Lisey’s Story (16 page)

Amanda's palms had been coated with a whitish cream. “He said stitches would only pull out,” she told them, almost proudly. “And I guess bandages won't stay put. I'm supposed to keep this stuff on them—ugh, doesn't it stink?—and soak them three times a day for the next three days. I have one 'scrip for the cream and one for the soak. He said to try and not bend my hands too much. To pick things up between my fingers, like this.” She tweezed a prehistoric copy of
People
between the first two fingers of her right hand, lifted it a little way, then dropped it.

The nurse appeared. “Dr. Munsinger could see you now. One or both.” Her tone made it clear there was little time to waste. Lisey was sitting on one side of Amanda, Darla on the other. They looked at each other across her. Amanda didn't notice. She was studying the people on the other side of the room with frank interest.

“You go, Lisey,” Darla said. “I'll stay with her.”

The nurse showed Lisey into
EXAMINATION ROOM
2, then went back to the sobbing girl, her lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. Lisey sat in the room's one chair and gazed at the room's one picture: a fluffy cocker spaniel in a field filled with daffodils. After only a few moments (she was sure she would have had to wait longer, had she not been something that needed getting rid of), Dr. Munsinger hurried in. He closed the door on the sound of the teenage girl's noisy sobs and parked one skinny buttock on the examination table.

“I'm Hal Munsinger,” he said.

“Lisa Landon.” She extended her hand. Dr. Hal Munsinger shook it briefly.

“I'd like to get a lot more information on your sister's situation—for the record, you know—but as I'm sure you see, I'm in a bit of a bind here. I've called for backup, but in the meantime, I'm having one of those nights.”

“I appreciate your making any time at all,” Lisey said, and what she appreciated even more was the calm voice she heard issuing from her own mouth. It was a voice that said
all this is under control.
“I'm willing to certify that my sister Amanda isn't a danger to herself, if that's troubling you.”

“Well, you know that troubles me a little, yep, a little, but I'm going to take your word for that. And hers. She's not a minor, and in any case this was pretty clearly not a suicide attempt.” He had been looking at something on his clipboard. Now he looked up at Lisey, and his gaze was uncomfortably penetrating. “Was it?”

“No.”

“No. On the other hand, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see this isn't the first case of self-mutilation with your sister.”

Lisey sighed.

“She told me she's been in therapy, but her therapist left for Idaho.”

Idaho? Alaska? Mars? Who cares where, the bead-wearing bitch is gone.
Out loud she said, “I believe that's true.”

“She needs to get back to working on herself, Mrs. Landon, okay? And soon. Self-mutilation isn't suicide any more than anorexia is, but both are
suicidal,
if you take my meaning.” He took a pad from the pocket of his white coat and began to scribble. “I want to recommend a book to you and your sister. It's called
Cutting Behavior,
by a man named—”

“—Peter Mark Stein,” Lisey said.

Dr. Munsinger looked up, surprised.

“My husband found it after Manda's last . . . after what Mr. Stein calls . . .”

(
her bool her last blood-bool
)

Young Dr. Munsinger was looking at her, waiting for her to finish.

(
go on then Lisey say it say blood-bool
)

She grasped her flying thoughts by main force. “After what Stein would call her last
outletting.
That's the word he uses, isn't it? Outletting?” Her voice was still calm, but she could feel little nestles of sweat in the hollows of her temples. Because that voice inside her was right. Call it an outletting or a blood-bool, both came to the same.
Everything
the same.

“I think so,” Munsinger said, “but it's been several years since I actually read the book.”

“As I say, my husband found it and read it and then got me to read it. I'll dig it out and give it to my sister Darla. And we have another sister in the area. She's in Boston right now, but when she gets back, I'll make sure she reads it, too. And we'll keep an eye on Amanda. She can be difficult, but we love her.”

“Okay, good enough.” He slid his skinny shank off the examination table. The paper covering crackled. “Landon. Your husband was the writer.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry for your loss.”

This was one of the odder things about having been married to a famous man, she was discovering; two years later, people were still condoling with her. She guessed the same would be true two years further along. Maybe ten. The idea was depressing. “Thank you, Dr. Munsinger.”

He nodded, then got back to business, which was a relief. “Case histories having to do with this sort of thing in adult women are pretty thin on the ground. Most commonly we see self-mutilation in—”

There was just time for Lisey to imagine him finishing with—
kids like that weepy brat in the next room,
and then there was a tremendous crash from the waiting area, followed by a confusion of shouts. The door to
EXAMINATION ROOM
2 was jerked open and the nurse was there. She seemed
bigger
somehow, as if trouble had caused her to swell. “Doctor, can you come?”

Munsinger didn't excuse himself, just boogied. Lisey respected him for that: SOWISA.

She got to the door in time to see the good doctor almost knock down the teenage girl, who'd emerged from
EXAMINATION ROOM
1 to check out what was going on, and then bump a gawking Amanda into her sister's arms so hard that they both almost went over. The State Cop and the County Mounty were standing around the seemingly uninjured boy who'd been waiting to make a call. He now lay on the floor either unconscious or in a faint. The boy with the gash in his cheek continued to talk on the phone as if nothing had happened. That made Lisey think of a poem Scott had once read to her—a wonderful, terrible poem about how the world just went on rolling without giving a

(
shite
)

good goddam how much pain you were in. Who had written it? Eliot? Auden? The man who had also written the poem about the death of the ball-turret gunner? Scott could have told her. In that moment she would have given every cent she had if she could have turned to him and asked which of them had written that poem about suffering.

“Are you sure you'll be all right?” Darla asked. She was standing in the open door of Amanda's little house an hour or so later, the mild June nightbreeze frisking around their ankles and leafing through the pages of a magazine on the hall table.

Lisey made a face. “If you ask me that again, I'm gonna throw you out on your head. We'll be
fine.
Some cocoa—which I'll help her with, since cups are going to be hard for her in her current condish—”

“Good,” Darla said. “Considering what she did with the last one.”

“Then off to bed. Just two Debusher old maids, without a single dildo between em.”

“Very funny.”

“Tomorrow, up with the sun! Coffee! Cereal! Off to fill her prescriptions! Back here to soak the hands! Then, Darla-darlin,
you're
on duty!”

“Just as long as you're sure.”

“I am. Go home and feed your cat.”

Darla gave her a final doubtful look, followed by a peck on the cheek and her patented sideways hug. Then she walked down the crazy-paving toward her little car. Lisey closed the door, locked it, and glanced at Amanda, sitting on the couch in a cotton nightie, looking serene and at peace. The title of an old gothic romance floated through her mind . . . one she might have read as a teenager.
Madam, Will You Talk?

“Manda?” she said softly.

Amanda looked up at her, and her blue Debusher eyes were so wide and trusting that Lisey didn't think she could lead Amanda toward what it was that she, Lisey, wanted to hear about: Scott and bools, Scott and blood-bools. If Amanda came to it on her own, perhaps as they lay together in the dark, that would be one thing. But to take her there, after the day Amanda had just put in?

You've had quite a day yourself, little Lisey.

That was true, but she didn't think it justified disturbing the peace she now saw in Amanda's eyes.

“What is it, Little?”

“
Would
you like some cocoa before bed?”

Amanda smiled. It made her years younger. “Cocoa before bed would be lovely.”

So they had cocoa, and when Amanda had trouble with her cup, she found herself a crazily twisted plastic straw—it would have been perfectly at home on the shelves of the Auburn Novelty Shop—in one of her kitchen cupboards. Before dunking one end in her cocoa, she held it up to Lisey (tweezed between two fingers, just as the doctor had shown her) and said, “Look, Lisey, it's my
brain.
”

For a moment Lisey could only gape, unable to believe she had actually heard Amanda making a joke. Then she cracked up. They both did.

They drank their cocoa, took turns brushing their teeth just as they had so long ago in the farmhouse where they'd grown up, and then went to
bed. And once the bedside lamp was out and the room was dark, Amanda spoke her sister's name.

Oboy, here it comes,
Lisey thought uneasily.
Another diatribe at good old Charlie. Or . . . is it the bool? Is it something about that, after all? And if it is, do I really want to hear?

“What, Manda?”

“Thank you for helping me,” Amanda said. “The stuff that doctor put on my hands makes them feel ever so much better.” Then she rolled over on her side.

Lisey was stunned again—was that really all? It seemed so, because a minute or two later, Amanda's breathing dropped into the slower, steeper respirations of sleep. She might be awake in the night wanting Tylenol, but right now she was gone.

Lisey did not expect to be so fortunate. She hadn't slept with anyone since the night before her husband left on his last trip, and had fallen out of the habit. Also, she had “Zack McCool” to think about, not to mention “Zack”'s employer, the Incunk son of a bitch Woodbody. She'd talk to Woodbody soon. Tomorrow, in fact. In the meantime, she'd do well to resign herself to some wakeful hours, maybe a whole night of them, with the last two or three spent in Amanda's Boston rocker downstairs . . . if, that was, she could find something on Amanda's bookshelves worth reading . . .

Madam, Will You Talk?
she thought.
Maybe Helen MacInnes wrote that book. It surely wasn't by the man who wrote the poem about the ball-turret gunner . . .

And on that thought, she fell into a deep and profound sleep. There were no dreams of the
PILLSBURY'S BEST
magic carpet. Or of anything else.

She awoke in the deepest ditch of the night, when the moon is down and the hour is none. She was hardly aware she was awake, or that she had snuggled against Amanda's warm back as she had once snuggled
against Scott's, or that she had fitted the balls of her knees to the hollows of Manda's, as she had once done with Scott—in their bed, in a hundred motel beds. Hell, in five hundred, maybe seven hundred, do I hear a thousand, come a thousand, someone gimme thousand. She was thinking of bools and blood-bools. Of SOWISA and how sometimes all you could do was hang your head and wait for the wind to change. She was thinking that if darkness had loved Scott, why then that was true love, wasn't it, for he had loved it as well; had danced with it across the ballroom of years until it had finally danced him away.

She thought:
I am going there again.

And the Scott she kept in her head (at least she
thought
it was that Scott, but who knew for sure) said:
Where are you going, Lisey? Where now, babyluv?

She thought:
Back to the present.

And Scott said:
That movie was
Back to the Future.
We saw it together.

She thought:
This was no movie, this is our life.

And Scott said:
Baby, are you strapped?

She thought:
Why am I in love with such a

He's such a fool,
she's thinking.
He's a fool and I'm another for bothering with him.

Still she stands looking out onto the back lawn, not wanting to call him, but starting to feel nervous now because he walked out the kitchen door and down the back lawn into the eleven o'clock shadows almost ten minutes ago, and what can he be doing? There's nothing down there but hedge and—

From somewhere not too far distant come the sounds of squalling tires, breaking glass, a dog barking, a drunken war-whoop. All the sounds of a college town on a Friday night, in other words. And she's tempted to holler down to him, but if she does that, even if it's just his name she hollers, he'll know she's not pissed at him anymore. Not
as
pissed, anyway.

She isn't, in fact. But the thing is, he picked a really bad Friday night to show up lit up for the sixth or seventh time and really late for the first time. The plan had been to see a movie he was hot for by some Swedish director, and she'd only been hoping it would be dubbed in English instead of with subtitles. So she'd gobbled a quick salad when she got home from work, thinking Scott would take her to the Bear's Den for a hamburger after the show. (If he didn't,
she
would take
him.
) Then the telephone had rung and she'd expected it to be him, hoped he'd had a change of heart and wanted to take her to the Redford movie at the mall in Bangor (please God not dancing at The Anchorage after being on her feet for eight hours). And instead it was Darla, saying she “just called to talk” and then getting down to the real business, which was bitching at her (again) for running away to Never-NeverLand (Darla's term) and leaving her and Amanda and Cantata to cope with all the problems (by which she meant Good Ma, who by 1979 was Fat Ma, Blind Ma, and—worst of all—Gaga Ma) while Lisey “played with the college kids.” Like waitressing eight hours a day was recess. For her, NeverLand was a pizza parlor three miles from the University of Maine campus and the Lost Boys were mostly Delta Taus who kept trying to put their hands up her skirt. God knew her vague dreams of taking a few courses—maybe at night—had dried up and blown away. It wasn't brains she was lacking; it was time and energy. She had listened to Darla rave and tried to keep her temper and of course she'd eventually lost it and the two of them ended up shouting at each other across a hundred and forty miles of telephone line and all the history that lay between them. It had been what her boyfriend would no doubt call a total smuckup, ending with Darla saying what she always said: “Do what you want—you will, anyway, you always do.”