bundled her into Lisey's BMW and got on the road to Norway, Manda was asking about Lisey's progress in the study, almost as if this were the end of a normal day. Lisey didn't mention “Zack McCool”'s call, but she told them about “Ike Comes Home” and quoted the single line of copy: “Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine. BOOL! THE END!” She wanted to use that word, that
bool,
in Mandy's presence. Wanted to see how she'd respond.

Darla responded first. “You married a very strange man, Lisa,” she said.

“Tell me something I
don't
know, darlin.” Lisey glanced in the rearview mirror to see Amanda sitting alone in the back seat.
In solitary splendor,
Good Ma would have said. “What do you think, Manda?”

Amanda shrugged, and at first Lisey thought that was going to be her only response. Then came the flood.

“It was just
him,
that's all. I hooked a ride with him up the city once—he needed to go to the office-supply store and I needed new shoes, you know, good walking shoes I could wear in the woods for hiking, stuff like that. And we happened to drive by Auburn Novelty. He'd never seen it before and nothing would do but he had to park and go right in. He was like a ten-year-old! I needed Eddie Bauer shitkickers so I could walk in
the woods without getting poison ivy all over me and all
he
wanted to do was buy out that whole freakin store. Itchy-powder, joy buzzers, pepper gum, plastic puke, X-ray glasses, you name it, he had it piled up on the counter next to these lollipops, when you sucked em down there was a naked woman inside. He must have bought a hundred dollars' worth of that crazy made-in-Taiwan shite, Lisey. Do you remember?”

She did. Most of all she remembered how he had looked coming home that day, his arms full of bags with laughing cartoon faces and the words
LAFF RIOT
printed all over them. How full of color his cheeks had been. And shite was what he'd called it, not
shit
but
shite,
that was one word he picked up from
her,
could you believe it. Well, turnabout was fair play, so Good Ma had liked to claim, although
shite
had been their Dad's word, as it had been Dandy Dave who would sometimes tell folks a thing was no good,
so I slang it forth.
How Scott had loved it, said it had a weight coming off the tongue that
I threw it away
or even
I flung it away
could never hope to match.

Scott with his catches from the word-pool, the story-pool, the myth-pool.

Scott smucking Landon.

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with.
A project,
the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

Amanda brightening up was the first good thing. Munsinger, the doctor on duty, was no grizzled vet, that was the second good thing. He
didn't look as young as Jantzen, the doc Lisey met during Scott's final illness, but if he was much beyond thirty, she'd be surprised. The third good thing—although she'd never have believed it if anyone had told her in advance—was the arrival of the car-accident folks from down the road in Sweden.

They weren't there when Lisey and Darla escorted Amanda into the Stephens Memorial ER; then the waiting room was empty except for a kid of ten or so and his mother. The kid had a rash and his mother kept snapping at him not to scratch it. She was still snapping when the two of them were called back to one of the examining rooms. Five minutes later the kid reappeared with bandages on his arms and a glum look on his face. Mom had some sample tubes of ointment and was still yapping.

The nurse called Amanda's name. “Dr. Munsinger will see you now, dear.” She pronounced the last word in the Maine fashion, so that it rhymed with
Leah.

Amanda gave first Lisey, then Darla her haughty, red-cheeked, Queen Elizabeth look. “I prefer to see him alone,” she said.

“Of course, your Grand High Mysteriousness,” Lisey said, and stuck her tongue out at Amanda. At that moment she didn't care if they kept the scrawny, troublesome bitch a night, a week, or a year and a day. Who cared what Amanda might have whispered at the kitchen table when Lisey had been kneeling beside her? Probably it
had
been boo, as she'd told Darla. Even if it had been the other word, did she really want to go back to Amanda's house, sleep in the same room with her, and breathe her crazy vapors when she had a perfectly good bed of her own at home?
Case smucking closed, babyluv,
Scott would have said.

“Just remember what we agreed on,” Darla said. “You got mad and you cut yourself because he wasn't there. You're better now. You're over it.”

Amanda gave Darla a look Lisey absolutely could not read. “That's right,” she said. “I'm over it.”

The car-accident folks from the little town of Sweden arrived shortly thereafter. Lisey wouldn't have counted it a good thing if any of them had been seriously hurt, but that did not appear to be the case. All of them were ambulating, and two of the men were actually laughing about something. Only one of them—a girl of about seventeen—was crying. She had blood in her hair and snot on her upper lip. There were six of them in all, almost certainly from two different vehicles, and a strong smell of beer was coming from the two laughing men, one of whom appeared to have a sprained arm. The sextet was shepherded in by two med-techs wearing East Stoneham Rescue jackets over civilian clothes, and two cops: a State Policeman and a County Mounty. All at once the little ER waiting room seemed absolutely stuffed. The nurse who had called Amanda
dear
popped her startled head out for a look, and a moment later young Dr. Munsinger did the same. Not long after that the teenage girl went into a noisy fit of hysterics, announcing to all and sundry that her stepmom was gonna murdalize her. A few moments after that the nurse came to get her (she didn't call the hysterical teenager
dear,
Lisey noted), and then Amanda came out of
EXAMINATION ROOM
2, clumsily carrying her own sample-sized tubes. There were also a couple of folded prescription slips poking from the left pocket of her baggy jeans.

“I think we may go,” Amanda said, still in haughty Grand Lady mode.

Lisey thought that was too good to be true even with the relative youth of the doctor on duty and the fresh influx of patients, and she was right. The nurse leaned out of
EXAMINATION ROOM
1 like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and said, “Are you two ladies Miss Debusher's sisters?”

Lisey and Darla nodded. Guilty as charged, judge.

“Doctor would like to speak to you for a minute before you go.” With that she pulled her head back into the room, where the girl was still sobbing.

On the other side of the waiting room, the two beer-smelling men burst out laughing again, and Lisey thought:
Whatever may be wrong with them, they must not have been responsible for the accident.
And indeed, the cops seemed to be concentrating on a white-faced boy of about the same age as the girl with the blood in her hair. Another boy had commandeered the pay phone. He had a badly gashed cheek which Lisey was sure would take stitches. A third waited his turn to make a call. This boy had no visible injuries.