Lisey’s Story (24 page)

“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.

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 resumption. 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.

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

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.”