Lisey's Story

V. Lisey and The Long, Long Thursday

(Stations of the Bool)

1

It didn't take Lisey long to realize this was far worse than Amanda's three previous breaks with reality—her periods of "passive semi-catatonia," to use the shrink's phrase. It was as if her usually irritating and sometimes troublesome sister had become a large breathing doll. Lisey managed (with considerable effort) to tug Amanda into a sitting position and swivel her around so she was sitting on the edge of the bed, but the woman in the white cotton nightgown—who might or might not have spoken in the voice of Lisey's dead husband a few moments before dawn—would not respond to her name when it was spoken, or called, or shouted, almost desperately, into her face. She only sat with her hands in her lap, looking fixedly at her younger sister. And when Lisey stepped away, Amanda looked fixedly into the space where she had been.

Lisey went into the bathroom to wet a cloth with cold water, and when she came back, Amanda had subsided into a prone position again with her upper half on the bed and her feet on the floor. Lisey began to pull her back up, then stopped when Amanda's buttocks, already close to the bed's edge, began to slide. If she persisted, Amanda would end up on the floor.

"Manda-Bunny!"

No response to the childhood nickname this time. Lisey decided to go whole hog.

"Big sissa Manda-Bunny!"

Nothing. Instead of being frightened (that would come shortly), Lisey was swept by the sort of rage Amanda had hardly ever been able to provoke in her younger sister when she had actually tried.

"Stop this! Stop it and scoot your ass back on the bed so you can sit up!"

Zip. Zero. She bent, wiped Amanda's expressionless face with the cold washcloth, and got more nothing. The eyes didn't blink even when the washcloth passed over them. Now Lisey did begin to be scared. She looked at the digital clock-radio beside the bed and saw it had just gone six. She could call Darla with no worries of waking Matt, who would be sleeping the sleep of the just up in Montreal, but she didn't want to do that. Not yet. Calling Darla would be the same as admitting defeat, and she wasn't ready to do that.

She circled the bed, grabbed Amanda under the armpits, and hauled her backward. It was harder to do than she expected, given Amanda's scrawny bod.

Because she's dead weight now, babyluv. That's why.

"Shut up," she said, with no idea who she was talking to. "Just shut it."

She got on the bed herself with her knees on either side of Amanda's thighs and her hands planted on either side of Amanda's neck. In this position, that of the lover superior, she could look directly down into her sister's upturned, staring face. During Manda's previous breaks, she had been biddable…almost the way a person under hypnosis is biddable, Lisey had thought at the time. This seemed very different. She could only hope it wasn't, because there were certain things a person had to do in the morning. If, that was, the person wanted to go on living a private life in her little Cape Cod home.

"Amanda!" she yelled down into her sister's face. Then, for good measure, and feeling only slightly ridiculous (it was only the two of them, after all): "Big…sissa…Manda-Bunny! I want you…to stand up…stand UP!…and go into the shithouse…and use the TOIDY! Use the TOIDY, Manda-Bunny! On three! ONE…and TWO!…and THREE!" On THREE Lisey again yanked Amanda to a sitting position, but Amanda still wouldn't stand. Once, at around twenty past six, Lisey actually got her off the bed and into a kind of half-assed crouch. She felt the way she had when she'd had her first car, a 1974 Pinto, and after two endless minutes of grinding the starter the motor would finally catch and run just before the battery died. But instead of straightening up and letting Lisey lead her into the bathroom, Amanda fell back onto the bed—fell crooked, too, so that Lisey had to lunge, catch her under the arms, and shove her, cursing, to keep her from going on the floor.

"You're faking, you bitch!" she shouted at Amanda, knowing perfectly well that Amanda wasn't. "Well, go on! Go on and—" She heard how loud she'd gotten—she'd wake up Mrs. Jones across the road if she didn't look out—and made herself lower her voice. "Go on and lie there. Yeah. But if you think I'm going to spend the whole morning dancing attendance around you, you're full of shite. I'm going downstairs to make coffee and oatmeal. If any of it smells good to Your Royal Majesty, give me a holler. Or, I don't know, send down your smucking footman for take-out."

She didn't know if it smelled good to big sissa Manda-Bunny, but it smelled fine to Lisey, especially the coffee. She had one cup of straight black before her bowl of oatmeal, another with double cream and sugar afterward. Sipping that one, she thought: All I need now is a ciggy and I could ride this day like a pony. A smucking Salem Light.

Her mind tried to turn toward her dreams and memories of the night just past (SCOTT AND LISEY THE EARLY YEARS for sure, she thought), and she wouldn't let it. Nor would she let it try to examine what had happened to her on waking. There might be time later to think about it, but not now. Now she had big sissa to deal with.

And suppose big sissa's found a nice pink disposable razor on top of the medicine cabinet and decided to slit her wrists with it? Or her throat?

Lisey got up from the table in a hurry, wondering if Darla had thought to clean the sharps out of the upstairs bathroom…or any of the upstairs rooms, for that matter. She took the stairs at a near-run, dreading what she might discover in the master bedroom, nerving herself to find nothing in the bed but a pair of dented pillows.

Amanda was still there, still staring up at the ceiling. She appeared not to have moved so much as an inch. Lisey's relief was replaced by foreboding. She sat on the bed and took her sister's hand in her own. It was warm but unresponsive. Lisey willed Manda's fingers to close on her own but they remained limp. Waxy.

"Amanda, what are we going to do with you?"

There was no response.

And then, because they were alone except for their reflections in the mirror, Lisey said: "Scott didn't do this, did he, Manda? Please say Scott didn't do it by…I don't know…by coming in?"

Amanda said nothing one way or the other, and after a little while Lisey went prospecting in the bathroom for sharp objects. She guessed that Darla had indeed been here before her, because all she found was a single pair of nail-scissors at the back of the lower drawer in Manda's small, not-veryvain vanity. Of course, even those would have been enough, in a dedicated hand. Why, Scott's own father

(hush Lisey no Lisey)

"All right," she said, alarmed by the panic that flooded her mouth with the taste of copper, the purple light that seemed to bloom behind her eyes, and the way her hand clenched on the tiny pair of scissors. "Okay, never mind. Pass it."

She hid the scissors behind a clutch of dusty shampoo samples high up in Amanda's towel cupboard, and then—because she could think of nothing else—took a shower herself. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw that a large wet patch had spread around Amanda's hips, and understood this was something the Debusher sisters weren't going to be able to work through on their own. She got a towel under Amanda's soaked bottom. Then she glanced at the clock on the night-table, sighed, picked up the telephone, and dialed Darla's number.

2

Lisey had heard Scott in her head the day before, loud and clear: I left you a note, babyluv. She'd dismissed it as her own interior voice, mimicking his. Maybe it had been—probably had been—but by three o'clock on that long, hot Thursday afternoon, as she sat in Pop's Café in Lewiston with Darla, she knew one thing for sure: he'd left her one hell of a posthumous gift. One hell of a bool-prize, in Scott-talk. It had been a bitch-kitty of a day, but it would have been a lot worse without Scott Landon, two years dead or not.

Darla looked every bit as tired as Lisey felt. Somewhere along the way she'd found time to put on a little makeup, but she didn't have enough ammo in her purse to hide the circles under her eyes. Certainly there was no sign of the angry

thirtysomething who had in the late nineteen-seventies made it her business to call Lisey once a week and hector her about her family duties.

"Penny for em, little Lisey," she said now.

Lisey had been reaching for the caddy containing the packets of Sweet'n Low. At the sound of Darla's voice she changed direction, reached for the old-fashioned sugar-shaker instead, and poured a hefty stream into her cup. "I was thinking this has been Coffee Thursday," she said. "Mostly Coffee With Real Sugar Thursday. This must be my tenth shot."

"You and me both," Darla said. "I've been to the john half a dozen times, and I plan to go again before we leave this charming establishment. Thank God for Pepcid AC."

Lisey stirred her coffee, grimaced, then sipped again. "Sure you want to pack up a suitcase for her?"

"Well, someone has to do it, and you look like death on a cracker."

"Thanks a pantload."

"If your sister won't tell you the truth, no one will."

Lisey had heard this from her many times, along with Duty doesn't ask permission and, Number One on the All-Time Darla Hit Parade, Life isn't fair. Today it didn't sting. It even raised the ghost of a smile. "If you want to do it, Darl, I won't arm-rassle you for the privilege."

"Didn't say I wanted to, just said I would. You stayed with her last night and got up with her this morning. I'd say you did your share. Excuse me, I've got to spend a penny."

Lisey watched her go, thinking There's another one. In the Debusher family, where there was a saying for everything, urinating was spending a penny and moving one's bowels was—odd but true—burying a Quaker. Scott had loved that, said it was probably an old Scots derivation. Lisey supposed it was possible; most of the Debushers came from Ireland and all the Andersons from England, or so Good Ma said, but there were a few stray dogs in every family, weren't there? And that hardly interested her. What interested her was that spending a penny and burying a Quaker were catches from the pool, Scott's pool, and ever since yesterday he seemed so smucking close to her…

That was a dream this morning, Lisey…you know that, don't you?

She wasn't sure what she knew or didn't know about what had happened in Amanda's bedroom this morning—it all seemed like a dream, even trying to get Amanda to stand up and go into the bathroom—but one thing she could be sure of: Amanda was now booked into Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation for at least a week, it had all been easier than she and Darla could have hoped, and they had Scott to thank. Right now and

(rah-cheer)

right here, that seemed like enough.

3

Darla had gotten to Manda's cozy little Cape Cod before seven AM, her usually stylish hair barely combed, one button of her blouse unbuttoned so that the pink of her bra peeked cheekily through. By then Lisey had confirmed that Amanda wouldn't eat, either. She allowed Lisey to insert a spoonful of scrambled eggs into her mouth after being tugged into a sitting position and propped against the head of the bed, and that gave Lisey some hope—Amanda was swallowing, after all, so maybe she'd swallow the eggs—but it was hope in vain. After simply sitting there for perhaps thirty seconds with the eggs peeping out from between her lips (to Lisey that peep of yellow had a rather gruesome look, as if her sister had tried to eat a canary), Amanda simply ejected the eggs with her tongue. A few bits stuck to her chin. The rest tumbled down the front of her nightgown. Amanda's eyes continued to stare serenely off into the distance. Or into the mystic, if you were a Van Morrison fan. Scott certainly had been, although his pash for Van the Man had tapered off quite a bit in the early nineties. That was when Scott had begun drifting back to Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.

Darla had refused to believe Amanda wouldn't eat until she tried the egg experiment for herself. She had to scramble fresh ones to do it; Lisey had scraped the remains of the first pair down the garbage disposal. Amanda's thousand-yard stare had robbed her of any appetite she might have had for big sissa's leftovers.

By the time Darla marched into the room, Amanda had slid back down from her propped-up position—oozed back down—and Darla helped Lisey get her back up again. Lisey was grateful for the help. Her back already hurt. She could barely imagine the mounting cost of caring for a person like this day in and day out, for an unlimited run.

"Amanda, I want you to eat these," Darla said in the forbidding, I-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer tone Lisey remembered from a great many telephone conversations in her younger years. The tone, combined with the jut of Darla's jaw and the set of Darla's body, made it clear she thought Amanda was shamming. Fakin like a brakeman, Dandy would have said; just one of his hundred or so cheerful, colorful, nonsensical phrases. But (Lisey mused) hadn't that almost always been Darla's judgment when you weren't doing what Darla wanted? That you were fakin like a brakeman?

"I want you to eat these eggs, Amanda—right now!"

Lisey opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. They would get to where they were going more quickly if Darla saw for herself. And where were they going? Greenlawn, very likely. Greenlawn Recovery and Rehab in Auburn. The place she and Scott had looked into briefly after Amanda's last outletting, in the spring of 2001. Only it turned out that Scott's dealings with Greenlawn had gone a little further than his wife had suspected, and thank God for that.

Darla got the eggs into Amanda's mouth and turned to Lisey with the beginnings of a triumphant smile. "There! I think she just needed a firm h—"

At this point Amanda's tongue appeared between her slack lips, once more pushing canary-colored eggs before it, and plop. Onto the front of her nightgown, still damp from its last sponging-off.

"You were saying?" Lisey asked mildly.

Darla took a long, long look at her older sister. When she turned her eyes back to Lisey, the jut-jawed determination was gone. She looked like what she was: a middle-aged woman who'd been harried out of bed too early by a family emergency. She wasn't crying, but she was close; her eyes, the bright blue all the Debusher girls shared, swam with tears. "This isn't like before, is it?"

"No."

"Did anything happen last night?"

"No." Lisey didn't hesitate.

"No crying fits or tantrums?"

"No."

"Oh, hon, what are we going to do?"

Lisey had a practical answer for that, and no surprise there; Darla might think differently, but Lisey and Jodi had always been the practical ones. "Lay her back down, wait for business hours, then call that place," she said. "Greenlawn. And hope she doesn't piss the bed again in the meantime."

4

While they waited, they drank coffee and played cribbage, a game each of the Debusher girls had learned from Dandy long before they'd taken their first rides on the big yellow Lisbon Falls schoolbus. Every third or fourth hand, one of them would check on Amanda. She was always the same, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. In the first game, Darla skunked her younger sister; in the second she skipped out with a run of three in the crib, leaving Lisey stuck in the mudhole. That this should put her in a good humor even with Manda gorked out upstairs gave Lisey something to think about…but nothing she wanted to say right out loud. It was going to be a long day, and if Darla started it with a smile on her face, terrific. Lisey declined a third game and the two of them watched some country singer on the last segment of the Today show. Lisey could almost hear Scott saying, He ain't gonna put Ole Hank out of business. By whom he meant, of course, Hank Williams. When it came to country music, for Scott there had been Ole Hank…and then all the rest of them.

At five past nine, Lisey sat down in front of the telephone and got the Greenlawn number from Directory Assistance. She gave Darla a wan and nervous smile. "Wish me luck, Darl."

"Oh, I do. Believe me, I do."

Lisey dialed. The phone on the other end rang exactly once. "Hello," a pleasant female voice said. "This is Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation, a service of Fedders Health Corporation of America."

"Hello, my name is—" Lisey got this far before the pleasant female voice began enumerating all the possible destinations one could reach…if, that was, one were possessed of a touchtone phone. It was a recording. Lisey had been booled.

Yeah, but they've gotten so good, she thought, punching 5 for Patient Intake Information.

"Please hold while your call is processed," the pleasant female voice told her, and was replaced by the Prozac Orchestra playing something that vaguely resembled Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound."

Lisey looked around to tell Darla she was on hold, but Darla had gone up to check on Amanda.

Bullshit, she thought. She just couldn't take the susp—

"Hello, this is Cassandra, how may I help you?"

A name of ill omen, babyluv, opined the Scott who kept house in her head.

"My name is Lisa Landon…Mrs. Scott Landon?"

She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn't hard to understand why she had done so now. It was what Scott called "the fame-card," and he himself had played it sparingly. Partly, he said, because doing so made him feel like a conceited asshole, and partly because he was afraid it wouldn't work; that if he murmured some version of Don't you know who I am? in the headwaiter's ear, the headwaiter would murmur back, Non, Monsieur—who ze fuck air you?

As Lisey spoke, recounting her sister's previous episodes of self-mutilation and semi-catatonia and this morning's great leap forward, she heard the soft clitter of computer keys. When Lisey paused, Cassandra said: "I understand your concern, Mrs. Landon, but Greenlawn is very full at the present time."

Lisey's heart sank. She instantly pictured Amanda in a closetsized room at Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, wearing a foodstained johnnie and looking out a barred window at the blinker-light where Route 117 crossed 19. "Oh. I see. Um…are you sure? This wouldn't be Medicaid or Blue Cross or any of those things—I'd be paying cash, you see…" Grasping at straws. Sounding dumb. When all else fails, chuck money. "If that makes a difference," she finished lamely.

"It really doesn't, Mrs. Landon." She thought she detected a faint frost in Cassandra's voice now, and Lisey's heart sank even farther. "It's a question of space and commitments. You see, we only have—"

Lisey heard a faint bing! then. It was very close to the sound her toaster-oven made when the Pop-Tarts or breakfast burritos were done.

"Mrs. Landon, can I put you on hold?"

"If you need to, of course."

There was a faint click and the Prozac Orchestra returned, this time with what might once have been the theme from Shaft. Lisey listened with a mild sense of unreality, thinking that if Isaac Hayes heard it, he would probably crawl into his bathtub with a plastic bag over his head. The time on hold lengthened until she began to suspect she'd been forgotten—God knew it had happened to her before, especially when trying to buy airline tickets or change rental car arrangements. Darla came downstairs and held her hands out in a What's happening? Give! gesture. Lisey shook her head, indicating both Nothing and I don't know.

At that moment the horrific holdmusic was gone and Cassandra was back. The frost was gone from her voice, and for the first time she sounded to Lisey like a human being. In fact, she sounded familiar, somehow. "Mrs. Landon?"

"Yes?"

"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but I had a note on my computer to get in touch with Dr. Alberness if either you or your husband called. Dr. Alberness is actually in his office now. May I transfer you?"

"Yes," Lisey told her. Now she knew where she was, exactly where she was. She knew that before he told her anything else, Dr. Alberness would tell her how sorry he was for her loss, as if Scott had died last month or last week. And she would thank him. In fact, if Dr. Alberness promised to take the

troublesome Amanda off their hands in spite of Greenlawn's current booked-up state, Lisey would probably be happy to get on her knees and give him a nice juicy hummer. A wild laugh threatened to surge out of her at that, and she had to clamp her lips tightly shut for a few seconds. And she knew why Cassandra had suddenly sounded so familiar: it was how people had sounded when they suddenly recognized Scott, realized they were dealing with someone who'd been on the cover of smucking Newsweek magazine. And if that famous person had his famous arm around someone, why she must be famous, too, if only by association. Or, as Scott himself had once said, by injection. "Hello?" a pleasantly rough male voice said. "This is Hugh Alberness. Am I speaking to Mrs. Landon?"

"Yes, Doctor," Lisey said, motioning for Darla to sit down and stop pacing circles in front of her. "This is Lisa Landon."

"Mrs. Landon, let me begin by saying how sorry I am for your loss. Your husband signed five of his books for me, and they are among my most treasured possessions."

"Thank you, Dr. Alberness," she said, and to Darla she made an It's-in-the-bag circle with her thumb and forefinger. "That's so very kind of you."

5

When Darla got back from using the Pop's Café ladies' room, Lisey said she thought she had better make a visit, as well—it was twenty miles to Castle View, and often the afternoon traffic was slow. For Darla, that would just be the first leg. After packing a bag for Amanda—a chore they'd both forgotten that morning—she'd have to drive back to Greenlawn with it. Once it was delivered, a second return trip to Castle View. She'd be turning into her own driveway for good around eightthirty, and only that early if luck—and traffic—was with her.

"I'd take a deep breath and hold your nose while you go," Darla said.

"Bad?"

Darla shrugged, then yawned. "I've been in worse."

So had Lisey, especially during her travels with Scott. She went with her thighs tensed and her bottom hovering over the seat—the well-remembered Book Tour Crouch—flushed, washed her hands, splashed water on her face, combed her hair, then looked at herself in the mirror. "New woman," she told her reflection. "American Beauty." She bared a great deal of expensive dental work at herself. The eyes above this gator grin, however, looked doubtful.

"Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask—"

Be quiet about that, leave it be.

"I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse—"

"Only Scott never said fooled," she told her reflection.

Shut up, little Lisey!

"—how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville."

"Scott said booled. Didn't he?"

That coppery taste was in her mouth again, the taste of pennies and panic. Yes, Scott had said booled. Sure. Scott had said that Dr. Alberness should ask Lisey (if he ever met her) how Scott booled the nurse that time in Nashville, Scott knowing perfectly well that she would get the message.

Had he been sending her messages? Had he, even then?

"Leave it alone," she whispered at her reflection, and left the ladies' room. It would have been nice to leave that voice trapped inside, but now it always seemed to be there. For a long time it had been quiet, either sleeping or agreeing with Lisey's conscious mind that there were some things one simply did not speak about, not even among the various versions of one's self. What the nurse had said on the day after Scott had been shot, for instance. Or

(hush do hush)

what had happened in

(Hush!)

the winter of 1996.

(YOU HUSH NOW!)

And for a blue-eyed wonder that voice did…but she sensed it watching and listening, and she was afraid.

6

Lisey exited the ladies' room just in time to see Darla hanging up the pay telephone.

"I was calling that motel across from Greenlawn," she said. "It looked clean, so I booked a room for tonight. I really don't want to drive all the way back to Castle View, and this way I can see Manda first thing tomorrow morning. All I'll have to do is be like the chicken and cross the road." She looked at her younger sister with an apprehensive expression Lisey found rather surreal, given all the years she'd spent listening to Darla lay down the law, usually in a strident, take-no-prisoners tone of voice. "Do you think that's silly?"

"I think it's a great idea." Lisey gave Darla's hand a squeeze, and Darla's relieved smile broke her heart a little. She thought: This is also what money does. It makes you the smart one. It makes you the boss. "Come on, Darl—I'll drive back, how's that?"

"Works for me," Darla said, and followed her younger sister out into the latening day.

7

The drive back to Castle View was as slow as Lisey had feared it might be; they got behind an overloaded, waddling pulp truck, and on the hills and curves there was no place to pass. The best Lisey could do was hang back so they didn't have to eat too much of the guy's half-cooked exhaust. It gave her time to reflect on the day. At least there was that.

Speaking with Dr. Alberness had been like getting to a baseball game in the bottom of the fourth inning, but that was nothing new; playing catch-up had always been part of life with Scott. She remembered the day a furniture van from Portland had shown up with a two-thousand-dollar sectional sofa. Scott had been in his study, writing with the music cranked to its usual deafening levels—she could faintly hear Steve Earle singing "Guitar Town" in the house even with the soundproofing—and interrupting him was apt to do another two thousand dollars' worth of damage to her ears, in Lisey's opinion. The furniture guys said "the mister" told them she'd let them know where to put the new piece of furniture. Lisey had briskly directed them to carry the current sofa—the perfectly good current sofa—out to the barn, and place the new sectional where it had been. The color was at least a fair match for the room, and that was a relief. She knew she and Scott had never discussed a new sofa, sectional or otherwise, just as she knew Scott would declare—oh yes, most vehemently— that they had. She was sure he'd discussed it with her in his head; he just sometimes forgot to vocalize those discussions. Forgetting was a skill he had honed.

His luncheon with Hugh Alberness might have been only another case in point. He might have meant to tell Lisey all about it, and if you'd asked him six months or a year later, he might well have told you he had told her all about it: Lunch with Alberness? Sure, filled her in that very night. When what he'd really done that very night was go out to his study, put on the new Dylan CD, and work on a new short story.

Or maybe this time it had been different—not Scott just forgetting (as he'd once forgotten they'd had a date, as he'd forgotten to tell her about his extremely smucked-up childhood), but Scott hiding clues for her to find after a death he had already foreseen; laying out what he himself would have called "stations of the bool."

In either case, Lisey had caught up with him before, and she got most of the blanks filled in on the phone, saying Uh-huh and Oh, really! And You know, I forgot about that! in all the right places.

When Amanda had tried to excise her navel in the spring of 2001 and then lapsed into a week-long state of sludge her shrink called semi-catatonia, the family had discussed the possibility of sending her to Greenlawn (or some mental care facility) at a long, emotional, and sometimes rancorous family dinner that Lisey remembered well. She also remembered that Scott had been unusually quiet through most of the discussion, and had only picked at his food that day. When the discussion began to wind down, he said that if nobody objected, he'd pick up some pamphlets and brochures they could all look at.

"You make it sound like a vacation cruise," Cantata had said— rather snidely, Lisey thought.

Scott had shrugged, Lisey remembered as she followed the pulp truck past the bullet-pocked sign reading CASTLE COUNTY WELCOMES YOU. "She's away, all right," he had said. "It might be important for someone to show her the way home while she still wants to come."

Canty's husband had snorted at that. The fact that Scott had made millions from his books had never kept Richard from regarding him as your basic dewy-eyed dreamer, and when Rich nominated an opinion, Canty Lawlor could be depended upon to second it. It had never occurred to Lisey to tell them that Scott knew what he was talking about, but now that she thought back, she hadn't eaten much herself that day.

In any case, Scott had brought home a number of Greenlawn brochures and folders; Lisey remembered finding them spread out on the kitchen counter. One, bearing a photograph of a large building that looked quite a bit like Tara in Gone With the Wind, had been titled Mental Illness, Your Family, and You. But she didn't remember any further discussion of Greenlawn, and really, why would she? Once Amanda began to get better, she had improved quickly. And Scott had certainly never mentioned his lunch with Dr. Alberness, which had come in October of '01—months after Amanda had resumed what in her passed for normality.

According to Dr. Alberness (this Lisey got over the phone, in response to her appreciative little Uh-huhs and Oh, reallys and I'd forgottens), Scott had told him at this lunch of theirs that he was convinced Amanda Debusher was headed for a more serious break with reality, perhaps a permanent one, and after reading the brochures and touring the facility with the good doctor, he believed Greenlawn would be exactly the right place for her, if it happened. That Scott had extracted Dr. Alberness's promise of a place for his sister-in-law when and if the time came—all in exchange for a single lunch and five signed books—didn't surprise Lisey at all. Not after the years she'd spent observing the liquorish way fame worked on some people.

She reached for the car radio, wanting some nice loud country music (there was another bad habit Scott had taught her in the last few years of his life, one she hadn't yet given up), then glanced over at Darla and saw that Darla had gone to sleep with her head resting against the passenger window. Not the right time for Shooter Jennings or Big & Rich. Sighing, Lisey dropped her hand from the radio.

8

Dr. Alberness had wanted to reminisce at length about his lunch with the great Scott Landon, and Lisey had been willing to let him do so in spite of Darla's repeated hand-signals, most of which meant Can't you hurry him up?

Lisey probably could have, but she thought doing so might have been bad for their cause. Besides, she was curious. More, she was hungry. For what? News of Scott. In a way, listening to Dr. Alberness had been like looking at those old memories hidden away in the study booksnake. She didn't know if Alberness's entire recollections constituted one of Scott's "stations of the bool"—she suspected not—but she knew they raised a dry yet compelling hurt in her. Was that what remained of grief after two years? That hard and ashy sadness?

First Scott had called Alberness on the phone. Had he known in advance that the doctor was a puffickly huh-yooge fan, or was that just a coincidence? Lisey didn't believe it had been a coincidence, thought that was just a little, ahem, too coincidental, but if Scott had known, how had he known? She hadn't been able to think of a way to ask without breaking into the doctor's flood of reminiscence, and that was all right; probably it didn't matter. In any case, Alberness had been intensely flattered to receive that call (pretty much bowled over, as the saying was), and more than receptive both to Scott's enquiries about his sister-in-law and his suggestion that they have lunch. Would it be all right, Dr. Alberness had asked, if he brought along a few of his favorite Landons for signature? More than all right, Scott had replied, he'd be pleased to do it.

Alberness had brought his favorite Landons; Scott had brought Amanda's medical records. Which led Lisey, now less than a mile from Amanda's little Cape Cod, to yet another question: how had Scott gotten hold of them? Had he charmed Amanda into handing them over? Had he charmed Jane Whitlow, the shrink with the beads? Had he charmed both of them? Lisey knew it was possible. Scott's ability to charm wasn't universal—Dashmiel, the southern-fried chickenshit, was a case in point—but many people had been susceptible. Certainly Amanda had felt it, although Lisey was sure that her sister had never fully trusted Scott (Manda had read all of his books, even Empty Devils…after which, Amanda said, she had slept with the lights on for an entire week). About Jane Whitlow Lisey had no idea.

How Scott had obtained the records might be another point upon which Lisey's curiosity would never be satisfied. She might have to content herself with knowing that he had, and that Dr. Alberness had willingly studied them, and had concurred with Scott's opinion: Amanda Debusher was probably headed for more trouble down the line. And at some point (probably long before they'd finished their dessert), Alberness had promised his favorite writer that if the feared break came, he would find a place for Ms. Debusher at Greenlawn.

"That was so wonderful of you," Lisey had told him warmly, and now—turning in to Amanda's driveway for the second time that day—she wondered at what point in the conversation the doctor had asked Scott where he got his ideas. Had it been early or late? With the appetizers or the coffee?

"Wake up, Darla-darlin," she said, turning off the engine. "We're here."

Darla sat up, looked at Amanda's house, and said: "Oh, shit."

Lisey burst out laughing. She couldn't help it.

9

Packing for Manda turned out to be an unexpectedly sad affair for both of them. They found her bags in the third-floor cubby that served as her attic. There were just two Samsonite suitcases, battered and still bearing MIA tags from the Florida trip she'd taken to see Jodotha…when? Seven years ago?

No, Lisey thought, ten. She regarded them sadly, then pulled out the larger of the two.

"Maybe we ought to take both," Darla said doubtfully, then wiped her face. "Whoo! Hot up here!"

"Let's just take the big one," Lisey said. She almost added that she didn't think Amanda would be going to the Catatonics' Ball this year, then bit her tongue. One look at Darla's tired, sweaty face told her this was absolutely the wrong time to try and be witty. "We can get enough in it for a week, at least. She won't be going far. Remember what the doc said?"

Darla nodded and wiped her face again. "Mostly in her room, at least to start with."

Under ordinary circumstances, Greenlawn would have sent a physician out to examine Amanda in situ, but thanks to Scott, Alberness had cut right to the chase. After ascertaining that Dr. Whitlow was gone and Amanda either could not or would not walk (and that she was incontinent), he had told Lisey he would send out a Greenlawn ambulance—unmarked, he emphasized. To most folks it looked like just another delivery van. Lisey and Darla had followed it to Greenlawn in Lisey's BMW, and both of them had been extremely grateful—Darla to Dr. Alberness, Lisey to Scott. The wait while Alberness examined her, however, had seemed much longer than forty minutes, and his report had been far from encouraging. The only part of it Lisey wanted to concentrate on right now was what Darla had just mentioned: Amanda would be spending most of her first week under close observation, in her room or on the little terrace outside her room if she could be persuaded to ambulate that far. She wouldn't even be visiting the Hay Common Room at the end of the corridor unless she showed sudden and drastic improvement. "Which I don't expect," Dr. Alberness had told them. "It happens, but it's rare. I believe in telling the truth, ladies, and the truth is that Ms. Debusher is probably in for the long haul."

"Besides," Lisey said, examining the bigger of the two suitcases, "I want to buy her some new luggage. This stuff is beat to shit."

"Let me do it," Darla said. Her voice had gone thick and wavery. "You do so much, Lisey. Dear little Lisey." She took Lisey's hand, lifted it to her lips, and planted a kiss on it.

Lisey was surprised—almost shocked. She and Darla had buried their ancient quarrels, but this sort of affection was still very unlike her older sister.

"Do you really want to, Darl?"

Darla nodded vehemently, started to speak, and settled for scrubbing her face again.

"Are you okay?"

Darla began to nod, then shook her head. "New luggage!" she cried. "What a joke! Do you think she's ever going to need new luggage? You heard him—no response to the snap test, no response to the clap test, no response to the pin test! I know what the nurses call people like her, they call em gorks, and I don't give a shit what he says about therapy and wonder drugs, if she ever comes back it'll be a blue-eyed miracle!"

As the saying is, Lisey thought, and smiled…but only inside, where it was safe to smile. She led her tired, slightly weepy sister down the short, steep flight of attic steps and below the worst of the heat. Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught the man whose last name she had taken for her own—that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.

10

Lisey asked again if Darla didn't want company on the ride back to Greenlawn, and Darla shook her head. She had an old Michael Noonan novel on cassette tapes, she said, and this would be a good chance to dig into it. By then she had washed her face in Amanda's bathroom, re-applied her makeup, and tied her hair back. She looked good, and in Lisey's experience, a woman who looked good usually felt that way. So she gave Darla's hand a little squeeze, told her to drive carefully, and watched her out of sight. Then she made a slow tour of Amanda's house, first inside and then out, making sure everything was locked up: windows, doors, cellar bulkhead, garage. She left two of the garage windows a quarter-inch open to keep the heat from building up. This was a thing Scott had taught her, a thing he'd learned from his father, the redoubtable Sparky Landon…along with how to read (at the precocious age of two), how to sum on the little blackboard that was kept beside the stove in the kitchen, how to jump from the bench in the front hall with a cry of Geronimo!…and about blood-bools, of course.

"Stations of the bool—like stations of the cross, I guess."

He says this and then he laughs. It's a nervous laugh, an I'mlooking-over-my-shoulder laugh. A child's laugh at a dirty joke.

"Yeah, exactly like that," Lisey murmured, and shivered in spite of the late afternoon heat. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.

That's a bad way to think, thinking that way will get you in the bad-gunky.

"I don't doubt it," Lisey said, and gave her own nervous laugh. She headed for her car with Amanda's key-ring— surprisingly heavy, heavier than her own, although Lisey's house was far bigger—hung over the forefinger of her right hand. She had a feeling she was already in the bad-gunky. Amanda in the nutbarn was just the beginning. There was also "Zack McCool" and that detestable Incunk, Professor Woodbody. The events of the day had driven the latter two out of her mind, but that didn't mean they'd ceased to exist. She felt too tired and dispirited to take on Woodbody this evening, too tired and dispirited even to track him to his lair…but she thought she'd better do it just the same, if only because her phone-pal "Zack" had sounded as though he could really be dangerous.

She got into her car, put big sissa Manda-Bunny's keys into the glove compartment, and backed down the driveway. As she did, the lowering sun cast a bright net of reflections off something behind her and up onto the roof. Startled, Lisey pressed the brake, looked over her shoulder—and saw the silver spade. COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. Lisey reached back, touched the wooden handle, and felt her mind calm a bit. She looked in both directions along the blacktop, saw nothing coming, and turned toward home. Mrs. Jones was sitting on her front stoop, and raised her hand in a wave. Lisey raised hers in return. Then she reached between the BMW's bucket seats again, so she could grasp the shaft of the spade.

11

If she was honest with herself, she thought as she began her short ride home, then she had to admit she was more frightened by these returning memories—by the sense that they were happening again, happening now—than she was by what might or might not have happened in bed just before sunrise. That she could dismiss (well…almost) as the half-waking dream of an anxious mind. But she hadn't thought of Gerd Allen Cole for ever so long, and if asked for the name of Scott's father or where he had worked, she would have said she honestly didn't remember.

"U.S. Gypsum," she said. "Only Sparky called it U.S. Gyppum." And then, low and fierce, almost growling it: "Stop, now. That's enough. You stop."

But could she? That was the question. And it was an important question, because her late husband wasn't the only one who had squirreled away certain painful and frightening memories. She'd put up some sort of mental curtain between LISEY NOW and LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!, and she had always thought it was strong, but this evening she just didn't know. Certainly there were holes in it, and if you looked through them, you ran the risk of seeing things in the purple haze beyond that you maybe didn't want to see. It was better not to look, just as it was better not even to glance at yourself in a mirror after dark unless all the lights in the room were on, or eat

(nightfood)

an orange or a bowl of strawberries after sundown. Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous. It was best to live in the present. Because if you got hold of the wrong memory, you might—

"Might what?" Lisey asked herself in an angry, shaky voice, and then, immediately: "I don't want to know."

A PT Cruiser going the other way came out of the declining sun, and the guy behind the wheel tipped her a wave. Lisey tipped him one right back, although she couldn't think of anyone of her acquaintance who owned a PT Cruiser. It didn't matter, out here in Sticksville you always waved back; it was plain country courtesy. Her mind was elsewhere, in any case. The fact was, she did not have the luxury of refusing all her memories just because there were some things

(Scott in the rocker, nothing but eyes while the wind howls outside, a killer gale all the way down from Yellowknife)

she didn't feel capable of looking at. Not all of them were lost in the purple, either; some were just tucked away in her own mental booksnake, all too accessible. The business of the bools, for instance. Scott had given her the complete lowdown on bools once, hadn't he?

"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.

12

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.

13

Lisey had parked beside the store so not to block access to any of the gas pumps—there were fourteen, on seven spankingclean 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 "Sh-Boom"—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 wideawake 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

14

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 twentythree 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."

Lisey nods, hoping the same small expectant smile is on her face. The one that says I have heard this story before but I'm not tired of it yet.

"So I went into the bathroom and that was empty. Then, when I turned around—"

"There he was," Lisey finishes for her. She speaks softly, still with the little smile. "Presto change-o, abracadabra." And bool, the end, she thinks.

"Yes, how did you know?"

"Well," Lisey says, still smiling, "Scott has a way of blending in with his surroundings."

This should sound exquisitely stupid—the bad lie of a person without much imagination—but it doesn't. Because it's not a lie at all. She's always losing track of him in supermarkets and department stores (places where he for some reason almost always goes unrecognized), and once she hunted for him for nearly half an hour in the University of Maine Library before spying him in the Periodicals Room, which she had checked twice before. When she scolded him for keeping her waiting and making her hunt for him in a place where she couldn't even raise her voice to call his name, Scott had shrugged and protested that he'd been in Periodicals all along, browsing the new poetry magazines. And the thing was, she didn't think he was even stretching the truth, let alone lying. She had just somehow…overlooked him.

The nurse brightens and tells her, "That's exactly what Scott said—he just kind of blends in." She blushes. "He told us to call him Scott. Practically demanded it. I hope you don't mind, Mrs. Landon." From this young southern nurse, Mrs. comes out Miz, but her accent doesn't grate on Lisey the way Dashmiel's did.

"Perfectly okay. He tells that to all the girls, especially the pretty ones."

The nurse smiles and blushes harder. "He said he saw me go by and look right at him. He said something like, 'I always was one of your whiter white men, but since I lost all of that blood, I must be in the top ten.'"

Lisey laughs politely, her stomach churning.

"And of course with the white sheets and the white johnny he's wearing…" The young nurse is starting to slow down. She wants to believe it, and Lisey has no doubt she did believe it when Scott was actually talking to her and gazing at her with his bright hazel eyes, but now she's starting to sense the absurdity which lurks just beneath what she's saying.

Lisey jumps in and helps her out. "Also, he's got a way of being so still," she says, although Scott is just about the jumpiest man she knows. Even when he's reading a book he's constantly shifting in his chair, gnawing at his nails (a habit he stopped for awhile after her tirade and then resumed again), scratching his arms like a junkie in need of a fix, sometimes even doing curls with the little five-pound handweights that are always parked under his favorite easy chair. She has only known him to be quiet in deep sleep and when he's writing and the writing's going exceptionally well. But the nurse still looks doubtful, so Lisey forges ahead, speaking in a gay tone that sounds horribly false to her own ear. "Sometimes I swear he's like a piece of furniture. I've walked right past him myself, plenty of times." She touches the nurse's hand. "I'm sure that's what happened, dear."

She's sure of no such thing, but the nurse gives her a grateful smile and the subject of Scott's absence is dropped. Or rather we pass it, Lisey thinks. Like a small kidney stone.

"He's ever so much better today," the nurse says. "Dr. Wendlestadt was in for early rounds, and he was absolutely amazed."

Lisey bets. And she tells the nurse what Scott told her all those years ago, in her Cleaves Mills apartment. She thought back then it was just one of those things you say, but now she believes it. Oh yes, now she believes it completely.

"All the Landons are fast healers," she says, and then goes in to see her husband.

15

He's lying there with his eyes closed and his head turned to one side, a very white man in a very white bed—that much is certainly true—but it's impossible to miss that mop of shoulder-length dark hair. The chair she sat in last night is where she left it, and she resumes her position beside his bed. She takes out her book—Savages, by Shirley Conran. She's removing the matchbook cover that marks her place when she feels Scott's eyes on her and looks up.

"How are you this morning, dear one?" she asks him.

He says nothing for a long time. His breath is wheezing, but no longer screaming as it did while he lay in the parking lot begging for ice. He really is better, she thinks. Then, with some effort, he moves his hand until it's over hers. He squeezes. His lips (which look dreadfully dry, she'll get a Chap Stick or Carmex for them later) part in a smile.

"Lisey," he says. "Little Lisey."

He goes back to sleep with his hand still covering hers, and that's perfectly okay with Lisey. She can turn the pages of her book with one hand.

16

Lisey stirred like a woman awaking from a doze, looked out the driver's-side window of her BMW, and saw the shadow of her car had grown noticeably longer on Mr. Patel's clean black pavement. There was not one butt in her ashtray, or two, but three. She looked out through the windshield and saw a face looking back at her from one of the small windows at the rear of the Market, in what had to be the storage area. It was gone before she could tell if it was Mr. Patel's wife or one of his two teenage daughters, but she had time to mark the

expression: curiosity or concern. Either way it was time to move on. Lisey backed out of her space, glad she had at least butted her cigarettes in her own ashtray instead of tossing them out onto that weirdly clean asphalt, and once again turned for home.

Remembering that day in the hospital—and what the nurse said— that was another station of the bool.

Yes? Yes.

Something had been in bed with her this morning, and for now she would go on believing it had been Scott. He had for some reason sent her on a bool hunt, just like the ones his big brother Paul had made for him when they were a pair of unhappy boys growing up in rural Pennsylvania. Only instead of little riddles leading her from one station to the next, she was being led…

"You're leading me into the past," she said in a low voice. "But why would you do that? Why, when that's where the badgunky is?"

The one you're on is a good bool. It goes behind the purple.

"Scott, I don't want to go behind the purple." Approaching the house now. "I'll be smucked if I want to go behind the purple."

But I don't think I have any choice.

If that was true, and if the next station of the bool meant reliving their weekend visit to The Antlers—Scott's frontloaded honeymoon—then she wanted Good Ma's cedar box. It was all she had of her mother now that the

(africans)

afghans were gone, and Lisey supposed it was her more humble version of the memory nook in Scott's office. It was a place where she'd stored all sorts of mementos from

(SCOTT AND LISEY! THE EARLY YEARS!)

the first decade of their marriage: photos, postcards, napkins, matchbooks, menus, drink-coasters, stupid stuff like that. How long had she collected those things? Ten years? No, not that long. Six at most. Probably less. After Empty Devils, the changes had come thick and fast—not just the Germany experiment but everything. Their married life had become something like the berserk merry-go-round (sort of a pun there, she thought—merry-go-round, marry-go-round) at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. She'd quit saving things like cocktail napkins and souvenir matchbooks because there'd been too many lounges and too many restaurants in too many hotels. Pretty soon she'd quit saving everything. And Good Ma's cedar box that smelled so sweet when you opened it, where was that? Somewhere in the house, she was sure of it, and she meant to find it.

Maybe it'll turn out to be the next station of the bool, she thought, and then she saw her mailbox up ahead. The door was down and a clutch of letters was rubber-banded to it. Curious, Lisey pulled up next to the pole. She'd often come home to a full mailbox when Scott was alive, but since then her mail tended to be on the thin side, and more often than not addressed to OCCUPANT or MR. AND MRS. HOME OWNER. In truth, this current sheaf looked pretty thin: four envelopes and a postcard. Mr. Simmons, the RFD 3 mailman, must have tucked a package in the box, although on fair days he was more apt to use a rubber band or two to attach them to the sturdy metal flag. Lisey glanced at the letters—bills, advertising comeons, a postcard from Cantata—and then reached into the mailbox. She touched something soft, furry, and wet. She screamed in surprise, yanked her hand back, saw the blood on her fingers, and screamed again, this time in horror. In that first moment she was positive she'd been bitten: something had climbed the cedar mailbox pole and then wormed its way inside. Maybe a rat, maybe something even worse—something rabid, like a woodchuck or a baby coon.

She wiped her hand on her blouse, breathing in audible gasps that weren't quite moans, then reluctantly raised her hand to see how many wounds there were. And how deep. For a moment her conviction that she must have been bitten was so strong that she actually saw the marks. Then she blinked her eyes and reality re-asserted itself. There were smears of blood, but no cuts or bites or breaks in the skin. Something was in her mailbox, all right, some horrible furry surprise, but its biting days were done.

Lisey opened the glove compartment and her unopened pack of cigarettes fell out. She rummaged until she came up with the little disposable flashlight that she had transferred from the glove compartment of her last car, a Lexus she had driven for four years. It had been a fine car, that Lexus. She had only traded it because she associated it with Scott, who called it Lisey's Sexy Lexus. It was surprising how much small things could hurt when someone close to you died; talk about the princess and the smucking pea. Now she only hoped there was some juice left in the flashlight.

There was. The beam shone out bright and steady and confident. Lisey shifted sideways, took a deep breath, and shone it into the mailbox. She was distantly aware that she'd folded her lips over her teeth and was pressing them together so tightly that it hurt. At first she saw only a darkish shape and a green glimmer, like light reflecting off a marble. And wetness on the corrugated metal floor of the mailbox. She supposed that was the blood she'd gotten on her fingers. She shifted farther left, settling her side all the way against the driver's door, gingerly pushing the flashlight farther into the mailbox. The darkish shape grew fur, and ears, and a nose that probably would have been pink in daylight. There was no mistaking the eyes; even dulled in death, their shape was distinctive. There was a dead cat in her mailbox.

Lisey began to laugh. It was not exactly normal laughter, but it wasn't entirely hysterical, either. There was genuine humor in it. She didn't need Scott to tell her that a slaughtered cat in the mailbox was too, too Fatal Attraction. That had been no Swedish-meatball movie with subtitles, and she had seen it twice. What made it funny was that Lisey didn't own a cat.

She let the laughter run its course, then lit a Salem Light and pulled into her driveway.