Lisey's Story

IV. Lisey and The Blood-Bool

(All the Bad-Gunky)

1

Driving to Amanda's along the recently widened and repaved Route 17 was a matter of fifteen minutes, even slowing for the blinker where 17 crossed the Deep Cut Road to Harlow. Lisey spent more of it than she wanted to thinking about bools in general and one bool in particular: the first. That one had been no joke.

"But the little idiot from Lisbon Falls went ahead and married him anyway," she said, laughing, then took her foot off the gas. Here was Patel's Market on the left—Texaco self-serve pumps on clean black asphalt under blinding white lights—and she felt an amazingly strong urge to pull in and grab a pack of cigarettes. Good old Salem Lights. And while she was there, she could get some of those Nissen doughnuts Manda liked, the squash ones, and maybe some HoHos for herself.

"You numbah one crazy baby," she said, smiling, and stepped smartly down on the gas again. Patel's receded. She was running with her dims on now, although there was still plenty of twilight. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw the silly silver shovel lying on the back seat, and said it again, this time laughing: "You numbah one crazy baby, ah so!"

And what if she was? Ah so what?

2

Lisey parked behind Darla's Prius and was only halfway to the door of Amanda's trim little Cape Cod when Darla came out, not quite running and struggling not to cry.

"Thank God you're here," she said, and when Lisey saw the blood on Darla's hands she thought of bools again, thought of her husband-to-be coming out of the dark and holding out his hand to her, only it hadn't really looked like a hand anymore.

"Darla, what—"

"She did it again! That crazy bitch went and cut herself again! All I did was go to use the bathroom…I left her drinking tea in the kitchen…'Are you okay, Manda,' I said…and…"

"Hold on," Lisey told her, forcing herself to at least sound calm. She'd always been the calm one, or the one who put on that face; the one who said things like Hold on and Maybe it's not that bad. Wasn't that supposed to be the oldest child's job? Well, maybe not if the oldest child turned out to be a smucking mental case.

"Oh, she's not gonna die, but what a mess," Darla said, beginning to cry after all. Sure, now that I'm here you let go, Lisey thought. Never occurs to any of you that little Lisey might have a few problems of her own, does it?

Darla blew first one side of her nose and then the other onto Amanda's darkening lawn in a pair of unladylike honks. "What a freakin mess, maybe you're right, maybe a place like Greenlawn's the answer…if it's private, that is…and discreet…I just don't know…maybe you can do something with her, probably you can, she listens to you, she always has, I'm at my wits' end…"

"Come on, Darl," Lisa said soothingly, and here was a revelation: she didn't really want cigarettes at all. Cigarettes were yesterday's bad habit. Cigarettes were as dead as her late husband, collapsed at a reading two years ago and died shortly thereafter in a Kentucky hospital, bool, the end. What she wanted to be holding wasn't a Salem Light but the handle of that silver spade.

There was comfort you didn't even have to light.

3

It's a bool, Lisey!

She heard it again as she turned on the light in Amanda's kitchen. And saw him again, walking toward her up the shadowy lawn behind her apartment in Cleaves Mills. Scott who could be crazy, Scott who could be brave, Scott who could be both at the same time, under the right circumstances.

And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!

Behind the apartment where she taught him to fuck and he taught her to say smuck and they taught each other to wait, wait, wait for the wind to change. Scott wading through the heavy, heady smell of mixed flowers because it was almost summer and Parks Greenhouse was down there and the louvers were open to let in the night air. Scott walking out of all that perfumed exhalation, that late-spring night, and into the light of the back door where she stood waiting. Pissed off at him, but not as pissed; in fact almost ready to make up. She had, after all, been stood up before (although never by him), and she'd had boyfriends turn up drunk before (including him). And oh when she had seen him—

Her first blood-bool.

And now here was another. Amanda's kitchen was daubed and smeared and splattered with what Scott had sometimes been pleased to call—usually in a bad Howard Cosell imitation—"the claret." Red droplets of it ran across Manda's cheery yellow Formica counter; a smear of it bleared the glass front of the microwave; there were blips and blots and even a single foottrack on the linoleum. A dishtowel dropped in the sink was soaked with it.

Lisey looked at all this and felt her heart speed up. It was natural, she told herself; the sight of blood did that to people. Plus, she was at the end of a long and stressful day. The thing you want to remember is that it almost certainly looks worse than it really is. You can bet she spread it around on purpose—there was never anything wrong with Amanda's sense of the dramatic. And you've seen worse, Lisey. The thing she did to her belly-button, for instance. Or Scott back in Cleaves. Okay?

"What?" Darla asked.

"I didn't say anything," Lisey replied. They were standing in the doorway, looking at their unfortunate older sister, who sat at the kitchen table—also surfaced in cheery yellow Formica—with her head bent and her hair hanging in her face.

"You did, you said okay."

"Okay, I said okay," Lisey replied crossly. "Good Ma used to say people who talk to themselves have money in the bank." And she did. Thanks to Scott, she had just over or just under twenty million, depending on how the market in T-bills and certain stocks had done that day.

The idea of money didn't seem to draw much water when you were in a blood-smeared kitchen, however. Lisey wondered if Mandy had never used shit simply because she'd never thought of it. If so, that was genuine by-God good fortune, wasn't it?

"You took away the knives?" she asked Darla, sotto voce.

"Of course I did," Darla said indignantly…but in the same low voice. "She did it with pieces of her teacup, Lisey. While I was having a pee."

Lisey had figured that out for herself and had already made a mental note to go to Wal-Mart for new ones just as soon as she could. Fun Yellow to match the rest of the kitchen if possible, but the real requirement was that they be the plastic ones with the little stickers reading UNBREAKABLE on the sides.

She knelt beside Amanda and moved to take her hand. Darla said, "That's what she cut, Lise. She did both palms." Doing so very gently, Lisey plucked Amanda's hands out of her lap. She turned them over and winced. The cuts were starting to clot, but they still made her stomach hurt. And of course they made her think again of Scott coming out of the summer darkness and holding out his dripping hand like a goddam loveoffering, an act of atonement for the terrible sins of getting drunk and forgetting they had a date. Sheesh, and they called Cole crazy?

Amanda had cut diagonally from the base of her thumbs to the base of her pinky fingers, severing heartlines, lovelines, and all the other lines along the way. Lisey could understand how she'd done the first one, but the second? That must have been hard cheese indeed (as the saying was). But she had managed, and then she had gone around the kitchen like a woman putting the icing on a madcake—Hey, looka me! Looka me! You not numbah one crazy baby, I numbah one! Manda numbah one crazy baby, you bet! All while Darla had been on the toilet, doing no more than whizzing a little lemonade and blotting the old bush, way to go Amanda, you also numbah one speed-devil baby.

"Darla—these are beyond Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide, hon. She's got to go to the Emergency Room."

"Oh, ratfuck," Darla said dismally, and began to cry again.

Lisey looked into Amanda's face, which was still barely visible through the screening wings of her hair. "Amanda," she said.

Nothing. No movement.

"Manda."

Nothing. Amanda's head dropped like a doll's. Damned Charlie Corriveau! Lisey thought. Damned smucking Frenchy Corriveau! But of course if it hadn't been "Shootin' Beans," it would have been someone or something else. Because the Amandas of the world were just made that way. You kept expecting them to fall down and thinking it was a miracle they didn't, and finally the miracle got tired of happening and fell over and took a seizure and died.

"Manda-Bunny."

It was the childhood name that finally got through. Amanda slowly raised her head. And what Lisey saw in her face wasn't the bloody, doped-out vacancy she'd expected (yes, Amanda's lips were all red, and that surely wasn't Max Factor on them) but rather the sparkling, childish, tripwire expression of hauteur and mischief, the one that meant Amanda had Taken Something On Herself, and tears would follow for someone.

"Bool," she whispered, and Lisey Landon's interior temperature seemed to fall thirty degrees in an instant.

4

They got her into the living room, Amanda walking docilely between them, and sat her on the couch. Then Lisey and Darla went back into the kitchen doorway, where they could keep an eye on her and still consult without being overheard.

"What did she say to you, Lisey? You're as white as a damn ghost."

Lisey wished Darla had said sheet. She didn't like hearing the word ghost, especially now that the sun had gone down. Stupid but true.

"Nothing," she said. "Well…boo. Like, 'Boo on you, Lisey, I'm covered with blood, how do you like it?' Look, Darl, you're not the only one stressing out."

"If we take her to the ER, what'll they do to her? Keep her on suicide watch, or something?"

"They might," Lisey admitted. Her head was clearer now. That word, that bool, had worked on her oddly like a slap, or a whiff of smelling salts. Of course it had also scared the hell out of her, but…if Amanda had something to tell her, Lisey wanted to know what it was. She had a sense that all the things that had been happening to her, maybe even "Zack McCool"'s telephone call, were somehow tied together by…what? Scott's ghost? Ridiculous. By Scott's blood-bool, then? How about that?

Or his long boy? The thing with the endless piebald side?

It doesn't exist, Lisey, it never did outside of his imagination…which was sometimes powerful enough to cast itself over people who were close to him. Powerful enough to make you uneasy about eating fruit after dark, for instance, even though you knew it was just some childhood superstition he never completely cast away. And the long boy was like that, too. You know it, right?

Did she? Then why, when she tried to consider the idea, did a kind of mist seem to creep over her thoughts, disrupting them? Why did that interior voice tell her to hush?

Darla was looking at her oddly. Lisey gathered herself and brought herself back to the present moment, the present people, the present problem. And for the first time noticed how tired Darl looked: the grooved lines around her mouth and the dark circles under her eyes. She took her sister by the upper arms, not liking how bony they felt, or the loose way Darl's bra-straps slid between her thumbs and the too-deep hollows of Darla's shoulders. Lisey could remember watching enviously as her big sisters went off to Lisbon High, home of the Greyhounds. Now Amanda was on the cusp of sixty and Darl wasn't far behind. They had become old dogs, indeed.

"But listen, hon," she told Darla, "they don't call it suicide watch—that's mean. They just call it observation." Not sure how she knew this, but almost positive, just the same. "They keep them for twenty-four hours, I think. Maybe forty-eight."

"Can they do it without permission?"

"Unless the person's committed a crime and the cops have brought them in, I don't think so."

"Maybe you ought to call your lawyer and make sure. The Montana guy."

"His name's Montano, and he's probably at home by now. That number's unlisted. I've got it in my address book, but my book's back at the house. I think if we take her to Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, we'll be okay."

No Soapa was how the locals referred to Norway–South Paris in neighboring Oxford County, towns which also happened to be within a day's drive of such exotic-sounding wide spots in the road as Mexico, Madrid, Gilead, China, and Corinth. Unlike the city hospitals in Portland and Lewiston, Stephens Memorial was a sleepy little place.

"I think they'll bandage her hands and let us take her home without too much trouble." Lisey paused. "If."

"If?"

"If we want to take her home. And if she wants to come. I mean, we don't lie or make up some big story, okay? If they ask—and I'm sure they will—we tell the truth. Yes, she's done it before when she's depressed, but not for a long time." "Five years is not such a long—"

"Everything's relative," Lisey said. "And she can explain that her boyfriend of several years just showed up in town with a brand-new wife and that had her feeling rather pissy."

"What if she won't talk?"

"If she won't talk, Darl, I think they'll probably be keeping her for at least twenty-four hours, and with permission from both of us. I mean, do you want her back here if she's still touring the outer planets?"

Darla thought about it, sighed, and shook her head.

"I think a lot of this depends on Amanda," Lisey said. "Step one is getting her cleaned up. I'll get in the shower with her myself, if that's what it takes."

"Yeah," Darla said, running her hand through her cropped hair. "I guess that's the way to go." She suddenly yawned. It was a startlingly wide gawp, one that would have put her tonsils on view if she'd had any left. Lisey took another look at the dark circles under her eyes and realized something she might have gotten much earlier if not for "Zack"'s call.

She took hold of Darla's arms again, lightly but insistently. "Mrs. Jones didn't call you today, did she?"

Darla blinked at her in owly surprise. "No, honey," she said. "Yesterday. Late yesterday afternoon. I came over, bandaged her up as well as I could, and sat up with her most of last night. Didn't I tell you that?"

"No. I was thinking it all happened today."

"Silly Lisey," Darla said, and smiled wanly.

"Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"Didn't want to bother you. You do so much for all of us."

"That's not true," Lisey said. It always hurt her when Darla or Canty (or even Jodotha, over the telephone) said crap like that. She knew it was crazy, but crazy or not, there it was. "That's just Scott's money."

"No, Lisey. It's you. Always you." Darla paused a second, then shook her head. "Never mind. Point is, I thought we could get through it, just the two of us. I was wrong."

Lisey kissed her sister on the cheek, gave her a hug, then went to Amanda and sat down next to her on the couch.

5

"Manda."

Nothing.

"Manda-Bunny?" What the smuck, it had worked before.

And yes, Amanda raised her head. "What. Do you want."

"We have to take you to the hospital, Manda-Bunny."

"I. Don't. Want. To go there."

Lisey was nodding halfway through this short but tortured speech, and starting to unbutton Amanda's blood-spattered blouse. "I know, but your poor old hands need more fixing than Darl and I can give them. Now the question is whether or not you want to come back here or spend the night at the hospital over in No Soapa. If you want to come back here, you get me for a roommate." And maybe we'll talk about bools in general and blood-bools in particular. "What do you say, Manda? Do you want to come back here or do you think you need to be in St. Steve's for awhile?"

"Want. To. Come back. Here." When Lisey urged Amanda to her feet so she could get Amanda's cargo pants off, Amanda stood up willingly enough, but she appeared to be studying the room's light-fixture. If this wasn't what her shrink had called "semi-catatonia," it was too close for Lisey's comfort, and she felt sharp relief when Amanda's next words came out sounding more like those of a human being and less like those of a robot: "If we're going…somewhere…why are you undressing me?"

"Because you need a run through the shower," Lisey said, guiding her in the direction of the bathroom. "And you need fresh clothes. These are…dirty." She glanced back and saw Darla gathering up the shed blouse and pants. Amanda, meanwhile, padded toward the bathroom docilely enough, but the sight of her going away squeezed Lisey's heart. It wasn't Amanda's scabbed and scarred body that did it, but rather the seat of her plain white Boxercraft underpants. For years Amanda had worn boy-shorts; they suited her angular body, were even sexy. Tonight the right cheek of the boxers she wore was smeared a muddy maroon.

Oh Manda, Lisey thought. Oh my dear.

Then she was through the bathroom door, an antisocial X-ray dressed in bra, pants, and white tube socks. Lisey turned to Darla. Darla was there. For a moment all the years and clamoring Debusher voices were, too. Then Lisey turned and went into the bathroom after the one she'd once called big sissa Manda-Bunny, who only stood there on the mat with her head bent and her hands dangling, waiting to be undressed the rest of the way.

Lisey was reaching for the hooks of Manda's bra when Amanda suddenly turned and grabbed her by the arm. Her hands were horribly cold. For a moment Lisey was convinced big sissa Manda-Bunny was going to spill the whole thing, blood-bools and all. Instead she looked at Lisey with eyes that were perfectly clear, perfectly there, and said: "My Charles has married another." Then she put her waxy-cool forehead against Lisey's shoulder and began to cry.

6

The rest of that evening reminded Lisey of what Scott used to call Landon's Rule of Bad Weather: when you slept in, expecting the hurricane to go out to sea, it hooked inland and tore the roof off your house. When you rose early and battened down for the blizzard, you got only snow flurries.

What's the point then? Lisey had asked. They had been lying in bed together—some bed, one of the early beds—snug and spent after love, him with one of his Herbert Tareytons and an ashtray on his chest and a big wind howling outside. What bed, what wind, what storm, or what year she no longer remembered.

The point is SOWISA, he had replied—that she remembered, although at first thought she'd either misheard or misunderstood.

Soweeza? What's soweeza?

He'd snuffed his cigarette and put the ashtray on the table next to the bed. He had taken her face in his hands, covering her ears and shutting out the whole world for a minute with the palms of his hands. He kissed her lips. Then he took his hands away so she could hear him. Scott Landon always wanted to be heard.

SOWISA, babyluv—Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate.

She had turned this over in her mind—she wasn't fast like he was, but she usually got there—and realized that SOWISA was what he called an agronim. Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate. She liked it. It was quite silly, which made her like it even more. She began to laugh. Scott laughed with her, and pretty soon he was as inside her as they were inside the house while the big wind boomed and shook outside.

With Scott she had always laughed a lot.

7

His saying about how the blizzard missed you when you really battened down for the storm recurred to her several times before their little excursion to the ER was over and they had once more returned to Amanda's weather-tight Cape Cod between Castle View and the Harlow Deep Cut. For one thing, Amanda helped matters by brightening up considerably. Morbid or not, Lisey kept thinking about how sometimes a dimming lightbulb will flash bright for an hour or two before burning out forever. This change for the better began in the shower. Lisey undressed and got in with her sister, who initially just stood there with her shoulders slumped and her arms dangling apishly. Then, in spite of using the hand-held attachment and being as careful as she could, Lisey managed to spray warm water directly onto Manda's slashed left palm.

"Ow! Ow!" Manda cried, snatching her hand away. "That hurts, Lisey! Watch where you're pointin that thing, willya, okay?"

Lisey rejoined in exactly the same tone—Amanda would have expected no less, even with both of them buckass naked—but rejoiced at the sound of her sister's anger. It was awake. "Well pardon me all the way to Kittery, but I wasn't the one who took a piece of the damn Pottery Barn to my hand."

"Well, I couldn't get at him, could I?" Amanda asked, and then unleashed a flood of stunning invective aimed at Charlie Corriveau and his new wife—a mixture of adult obscenity and childish poopie-talk that filled Lisey with amazement, amusement, and admiration.

When she paused for breath, Lisey said: "Shitmouth motherfucker, huh? Wow."

Amanda, sullen: "Fuck you too, Lisey."

"If you want to come back home, I wouldn't use a lot of those words on the doc who treats your hands."

"You think I'm stupid, don't you?"

"No. I don't. It's just…saying you were mad at him will be enough."

"My hands are bleeding again."

"A lot?"

"Just a little bit. I think you better put some Vaseline on em."

"Really? Won't it hurt?"

"Love hurts," Amanda said solemnly…and then gave a little snort of laughter that lightened Lisey's heart.

By the time she and Darla bundled her into Lisey's BMW and got on the road to Norway, Manda was asking about Lisey's progress in the study, almost as if this were the end of a normal day. Lisey didn't mention "Zack McCool"'s call, but she told them about "Ike Comes Home" and quoted the single line of copy: "Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine. BOOL! THE END!" She wanted to use that word, that bool, in Mandy's presence. Wanted to see how she'd respond.

Darla responded first. "You married a very strange man, Lisa," she said.

"Tell me something I don't know, darlin." Lisey glanced in the rearview mirror to see Amanda sitting alone in the back seat. In solitary splendor, Good Ma would have said. "What do you think, Manda?"

Amanda shrugged, and at first Lisey thought that was going to be her only response. Then came the flood.

"It was just him, that's all. I hooked a ride with him up the city once—he needed to go to the office-supply store and I needed new shoes, you know, good walking shoes I could wear in the woods for hiking, stuff like that. And we happened to drive by Auburn Novelty. He'd never seen it before and nothing would do but he had to park and go right in. He was like a ten-year-old! I needed Eddie Bauer shitkickers so I could walk in the woods without getting poison ivy all over me and all he wanted to do was buy out that whole freakin store. Itchypowder, joy buzzers, pepper gum, plastic puke, X-ray glasses, you name it, he had it piled up on the counter next to these lollipops, when you sucked em down there was a naked woman inside. He must have bought a hundred dollars' worth of that crazy made-in-Taiwan shite, Lisey. Do you remember?"

She did. Most of all she remembered how he had looked coming home that day, his arms full of bags with laughing cartoon faces and the words LAFF RIOT printed all over them. How full of color his cheeks had been. And shite was what he'd called it, not shit but shite, that was one word he picked up from her, could you believe it. Well, turnabout was fair play, so Good Ma had liked to claim, although shite had been their Dad's word, as it had been Dandy Dave who would sometimes tell folks a thing was no good, so I slang it forth. How Scott had loved it, said it had a weight coming off the tongue that I threw it away or even I flung it away could never hope to match.

Scott with his catches from the word-pool, the story-pool, the myth-pool.

Scott smucking Landon.

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

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 pronounced 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 bitch 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 sextet 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 stitches. 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 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."

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 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.

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 dildo 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 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.

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 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.

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 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

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 glass, 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 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."

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 lust.) 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 fucked-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 bitch 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 fucking 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 glass of wine beside her and an unwatched nature program before her by the time her anger passed 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 muffler 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 cumoffee 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 glass 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 fucking 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 glass 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 pissed-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—hell, 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 God about this, Jodotha? And Jodi—right back atcha, Good Ma: It was Don Cloutier got me in the family way, not God. 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," nobody 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 ass, 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.

But only a little.

She is beginning to be so frightened.

16

Dandy's radio is strictly AM. WGUY's a sundowner and long off the air, but WDER was playing the oldies when she rinsed her wineglass—some fifties hero singing about young love—and went back into the living room and bingo, there he was, standing in the doorway with a can of beer in one hand and his slanted smile on his face. Probably she hadn't heard the sound of his Ford pulling up because of the music. Or the beat of her headache. Or both.

"Hey, Lisey," he said. "Sorry I'm late. Really sorry. A bunch of us from David's Honors seminar got arguing about Thomas Hardy, and—"

She turned away from him without a word and went back into the kitchen, back into the sound of the Philco. Now it was a bunch of guys singing "Sh-Boom." He followed her. She knew he would follow her, it was how these things went. She could feel all the things she had to say to him crowding up in her throat, acid things, poison things, and some lonely, terrified voice told her not to say them, not to this man, and she slang that voice away. In her anger she could do nothing else.

He cocked a thumb at the radio and said, stupidly proud of his useless knowledge: "That's The Chords. The original black version."

She turned to him and said, "Do you think I give a rat's ass who's singing on the radio after I worked eight hours and waited for you another five? And you finally show up at quarter of eleven with a grin on your face and a beer in your hand and a story about how some dead poet ended up being more important to you than I am?"

The grin on his face was still there but it was getting smaller, fading until it was little more than a quirk and one shallow dimple. Water, meanwhile, had risen in his eyes. The lost scared voice tried to call its warning again and she ignored it. This was a cutting party now. In both the fading grin and the growing hurt in his eyes she saw how he loved her, and knew this increased her power to hurt him. Still, she would cut. And why? Because she could.

Standing in the kitchen door and waiting for him to come back, she can't remember all the things she said, only that each one was a little worse, a little more perfectly tailored to hurt. At one point she was appalled to hear how much she sounded like Darla at her worst—just one more hectoring Debusher—and by then his smile was no longer even hanging in there. He was looking at her solemnly and she was terrified by how large his eyes were, magnified by the wetness shimmering on their surfaces until they seemed to eat up his face. She stopped in the middle of something about how his fingernails were always dirty and he gnawed on them like a rat when he was reading. She stopped and at that moment there were no engine sounds from in front of The Shamrock and The Mill downtown, no screeching tires, not even the faint sound of this weekend's band playing at The Rock. The silence was enormous and she realized she wanted to go back and had no idea how to do it. The simplest thing—I love you anyway, Scott, come to bed—will not occur to her until later. Not until after the bool.

"Scott…I—"

She had no idea where to go from there, and it seemed there was no need. Scott raised the forefinger of his left hand like a teacher who means to make a particularly important point, and the smile actually resurfaced on his lips. Some sort of smile, anyway.

"Wait," he said.

"Wait?"

He looked pleased, as if she had grasped a difficult concept. "Wait."

And before she could say anything else he simply walked off into the dark, back straight, walk straight (no drunk in him now), slim hips slinging in his jeans. She said his name once— "Scott?"—but he only raised that forefinger again: wait. Then the shadows swallowed him.

17

Now she stands looking anxiously down the lawn. She has turned off the kitchen light, thinking that may make it easier to see him, but even with the help of the pole-light in the yard next door, the shadows take over halfway down the hill. In the next yard, a dog barks hoarsely. That dog's name is Pluto, she knows because she has heard the people over there yelling at it from time to time, fat lot of good it does. She thinks of the breaking-glass sound she heard a minute ago: like the barking, the breaking sounded close. Closer than the other sounds that populate this busy, unhappy night.

Why oh why did she have to tee off on him like that? She didn't even want to see the stupid Swedish movie in the first place! And why had she felt such joy in it? Such mean and filthy joy?

To that she has no answer. The late-spring night breathes around her, and exactly how long has he been down there in the dark? Only two minutes? Five, maybe? It seems longer. And that sound of breaking glass, did that have anything to do with Scott?

The greenhouse is down there. Parks.

There's no reason that should make her heart beat faster, but it does. And just as she feels that increased rhythm she sees motion beyond the place where her eyes lose their ability to see much of anything. A second later the moving thing resolves itself into a man. She feels relief, but it doesn't dissipate her fear. She keeps thinking about the sound of breaking glass. And there's something wrong with the way he's moving. His limber, straight walk is gone.

Now she does call his name, but what comes out is little more than a whisper: "Scott?" At the same time her hand is scrabbling around on the wall, feeling for the switch that turns on the light over the stoop.

Her call is low, but the shadowy figure plodding up the lawn— yes, that's a plod, all right, not a walk but a plod—raises its head just as Lisey's curiously numb fingers find the light-switch and flick it. "It's a bool, Lisey!" he shouts as the light springs on, and could he have planned it better if he had stage-managed it? She thinks not. In his voice she hears mad jubilant relief, as if he has fixed everything. "And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!"

She has never heard the word before, but she doesn't mistake it for anything else, for boo or book or anything else. It's bool, another Scott-word, and not just any bool but a bloodbool. The kitchen light leaps down the lawn to meet him and he's holding out his left hand to her like a gift, she's sure he means it as a gift, just as she's pretty sure there's still a hand under there someplace, oh pray to Jesus Mary and JoJo the everloving Carpenter there's still a hand under there someplace or he's going to be finishing the book he's working on plus any that might come later typing one-handed. Because where his left hand was there's now just a red and dripping mass. Blood goes slipping between spread starfish things that she supposes are his fingers, and even as she flies to meet him, her feet stuttering down the back porch steps, she's counting those spread red shapes, one two three four and oh thank God, that fifth one's the thumb. Everything's still there, but his jeans are splattered red and still he holds his bloody lacerated hand out to her, the one he plunged through a pane of thick greenhouse glass, shouldering his way through the hedge at the foot of the lawn in order to get to it. Now he's holding out his gift to her, his act of atonement for being late, his blood-bool.

"It's for you," he says as she yanks off her blouse and drapes it around the red and dripping mass, feeling it soak through the cloth at once, feeling the crazy heat of it and knowing—of course!—why that small voice was in such terror of the things she was saying to him, what it knew all along: not only is this man in love with her, he's half in love with death and more than ready to agree with every mean and hurtful thing anyone says about him.

Anyone?

No, not quite. He's not quite that vulnerable. Just anyone he loves. And Lisey suddenly realizes she's not the only one who has said almost nothing about her past.

"It's for you. To say I'm sorry I forgot and it won't happen again. It's a bool. We—"

"Scott, hush. It's all right. I'm not—"

"We call it a blood-bool. It's special. Daddy told me and Paul—"

"I'm not mad at you. I was never mad at you."

He stops at the foot of the splintery back steps, gawking at her. The expression makes him look about ten years old. Her blouse is wrapped clumsily around his hand like a knight's dress gauntlet; once yellow, it's now all bloom and blood. She stands there on the lawn in her Maiden-form bra, feeling the grass tickling her bare ankles. The dusky yellow light which rains on them from the kitchen puts a deep curved shadow between her breasts. "Will you take it?"

He's looking at her with such childish pleading. All the man in him is gone for now. She sees pain in his long and longing glance and knows it's not from his lacerated hand, but she doesn't know what to say. This is beyond her. She's done well to get some sort of compress on the horrible mess he's made south of his wrist, but now she's frozen. Is there a right thing to say? More important, is there a wrong one? One that will set him off again?

He helps her. "If you take a bool—especially a blood-bool—then sorry's okay. Daddy said so. Daddy tole Paul n me over n over." Not told but tole. He has regressed to the diction of his childhood. Oh jeez. Jeez Louise.

Lisey says, "I guess I take it, then, because I never wanted to go see any Swedish-meatball movie with subtitles in the first place. My feet hurt. I just wanted to go to bed with you. And now look, we have to go to the smucking Emergency Room, instead."

He shakes his head, slowly but firmly.

"Scott—"

"If you weren't mad, why did you shout and call me all the bad-gunky?"

All the bad-gunky. Surely another postcard from his childhood. She notes it, puts it away for later examination.

"Because I couldn't shout at my sister anymore," she says. This hits her funny and she begins to laugh. She laughs hard, and the sound so shocks her that she begins to cry. Then she feels light-headed. She sits down on the porch steps, thinking she may faint.

Scott sits beside her. He's twenty-four, his hair falls almost to his shoulders, his face is scruffy with two days' growth, and he's as slim as a rule. On his left hand he wears her blouse, one sleeve now unwrapped and hanging down. He kisses the throbbing hollow of her temple, then looks at her with perfect fond understanding. When he speaks, he sounds almost like himself again.

"I understand," he says. "Families suck."

"Yeah they do," she whispers.

He puts his arm around her—the left one, which she is already thinking of as the blood-bool arm, his gift to her, his crazy smucked-up Friday-night gift.

"They don't have to matter," he says. His voice is weirdly serene. It's as if he hasn't just turned his left hand into so much raw and bleeding meat. "Listen, Lisey: people can forget anything."

She looked at him doubtfully. "Can they?"

"Yes. This is our time now. You and me. That's what matters."

You and me. But does she want that? Now that she sees how narrowly he's balanced? Now that she has a picture of what life with him may be like? Then she thinks of how his lips felt in the hollow of her temple, touching that special secret place, and she thinks, Maybe I do. Doesn't every hurricane have an eye?

"Is it?" she asks.

For several seconds he says nothing. Only holds her. From Cleaves's paltry downtown come the sounds of engines and yells and wild, whooping laughter. It's Friday night and the Lost Boys are at play. But that is not here. Here is all the smell of her long, sloping backyard sleeping toward summer, the sound of Pluto barking under the pole-light next door, and the feel of his arm around her. Even the warm damp press of his wounded hand is comforting, marking the bare skin of her midriff like a brand.

"Baby," he says at last.

Pauses.

Then: "Babyluv."

For Lisey Debusher, twenty-two, weary of her family and equally tired of being on her own, it is enough. Finally enough. He has hollered her home, and in the dark she gives in to the Scott of him. From then until the end she will never look back.

18

When they're in the kitchen again, she unwinds her blouse and sees the damage. Looking at it, she feels another wave of faintness first lift her up toward the bright overhead light and then drop her toward darkness; she has to struggle to stay conscious, and manages to do it by telling herself He needs me. He needs me to drive him to the ER at Derry Home.

He has somehow missed slicing into the veins which lie so close under the wrist—a blue-eyed miracle—but the palm is cut in at least four different places, some of the skin is hanging like wallpaper, and three of what her Dad called "the fat fingers" are also cut. The pièce de résistance is a horrible gash on his forearm with a triangle of thick green glass sticking up from it like a sharkfin. She hears herself make a helpless ouck! sound as he pulls it out—almost casually—and tosses it into the trash. He holds her blood-soaked blouse under his hand and arm as he does this, considerately trying to keep blood off her kitchen floor. He does get a few drops on the lino, but there's surprisingly little to clean up later. There's a high counter-stool that she sometimes sits on when she's peeling veggies, or even when she's washing dishes (when you're on your feet eight hours a day, you take your sitdowns where you can get em), and Scott hooks it over with one foot so he can sit with his hand dripping into the sink. He says he's going to tell her what to do.

"You have to go to the ER," she tells him. "Scott, be sensible! Hands are full of tendons and things! Do you want to lose the use of it? Because you could! You really could! If you're worried about what they'll say, you can cook up some story, cooking up stories is what you do, and I'll back y—"

"If you still want me to go tomorrow, we'll go," he tells her. Now he's entirely his normal self, rational and charming and almost hypnotically persuasive. "I'm not going to die of this tonight, the bleeding's almost stopped already, and besides—do you know what ERs are like on Friday night? Drunks On Parade! First thing Saturday morning would be lots better." He's grinning at her now, that delighted honey, I'm hip grin that almost demands you grin back, and she tries not to, but this is a battle she's losing. "Besides, all the Landons are fast healers. We had to be. I'm going to show you just what to do."

"You act like you've put your hand through a dozen greenhouse windows."

"No," he says, the grin faltering a little. "Never poked a greenhouse until tonight. But I learned some stuff about being hurt. Paul and I both did."

"He was your brother?"

"Yeah. He's dead. Draw a basin of warm water, Lisey, okay? Warm but not quite hot."

She wants to ask him all kinds of questions about this brother

(Daddy tole Paul n me over n over)

she never knew he had, but this isn't the time. Nor will she hector him anymore about going to the Emergency Room, not just now. For one thing if he agreed to go she'd just have to drive him there, and she isn't sure she could do it, she's come over all shaky inside. And he's right about the bleeding, it's slowed way down. Thank God for small favors.

Lisey gets her white plastic basin (Mammoth Mart, seventy-nine cents) from under the sink and fills it with warm water. He plops his lacerated hand into it. At first she's okay—the tendrils of blood lazing their way to the surface don't bother her too much—but when he reaches in and begins to gently rub, the water goes pink and Lisey turns away, asking him why in God's name he's making the cuts bleed all over again like that.

"I want to make sure they're clean," he says. "They should be clean when I go—" He pauses, then finishes: "—to bed. I can stay here, can't I? Please?"

"Yes," she says, "of course you can." And thinks: That isn't what you were going to say.

When he's finished soaking his hand, he pours out the bloody water himself so she won't have to do it, then shows her his hand. Wet and gleaming, the cuts look less dangerous and yet somehow more awful, like crisscrossing fishgills, with pink deepening to red inside them.

"Can I use your box of tea, Lisey? I'll buy you another one, I promise. I've got a royalty check coming. Over five grand. My agent promises on his mother's honor. I told him it was news to me he had one. That's a joke, by the way."

"I know it's a joke, I'm not that dumb—"

"You're not dumb at all."

"Scott, why do you want a whole box of teabags?"

"Get it and find out."

She gets the tea. Still sitting on her stool and working with one-handed care, Scott fills the basin with more not-quite-hot water. Then he opens the box of Lipton teabags. "Paul thought this up," he says excitedly. It's a kid's excitement, she thinks. Look at the neat model airplane I made all by myself, look at the invisible ink I made with the stuff from my chemistry set. He dumps the teabags in, all eighteen or so. They immediately begin staining the water a dull amber as they sink to the bottom of the basin. "It stings a little but it works really really good. Watch!"

Really really good, Lisey notes.

He puts his hand in the weak tea he has made, and for just a moment his lips skin back, revealing his teeth, which are crooked and a bit discolored. "Hurts a little," he says, "but it works. It really really works, Lisey."

"Yes," she says. It's bizarre, but she supposes it might actually do something about preventing infection, or promoting healing, or both. Chuckie Gendron, the short-order cook at the restaurant, is a big fan of the Insider, and she sometimes sneaks a look. Just a couple of weeks ago she read an article on one of the back pages about how tea is supposed to be good for all sorts of things. Of course it was on the same page as an article about Bigfoot bones being found in Minnesota. "Yes, I suppose you're right."

"Not me, Paul." He's excited, and all his color has come back. It's almost as if he never hurt himself at all, she thinks.

Scott jerks his chin at his breast pocket. "Cigarette me, babyluv."

"Should you be smoking with your hand all—"

"Sure, sure."

So she takes his cigarettes out of his breast pocket and puts one in his mouth and lights it for him. Fragrant smoke (she will always love that smell) rises in a blue stack toward the kitchen's sagging, water-stained ceiling. She wants to ask him more about bools, blood-bools in particular. She is starting to get a picture.

"Scott, did your Dad and Mom raise you and your brother?"

"Nope." He's got the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and one eye's squinted shut against the smoke. "Mumma died havin me. Daddy always said I killed her by bein a sleepyhead and gettin too big." He laughs at this as though it's the funniest joke in the world, but it's also a nervous laugh, a kid's laugh at a dirty joke he doesn't quite understand.

She says nothing. She's afraid to.

He's looking down at the place where his hand disappears into the basin, which is now filled with bloodstained tea. He puffs rapidly on his Herbert Tareyton and the ash grows long. His eye is still squinted shut and it makes him look different, somehow. Not like a stranger, exactly, but different. Like… Oh, say like an older brother. One who died.

"But Daddy said it wasn't my fault I stayed asleep when it was time to come out. He said she should have slap me awake and she didn't so I growed too big and she got kilt for it, bool the end." He laughs. The ash falls off his cigarette onto the counter. He doesn't seem to notice. He looks at his hand in the murky tea but says no more.

Which leaves Lisey in a delicate dilemma. Should she ask another question or not? She's afraid he won't answer, that he'll snap at her (he can snap, this she knows; she has audited his Moderns seminar on occasion). She's also afraid he will answer. She thinks he will.

"Scott?" She says this very softly.

"Mmmm?" The cigarette is already three quarters of the way down to what looks like a filter but is, on a Herbert Tareyton, only a kind of mouthpiece.

"Did your Daddy make bools?"

"Blood-bools, sure. For when we didn't dare or to let out the bad-gunky. Paul made good bools. Fun bools. Like treasure hunts. Follow the clues. 'Bool! The End!' and get a prize. Like candy or an RC." The ash falls off his cigarette again. Scott's eyes are on the bloody tea in the basin. "But Daddy gives a kiss." He looks at her and she suddenly understands he knows everything she has been too timid to ask and is answering as well as he can. As well as he dares. "That's Daddy's prize. A kiss when the hurting stops."

19

She has no bandage in her medicine cabinet that will satisfy her, so Lisey ends up tearing long strips from a sheet. The sheet is old, but she mourns its passing just the same—on a waitress's salary (supplemented by niggardly tips from the Lost Boys and only slightly better ones from the faculty members who lunch at Pat's) she can ill afford to raid her linen closet. But when she thinks of the crisscrossing cuts on his hand—and the deeper, longer gill on his forearm—she doesn't hesitate.

Scott's asleep almost before his head hits the pillow on his side of her ridiculously narrow bed; Lisey thinks she will be awake for some time, mulling over the things he's told her. Instead she falls asleep almost at once.

She wakes twice during the night, the first time because she needs to pee. The bed is empty. She sleepwalks to the bathroom, hiking the oversized University of Maine tee-shirt she sleeps in to her hips as she goes, saying "Scott, hurry up, okay, I really have to g—" But when she enters the bathroom, the night-light she always leaves burning shows her an empty room. Scott isn't there. Nor is the toilet-seat up, the way he always leaves it after he takes a whiz.

All at once Lisey no longer has to urinate. All at once she's terrified that pain has awakened him, he's remembered all the things he's told her, and has been crushed by—what do they call them in Chuckie's Insider?—recovered memories.

Are they recovered, or things he's just been keeping to himself? She doesn't know for sure, but she does know that childish way he spoke for awhile was very spooky…and suppose he's gone back down to Parks Greenhouse to finish the job? His throat this time instead of his hand?

She turns toward the dim maw of the kitchen—the apartment consists of only that and the bedroom—and catches sight of him curled up in bed. He's sleeping in his usual semi-fetal position, knees almost to his chest, forehead touching the wall (when they leave this place in the fall, there will be a faint but discernible mark there—Scott's mark). She has told him several times that he'd have more room if he slept on the outside, but he won't. Now he shifts a little, the springs squeak, and in the glow of the streetlight coming in the window, Lisey can see a dark wing of hair fall across his cheek.

He wasn't in bed.

But there he is, on the inside. If she doubts, she could put her hand under the sheaf of hair she's looking at, lift it, feel its weight.

So maybe I just dreamed he was gone?

That makes sense—sort of—but as she goes back into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, she thinks again: He wasn't there. When I got up, the smucking bed was empty.

She puts the ring up after she's finished, because if he gets up in the night, he'll be too asleep to do it. Then she goes back to bed. She's in a doze by the time she gets there. He's beside her now, and that's what matters. Surely that's what matters.

20

The second time she doesn't wake up on her own.

"Lisey."

It's Scott, shaking her.

"Lisey, little Lisey."

She fights it, she put in a hard day—hell, a hard week—but he's persistent.

"Lisey, wake up!"

She expects morning light to lance her eyes, but it's still dark.

"Scott. Hizzit?"

She wants to ask if he's bleeding again, or if the bandage she put on has slipped, but these ideas seem too big and complicated for her fogged-out mind. Hizzit will have to do.

His face is looming over hers, completely awake. He looks excited, but not dismayed or in pain. He says, "We can't go on living like this."

That wakes her up most of the way, because it scares her. What is he saying? That he wants to break up?

"Scott?" She fumbles on the floor, comes up with her Timex, squints at it. "It's quarter past four in the morning!" Sounding put-out, sounding exasperated, and she is those things, but she is also frightened.

"Lisey, we should get a real house. Buy it." He shakes his head. "Nah, that's backwards. I think we ought to get married."

Relief floods her and she slumps back. The watch falls from her relaxing fingers and clatters to the floor. That's all right; Timexes take a licking and keep on ticking. Relief is followed by amazement; she has just been proposed to, like a lady in a romance novel. And relief is followed by a little red caboose of terror. The guy doing the proposing (at quarter past four in the morning, mind you) is the same guy who stood her up last night, tore the shit out of his hand when she yelled at him about it (and a few other things, yeah, okay, true), then came up the lawn holding the wounded hand out to her like some kind of smucking Christmas present. This is the man with the dead brother she only found out about tonight, and the dead mother that he supposedly killed because he—how did the hotshot writer put it?—growed too big.

"Lisey?"

"Shut up, Scott, I'm thinking." Oh but it's hard to think when the moon is down and the hour is none, no matter what your trusty Timex may say.

"I love you," he says mildly.

"I know. I love you, too. That's not the point."

"It might be," he says. "That you love me, I mean. That might be exactly the point. No one's loved me since Paul." A long pause. "And Daddy, I guess."

She gets up on her elbow. "Scott, lots of people love you. When you read from your last book—and the one you're writing now—" She wrinkles her nose. The new one is called Empty Devils, and what she's read of it and heard him read from it she doesn't like. "When you read, nearly five hundred people showed up! They had to move you from the Maine Lounge into Hauck Auditorium! When you were done, they gave you a standing O!"

"That's not love," he says, "that's curiosity. And just between me and thee, it's freakshow stuff. When you publish your first novel at twenty-one, you find out all about freakshow stuff, even if the damn thing only sells to libraries and there's no paperback. But you don't care about the child-prodigy stuff, Lisey—"

"Yes I do—" Wholly awake now, or almost.

"Yes, but…cigarette me, babyluv." His cigarettes are on the floor, in the turtle ashtray she keeps for him. She hands him the ashtray, puts a cigarette in his mouth, and lights it for him. He resumes. "But you also care about whether or not I brush my teeth—"

"Well yeah—"

"And if the shampoo I'm using is getting rid of my dandruff or just causing more of it—"

That reminds her of something. "I bought a bottle of that Tegrin stuff I told you about. It's in the shower. I want you to try it."

He bursts out laughing. "See? See? A perfect example. You take the holistic approach."

"I don't know that word," she says, frowning.

He stubs out the cigarette a quarter smoked. "It means that when you look at me you see me top to bottom and side to side and to you everything weighs the same."

She thinks about it, then nods. "I suppose, sure."

"You don't know what that's like. I put in a childhood when I was only…when I was one thing. The last six years, I've been another. It's a better thing, but still, to most people around here and back at Pitt, Scott Landon is nothing but a…a holy jukebox. Put in a couple of bucks and out comes a smucking story." He doesn't sound angry, but she senses he could become angry. In time. If he doesn't have a place to go and be safe, be right-sized. And yes, she could be that person. She could make that place. He would help her do it. To some extent they have done it already.

"You're different, Lisey. I knew it the first time I met you, on Blues Night in the Maine Lounge—do you remember?"

Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, does she remember. She had gone up to the University that night to look at the Hartgen art exhibition outside Hauck, heard the music coming from the lounge, and went in on what was little more than a whim. He came in a few minutes later, looked around at the mostly full house, and asked if the other end of the couch she was sitting on was taken. She had almost skipped the music. She could have made the eight-thirty bus back to Cleaves if she'd skipped it. That was how close she had come to being in bed alone tonight. The thought makes her feel the way looking down from a high window makes her feel.

She says none of this, only nods.

"To me you're like…" Scott pauses, then smiles. His smile is divine, crooked teeth and all. "You're like the pool where we all go down to drink. Have I told you about the pool?"

She nods again, smiling herself. He hasn't—not directly—but she's heard him talk about it at his readings, and during the lectures she's audited at his enthusiastic invitation, sitting way at the back of Board-man 101 or Little 112. When he talks about the pool he always reaches out, as if he'd put his hands in it if he could, or pull things—language-fishies, maybe—out of it. She finds it an endearing, boyish gesture. Sometimes he calls it the myth-pool; sometimes the word-pool. He says that every time you call someone a good egg or a bad apple you're drinking from the pool or catching tadpoles at its edge; that every time you send a child off to war and danger of death because you love the flag and have taught the child to love it, too, you are swimming in that pool…out deep, where the big ones with the hungry teeth also swim.

"I come to you and you see me whole," he says. "You love me all the way around the equator and not just for some story I wrote. When your door closes and the world's outside, we're eye to eye."

"You're a lot taller than me, Scott."

"You know what I'm saying."

She supposes she does. And she's too moved by it to agree in the dead of night to something she might regret in the morning. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," she says. She takes his smoking gear and puts it on the floor again. "Ask me then, if you still want to."

"Oh, I'll want to," he says with perfect confidence.

"We'll see. For now, go back to sleep."

He turns on his side. He's lying almost straight now, but as he begins to drift he'll begin to bend. His knees will come up toward his narrow chest and his forehead, behind which all the exotic storyfish swim, will go to the wall.

I know him. Am beginning to know him, at least.

At this she feels another wave of love for him, and has to close her lips against dangerous words. The kind that are hard to take back once they have been spoken. Maybe impossible. She settles for pressing her breasts to his back and her stomach to his naked bottom. A few late crickets sing outside the window and Pluto goes on barking his way through another night shift. She begins to drift away again.

"Lisey?" His voice is almost coming from another world.

"Hmmmm?"

"I know you don't like Devils—"

"Haydit," she manages, which is as close as she can come to a critical appraisal in her current state; she is drifting, drifting, drifting away.

"Yeah, and you won't be the only one. But my editor loves it. He says the folks at Sayler House have decided it's a horror novel. That's fine by me. What's the old saying? 'Call me anything you want, just don't call me late to dinner.'"

Drifting. His voice coming down a long dark corridor.

"I don't need Carson Foray or my agent to tell me Empty Devils is gonna buy a lot of groceries. I'm done screwing around, Lisey. I'm on my way, but I don't want to go alone. I want you to come with me."

"Shup, Ska. Go-slee."

She doesn't know if he goes to sleep or not, but for a wonder (for a blue-eyed wonder), Scott Landon does indeed shut up.

21

Lisey Debusher awakens on Saturday morning at the impossibly luxurious hour of nine o'clock, and to the smell of frying bacon. Sunshine lies across the floor and the bed in a brilliant stripe. She goes out to the kitchen. He's frying bacon in his underpants, and she's horrified to see that he's removed the bandage she so carefully applied. When she remonstrates, Scott tells her simply that it itched.

"Besides," he says, holding his hand out to her (this reminds her so much of how he came walking out of the shadows last night that she has to repress a shiver), "it doesn't look so bad in the light of day, does it?"

She takes his hand, bends over it as if she means to read his palm, and looks until he pulls away, saying if he doesn't turn the bacon it will burn. She isn't astounded, isn't amazed; those are emotions perhaps reserved for dark nights and shadowy rooms, not for sunshiny weekend mornings with the Philco in the window playing that low-rider song she's never understood but always liked. Not astounded, not amazed…but she is perplexed. All she can think is that she must have believed the cuts were a hell of a lot worse than they actually turned out to be. That she panicked. Because these wounds, while not exactly scratches, are far from as serious as she thought. They've not only clotted over; they've started scabbing over. If she'd taken him to the Derry Home ER, they probably would have told her to get lost.

All the Landons are fast healers. We had to be.

Meanwhile, Scott's forking crisp bacon out of the pan and onto a double fold of paper towels. As far as Lisey's concerned, he may be a good writer, but he's a great fry cook. At least when he really sets his mind to it. He needs new underwear, though; the seat of this pair sags rather comically, and the elastic waistband is on life-support. She'll see what she can do about getting him to buy new ones when the royalty check he's been promised comes in, and of course underwear isn't what's on her mind, not actually; her mind wants to compare what she saw last night—those deep and sickening gills, pink shading to liverish red—with what's on offer this morning. It's the difference between mere cuts and gashes, and does she really think anyone heals that fast, outside of a Bible story? Does she really? It wasn't a window-pane he stuck his hand through, after all, it was a pane of greenhouse glass, which reminds her, they'll have to do something about that, Scott will have to—

"Lisey."

She's jerked out of her reverie to find herself sitting at the kitchen table, nervously knitting her tee-shirt together between her thighs. "What?"

"One egg or two?"

She considers it. "Two. I guess."

"Over easy or want em lookin atcha?"

"Over," she says.

"Will we marry?" he asks in exactly the same tone, cracking both eggs in his good right hand and dropping them into the pan, kerplunk.

She smiles a little, not at his matter-of-fact tone but at the faintly archaic turn of phrase, and realizes she's not surprised at all. She has expected this…this what-do-you-callit, this resumption; must have been turning his proposal over in some deep part of her mind even as she slept.

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Sure shot," he says. "What do you think, babyluv?"

"Babyluv thinks that sounds like a plan."

"Good," he says. "That's good." He pauses. Then: "Thank you."

For a minute or two neither of them says anything. On the windowsill, the old cracked Philco plays the sort of music Dad Debusher never listened to. In the pan, the eggs snap. She's hungry. And she's happy.

"In the fall," she says.

He nods, reaching for a plate. "Good. October?"

"Maybe too soon. Say right around Thanksgiving. Are there any eggs left for you?"

"There be one, and one be all I want."

She says, "I won't marry you if you don't buy some new underwear."

He doesn't laugh. "Then I'll make it a priority."

He puts the plate in front of her. Bacon and eggs. She is so hungry. She starts in and he cracks the last egg into the pan.

"Lisa Landon," he says. "What do you think?"

"I think it's a keeper. It's…what do you call it when all the words start with the same sound?"

"Alliteration."

"Yeah, that." Now she says it. "Lisa Landon." Like the eggs, it tastes good.

"Little Lisey Landon," he says, and flips his egg in the air. It turns over twice and lands square in the bacon-grease, splat.

"Do you, Scott Landon, promise to strap it on and keep the mothersmucker strapped?" she asks.

"Strapped in sickness, strapped in health," he agrees, and they begin laughing like mad bastards while the radio plays in the sunshine.

22

With Scott, she always laughed a lot. And a week later the cuts on his hand, even the one on his forearm, were pretty much healed.

They didn't even scar.

23

When Lisey wakes again, she no longer knew when she was—then or now. But enough of morning's first light had crept into the room so she can see the cool blue wallpaper and the seascape on the wall. So it was Amanda's bedroom, and that seemed right, but it also seems wrong; it seems to her that this is a dream of the future she's having in her narrow apartment bed, the one she still shares with Scott on most nights, and will until the wedding in November.

What wakened her?

Amanda was turned away from her and Lisey was still fitted against her like a spoon, her breasts against Manda's back, her belly against Manda's scant bottom, and just what has wakened her? She doesn't need to pee…not badly, anyway, so what…?

Amanda, did you say something? Do you want something? Drink of water, maybe? Piece of greenhouse glass to slit your wrists with?

These things passed through her mind, but Lisey didn't really want to say anything, because an odd idea has come to her. The idea is that, although she can see the rapidly graying mop of Amanda's hair and the frill around the neck of Amanda's nightgown, she was actually in bed with Scott. Yes! That at some point in the night Scott has…what? Crept through the lens of Lisey's memories and into Amanda's body? Something like that. It's a funny idea, all right, and yet she doesn't want to say anything, because she's afraid that if she did, Amanda might answer in Scott's voice. And what would she do then? Would she scream? Would she scream to wake the dead, as the saying is? Surely the idea is absurd, but—

But look at her. Look how she's sleeping, with her knees pulled up and her head bent. If there was a wall, her forehead would be touching it. No wonder you think—

And then, in that pre-dawn ditch of five o'clock, with her face turned away so Lisey cannot see it, Amanda spoke.

"Baby," she says.

There is a pause.

Then: "Babyluv."

If Lisey's interior temperature seemed to drop thirty degrees the evening before, now it seems to drop sixty, for although the voice which spoke the word was undeniably female, it is also Scott's. Lisey lived with him for over twenty years. She knows Scott when she hears him.

This is a dream, she told herself. That's why I can't even tell if it's then or now. If I look around I'll see the PILLSBURY'S BEST magic carpet floating in the corner of the room.

But she couldn't look around. For a long time she couldn't move at all. What finally impels her to speak is the strengthening light. Night is almost over. If Scott has come back—if she was really awake and not just dreaming this—then there must be a reason. And it wouldn't be to harm her. Never to harm her. At least…not on purpose. But she finds she can speak neither his name nor Amanda's. Neither seems right. Both seemed wrong. She saw herself grabbing Amanda's shoulder and rolling her over. Whose face would she see under Manda's graying bangs? Suppose it was Scott's? Oh sweet God, suppose.

Daylight is coming. And she was suddenly sure that if she let the sun come up without speaking, the door between the past and the present will close and any chance of getting answers will be gone.

Never mind the names, then. Never mind just who the hell is inside the nightgown.

"Why did Amanda say bool?" she asked. Her voice in the bedroom—still dim but brightening, brightening—sounds hoarse, dusty.

"I left you a bool," remarks the other person in the bed, the person against whose bottom Lisey's belly lies.

Oh God oh God oh God this is the bad-gunky if there ever was bad-gunky, this is it—

And then: Get hold of yourself. You strap it the fuck on. Do it right now.

"Is it…" Her voice was drier and dustier than ever. And now the room seems to be brightening too fast. The sun will clear the eastern horizon any second now. "Is it a blood-bool?" "You have a blood-bool coming," the voice tells her, sounding faintly regretful. And oh it sounds so much like Scott. Yet now it sounded more like Amanda, too, and this scared Lisey more than ever.

Then the voice brightened. "The one you're on is a good bool, Lisey. It goes behind the purple. You've already found the first three stations. A few more and you'll get your prize."

"What's my prize?" she asks.

"A drink." The reply was prompt.

"A Coke? An RC?"

"Be quiet. We want to watch the hollyhocks."

The voice spoke with strange and infinite longing, and what is familiar about that? Why does it seem like a name for something instead of just bushes? Is it another thing that's hidden behind the purple curtain which sometimes keeps her own memories away from her? There was no time to think about it, let alone ask about it, because a slant of red light fingered in through the window. Lisey felt time come back into focus, and, frightened as she had been, she felt an intense pang of regret.

"When is the blood-bool coming?" she asked. "Tell me that."

There was no answer. She knew there would be no answer, and still her frustration grew, filling the place where her terror and her perplexity had been before the sun peeped over the horizon, casting its dispelling rays.

"When is it coming? Damn you, when?" She was shouting now, and shaking the white-nightgowned shoulder hard enough to make the hair flop…and still no answer. Lisey's fury broke. "Don't tease me like that, Scott, when?"

This time she yanked on the nightgowned shoulder instead of just shaking, and the other body on the bed rolled limply over. It was Amanda, of course. Her eyes were open and she still breathed, there was even some dull color in her cheeks, but Lisey recognized that thousand-yard stare from big sissa Manda-Bunny's other breaks with reality. And not only hers. Lisey no longer had any idea if Scott had actually come to her or if she had only been fooling herself while in a semi-waking state, but of one thing she was quite sure: at some point during the night, Amanda had gone away again. This time maybe for good.