Lisey’s Story (3 page)

Amanda hated these pictures. She looked and saw her sister playing salt for the sirloin, setting for the stone. She saw her sister sometimes identified as
Mrs. Landon,
sometimes as
Mrs. Scott Landon,
and sometimes—oh, this was bitter—not identified at all. Demoted all the way to
Gal Pal.
To Amanda it must seem like a kind of murder.

“Mandy-oh?”

Amanda looked at her. The light was cruel, and Lisey remembered with a real and total sense of shock that Manda would be sixty in the fall. Sixty! In that moment Lisey found herself thinking about the thing that had haunted her husband on so many sleepless nights—the thing the Woodbodys of the world would never know about, not if she had her way. Something with an endless mottled side, something seen best by cancer patients looking into tumblers from which all the painkiller had been emptied; there will be no more until morning.

It's very close, honey. I can't see it, but I hear it taking its meal.

Shut up, Scott, I don't know what you're talking about.

“Lisey?” Amanda asked. “Did you say something?”

“Just muttering under my breath.” She tried to smile.

“Were you talking to Scott?”

Lisey gave up trying to smile. “Yes, I guess I was. Sometimes I still do. Crazy, huh?”

“I don't think so. Not if it works. I think crazy is what doesn't work. And I ought to know. I've had some experience. Right?”

“Manda—”

But Amanda had turned to look at the heaps of journals and annuals and student magazines. When she returned her gaze to Lisey, she was smiling uncertainly. “Did I do right, Lisey? I only wanted to do my part . . .”

Lisey took one of Amanda's hands and squeezed it lightly. “You did. What do you say we get out of here? I'll flip you for the first shower.”

I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice.

Scott's voice.

Lisey opened her eyes, thinking she had drifted away from some daytime task or moment and had had a brief but amazingly detailed dream in which Scott was dead and she was engaged in the Herculean job of cleaning out his writing stables. With them open she immediately understood that Scott indeed
was
dead; she was asleep in her own bed after delivering Manda home, and this was her dream.

She seemed to be floating in moonlight. She could smell exotic flowers. A fine-grained summer wind combed her hair back from her temples, the kind of wind that blows long after midnight in some secret place far from home. Yet it
was
home,
had
to be home, because ahead of her was the barn which housed Scott's writing suite, object of so much Incunk interest. And now, thanks to Amanda, she knew it held all those pictures of her and her late husband. All that buried treasure, that emotional loot.

It might be better not to look at those pictures,
the wind whispered in her ears.

Oh, of that she had no doubt. But she
would
look. Was helpless not to, now that she knew they were there.

She was delighted to see she was floating on a vast, moon-gilded piece of cloth with the words
PILLSBURY'S BEST FLOUR
printed across it again and again; the corners had been knotted like hankies. She was charmed by the whimsy of it; it was like floating on a cloud.

Scott.
She tried to say his name aloud and could not. The dream
wouldn't let her. The driveway leading to the barn was gone, she saw. So was the yard between it and the house. Where they had been was a vast field of purple flowers, dreaming in haunted moonlight.
Scott, I loved you, I saved you, I

Then she was awake and could hear herself in the dark, saying it over and over like a mantra: “I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice. I loved you, I saved you, I got you ice.”

She lay there a long time, remembering a hot August day in Nashville and thinking—not for the first time—that being single after being double so long was strange shite, indeed. She would have thought two years was enough time for the strangeness to rub off, but it wasn't; time apparently did nothing but blunt grief's sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced. Because everything was
not
the same. Not outside, not inside, not for her. Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

The next morning Lisey sat tailor-fashion on the floor of Scott's memory nook, looking across at the heaps and stacks and piles of magazines, alumni reports, English Department bulletins, and University “journals” that ran along the study's south wall. It had occurred to her that maybe looking would be enough to dispel the stealthy hold all those as-yet-unseen pictures had taken on her imagination. Now that she was actually here, she knew that had been a vain hope. Nor would she need Manda's limp little notebook with all the numbers in it. That was lying discarded on the floor nearby, and Lisey put it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't like the look of it, the treasured artifact of a not-quite-right mind.

She once again measured that long stack of books and magazines against the south wall, a dusty booksnake four feet high and easily thirty feet long. If not for Amanda, she probably would have packed every last one of them away in liquor-store boxes without ever looking at them or wondering what Scott meant by keeping so many of them.

My mind just doesn't run that way,
she told herself.
I'm really not much of a thinker at all.

Maybe not, but you always
remembered
like a champ.

That was Scott at his most teasing, charming, and hard to resist, but the truth was she'd been better at forgetting. As had he, and both of them had had their reasons. And yet, as if to prove his point, she
heard a ghostly snatch of conversation. One speaker—Scott—was familiar. The other voice had a little southern glide to it. A
pretentious
little southern glide, maybe.

—
Tony here will be writing it up for the
[thingummy, rum-tum-tummy, whatever].
Would you like to see a copy, Mr. Landon?

—
Hmmmm? Sure, you bet!

Muttering voices all around them. Scott barely hearing the thing about Tony writing it up, he'd had what was almost a politician's knack for turning himself outward to those who'd come to see him when he was in public, Scott was listening to the voices of the swelling crowd and already thinking about finding the plug-in point, that pleasurable moment when the electricity flowed from him to them and then back to him again doubled or even tripled, he loved the current but Lisey was convinced he had loved that instant of plugging in even more. Still, he'd taken time to respond.

—
You can send photos, campus newspaper articles or reviews, departmental write-ups, anything like that. Please. I like to see everything. The Study, RFD #2, Sugar Top Hill Road, Castle Rock, Maine. Lisey knows the zip. I always forget.

Nothing else about her, just
Lisey knows the zip.
How Manda would have howled to hear it! But she had
wanted
to be forgotten on those trips, both there and not there. She liked to watch.

Like the fellow in the porno movie?
Scott had asked her once, and she'd returned the thin moon-smile that told him he was treading near the edge.
If you say so, dear,
she had replied.

He always introduced her when they arrived and again here and there, to other people, when it became necessary, but it rarely did. Outside of their own fields, academics were oddly lacking in curiosity. Most of them were just delighted to have the author of
The Coaster's Daughter
(National Book Award) and
Relics
(the Pulitzer) among them. Also, there had been a period of about ten years when Scott had somehow gotten larger than life—to others, and sometimes to himself. (Not to Lisey; she was the one who had to fetch him a fresh roll of toilet paper if he ran out while he was on the john.) Nobody exactly charged the stage when he stood there with the microphone in his hand, but even Lisey felt the connection he made with his audience. Those volts. It was hardwired, and it had little
to do with his work as a writer. Maybe nothing. It had to do with the
Scottness
of him, somehow. That sounded crazy, but it was true. And it never seemed to change him much, or hurt him, at least until—

Her eyes stopped moving, fixed on a hardcover spine and gold leaf letters reading
U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.

1988, the year of the rockabilly novel. The one he'd never written.

1988, the year of the madman.

—
Tony here will be writing it up

“No,” Lisey said. “Wrong. He didn't say Tony, he said—”

—
Toneh

Yes, that was right, he said
Toneh,
he said

—
Toneh heah well be rahtin it up

“—writin it up for the
U-Tenn '88 Year in Review,
” Lisey said. “He said . . .”

—
Ah could Express Mail it

Only she was damned if the little Tennessee Williams wannabe hadn't almost said
Spress
Mail it. That was the voice, all right, that was the southern-fried chickenshit. Dashmore? Dashman? The man had
dashed,
all right, had dashed like a smucking track-star, but that wasn't it. It had been—

“Dashmiel!” Lisey murmured to the empty rooms, and clenched her fists. She stared at the book with the gold-stamped spine as if it might disappear the second she took her eyes away. “Little prig-southerner's name was Dashmiel, and
HE RAN LIKE A RABBIT!
”

Scott would have turned down the offer of Express Mail or Federal Express; believed such things to be a needless expense. About correspondence there was never any hurry—when it came floating downstream, he plucked it out. When it came to reviews of his novels he had been a lot less Come Back To De Raft, Huck Honey and a lot more What Makes Scotty Run, but for write-ups following public appearances, regular mail did him just fine. Since The Study had its own address, Lisey realized she would have been very unlikely to see these things when they came in. And once they were here . . . well, these airy, well-lighted rooms had been Scott's creative playground, not hers, a mostly benign one-boy clubhouse where he'd written his stories and listened to his music as loud as he
wanted in the soundproofed area he called My Padded Cell. There'd never been a
KEEP OUT
sign on the door, she'd been up here lots of times when he was alive and Scott was always glad to see her, but it had taken Amanda to see what was in the belly of the booksnake sleeping against the south wall. Quick-to-offense Amanda, suspicious Amanda, OCD Amanda who had somehow become convinced that her house would burn flat if she didn't load the kitchen stove with exactly three maple chunks at a time, no more or less. Amanda whose unalterable habit was to turn around three times on her stoop if she had to go back into the house for something she'd forgotten. Look at stuff like that (or listen to her counting strokes as she brushed her teeth) and you could easily write Manda off as just another gonzo-bonkie old maid, somebody write that lady a prescription for Zoloft or Prozac. But without Manda, does little Lisey ever realize there are hundreds of pictures of her dead husband up here, just waiting for her to look at them? Hundreds of memories waiting to be called forth? And most of them surely more pleasant than the memory of Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit coward . . .

“Stop it,” she murmured. “Just stop it now. Lisa Debusher Landon, you open your hand and let that go.”

But she was apparently not ready to do that, because she got up, crossed the room, and knelt before the books. Her right hand floated out ahead of her like a magician's trick and grasped the volume marked
U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review.
Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary. The madman's hair had been so blond it was almost white. He had been a
graduate student
madman, spouting what was not quite gibberish. A day after the shooting—when Scott's condition was upgraded from critical to fair—she had asked Scott if the madman grad student had had it
strapped on,
and Scott had whispered that he didn't know if a crazy person could strap
anything
on.
Strapping it on
was a heroic act, an act of will, and crazy people didn't have much in the way of will . . . or did she think otherwise?

—
I don't know, Scott. I'll think about it.

Not meaning to. Wanting to never think about it again, if she
could help it. As far as Lisey was concerned, the smucking looneytune with the little gun could join the other things she'd successfully forgotten since meeting Scott.

—
Hot, wasn't it?

Lying in bed. Still pale, far
too
pale, but starting to get a little of his color back. Casual, no special look, just making conversation. And Lisey Now, Lisey Alone, the widow Landon, shivered.

“He didn't remember,” she murmured.

She was almost positive he didn't. Nothing about when he'd been down on the pavement and they'd both been sure he would never get back up. That he was dying and whatever passed between them then was all there would ever be, they who had found so much to say to each other. The neurologist she plucked up courage enough to speak to said that forgetting around the time of a traumatic event was par for the course, that people recovering from such events often discovered that a spot had been burned black in the film of their memories. That spot might stretch over five minutes, five hours, or five days. Sometimes disconnected fragments and images would surface years or even decades later. The neurologist called it a defense mechanism.