Lisey’s Story (32 page)

“Good deal. Bye, Darl.”

“And you really don't think I was wrong to call Canty?”

No! Call Bruce Springsteen! Call Hal Holbrook! Call Condi Smucking Rice! Just LEAVE ME ALONE!

“Not at all. I think it's good that you did. Keep her . . .” Lisey thought of Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions. “Keep her in the loop, you know.”

“Well . . . okay. Goodbye, Lisey. I guess I'll see you later.”

“Bye, Darl.”

Click.

At last.

Lisey closed her eyes, opened the box, and inhaled the strong scent of cedar. For a moment she allowed herself to be five again, wearing a pair of Darla's hand-me-down shorts and her own scuffed but beloved Li'l Rider cowboy boots, the ones with the faded pink swoops up the sides.

Then she looked into the box to see what there was, and where it would take her.

On top was a foil packet, six or eight inches long, maybe four inches wide and two inches deep. Two lumps poked out of it, rounding the foil. She didn't know what it was as she lifted it out, caught a ghostly whiff of peppermint—had she been smelling it already, along with the cedarscent
of the box?—and remembered even before she unfolded one side and saw the rock-hard slice of wedding cake. Embedded in it were two plastic figures: a boy-doll in morning-coat and top-hat, a girl-doll in a white wedding dress. Lisey had meant to save this for a year and then share it with Scott on their first anniversary. Wasn't that the superstition? If so, she should have put it in the freezer. Instead, it had wound up here.

Lisey chipped off a piece of the frosting with her nail and put it in her mouth. It had almost no taste, just a ghost of sweetness and a last fading whisper of peppermint. They had been married in the Newman Chapel at the University of Maine, in a civil ceremony. All of her sisters had come, even Jodi. Lincoln, Dad Debusher's surviving brother, came up from Sabbatus to give away the bride. Scott's friends from Pitt and UMO had been there, and his literary agent had done the best-man honors. No Landon family, of course; Scott's family was dead.

Below the petrified slice of cake was a pair of wedding invitations. She and Scott had hand-written them, each doing half, and she had saved one of Scott's and one of her own. Below those was a souvenir match-book. They had discussed having both the invitations and matchbooks printed, it was an expense they probably could have managed even though the money from the
Empty Devils
paperback sale hadn't begun to flow yet, but in the end they had decided on handmade as more intimate (not to mention funkier). She remembered buying a fifty-count box of plain paper matches at the Cleaves Mills IGA and hand-lettering them herself, using a red pen with a fine-point ball. The matchbook in her hand was quite likely the last of that tribe, and she examined it with the curiosity of an archaeologist and the ache of a lover.

Scott and Lisa Landon
November 19th, 1979
“Now we are two.”

Lisey felt tears prick her eyes.
Now we are two
had been Scott's idea, he said it was a riff on a Winnie-the-Pooh title. She remembered the one he meant at once—how many times had she pestered either Jodotha or
Amanda into reading her away to the Hundred-Acre Wood?—and thought
Now we are two
was brilliant, perfect. She had kissed him for it. Now she could hardly bear to look at the matchbook with its foolishly brave motto. This was the other end of the rainbow, now she was one, and what a stupid number it was. She tucked the matchbook away in the breast pocket of her blouse and then wiped tears from her cheeks—some few had spilled after all. It seemed investigating the past was wet work.

What's happening to me?

She would have given the price of her pricey Beemer and more to know the answer to that question. She had seemed so all right! Had mourned him and gone on; had put away her weeds and gone on. For over two years now the old song seemed to be true: I get along without you very well. Then she had begun the work of cleaning out his study, and that had awakened his ghost, not in some ethery out-there-spirit-world, but in
her.
She even knew when and where it had begun: at the end of the first day, in that not-quite-triangular corner Scott liked to call his memory nook. That was where the literary awards hung on the wall, citations under glass: his National Book Award, his Pulitzer for fiction, his World Fantasy Award for
Empty Devils.
And what had happened?

“I broke,” Lisey said in a small, frightened voice, and sealed the foil back over the fossilized slice of wedding cake.

There was no other word for it. She
broke.
Her memory of it wasn't terribly clear, only that it started because she was thirsty. She went to get a glass of water in that stupid smucking bar alcove—stupid because Scott no longer used the booze, although his adventures with alcohol had lasted years longer than his love-affair with the smokes—and the water wouldn't come, nothing came but the maddening sound of chugging pipes blowing up blasts of air, and she could have waited for the water, it would have come eventually, but instead she turned off the faucets and went back to the doorway between the alcove and the so-called memory nook, and the overhead light was on, but it was the kind on a rheostat and dialed low. With the light like that everything looked normal—everything the same, ha-ha. You almost expected
him to open the door from the outside stairway, walk in, crank the tunes, and start to write. Just like he hadn't come unstrapped forever. And what had she expected to feel? Sadness?
Nostalgia?
Really? Something as polite, as dear-dear-lady, as
nostalgia
? If so, that was a real knee-slapper, because what had come over her then, both fever-hot and freezing cold, was

What comes over her—practical Lisey, Lisey who always stays cool (except maybe on the day she had to swing the silver spade, and even on that day she flatters herself that she did okay), little Lisey who keeps her head when those all about her are losing theirs—what comes over her is a kind of seamless and bulging rage, a divine fury that seems to push her mind aside and take control of her body. Yet (she doesn't know if this is a paradox or not) this fury also seems to clarify her thinking,
must
, because she finally understands. Two years is a long time, but
the penny finally drops.
She
gets the picture.
She
sees the light.

He has
kicked the bucket
, as the saying is. (Do you like it?)

He has
popped off.
(Do you love it?)

He is
eating a dirt sandwich.
(It's a big one I caught in the pool where we all go down to drink and fish.)

And when you boil it down, what's left? Why, he has jilted her. Done a runner. Put an egg in his shoe and beat it, hit the road, Jack, took the Midnight Special out of town. He lit out for the Territories. He left the woman who loved him with every cell in her body and every brain in her not-so-smart head, and all she has is this shitty . . . smucking . . .
shell.

She breaks. Lisey breaks. As she bolts forward into his stupid smucking memory nook she seems to hear him saying
SOWISA, babyluv—Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate
, and then that is gone and she begins tearing his plaques and pictures and framed citations from the walls. She picks up the bust of Lovecraft the World Fantasy Award judges gave him for
Empty Devils
, that hateful book, and throws it the length of the study, screaming “Fuck
you
, Scott, fuck
you!
” It's one of the few times
she's used the word in its unvarnished form since the night he put his hand through the greenhouse glass, the night of the blood-bool. She was angry with him then but never in her life has she been so angry with him as she is now; if he were here, she might kill him all over again. She's on a full-bore rampage, tearing all that useless vanity crap off the walls until they are bare (few of the things she throws down break on the floor because of the deep-pile carpet—lucky for her, she'll think later on, when sanity returns). As she whirls around and around, a tornado now for sure, she screams his name again and again, screams
Scott
and
Scott
and
Scott
, crying for grief, crying for loss, crying for rage; crying for him to explain how he could leave her so, crying for him to come back, oh to come back. Never mind
everything the same, nothing
is the same without him, she hates him, she misses him, there's a hole in her, a wind even colder than the one that blew all the way down from Yellowknife now blows through
her
, the world is so empty and so loveless when there's no one in it to holler your name and holler you home. At the end she seizes the monitor of the computer that sits in the memory nook and something in her back gives a warning creak as she lifts it but
smuck
her back, the bare walls mock her and she is raging. She spins awkwardly with the monitor in her arms and heaves it against the wall. There is a hollow shattering noise—
POOMP!
, it sounds like—and then silence again.

No, there are crickets outside.

Lisey collapses to the littered carpet, sobbing weakly, all in. And
does
she call him back somehow? Does she call him back into her life by the very force of her angry delayed grief? Has he come like water through a long-empty pipe? She thinks the answer to that is

“No,” Lisey murmured. Because—crazy as it seemed—Scott seemed to have been at work placing the stations of this bool hunt for her
long before he died.
Getting in touch with Dr. Alberness, for instance, who happened to have been such a puffickly
huh-yooge
fan. Somehow laying hands on Amanda's medical records and bringing them to lunch, for heaven's
sake. And then the kicker:
Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.

And . . . when had he put Good Ma's cedar box under the Bremen bed out in the barn? Because surely it had been Scott, she knew she had never put it there.

1996?

(
hush
)

In the winter of 1996, when Scott's mind had broken and she had

(
YOU HUSH NOW LISEY!
)

All right . . . all right, she would hush about the winter of '96—for now—but that felt about right. And . . .

A bool hunt. But
why?
To what purpose? To allow her to face in stages something she couldn't face all at once? Maybe.
Probably.
Scott would know about such things, would surely sympathize with a mind that would want to hide its most terrible memories behind curtains or squirrel them away in sweet-smelling boxes.

A good bool.

Oh Scott, what's good about this? What's good about all this pain and sorrow?

A short bool.

If so, the cedar box was either the end or close to the end, and she had an idea that if she looked much further, there would be no going back.

Baby
, he sighed . . . but only in her head. There were no ghosts. Only memory. Only the voice of her dead husband. She believed that; she
knew
it. She could close the box. She could draw the curtain. She could let the past be past.

Babyluv.

He would always have his say. Even dead, he would have his say.

She sighed—it was a wretched, lonely sound to her own ears—and decided to go on. To play Pandora after all.

The only other thing she'd squirreled away in here from their cut-rate, non-religious (but it had held for all that, had held very well) wedding day was a photograph taken at the reception, which had been held at The Rock—Cleaves Mills's raunchiest, rowdiest, low-down-and-dirtiest rock-and-roll bar. It showed her and Scott out on the floor as they began the first dance. She was in her white lace dress, Scott in a plain black suit—
My undertaker's suit
, he'd called it—which he'd bought special for the occasion (and had worn again and again on the
Empty Devils
book-tour that winter). In the background she could see Jodotha and Amanda, both of them impossibly young and pretty, their hair up, their hands frozen in mid-clap. She was looking at Scott and he was smiling down at her, his hands on her waist, and oh God, look how long his hair had been, almost brushing his shoulders, she had forgotten that.

Lisey brushed the surface of the photograph with the tips of her fingers, slipping them across the people they'd been back at
SCOTT AND LISEY, THE BEGINNING!
and found she could even remember the name of the band from Boston (The Swinging Johnsons, pretty funny) and the song to which they had danced in front of their friends: a cover of “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose.

“Oh Scott,” she said. Another tear slipped down her cheek and she wiped it away absently. Then she put the photo on the sunny kitchen table and prospected deeper. Here was a thin stack of menus, bar-napkins, and matchbooks from motels in the Midwest, also a program from Indiana University in Bloomington, announcing a reading from
Empty Devils
, by Scott Linden. She remembered saving that one for the misprint, telling him it would be worth a fortune someday, and Scott replying
Don't hold your breath, babyluv.
The date on the program was March 19th, 1980 . . . so where were her souvenirs from The Antlers? Had she taken nothing? In those days she almost always took
something
, it was a kind of hobby, and she could have
sworn
—

She lifted out the “Scott Linden” program and there beneath it was
a dark purple menu with
The Antlers
and
Rome, New Hampshire
stamped on it in gold. And she could hear Scott as clearly as if he were speaking in her ear:
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
He'd said it that night in the dining room (empty except for them and a single waitress), ordering the Chef's Special for both of them. And again, later, in bed, as he covered her naked body with his own.