Lisey's Story

VIII. Lisey and Scott

(Under the Yum-Yum Tree)

1

She had no more than entered her sunny kitchen with the cedar box clasped in her arms when the phone began to ring. She put the box on the table and answered with an absent hello, no longer fearing Jim Dooley's voice. If it was him, she would just tell him she had called the police and then hang up. She was currently too busy to be scared.

It was Darla, not Dooley, calling from the Greenlawn Visitors' Lounge, and Lisey wasn't exactly surprised to find that Darla had the guilts about calling Canty in Boston. And if it had been the other way around, Canty in Maine and Darla in Boston? Lisey thought it would have been about the same deal. She didn't know how much Canty and Darla still loved each other, but they still used each other the way drunks used the booze. When they were kids, Good Ma used to say that if Cantata caught the flu, Darlanna ran her fever.

Lisey tried to make all the right responses, just as she had earlier while on the phone with Canty, and for exactly the same reason: so she could get past this shite and go on with her business. She supposed she would come back to caring about her sisters later—she hoped so—but right now Darla's guilty conscience mattered as little to her as Amanda's gorked-out state. As little as Jim Dooley's current whereabouts, come to that, as long as he wasn't in the room with her, waving a knife.

No, she assured Darla, she hadn't been wrong to call Canty. Yes, she had been right to tell Canty to stay put down there in Boston. And yes indeed, Lisey would be up to visit Amanda later on that day.

"It's horrible," Darla said, and in spite of her own preoccupation, Lisey heard the misery in Darla's voice. "She's horrible." Then, immediately, in a rush: "I don't mean that, she's not, of course she's not, but it's horrible to see her. She only sits there, Lisey. The sun was hitting the side of her face when I was in, the morning sun, and her skin looks so gray and old…"

"Take it easy, hon," Lisey said, running the tips of her fingers over the smooth, lacquered surface of Good Ma's box. Even closed she could smell its sweetness. When she opened it, she would bend forward into that aroma and it would be like inhaling the past.

"They're feeding her through a tube," Darla said. "They put it in and then take it out. If she doesn't start to eat on her own, I suppose they'll just leave it in all the time." She gave a huge, watery sniff. "They're feeding her through a tube and she's already so thin and she won't talk and I spoke to a nurse who said sometimes they go on this way for years, sometimes they never come back, oh Lisey, I don't think I can stand it!"

Lisey smiled a little at this as her fingers moved to the hinges at the back of the box. It was a smile of relief. Here was Darla the Drama Queen, Darla the Diva, and that meant they were back on safe ground, two sisters with well-worn scripts in hand. At one end of the wire is Darla the Sensitive. Give her a hand, ladies and gentlemen. At the other end, Little Lisey, Small But Tough. Let's hear it for her.

"I'll be up this afternoon, Darla, and I'll have another talk with Dr. Alberness. They'll have a clearer picture of her condition by then—"

Darla, doubtful: "Do you really think so?"

Lisey, with no smucking idea: "Absolutely. And what you need is to go home and put your feet up. Maybe take a nap."

Darla, in tones of dramatic proclamation: "Oh, Lisey, I could never sleep!"

Lisey didn't care if Darla ate, busted a joint, or took a shit in the begonias. She just wanted to get off the phone. "Well, you come on back, honey, and take it easy for a little while, anyway. I have to get off the phone—I've got something in the oven."

Darla was instantly delighted. "Oh, Lisey! You?" Lisey found this extremely annoying, as if she had never cooked anything more strenuous in her life than…well, Hamburger Helper. "Is it banana bread?"

"Close. Cranberry bread. I've got to go check it."

"But you'll be coming to see Manda later, right?"

Lisey felt like screaming. Instead she said, "Right. This afternoon."

"Well, then…" Doubt was back. Convince me, it said. Stay on the phone another fifteen minutes or so and convince me. "I guess I'll come on home."

"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.

2

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 cedar-scent 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 bestman 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 matchbook. 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 handlettering 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 19^th, 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

3

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

4

"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.

5

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 midclap. 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.

"I offered to pay for this," she murmured, holding the menu up to her sunny, empty kitchen, "and the guy said I could just take it. Because we were their only guests. And because of the snowstorm."

That weird October snowstorm. They had stayed two nights instead of just the one that had been in the plan, and on the second she had remained awake long after Scott had gone to sleep. Already the cold front that had brought the unusual snow was moving out and she could hear it melting, dripping from the eaves. She had lain there in that strange bed (the first of so many strange beds she'd shared with Scott), thinking about Andrew "Sparky" Landon, and Paul Landon, and Scott Landon—Scott the survivor. Thinking about bools. Good bools and blood-bools.

Thinking about the purple. Thinking about that, too.

At some point the clouds had broken open and the room had been flooded with windy moonlight. In that light she had at last fallen asleep. The next day, a Sunday, they had driven through countryside that was reverting back from winter to fall, and less than a month later they had been dancing to The Swinging Johnsons: "Too Late to Turn Back Now."

She opened the gold-stamped menu to see what the Chef's Special had been that long-ago night, and a photograph fell out. Lisey remembered it at once. The owner of the place had taken it with Scott's little Nikon. The guy had scrounged up two pairs of snowshoes (his cross-country skis were still in storage up in North Conway, he said, along with his four snowmobiles), and insisted that Scott and Lisey take a hike along the trail behind the inn. The woods are magical in the snow, Lisey remembered him telling them, and you'll have them all to yourselves—not a single skier or snow machine. It's the chance of a lifetime.

He had even packed them a picnic lunch with a bottle of red wine on the house. And here they were, togged out in snowpants and parkas and the earmuffs which the guy's amiable wife had found for them (Lisey's parka comically too big, the hem drooping all the way to her knees), standing for their portrait outside a country bed-and-breakfast in what looked like a Hollywood special-effects blizzard, wearing snowshoes and grinning like a couple of cheerful nitwits. The pack Scott wore to hold their lunch and the bottle of vino was another loaner. Scott and Lisey, bound for the yum-yum tree, although neither had known it then. Bound for a trip down Memory Lane. Only for Scott Landon, Memory Lane was Freak Alley, and it was no wonder he didn't choose to go there often.

Still, she thought, skating the tips of her fingers over this photograph as she had over the one of their wedding-dance, you must have known you'd have to go there at least once before I married you, like it or not. You had something to tell me, didn't you? The story that would back up your one nonnegotiable condition. You must have been looking for the right spot for weeks. And when you saw that tree, that willow so drooped over with snow it made a grotto inside, you knew you'd found it and you couldn't put it off any longer. How nervous were you, I wonder? How afraid that I'd hear you out and then tell you I didn't want to marry you after all?

Lisey thought he'd been nervous, all right. She could remember his silence in the car. Hadn't she thought even then that something was on his mind? Yes, because Scott was usually so talkative.

"But you must have known me well enough by then…" she began, then trailed off. The nice thing about talking to yourself was that mostly you didn't have to finish what you were saying. By October of 1979 he must have known her well enough to believe she'd stick. Hell, when she didn't tell him to take a hike after he cut his hand to ribbons on a pane of Parks Greenhouse glass, he must have believed she was in for the long haul. But had he been nervous about exposing those old memories, touching those ancient live wires? She guessed about that he'd been more than nervous. She guessed about that he'd been scared to smucking death.

All the same he had taken her gloved hand in one of his, pointed, and said, "Let's eat there, Lisey—let's go under that

6

"Let's eat under that willow," he says, and Lisey is more than willing to fall in with this plan. For one thing, she's hugely hungry. For another, her legs—especially her calves—are aching from the unaccustomed exercise involved in using the snowshoes: lift, twist, and shake…lift, twist, and shake. Mostly, though, she wants a rest from looking at the ceaselessly falling snow. The walk has been every bit as gorgeous as the innkeeper promised, and the quiet is something she thinks she'll remember for the rest of her life, the only sounds the crunch of their snowshoes, the sound of their breathing, and the restless tackhammer of a far-off

woodpecker. Yet the steady downpour (there is really no other word) of huge flakes has started to freak her out. It's coming so thick and fast that it's messed up her ability to focus, and that's making her feel disoriented and a little dizzy. The willow sits on the edge of a clearing, its still-green fronds weighted down with thick white frosting.

Do you call them fronds? Lisey wonders, and thinks she will ask Scott over lunch. Scott will know. She never asks. Other matters intervene.

Scott approaches the willow and Lisey follows, lifting her feet and twisting them to shake off the snowshoes, walking in her fiancé's tracks. When he reaches the tree, Scott parts the snow-covered—fronds, branches, whatever they are—like a curtain, and peers inside. His blue-jeaned butt is sticking out invitingly in her direction.

"Lisey!" he says. "This is pretty neat! Wait 'til you s—"

She raises Snowshoe A and applies it to Blue-Jeaned Butt B. Fiancé C promptly disappears into Snow-Covered Willow D (with a surprised curse). It's amusing, quite amusing indeed, and Lisey begins to giggle as she stands in the pouring snow. She is coated with it; even her eyelashes are heavy.

"Lisey?" From inside the drooping white umbrella.

"Yes, Scott?"

"Can you see me?"

"Nope," she says.

"Come a little closer, then."

She does, stepping in his tracks, knowing what to expect, but when his arm shoots out through the snow-covered curtain and his hand seizes her wrist, it's still a surprise and she shrieks with laughter because she's a bit more than startled; she's actually a little frightened. He pulls her forward and cold whiteness dashes across her face, blinding her for a moment. The hood of her parka is back and snow slides down her neck, freezing on her warm skin. Her earmuffs are pulled askew. She hears a muffled flump as heavy clots of snow fall off the tree behind her.

"Scott!" she gasps. "Scott, you scared m—" But here she stops.

He's on his knees before her, the hood of his own parka pushed back to reveal a spill of dark hair that's almost as long as hers. He's wearing his earmuffs around his neck like headphones. The pack is beside him, leaning against the treetrunk. He's looking at her, smiling, waiting for her to dig it. And Lisey does. She digs it bigtime. Anybody would, she thinks.

It's a little like being allowed in the clubhouse where her big sister Manda and her friends played at being girl pirates— But no. It's better than that, because it doesn't smell of ancient wood and damp magazines and moldy old mouseshit. It's as if he's taken her into an entirely different world, pulled her into a secret circle, a white-roofed dome that belongs to nobody but them. It's about twenty feet across. In the center is the trunk of the willow. The grass growing out from it is still the perfect green of summer.

"Oh, Scott," she says, and no vapor comes out of her mouth. It's warm in here, she realizes. The snow caught on the drooping branches has insulated the space beneath. She unzips her jacket.

"Neat, isn't it? Now listen to the quiet."

He falls silent. So does she. At first she thinks there's no sound at all, but that's not quite right. There's one. She can hear a slow drum muffled in velvet. It's her heart. He reaches out, strips off her gloves, takes her hands. He kisses each palm, deep in the center of the cup. For a moment neither of them says anything. It's Lisey who breaks the silence; her stomach rumbles. Scott bursts into laughter, falling back against the trunk of the tree and pointing at her.

"Me too," he says. "I wanted to skin you out of those snowpants and screw in here, Lisey—it's warm enough—but after all that exercise, I'm too hungry."

"Maybe later," she says. Knowing that later she'll almost certainly be too full for screwing, but that's okay; if the snow keeps up, they'll almost certainly be spending another night here at The Antlers, and that's fine with her.

She opens the pack and lays out lunch. There are two thick chicken sandwiches (lots of mayo), salad, and two hefty slices of what proves to be raisin pie. "Yum," he says as she hands him one of the paper plates.

"Of course yum," she says. "We're under the yum-yum tree."

He laughs. "Under the yum-yum tree. I like it." Then his smile fades and he looks at her solemnly. "It's nice here, isn't it?"

"Yes, Scott. Very nice."

He leans over the food; she leans to meet him; they kiss above the salad. "I love you, little Lisey."

"I love you, too." And at that moment, hidden away from the world in this green and secret circle of silence, she has never loved him more. This is now.

7

Despite his profession of hunger, Scott eats only half his sandwich and a few bites of salad. The raisin pie he doesn't touch at all, but he drinks more than his share of the wine. Lisey eats with better appetite, but not quite as heartily as she thought she would. There's a worm of unease gnawing at her. Whatever has been on Scott's mind, the telling will be hard for him and maybe even harder for her. What makes her most uneasy is that she can't think what it might be. Some kind of trouble with the law back in the rural western Pennsylvania town where he grew up? Did he perhaps father a child? Was there maybe even some kind of teenage marriage, a quickie job that ended in a divorce or an annulment two months later? Is it Paul, the brother who died? Whatever it is, it's coming now. Sure as rain follows thunder, Good Ma would have said. He looks at his slice of pie, seems to think about taking a bite, then pulls out his cigarettes instead. She remembers his saying Families suck and thinks, It's the bools. He brought me here to tell me about the bools. She isn't surprised to find the thought scares her badly.

"Lisey," he says. "There's something I have to explain. And if it changes your mind about marrying m—"

"Scott, I'm not sure I want to hear—"

His grin is both weary and frightened. "I bet you're not. And I know I don't want to tell. But it's like getting a shot at the doctor's office…no, worse, like getting a cyst opened up or a carbuncle lanced. But some things just have to be done." His brilliant hazel eyes are fixed on hers. "Lisey, if we get married, we can't have kids. That's flat. I don't know how badly you want them right now, but you come from a big family and I guess it'd be natural for you to want to fill up a big house with a big family of your own someday. You need to know that if you're with me, that can't happen. And I don't want you to be facing me across a room somewhere five or ten years down the line and screaming 'You never told me this was part of the deal.'"

He draws on his cigarette and jets smoke from his nostrils. It rises in a blue-gray fume. He turns back to her. His face is very pale, his eyes enormous. Like jewels, she thinks, fascinated. For the first and only time she sees him not as handsome (which he is not, although in the right light he can be striking) but as beautiful, the way some women are beautiful. This fascinates her, and for some reason horrifies her.

"I love you too much to lie to you, Lisey. I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. I think we're going to be quite a wealthy couple in terms of money, but I'll almost certainly be an emotional pauper all my life. I've got the money coming, but as for the rest I've got just enough for you, and I won't ever dirty it or dilute it with lies. Not with the words I say, not with the ones I hold back." He sighs—a long, shuddering sound—and places the heel of the hand holding the cigarette against the center of his brow, as if his head hurts. Then he takes it away and looks at her again. "No kids, Lisey. We can't. I can't."

"Scott, are you…did a doctor…"

He's shaking his head. "It's not physical. Listen, babyluv. It's here." He taps his forehead, between the eyes. "Lunacy and the Landons go together like peaches and cream, and I'm not talking about an Edgar Allan Poe story or any genteel Victorian we-keep-auntie-in-the-attic ladies' novel; I'm talking about the real-world dangerous kind that runs in the blood."

"Scott, you're not crazy—" But she's thinking about his walking out of the dark and holding the bleeding ruins of his hand out to her, his voice full of jubilation and relief. Crazy relief. She's remembering her own thought as she wrapped that ruin in her blouse: that he might be in love with her, but he was also half in love with death.

"I am," he says softly. "I am crazy. I have delusions and visions. I write them down, that's all. I write them down and people pay me to read them."

For a moment she's too stunned by this (or maybe it's the memory of his mangled hand, which she has deliberately put away from her, that has stunned her) to reply. He is speaking of his craft—that is always how he refers to it in his lectures, never as his art but as his craft—as delusion. And that is madness.

"Scott," she says at last, "writing's your job."

"You think you understand that," he says, "but you don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey. And I'm not going to sit here under this tree and give you the history of the Landons, because I only know a little. I went back three generations, got scared of all the blood I was finding on the walls, and quit. I saw enough blood—some of it my own—when I was a kid. Took my Daddy's word for the rest. When I was a kid, Daddy said that the Landons— and the Landreaus before them—split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky. Bad-gunky was better, because you could let it out by cutting. You had to cut, if you didn't want to spend your life in the bughouse or the jailhouse. He said it was the only way."

"Are you talking about self-mutilation, Scott?"

He shrugs, as if unsure. She is unsure, as well. She has seen him naked, after all. He has a few scars, but only a few.

"Blood-bools?" she asks.

This time he's more positive. "Blood-bools, yeah."

"That night when you stuck your hand through the greenhouse glass, were you letting out the bad-gunky?"

"I suppose. Sure. In a way." He stubs his cigarette in the grass. He takes a long time, and doesn't look at her while he does it. "It's complicated. You have to remember how terrible I felt that night, a lot of things had been piling up—"

"I should never have—"

"No," he says, "let me finish. I can only say this once."

She stills.

"I was drunk, I was feeling terrible, and I hadn't let it out— it—in a long time. I hadn't had to. Mostly because of you, Lisey."

Lisey has a sister who went through an alarming bout of selfmutilation in her early twenties. Amanda's past all that now— thank God—but she bears the scars, mostly high on her inner arms and thighs. "Scott, if you've been cutting yourself, shouldn't you have scars—"

It's as if he hasn't heard her. "Then last spring, long after I thought he'd shut up for good, I be good-goddam if he didn't start up talking to me again. 'It runs in you, Scoot,' I'd hear him say. 'It runs in your blood just like a sweetmother. Don't it?'"

"Who, Scott? Who started talking to you?" Knowing it's either Paul or his father, and probably not Paul.

"Daddy. He says, 'Scooter, if you want to be righteous, you better let that bad-gunky out. Get after it, now, don't smuckin wait.' So I did. Little…little…" He makes small cutting gestures—one on his cheek, one on his arm—to illustrate. "Then that night, when you were mad…" He shrugs. "I got after the rest. Over and done with. Over and out. And we 'us fine. We 'us fine. Tell you one thing, I'd bleed myself dry like a hog on a chain before I'd hurt you. Before I'd ever hurt you." His face draws down in an expression of contempt she has never seen before. "I ain't never yet been like him. My Daddy." And then, almost spitting it: "Fuckin Mister Sparky."

She doesn't speak. She doesn't dare. Isn't sure she could, anyway. For the first time in months she wonders how he could cut his hand so badly and have so little scarring. Surely it isn't possible. She thinks: His hand wasn't just cut; his hand was mangled.

Scott, meanwhile, has lit another Herbert Tareyton with hands that are shaking just the smallest bit. "I'll tell you a story," he says. "Just one story, and let it stand for all the stories of a certain man's childhood. Because stories are what I do." He looks at the rising cigarette smoke. "I net them from the pool. I've told you about the pool, right?"

"Yes, Scott. Where we all go down to drink."

"Yep. And cast our nets. Sometimes the really brave fisherfolk—the Austens, the Dostoevskys, the Faulkners—even launch boats and go out to where the big ones swim, but that pool is tricky. It's bigger than it looks, it's deeper than any man can tell, and it changes its aspect, especially after dark."

She says nothing to this. His hand slips around her neck. At some point it steals inside her unzipped parka to cup her breast. Not out of lust, she's quite sure; for comfort.

"All right," he says. "Story-time. Close your eyes, little Lisey."

She closes them. For a moment all is dark as well as silent under the yum-yum tree, but she isn't afraid; there's the smell of him and the bulk of him beside her; there's the feel of his hand, currently resting on the rod of her collarbone. He could choke her easily with that hand, but she doesn't need him to tell her he'd never hurt her, at least not physically; this is just a thing Lisey knows. He will cause her pain, yes, but mostly with his mouth. His everlasting mouth.

"All right," says the man she will marry in less than a month. "This story might have four parts. Part One is called 'Scooter on the Bench.'

"Once upon a time there was a boy, a skinny little frightened boy named Scott, only when his Daddy got in the bad-gunky and cutting himself wasn't enough to let it out, his Daddy called him Scooter. And one day—one bad, mad day—the little boy stood up on a high place, looking down at a polished wooden plain far below, and watching as his brother's blood

8

runs slowly along the crack between two boards.

—Jump, his father tells him. Not for the first time, either.— Jump, you little bastard, you sweetmother chickenkike, jump right now!

—Daddy, I'm afraid! It's too high!

—It's not and I don't give a shit if you're afraid or not, you smucking jump or I'll make you sorry and your buddy sorrier, now paratroops over the side!

Daddy pauses a moment, looking around, eyeballs shifting the way they do when he gets in the bad-gunky, almost ticking from side to side, then he looks back at the three-year-old who stands trembling on the long bench in the front hall of the big old dilapidated farmhouse with its million puffing drafts. Stands there with his back pressed against the stenciled leaves on the pink wall of this farmhouse far out in the country where people mind their own business.

—You can say Geronimo if you want to, Scoot. They say sometimes that helps. If you scream it real loud when you jump out of the plane.

So Scott does, he will take any help he can get, he screams GEROMINO!—which isn't quite right and doesn't help anyway because he still can't jump off the bench to the polished wooden floor-plain so far below.

—Ahhhh, sweet-smockin chicken-kikin Christ.

Daddy yanks Paul forward. Paul is six now, six going on seven, he is tall and his hair is a darkish blond, long in front and on the sides, he needs a haircut, needs to go see Mr. Baumer at the barbershop in Martensburg, Mr. Baumer with the elk's head on his wall and the faded decal in his window that shows a Merican flag and says I SERVED, but it will be awhile before they go near Martensburg and Scott knows it. They don't go to town when Daddy is in the bad-gunky and Daddy won't even go to work for awhile because this is his vacation from U.S. Gyppum.

Paul has blue eyes and Scott loves him more than anyone, more than he loves himself. This morning Paul's arms are covered with blood, crisscrossed with cuts, and now Daddy goes to his pocketknife again, the hateful pocketknife that has drunk so much of their blood, and raises it up to catch the morning sun. Daddy came downstairs yelling for them, yelling—Bool! Bool! Get in here, you two! If the bool's on Paul he cuts Scott and if the bool's on Scott he cuts Paul. Even in the bad-gunky Daddy understands love.

—You gonna jump you coward or am I gonna have to cut him again?

—Don't, Daddy! Scott shrieks.—Please don't cut 'im no more, I'll jump!

—Then do so! Daddy's top lip rolls back to show his teeth. His eyes roll in their sockets, they roll roll roll like he's looking for folks in the corners, and maybe he is, prolly he is, because sometimes they hear him talking to folks who ain't there. Sometimes Scott and his brother call them the Bad-Gunky Folks and sometimes the Bloody Bool People.

—You do it, Scooter! You do it, you ole Scoot! Yell Geronimo and then paratroops over the side! No cowardy kikes in this family! Right now!

—GEROMINO! he yells, and although his feet tremble and his legs jerk, he still can't make himself jump. Cowardy legs, cowardy kike legs. Daddy doesn't give him another chance. Daddy cuts deep into Paul's arm and the blood falls down in a sheet. Some goes on Paul's shorts and some goes on his sneaks and most goes on the floor. Paul grimaces but doesn't cry out. His eyes beg Scott to make it stop, but his mouth stays shut. His mouth will not beg.

At U.S. Gypsum (which the boys call U.S. Gyppum because it's what their Daddy calls it) the men call Andrew Landon Sparky or sometimes Mister Sparks. Now his face looms over Paul's shoulder and his fluff of whitening hair stands up as if all the lectricity he works with has gotten inside of him and his crooked teeth show in a Halloween grin and his eyes are empty because Daddy is gone, he's a goner, there's nothing in his shoes but the bad-gunky, he's no longer a man or a daddy but just a blood-bool with eyes.

—Stay up there this time and I'll cut off his ear, says the thing with their Daddy's lectric hair, the thing standing up in their Daddy's shoes.—Stay up there next time and I'll cut his mothersmuckin throat, I don't give a shit. Up to you, Scooter Scooter you ole Scoot. You say you love him but you don't love him enough to stop me cutting him, do you? When all you have to do is jump off a sweetmother three-foot bench! What do you think of that, Paul? What have you got to say to your chickenkike little brother now?

But Paul says nothing, only looks at his brother, dark blue eyes locked on hazel ones, and this hell will go on for another twenty-five hundred days; seven endless years. Do what you can and let the rest go is what Paul's eyes say to Scott and it breaks his heart and when he jumps from the bench at last (to what part of him is firmly convinced will be his death) it isn't because of their father's threats but because his brother's eyes have given him permission to stay right where he is if in the end he's just too scared to do it.

To stay on the bench even if it gets Paul Landon killed.

He lands and falls on his knees in the blood on the boards and begins crying, shocked to find he is still alive, and then his father's arm is around him, his father's strong arm is lifting him up, now in love rather than in anger. His father's lips are first on his cheek and then pressed firmly against the corner of his mouth.

—See, Scooter old Scooter you old Scoot? I knew you could do it.

Then Daddy is saying it's over, the blood-bool is over and Scott can take care of his brother. His father tells him he's brave, one brave little sumbitch, his father says he loves him and in that moment of victory Scott doesn't even mind the blood on the floor, he loves his father too, he loves his crazy blood-bool Daddy for letting it be over this time even though he knows, even at three he knows that next time will come.

9

Scott stops, looks around, spies the wine. He doesn't bother with the glass but drinks straight from the bottle. "It really wasn't much of a jump," he says, and shrugs. "Looked like a lot to a three-year-old, though."

"Scott, my God," Lisey says. "How often was he like that?"

"Often enough. A lot of the times I've blocked out. That time on the bench, though, that one's stone clear. And like I said, it can stand for the rest."

"Was it…was he drunk?"

"No. He almost never drank. Are you ready for Part Two of the story, Lisey?"

"If it's like Part One, I'm not sure I am."

"Don't worry. Part Two is 'Paul and the Good Bool.' No, I take that back, it's 'Paul and the Best Bool,' and it was only a few days after the old man made me jump off the bench. He got called in to work, and as soon as his truck was out of sight, Paul told me to be good while he went down to Mulie's." He stops, laughs, and shakes his head as people do when they realize they're being silly. "Mueller's. That's what it really was. I told you about going back to Martensburg when the bank auctioned off the home place, right? Just before I met you?"

"No, Scott."

He looks puzzled—for a moment almost frighteningly vague. "No?"

"No." This isn't the time to tell him he's told her next to nothing about his childhood—

Next to nothing? Nothing at all. Until today, under the yumyum tree.

"Well," he says (a little doubtfully), "I got a letter from Daddy's bank—First Rural of Pennsylvania…you know, like there was a Second Rural out there somewhere…and they said it was out of court after all these years and I was set for a piece of the proceeds. So I said what the smuck and went back. First time in seven years. I graduated Martensburg Township High when I was sixteen. Took a lot of tests, got a papal dispensation. Surely I told you that."

"No, Scott."

He laughs uneasily. "Well, I did. Go, you Ravens, peck em and deck em." He makes a cawing sound, laughs more uneasily still, then takes a big glug of wine. It's almost gone. "The home place ended up going for seventy grand, something like that, of which I got thirty-two hundred, big smogging deal, huh? But anyway, I took a ride around our part of Martensburg before the auction and the store was still there, a mile down the road from the home place, and if you'd told me when I was a kid it was only a mile I would have said you were full of shit up to your tick-tock. It was empty, all boarded up, FOR SALE sign in front but so faded you could hardly read it. The sign on the roof was actually in better shape, and that one said MUELLER'S GENERAL STORE. Only we always called it Mulie's, see, because that 'us what Daddy called it. Like he called U.S. Steel U.S. Beg Borrow and Steal…and he'd call The Burg Pittsburgh Shitty…and…oh dammit, Lisey, am I crying?"

"Yes, Scott." Her voice sounds faraway to her own ears.

He takes one of the paper napkins that came with the picnic lunch and wipes his eyes. When he puts the napkin down, he's smiling. "Paul told me to be good when he was gone to Mulie's and I did what Paul said. I always did. You know?"

She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

"Anyway, when he came back I saw he had two bottles of RC and I knew he was going to make a good bool, and that made me happy. He told me to go in my bedroom and look at my books awhile so he could make it. It took him a long time and I knew it was going to be a long good bool, and I was happy about that, too. Finally he hollered to me to come out to the kitchen and look on the table."

"Did he ever call you Scooter?" Lisey asks.

"Not him, not never. By the time I got out there t' kitchen, he was gone. He 'us hidin. But I knew he 'us watching me. There was a piece of paper on the table that said BOOL! and then it said—"

"Wait a second," Lisey said.

Scott looks at her, eyebrows raised.

"You were three…he was six…or maybe going on seven—"

"Right—"

"But he could write little riddles and you could read them. Not only read them, figure them out."

"Yes?" Raised eyebrows asking what the big deal is.

"Scott—did your crazy Daddy understand he was abusing a couple of smucking child prodigies?"

Scott surprises her by throwing back his head and laughing. "That would have been the least of his concerns!" he says. "Just listen, Lisey. Because that was the best day I can remember having as a kid, maybe because it was such a long day. Probably someone at the Gypsum plant screwed up and the old man had to put in some serious overtime, I don't know, but we had the house to ourselves from eight that morning until sundown—"

"No babysitter?"

He doesn't reply, only looks at her as if she might have a screw loose.

"No neighbor-lady checking in?"

"Our nearest neighbors were four miles away. Mulie's was closer. That's how Daddy liked it, and believe me, that's the way people in town liked it, too."

"All right. Tell me Part Two. 'Scott and the Good Bool.'"

" 'Paul and the Good Bool. The Great Bool. The Excellent Bool.'" His face smooths out at the memory. One to balance the horror of the bench. "Paul had a notebook with blue-ruled lines, a Dennison notebook, and when he made stations of the bool, he'd take a sheet out and then fold it so he could tear it into strips. That made the notebook last longer, do you see?"

"Yes."

"Only that day he must have ripped out two sheets or even three—Lisey, it was such a long bool!" In his remembered pleasure, Lisey can see the child he was. "The strip on the table said BOOL!—the first one and the last one always said that—and then, right underneath—

10

Right underneath BOOL! it says this in Paul's big and careful capital letters:

1 FIND ME CLOSE IN SOMETHING SWEET! 16

But before considering the riddle, Scott looks at the number, savoring that 16. Sixteen stations! He is filled with a tingling, pleasurable excitement. The best part of it is knowing Paul never teases. If he promises sixteen stations, there will be fifteen riddles. And if Scott can't get one, Paul will help. Paul will call from his hiding place in a spooky scary voice (it's a Daddyvoice, although Scott won't realize this until years later, when he is writing a spooky scary story called Empty Devils), giving hints until Scott does get it. More and more often, though, Scott doesn't need the hints. He improves swiftly at the art of solving, just as Paul improves swiftly at the art of making.

Find me close in something sweet.

Scott looks around and almost at once fixes on the big white bowl standing on the table in a mote-filled bar of morning sun. He has to stand on a chair to reach it and giggles when Paul calls out in his spooky Daddyvoice,—Don't spill it, you mother!

Scott lifts the lid, and on top of the sugar is another strip of paper with another message printed in his brother's careful capital letters:

2 I'M WHERE CLIDE USED TO PLAY

WITH SPULES IN THE SUN

Until he disappeared in the spring, Clyde was their cat and both boys loved him, but Daddy didn't love him because Clyde used to waow all the time to be let in or out and although neither of them says it out loud (and neither would ever dare ask Daddy), they have a good idea that something a lot bigger and a lot meaner than a fox or a fisher got Clyde. In any case, Scott knows perfectly well where Clyde used to play in the sun and hurries there now, trotting down the main hall to the back porch without giving the bloodstains under his feet or the terrible bench so much as a glance (well, maybe just one). On the back porch is a vast lumpy couch that exudes weird smells when you sit down on it.—It smells like fried farts, Paul said one day, and Scott laughed until he wet his pants. (If Daddy had been there, wetting his pants would have meant BIG TROUBLE, but Daddy was at work.) Scott goes to this couch now, where Clyde used to lie on his back and play with the spools of thread Paul and Scott would dangle above him, reaching up with his front paws and making a giant boxing shadow-cat on the wall. Now Scott falls on his knees and looks under the lumpy cushions one by one until he finds the third scrap of paper, the third station of the bool, and this one sends him to—

It doesn't matter where it sends him. What matters is that long suspended day. There are two boys who spend the morning ranging in and around a slumped distempered farmhouse far out in the country as the sun climbs slowly in the sky toward depthless shadowless noon. This is a simple tale of shouts and laughter and dooryard dust and socks that fall down until they puddle around dirty ankles; this is a story of boys who are too busy to pee inside and so water the briars on the south side of the house instead. It's about a little kid not that long out of his diapers collecting slips of paper from the foot of a ladder leading up to the barn loft, from under the porch stoop steps, from behind the junked-out Maytag washer in the backyard, and beneath a stone near the old dry well. (— Don't fall in, you little booger! says the spooky Daddyvoice, now coming from the high weeds at the edge of the bean field, which has been left fallow this year.) And finally Scott is directed this way:

15 I'M UNDERNEATH YOUR EVERY DREEM

Underneath my every dream, he thinks. Underneath my every dream…where is that?

—Need help, you little booger? the spooky voice intones.— Because I'm getting hungry for my lunch.

Scott is, too. It's afternoon, now, he's been at this for hours, but he asks for another minute. The spooky Daddyvoice informs him he can have thirty seconds.

Scott thinks furiously. Underneath my every dream…underneath my every…

He's blessedly de-quipped with ideas having to do with the subconscious mind or the id, but has already begun to think in metaphor, and the answer comes to him in a divine, happy flash. He races up the stairs as fast as his small legs will carry him, hair flying back from his tanned and grimy forehead. He goes to his bed in the room he shares with Paul, looks beneath his pillow, and sure enough, there is his bottle of RC Cola—a tall one!—along with a final slip of paper. The message on it is the same as always:

16 BOOL! THE END!

He lifts the bottle as he will much later hold up a certain silver spade (a hero is what he feels like), then turns around. Paul comes sauntering in the door, holding his own bottle of RC and carrying the church key from the Things Drawer in the kitchen.

—Not bad, Scott-O. Took you awhile, but you got there.

Paul opens his bottle, then Scott's. They clink the longnecks together. Paul says this is "having a host," and when you do it you have to make a wish.

—What do you wish for, Scott?

—I wish the Bookmobile comes this summer. What do you wish for, Paul?

His brother looks at him calmly. In a little while he will go downstairs and make them peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, taking the step-stool from the back porch, where their fatally noisy pet once slept and played, in order to get a fresh jar of Shedd's from the top shelf in the pantry. And he says

11

But here Scott falls silent. He looks at the bottle of wine, but the bottle of wine is empty. He and Lisey have taken off their parkas and laid them aside. It has grown more than warm under the yum-yum tree; it's hot, really just short of stifling, and Lisey thinks: We'll have to leave soon. If we don't, the snow lying on the fronds will melt enough to come crashing down on us.

12

Sitting in her kitchen with the menu from The Antlers in her hands, Lisey thought, I'll have to leave these memories soon, too. If I don't, something a lot heavier than snow will come crashing down on me.

But wasn't that what Scott had wanted? What he'd planned? And wasn't this bool hunt her chance to strap it on?

Oh, but I'm scared. Because now I'm so close.

Close to what? Close to what?

"Hush," she whispered, and shivered as if before a cold wind. One all the way down from Yellowknife, perhaps. But then, because she was two-minded, two-hearted: "Just a little more."

It's dangerous. Dangerous, little Lisey.

She knew it was, could already see bits of the truth shining through holes in her purple curtain. Shining like eyes. Could hear voices whispering that there were reasons why you didn't look into mirrors unless you really had to (especially not after dark and never at twilight), reasons to avoid fresh fruit after sunset and to fast completely between midnight and six AM.

Reasons not to unbury the dead.

But she didn't want to leave the yum-yum tree. Not just yet.

Didn't want to leave him.

He had wished for the Bookmobile, even at the age of three a very Scott wish. And Paul? What was Paul's

13

"What, Scott?" she asks him. "What was Paul's wish?"

"He said, 'I wish Daddy dies at work. That he gets lectercuted and dies.'"

She looks at him, mute with horror and pity.

Abruptly Scott begins stuffing things back into the pack. "Let's get out of here before we roast," he says. "I thought I could tell you a lot more, Lisey, but I can't. And don't say I'm not like the old man, because that's not the point, okay? The point is that everyone in my family got some of it."

"Paul, too?"

"I don't know if I can talk about Paul anymore now."

"Okay," she says. "Let's go back. We'll take a nap, then build a snowman, or something."

The look of intense gratitude he shoots her makes her feel ashamed, because really, she was ready for him to stop—she's taken in all she can process, at least for the time being. In a word, she's freaked. But she can't leave it completely, because she's got a good idea of how the rest of this story must go. She almost thinks she could finish it for him. But first she has a question.

"Scott, when your brother went after the RC Colas that morning…the prizes for the good bool…"

He's nodding, smiling. "The great bool."

"Uh-huh. When he went down to that little store…Mulie's…didn't anybody think it was weird to see a six-year-old kid come in all covered with cuts? Even if the cuts were covered with Band-Aids?"

He stops doing up the buckles on the pack and looks at her very seriously. He's still smiling, but the flush in his cheeks has faded almost entirely; his skin looks pale, almost waxy. "The Landons are fast healers," he says. "Didn't I ever tell you that?"

"Yes," she agrees. "You did." And then, freaked or not, she pushes ahead a little farther. "Seven more years," she says.

"Seven, yes." He looks at her, the pack between his bluejeaned knees. His eyes ask how much she wants to know. How much she dares to know.

"And Paul was thirteen when he died?"

"Thirteen. Yes." His voice is calm enough, but now all the red is gone from his cheeks, although she can see sweat trickling down the skin there, and his hair is limp with it. "Almost fourteen."

"And your father, did he kill him with his knife?"

"No," Scott says in that same calm voice, "with his rifle. His .30-06. In the cellar. But Lisey, it's not what you think."

Not in a rage, that's what she believes he's trying to tell her. Not in a rage but in cold blood. That is what she thinks under the yum-yum tree, when she still sees Part Three of her fiancé's story as "The Murder of the Saintly Older Brother."

14

Hush, Lisey, hush, little Lisey, she told herself in the kitchen—badly frightened now, and not only because she had been so wrong in what she'd believed about the death of Paul Landon. She was frightened because she was realizing—too late, too late—that what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after.

Even if the memories are insane.

"I don't have to remember," she said, bending the menu swiftly back and forth in her hands. "I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to unbury the dead, crazy shite like that doesn't happen, it

15

"It isn't what you think."

She will think what she thinks, however; she may love Scott Landon, but she isn't bound to the wheel of his terrible past, and she will think what she thinks. She will know what she knows.

"And you were ten when it happened? When your father—?"

"Yes."

Just ten years old when his father killed his beloved older brother. When his father murdered his beloved older brother. And Part Four of this story has its own dark inevitability, doesn't it? There's no doubt in her mind. She knows what she knows. The fact that he was only ten doesn't change it. He was, after all, a prodigy in other ways.

"And did you kill him, Scott? Did you kill your father? You did, didn't you?"

His head is lowered. His hair hangs, obscuring his face. Then from below that dark curtain comes a single hard dry barking sob. It is followed by silence, but she can see his chest heaving, trying to unlock. Then:

"I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun and then dump him down the old dry well. It was in March, during the bad sleet-storm. I drug him outside by the feet. I tried to take him where Paul was burrit but I coont. I trite, I trite and I trite, but Lisey he woon't go. He was like the firs' shovel. So I dump him down the well. So far as I know he's still there, although when they auctioned the farm I was…I…Lisey…I…I…I was afraid…"

He reaches out for her blindly and if she hadn't been there he would have gone right on his face but she is there and then they are

They are

Somehow they are

16

"No!" Lisey snarled. She threw the menu, now so strenuously bent it was almost a tube, back into the cedar box and slammed the lid. But it was too late. She had gone too far. It was too late because

17

Somehow they're outside in the pouring snow.

She took him in her arms under the yum-yum tree, and then

(boom! bool!)

they are outside in the snow.

18

Lisey sat in her kitchen with the cedar box on the table before her, eyes closed. The sunlight pouring in the east window came through her lids and made a dark red beet soup that moved with the rhythm of her heart—a rhythm that was just now much too fast.

She thought: All right, that one got through. But I guess I can live with just one. Just one won't kill me.

I trite and I trite.

She opened her eyes and looked at the cedar box sitting there on the table. The box for which she had searched so diligently. And thought of something Scott's father had told him. The Landons—and the Landreaus before them—split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky.

The bad-gunky was—among other things—a species of homicidal mania.

And gomers? Scott had given her the lowdown on those that night. Gomers were your garden-variety catatonics, like her very own sister, up there in Greenlawn.

"If this is all about saving Amanda, Scott," Lisey whispered, "you can forget it. She's my sis and I love her, but not quite that much. I'd go back into that…that hell…for you, Scott, but not for her or anyone else."

In the living room the telephone began to ring. Lisey jumped in her seat as if stabbed, and screamed.