8.

Amanda brightening up was the first good thing. Munsinger, the doctor on duty, was no grizzled vet, that was the second good thing. He didn't look as young as Jantzen, the doc Lisey met during Scott's final illness, but if he was much beyond thirty, she'd be surprised. The third good thing-although she'd never have believed it if anyone had told her in advance-was the arrival of the car-accident folks from down the road in Sweden.

They weren't there when Lisey and Darla escorted Amanda into the Stephens Memorial ER; then the waiting room was empty except for a kid of ten or so and his mother. The kid had a rash and his mother kept snapping at him not to scratch it. She was still snapping when the two of them were called back to one of the examining rooms. Five minutes later the kid reappeared with bandages on his arms and a glum look on his face. Mom had some sample tubes of ointment and was still yapping.

The nurse called Amanda's name. "Dr. Munsinger will see you now, dear." She p.r.o.nounced the last word in the Maine fashion, so that it rhymed with Leah.

Amanda gave first Lisey, then Darla her haughty, red-cheeked, Queen Elizabeth look. "I prefer to see him alone," she said.

"Of course, your Grand High Mysteriousness," Lisey said, and stuck her tongue out at Amanda. At that moment she didn't care if they kept the scrawny, troublesome b.i.t.c.h a night, a week, or a year and a day. Who cared what Amanda might have whispered at the kitchen table when Lisey had been kneeling beside her? Probably it had been boo, as she'd told Darla. Even if it had been the other word, did she really want to go back to Amanda's house, sleep in the same room with her, and breathe her crazy vapors when she had a perfectly good bed of her own at home? Case smucking closed, babyluv, Scott would have said.

"Just remember what we agreed on," Darla said. "You got mad and you cut yourself because he wasn't there. You're better now. You're over it."

Amanda gave Darla a look Lisey absolutely could not read. "That's right," she said. "I'm over it."

9.

The car-accident folks from the little town of Sweden arrived shortly thereafter. Lisey wouldn't have counted it a good thing if any of them had been seriously hurt, but that did not appear to be the case. All of them were ambulating, and two of the men were actually laughing about something. Only one of them-a girl of about seventeen-was crying. She had blood in her hair and snot on her upper lip. There were six of them in all, almost certainly from two different vehicles, and a strong smell of beer was coming from the two laughing men, one of whom appeared to have a sprained arm. The s.e.xtet was shepherded in by two med-techs wearing East Stoneham Rescue jackets over civilian clothes, and two cops: a State Policeman and a County Mounty. All at once the little ER waiting room seemed absolutely stuffed. The nurse who had called Amanda dear popped her startled head out for a look, and a moment later young Dr. Munsinger did the same. Not long after that the teenage girl went into a noisy fit of hysterics, announcing to all and sundry that her stepmom was gonna murdalize her. A few moments after that the nurse came to get her (she didn't call the hysterical teenager dear, Lisey noted), and then Amanda came out of EXAMINATION ROOM 2, clumsily carrying her own sample-sized tubes. There were also a couple of folded prescription slips poking from the left pocket of her baggy jeans.

"I think we may go," Amanda said, still in haughty Grand Lady mode.

Lisey thought that was too good to be true even with the relative youth of the doctor on duty and the fresh influx of patients, and she was right. The nurse leaned out of EXAMINATION ROOM 1 like an engineer from the cab of a locomotive and said, "Are you two ladies Miss Debusher's sisters?"

Lisey and Darla nodded. Guilty as charged, judge.

"Doctor would like to speak to you for a minute before you go." With that she pulled her head back into the room, where the girl was still sobbing.

On the other side of the waiting room, the two beer-smelling men burst out laughing again, and Lisey thought: Whatever may be wrong with them, they must not have been responsible for the accident. And indeed, the cops seemed to be concentrating on a white-faced boy of about the same age as the girl with the blood in her hair. Another boy had commandeered the pay phone. He had a badly gashed cheek which Lisey was sure would take st.i.tches. A third waited his turn to make a call. This boy had no visible injuries.

Amanda's palms had been coated with a whitish cream. "He said st.i.tches 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."

10.

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 c.o.c.ker 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 b.u.t.tock 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 b.u.mp 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 (s.h.i.te) good G.o.ddam 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.

11.

"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 d.i.l.d.o between em."

"Very funny."

"Tomorrow, up with the sun! Coffee! Cereal! Off to fill her prescriptions! Back here to soak the hands! Then, Darladarlin, 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 t.i.tle 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.

12.

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 b.i.t.c.h 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.

13.

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 b.a.l.l.s of her knees to the hollows of Manda's, as she had once done with Scott-in their bed, in a hundred motel beds. h.e.l.l, 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 14.

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 gla.s.s, a dog barking, a drunken warwhoop. 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 p.i.s.sed at him anymore. Not as p.i.s.sed, 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 subt.i.tles. 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 G.o.d 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 b.i.t.c.hing 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. G.o.d 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."

After that she hadn't wanted the slice of cheesecake she'd brought home from the restaurant for dessert, and she certainly hadn't wanted to go to any Ingmar Bergman movie...but she had wanted Scott. Yes. Because over the last couple of months, and especially over the last four or five weeks, she's come to depend on Scott in a funny way. Maybe it's corny- probably-but there's a feeling of safety when he puts his arms around her that wasn't there with any of her other guys; what she felt with and for most of them was either impatience or wariness. (Sometimes fleeting l.u.s.t.) But there is kindness in Scott, and from the first she felt interest coming from him- interest in her-that she could hardly believe, because he's so much smarter and so talented. (To Lisey, the kindness means more than either.) But she does believe it. And he speaks a language she grasped greedily from the beginning. Not the language of the Debushers, but one she knows very well, just the same-it's as if she's been speaking it in dreams.

But what good is talk, and a special language, if there's no one to talk to? Someone to cry to, even? That's what she needed tonight. She's never told him about her crazy f.u.c.ked-up family-oh, pardon me, that's crazy smucked-up family, in Scott-talk-but she meant to tonight. Felt she had to or explode from pure misery. So of course he picked tonight of all nights not to show up. As she waited she tried to tell herself that Scott certainly didn't know she'd just had the world's worst fight with her b.i.t.c.h of an older sister, but as six became seven became eight, do I hear nine, come nine, someone gimme nine, as she picked at the cheesecake a little more and then threw it away because she was just too smucking...no, too f.u.c.king mad to eat it, we got nine, anybody gimme ten, I got ten o'clock and still no '73 Ford with one flickery headlight pulling up in front of her North Main Street apartment, she became angrier still, can anybody gimme furious.

She was sitting in front of the TV with a barely tasted gla.s.s of wine beside her and an unwatched nature program before her by the time her anger pa.s.sed over into a state of fury, and that was also when she became positive that Scott would not stand her up completely. He would make the scene, as the saying was. In hopes of getting his end wet. Another one of Scott's catches from the word-pool where we all go down to cast our nets, and how charming it was! How charming they all were! There was also getting your ashes hauled, dipping your wick, making the beast with two backs, choogling, and the very elegant ripping off a piece. How very Never-NeverLand they all were, and as she sat there listening for the sound of her particular Lost Boy's '73 Ford Fairlane-you couldn't miss that throaty burble, there was a hole in the m.u.f.fler or something- she thought of Darla saying, Do what you want, you always do. Yes, and here she was, little Lisey, queen of the world, doing what she wanted, sitting in this cruddy apartment, waiting for her boyfriend who'd turn up drunk as well as late-but still wanting a piece because they all wanted that, it was even a joke, Hey waitress, bring me the Sheepherder's Special, a cup of c.u.moffee and a piece of ewe. Here she was, sitting in a lumpy thrift-shop chair with her feet aching at one end and her head throbbing at the other, while on the TV-snowy, because the K-mart rabbit-ears brought in smuck-all for reception-she was watching a hyena eat a dead gopher. Lisey Debusher, queen of the world, leading the glamorous life.

And yet as the hands of the clock crept past ten, had she not also felt a kind of low, crabby happiness creeping in? Now, looking anxiously down the shadowed lawn, Lisey thinks the answer is yes. Knows the answer is yes. Because sitting there with her headache and a gla.s.s of harsh red wine, watching the hyena dine on the gopher while the narrator intoned, "The predator knows he may not eat so well again for many days," Lisey was pretty sure she loved him and knew things that could hurt him.

That he loved her too? Was that one of them?

Yes, but in this matter his love for her was secondary. What mattered here was how she saw him: dead level. His other friends saw his talent, and were dazzled by it. She saw how he sometimes struggled to meet the eyes of strangers. She understood that, underneath all his smart (and sometimes brilliant) talk, in spite of his two published novels, she could hurt him badly, if she wanted to. He was, in her Dad's words, cruising for a bruising. Had been his whole charmed smucking-no, check that-his whole charmed f.u.c.king life. Tonight the charm would break. And who would break it? She would.

Little Lisey.

She had turned off the TV, gone into the kitchen with her gla.s.s of wine, and poured it down the sink. She no longer wanted it. It now tasted sour in her mouth as well as harsh. You're turning it sour, she thought. That's how p.i.s.sed-off you are. She didn't doubt it. There's an old radio placed precariously on the window-ledge over the sink, an old Philco with a cracked case. It had been Dandy's; he kept it out in the barn and listened to it while he was a-choring. It's the only thing of his Lisey still has, and she keeps it in the window because it's the only place where it will pick up local stations. Jodotha gave it to him one Christmas, and it was secondhand even then, but when it was unwrapped and he saw what it was, he grinned until it seemed his face would crack and how he thanked her! Over and over! It was ever Jodi who was his favorite, and it was Jodi who sat at the dinner-table one Sunday and announced to her parents-h.e.l.l, announced to all of them-that she was pregnant and the boy who'd gotten her that way had run off to enlist in the Navy. She wanted to know if maybe Aunt Cynthia over in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, could take her in until the baby was put out for adoption-that was how Jodi said it, as though it were an old china cabinet at a yard sale. Her news had been greeted by an unaccustomed silence at the dinner-table. For one of the few times in Lisey's memory-maybe for the only time in Lisey's memory-the constant chattering conversation of knives and forks against plates as seven hungry Debushers raced the roast to the bone had stopped. At last Good Ma had asked, Have you talked to G.o.d about this, Jodotha? And Jodi-right back atcha, Good Ma: It was Don Cloutier got me in the family way, not G.o.d. That was when Dad left the table and his favorite daughter behind without a word or backward look. A few moments later Lisey had heard the sound of his radio coming from the barn, very faint. Three weeks later he'd had the first of his strokes. Now Jodi's gone (although not yet to Miami, that is years in the future) and it's Lisey who bears the brunt of Darla's outraged calls, little Lisey, and why? Because Canty is on Darla's side and calling Jodi does neither of them any good. Jodi is different from the other Debusher girls. Darla calls her cold, Canty calls her selfish, and they both call her uncaring, but Lisey thinks it's something else-something better and finer. Of the five girls, Jodi is the one true survivor, completely immune to the fumes of guilt rising from the old family teepee. Once Granny D generated those fumes, then their mother, but Darla and Canty stand ready to take over, already understanding that if you call that poisonous, addictive smoke "duty," n.o.body tells you to put the fire out. As for Lisey, she only wishes she were more like Jodi, that when Darla calls she could laugh and say Blow it out your a.s.s, Darla-darlin; you made your bed, so go on and sleep in it.

15.

Standing in the kitchen doorway. Looking into the long, sloping backyard. Wanting to see him come walking back out of the darkness. Wanting to holler him back-yes, more than ever- but stubbornly holding his name behind her lips. She waited for him all evening. She will wait a little longer.