Lisey’s Story (54 page)

“No, baby,” he says. “It can't do that unless it gets a real good whiff of your scent or a fix on your . . .” He trails off. It's the movie he's still most concerned with, it seems. “Also, it's never ‘Jambalaya' in this scene. I've watched
The Last Picture Show
fifty times, except for
Citizen Kane
it may be the greatest movie ever made, and it's never ‘Jambalaya' in the pool-hall scene. It's Hank Williams, sure, but it's ‘Kaw-Liga,' the song about the Indian chief. And if the TV and the VCR are working, where's the damn lights?”

He gets up and flicks the wall-switch. There's nothing. That big cold wind from Yellowknife has finally killed their power, and power all over Castle Rock, Castle View, Harlow, Motton, Tashmore Pond, and most of western Maine. At the same instant Scott flicks the useless light-switch on, the TV goes
off
. The picture dwindles to a bright white point that glows for a moment, then disappears. The next time he tries his tape of
The Last Picture Show
, he'll discover a ten-minute stretch in the middle of it is blank, as if wiped clean by a powerful magnetic field. Neither of them will ever speak of it, but Scott and Lisey will understand that although both of them were visualizing the guest room, it was probably Lisey who hollered them home with the greatest force . . . and it was
certainly
Lisey who visualized ole Hank singing “Jambalaya” instead of “Kaw-Liga.” As it was Lisey who so fiercely visualized both the VCR and the TV running when they returned that those appliances
did
run for almost a minute and a half, even though the electricity was out from one end of Castle County to the other.

He stokes up the woodstove in the kitchen with oak chunks from the woodbox and she makes them a jackleg bed—blankets and an airmattress—on the linoleum. When they lie down, he takes her in his arms.

“I'm afraid to go to sleep,” she confesses. “I'm afraid that when I wake up in the morning, the stove will be out and you'll be gone again.”

He shakes his head. “I'm all right—it's past for awhile.”

She looks at him with hope and doubt. “Is that something you know, or just something you're saying to soothe the little wife?”

“Which do
you
think?”

She thinks this isn't the ghost-Scott she's been living with since November, but it's still hard for her to believe in such miraculous changes. “You
seem
better, but I'm leery of my own wishful thinking.”

In the stove, a knot of wood explodes and she jumps. He holds her closer. She snuggles against him almost fiercely. It's warm under the covers; warm in his arms. He is all she has ever wanted in the dark.

He says, “This . . . this
thing
that has troubled my family . . . it comes and goes. When it passes, it's like a cramp letting go.”

“But it will come back?”

“Lisey, it might not.” The strength and surety in his voice so surprises her that she looks up to check his face. She sees no duplicity there, even of the kindly sort meant to ease a troubled wife's heart. “And if it does, it might never come back as strongly as it did this time.”

“Did your father tell you that?”

“My father didn't know much about the
gone
part. I've felt this tug toward . . . the place where you found me . . . twice before. Once the year before I met you. That time booze and rock music got me through. The second time—”

“Germany,” she says flatly.

“Yes,” he says. “Germany. That time you pulled me through, Lisey.”

“How close, Scott? How close was it in Bremen?”

“Close,” he says simply, and it makes her cold. If she had lost him in Germany, she would have lost him for good.
Mein gott
. “But that was a breeze compared to this. This was a hurricane.”

There are other things she wants to ask him, but mostly she only wants to hold him and believe him when he says that maybe things will be okay. The way you want to believe the doctor, she supposes, when he says the cancer is in remission and may never come back.

“And you're okay.” She needs to hear him say it one more time.
Needs
to.

“Yes. Good to go, as the saying is.”

“And . . .
it?
” She doesn't need to be more specific. Scott knows what she's talking about.

“It's had my scent for a long time, and it knows the shape of my thoughts. After all these years, we're practically old friends. It could probably take me if it wanted to, but it would be an effort, and that fella's pretty lazy. Also . . . something watches out for me. Something on the bright side of the equation. There
is
a bright side, you know. You
must
know, because you're a part of it.”

“Once you told me you could call it, if you wanted to.” She says this very low.

“Yes.”

“And sometimes you want to. Don't you?”

He doesn't deny it, and outside the wind howls a long cold note along the eaves. Yet here under the blankets in front of the kitchen stove, it's warm. It's warm with him.

“Stay with me, Scott,” she says.

“I will,” he tells her. “I will as long as

“I will as long as I can,” Lisey said.

She realized several things at the same time. One was that she had returned to her bedroom and her bed. Another was that the bed would have to be changed, because she had come back soaking wet, and her damp feet were coated with beach sand from another world. A third was that she was shivering even though the room wasn't particularly cold. A fourth was that she no longer had the silver spade; she had left it behind. The last was that if the seated shape had indeed been her husband, she had almost certainly seen him for the last time; her husband was now one of the shrouded things, an unburied corpse.

Lying on her wet bed in her soaking shorts, Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind—she thought that might also have been part of her prize at the end of Scott's last bool hunt—but first she needed to finish
grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time, and although there was also still some pain in her damaged breast, Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, or so ready to kick ass and take down names.

As the saying was.

She glanced at the clock on the nightstand as she peeled off her soaked shorts and smiled, not because there was anything intrinsically funny about ten minutes to twelve on a morning in June, but because one of Scrooge's lines from
A Christmas Carol
had occurred to her: “The spirits have done it all in one night.” It seemed to Lisey that
something
had accomplished a great deal in her own life in a very short period of time, most of it in the last few hours.

But you have to remember that I've been living in the past, and that takes up a surprising amount of a person's time
, she thought . . . and after a moment's consideration let out a great, larruping laugh that probably would have sounded insane to anyone listening down the hall.

That's okay, keep laughin, babyluv, ain't nobody here but us chickadees
, she thought, going into the bathroom. That big, loose laugh started to come out of her again, then stopped suddenly when it occurred to her that
Dooley
might be here. He could be holed up in the root cellar or one of this big house's many closets; he might be sweating it out this late morning in the attic, right over her head. She didn't know much about him and would be the first to admit it, but the idea that he had gone to ground here in the house fit what she
did
know. He'd already proved he was a bold sonofabitch.

Don't worry about him now. Worry about Darla and Canty
.

Good idea. Lisey could get to Greenlawn ahead of her older sisters,
that wouldn't be much of a horse-race, but she couldn't afford to dawdle, either.
Keep your string a-drawing
, she thought.

But she couldn't deny herself a moment in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, standing with her hands at her sides, looking levelly and without prejudice at her slender, unremarkable, middle-aged body—and at her face, which Scott had once described as that of a fox in summer. It was a little puffy, nothing more. She looked like she'd slept exceptionally hard (maybe after a drink or three too many), and her lips still turned out a little, giving them a strangely sensual quality that made her feel both uneasy and a tiny bit gleeful. She hesitated, not sure what to do about that, and then found a tube of Revlon Hothouse Pink at the back of her lipstick drawer. She touched some on and nodded, a little doubtfully. If people were going to look at her lips—and she thought they might—she'd do better giving them something to look at than trying to cover up what couldn't be hidden.

The breast Dooley had operated on with such lunatic absorption was marked with an ugly scarlet ditch that circled up from beneath her armpit before petering out above her ribcage. It looked like a fairly bad cut that might have happened two or three weeks ago and was now healing well. The two shallower wounds looked like no more than the sort of red marks that resulted from wearing too-tight elastic garments. Or perhaps—if you had a lively imagination—rope burns. The difference between this and the horror she had observed upon regaining consciousness was amazing.

“All the Landons are fast healers, you sonofabitch,” Lisey said, and stepped into the shower.

A quick rinse was all she had time for, and her breast was still sore enough to make her decide against a bra. She put on a pair of carpenter's pants and a loose tee-shirt. She slipped a vest over the latter to keep anyone from staring at her nipples, assuming guys bothered scoping out the nipples of fifty-year-old women, that was. According to Scott, they did.
She remembered his telling her, once upon a happier time, that straight men stared at pretty much anyone of a female persuasion between the ages of roughly fourteen and eighty-four; he claimed it was a simple hardwired circuit between eye and cock, that the brain had nothing to do with it.

It was noon. She went downstairs, glanced into the living room, and saw the remaining pack of cigarettes sitting on the coffee table. She had no craving for cigarettes now. She got a fresh jar of Skippy out of the pantry instead (steeling herself for Jim Dooley lurking in the corner or behind the pantry door) and the strawberry jam out of the fridge. She made herself a PB&J on white and took two delicious, gummy bites before calling Professor Woodbody. The Castle County Sheriff's Department had taken “Zack McCool”'s threatening letter, but Lisey's memory for numbers had always been good, and this one was a cinch: Pittsburgh area code at one end, eighty-one and eighty-eight at the other. She was as willing to talk to the Queen of the Incunks as the King. An answering machine, however, would be inconvenient. She could leave her message, but would have no way of being sure it would reach the right ear in time to do any good.

She need not have worried. Woodbody himself answered, and he did not sound kingly. He sounded chastened and cautious. “Yes? Hello?”

“Hello, Professor Woodbody. This is Lisa Landon.”

“I don't want to talk to you. I've spoken to my lawyer and he says I don't have to—”

“Chill,” she said, and eyed her sandwich with longing. It wouldn't do to talk with her mouth full. On the upside, she thought this conversation was going to be brief. “I'm not going to make any trouble for you. No trouble with the cops, no trouble with lawyers, nothing like that. If you do me one teensy favor.”

“What favor?” Woodbody sounded suspicious. Lisey couldn't blame him for that.

“There's an off-chance your friend Jim Dooley may call you today—”

“That guy's no friend of
mine!
” Woodbody bleated.

Right
, Lisey thought.
And you're well on your way to persuading yourself he never was
.

“Okay, drinking buddy. Passing acquaintance. Whatever. If he calls, just tell him I've changed my mind, would you do that? Say I've regained my senses. Tell him I'll see him this evening, at eight, in my husband's study.”

“You sound like someone preparing to get herself into a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Landon.”

“Hey, you'd know, wouldn't you?” The sandwich was looking better and better. Lisey's stomach rumbled. “Professor, he probably won't call you. In which case, you're golden. If he
does
call, give him my message and you're also golden. But if he calls and you
don't
give him my message—just ‘She's changed her mind, she wants to see you tonight in Scott's study at eight'—and I find out . . . then, sir, oy, such a mess I'm making for you.”

“You can't. My lawyer says—”

“Don't listen to what he says. Be smart and listen to what
I'm
saying. My husband left me twenty million dollars. With that kind of money, if I decide to ass-fuck you, you'll spend the next three years shitting blood from a crouch. Got it?”

Lisey hung up before he could say anything else, tore a bite from her sandwich, got the lime Kool-Aid from the fridge, thought about a glass, then drank directly from the pitcher instead.

Yum!

If Dooley phoned during the next few hours, she wouldn't be around to take his call. Luckily, Lisey knew which phone he'd ring in on. She went out to her unfinished office in the barn, across from the shrouded corpse of the Bremen bed. She sat in the plain kitchen-style chair (a nice new desk-chair was one of the things she'd never gotten around to ordering), pushed the
RECORD MESSAGE
button on the answering machine, and spoke without thinking too much. She hadn't come back from Boo'ya Moon with a plan so much as with a clear set of steps to follow and the
belief that, if she did her part, Jim Dooley would be forced to do his.
I'll whistle and you'll come to me, my lad
, she thought.