Lisey’s Story (62 page)

“I did,” Lisey said, smiling guiltily, “but I ate it.”

“Pull in to Patel's,” Amanda said. “I'll spring for a box.”

Lisey pulled in. Amanda had insisted on bringing her house-money from the blue pitcher where she kept it stashed in the kitchen, and she now extracted a crumpled five-spot. “What kind do you want, Little?”

“Anything but Cheeseburger Pie,” Lisey said.

At seven-fifteen that evening, Lisey had a premonition. It wasn't the first of her life; she'd had at least two others. One in Bowling Green, shortly after entering the hospital where her husband had been taken after collapsing at an English Department reception. And certainly she'd had one on the morning of their flight to Nashville, the morning of the shattered toothglass. The third one came as the thunderstorms were clearing out and a gorgeous gold light began to shine through the breaking clouds. She and Amanda were in Scott's study over the barn. Lisey was going through the papers in Scott's main desk, aka Dumbo's Big Jumbo. So far the most interesting thing she'd found was a packet of mildly risqué French postcards with a sticky-note on top, reading, in Scott's scrawl,
Who sent me THESE THINGS???
Sitting beside the blank-eyed computer was the shoebox with the revolver inside. The lid was still on, but Lisey had slit the tape with her fingernail. Amanda was across the way, in the alcove that held Scott's TV and component sound-system. Every now and then Amanda heard her grumbling about the haphazard way things had been shelved. Once Lisey heard her wonder aloud how Scott had ever found
anything
.

That was when the premonition came. Lisey shut the drawer she had been investigating and sat down in the high-backed office chair. She closed her eyes and just waited, as something rolled toward her. It turned out to be a song. A mental jukebox lit up and the nasal but undeniably
jolly voice of Hank Williams began to sing.
“Goodbye Joe, we gotta go, me-oh-my-oh; we gotta go, pole the pirogue down the bayou . . .”

“Lisey!” Amanda called from the alcove where Scott used to sit and listen to his music or watch movies on his VCR. When he wasn't watching them in the guest room in the middle of the night, that was. And Lisey heard the voice of the professor from the Pratt College English Department—in Bowling Green, this was, only sixty miles from Nashville. Not much more'n a long spit, Missus.

I think it would be wise if you got here as soon as possible
, Professor Meade had told her over the phone.
Your husband has been taken ill. Very ill indeed, I'm afraid
.

“My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh . . .”

“Lisey!” Amanda sounded just as bright as a new-minted penny. Would anyone believe she'd been totally zonked only eight hours ago? Nay, madam. Nay, good sir.

The spirits have done it all in one night
, Lisey thought.
Yay, spirits
.

Dr. Jantzen feels that surgery is warranted. Something called a thoracotomy
.

And Lisey thought,
The boys came back from Mexico. They came back to Anarene. Because Anarene was home
.

Which boys, pray tell? The black-and-white boys. Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. The boys from
The Last Picture Show
.

In that movie it's always now and they are always young
, she thought.
They are always young and Sam the Lion is always dead
.

“Lisey?”

She opened her eyes and there was big sissa standing in the alcove doorway, her eyes as bright as her voice, and of course in her hand she was holding the VCR box containing
The Last Picture Show
and the feeling was . . . well, coming home. The feeling was coming home, me-oh-my-oh.

And why would that be? Because drinking from the pool had its little perks and privileges? Because you sometimes brought back to this world what you picked up in that world? Picked up or swallowed? Yes, yes, and yes.

“Lisey, honey, are you all right?”

Such warm concern, such smucking
motherliness
, was so foreign to
Amanda's usual nature that it made Lisey feel unreal. “Fine,” she said. “I was just resting my eyes.”

“Would it be all right if I watched some of this? I found it with the rest of Scott's tapes. Most of them look pretty junky, but I always meant to see this one and never got around to it. Maybe it'll take my mind off things.”

“Fine by me,” Lisey said, “but I should warn you, I'm pretty sure there's a blank spot in the middle of it. It's an old tape.”

Amanda was studying the back of the box. “Jeff Bridges looks like such a
kid
.”

“He does, doesn't he?” Lisey said wanly.

“And Ben Johnson's dead, of course . . .” She stopped. “Maybe I better not. We might not hear your boyf . . . we might not hear Dooley, if he comes.”

Lisey pushed the top off the shoebox, took out the Pathfinder, and pointed it at the stairs leading down to the barn. “I locked the door to the outside stairs,” she said, “so that's the only way up here. And I'm watching it.”

“He could start a fire down there in the barn,” Amanda said nervously.

“He doesn't want me cooked—what fun would that be?”
Also
, Lisey thought,
there's a place I can go. As long as my mouth tastes as sweet as it does right now, there's a place I can go, and I don't think I'd have any trouble taking you with me, Manda
. Not even two helpings of Hamburger Helper and two glasses of cherry Kool-Aid had taken away that lovely sweet taste in her mouth.

“Well, if you're sure it won't be bothering you . . .”

“Do I look like I'm studying for finals? Go ahead.”

Amanda went back into the alcove. “Sure hope this VCR still works.” She sounded like a woman who has discovered a wind-up gramophone and a stack of ancient acetate records.

Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo's Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now . . . and probably was. She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here. Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer
hard drives. Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end. But all the real horses were out of the barn. The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers—people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sunporch—all that stuff had been published.
The Secret Pearl
, published a month after his death, had been the last.

No, Lisey
, a voice whispered, and at first she thought it was Scott's, and then—how crazy—she thought it was the voice of Ole Hank. But that
was
crazy, because it wasn't a man's voice at all. Was that Good Ma's voice, going whisper-whisper-whisper in her head?

I think he wanted me to tell you something. Something about a story
.

Not Good Ma's voice—although Good Ma's yellow afghan had figured in it somewhere—but Amanda's. They had been sitting together on those stone benches, looking out at the good ship
Hollyhocks
, which always rode at anchor but never quite set sail. Lisey had never realized how much alike their mother and her oldest sister sounded until this memory of the benches. And—

Something about a story. Your story
. Lisey's
story
.

Had Amanda actually said that? It was like a dream now and Lisey couldn't be completely sure, but she thought yes.

And the afghan. Only
—

“Only he called it an african,” Lisey said in a low voice. “He called it an african, and he called it a bool. Not a boop, not a beep, a bool.”

“Lisey?” Amanda called from the other room. “Did you say something?”

“Just talking to myself, Manda.”

“Means you've got money in the bank,” Amanda said, and then
there was only the soundtrack of the movie. Lisey seemed to remember every line of it, every scratchy snatch of music.

If you left me a story, Scott, where is it? Not up here in the study, I'd bet money on it. Not in the barn, either—nothing down there but false bools like
Ike Comes Home.

But that wasn't quite true. There had been at least two true prizes in the barn: the silver spade and Good Ma's cedar box, tucked away under the Bremen bed. With the delight square in it. Was that what Amanda had been talking about?

Lisey didn't think so. There
was
a story in that box, but it was
their
story—
Scott & Lisey: Now We Are Two
. So what was
her
story? And
where
was it?

And speaking of wheres, where was the Black Prince of the Incunks?

Not on the answering machine at Amanda's; not on the answering machine here, either. Lisey had found only one message, on the recorder in the house. It had been from Deputy Alston.

“Mrs. Landon, this storm has done quite a lot of damage in town, particularly at the south end. Someone—I hope me or Dan Boeckman—is gonna check back on you as soon as possible, but in the meantime I want to remind you to keep your doors locked and don't let anyone in you can't identify. That means gettin em to take off their hats or push back the hoods of their slickers even if it's pourin down cats n dogs, okay? And keep that cell phone with you at all times. Remember, in an emergency all you have to do is hit
SPEED-DIAL
and the
1
-key. The call will go right through to the Sheriff's.”

“Great,” Amanda had commented. “Our blood'll still be runny instead of clotted when they get here. Probably speed up their DNA tests.”

Lisey hadn't bothered replying. She had no intention of letting the Castle County Sheriff's Department handle Jim Dooley. As far as she was concerned, Jim Dooley might as well have cut his own throat with her Oxo can opener.

The light on the answering machine in her barn office had been flashing, the number
1
showing in the
MESSAGES RECEIVED
window, but when Lisey hit the
PLAY
button, there had been only three seconds of silence,
one soft, indrawn breath, and a hang-up. It could have been a wrong number, people dialed wrong numbers and hung up all the time, but she knew it hadn't been.

No. It had been Dooley.

Lisey sat back in the office chair, ran a finger down the rubber grip of the .22, then picked it up and swung open the cylinder. It was easy enough to do, once you'd done it a couple of times. She loaded the chambers, then swung the cylinder closed again. It made a small but final
click
.

In the other room, Amanda laughed at something in the movie. Lisey smiled a little herself. She didn't believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn't even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes—if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered—it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure
was
the book. Lisey supposed the Roger Dashmiels of the world didn't believe it and the Joseph Woodbodys thought it had to be something grander—more exalted—but Lisey had lived with him, and she believed it. Writing a book was a bool hunt. What he'd never told her (but she supposed she'd always guessed it) was that if the string didn't break, it always led back to the beach. Back to the pool where we all go down to drink, to cast our nets, to swim, and sometimes to drown.

And did he know? At the end, did he
know
it was the end?

She sat up a little straighter, trying to remember if Scott has discouraged her from coming along on his trip to Pratt, a small but well-regarded liberal arts school where he'd read from
The Secret Pearl
for the first and last time. He had collapsed halfway through the reception afterward. Ninety minutes later she had been in an airplane and one of the guests at that reception—a cardiovascular surgeon dragged to Scott's reading by his wife—had been operating in an attempt to save his life, or at least preserve it long enough to get him to a bigger hospital.

Did he know? Did he purposely try to keep me away because he knew it was coming?

She didn't
exactly
believe that, but when the call came from Professor Meade, hadn't she understood that Scott had known that
something
was coming? If not the long boy, then this? Wasn't that why their financial affairs had been in such apple-pie order, all the right papers neatly executed? Wasn't that why he had been so careful to see to Amanda's future problems?

I think it would be wise if you left as soon as you give permission for the surgery
, Professor Meade had said. And she had done just that, calling the air charter company they used after speaking to an anonymous voice in Bowling Green Community Hospital's main office. To the hospital functionary she identified herself as Scott Landon's wife, Lisa, and gave a Dr. Jantzen permission to carry out a thoracotomy (a word she could hardly pronounce) and “all attendant procedures.” With the charter company she'd been more assured. She wanted the fastest aircraft they had available. Was the Gulfstream faster than the Lear? Fine. Make it the Gulfstream.