Lisey's Story(102)

Silence in the guest room, where it's cold and her husband is gone. Silence in the bedroom at The Antlers, where they lie together, Scott and Lisey, Now we are two.

Then the living Scott speaks for the one that's dead in 2006 and gone in 1996, and the arguments against insanity do more than fall through; for Lisey Landon, they finally collapse completely: everything the same.

19

Outside their bedroom at The Antlers, the wind is blowing and the clouds are thinning. Inside, Scott pauses long enough to get a drink from the glass of water he always keeps by the side of the bed. The interruption breaks the hypnotic regression that has once more begun to grip him. When he resumes, he seems to be telling instead of living, and she finds this an enormous relief.

"I tried twice more," he says. Tried, not trite. "I used to think trying that last time was how I got him killed. Right up until tonight I thought that, but talking about it -  hearing myself talk about it - has helped more than I ever would have believed. I guess psychoanalysts have got something with that old talking-cure stuff after all, huh?"

"I don't know." Nor does she care. "Did your father blame you?" Thinking, Of course he did.

But once more she seems to have underestimated the complexity of the little triangle that existed for awhile on an isolated farmyard hill in Martensburg, Pennsylvania. Because, after hesitating a moment, Scott shakes his head.

"No. It might have helped if he'd taken me in his arms - like he did after the first time I tried - and told me it wasn't my fault, wasn't anybody's fault, that it was just the badgunky, like cancer or cerebral palsy or something, but he never did that, either. He just hauled me away with one arm...I hung there like a puppet whose strings had been cut...and afterward we just..." In the brightening dimness, Scott explains all his silence about his past with one terrible gesture. He puts a finger to his lips for a second - it is a pallid exclamation point below his wide eyes - and holds it there: Shhhhh. Lisey thinks of how it was after Jodi got pregnant and went away, and nods her understanding. Scott gives her a grateful look.

"Three tries in all," he resumes. "The second was only three or four days after my first go. I tried as hard as I could, but it was just like the first time. Only by then you could see a lean in the post he was chained to, and there was a second arc of turds, farther out, because he'd moved the table a little more and gotten a little extra slack in that chain. Daddy was starting to be afraid he might snap one of the table-legs, even though they were metal, too.

"After my second try, I told Daddy I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong. I couldn't do it - couldn't take him - because he was always knocked out when I got close to him. And Daddy said, 'Well what's your plan, Scooter, you want to grab him when he's awake and raving? He'd rip your smockin head off.' I said I knew it. I knew more than that, Lisey - I knew that if he didn't rip my head off in the cellar, he'd rip it off on the other side, in Boo'ya Moon. So then I ast Daddy if he couldn't knock him out just a little - you know, make him woozy. Enough so I could get in close and hold him the way I was holding you, today, under the yum-yum tree."

"Oh, Scott," she says. She is afraid for the ten-year-old boy even though she knows it must have come out all right; knows he lived to father the young man lying beside her.

"Daddy said it was dangerous. 'Playin with fire there, Scoot,' he said. I knew I was, but there wasn't any other way. We couldn't keep him in the cellar much longer; even I could see that. And then Daddy - he kind of ruffled my hair and said, 'What happen to the little pissant ascairt to jump off the hall bench?' I was surprised he even remembered that, because he was so far in the bad-gunky, and I was proud."

Lisey thinks what a dismal life it must have been, where pleasing such a man could make a child proud, and reminds herself he was only ten. Ten, and alone with a monster in the cellar much of the time. The father was also a monster, but at least a rational one some of the time. A monster capable of doling out the occasional kiss.

"Then..." Scott looks up into the dim. For a moment the moon comes out. It dashes a pale and playful paw across his face before retreating into the clouds once more. When he resumes, she hears the child beginning to take over once more. "Daddy - see, Daddy never ast what I saw or where I went or what I did when I went there and I don't think he ever ast Paul - I dunno if Paul even remembered too much - but he come close then. He said, 'And if you take him like that, Scoot. What happens if he wakes up? Is he just gonna be suddenly all better? Because if he ain't, I won't be there to help you.'

"But I thought about that, see? Thought about it and thought about it until it seem like my brains'd bust wide open." Scott gets up on one elbow and looks at her. "I knew it had to end as well as Daddy, maybe even better. Because of the pos'. And the table. But also because of how he was losin weight, and gettin sores on his face from not eatin the right food - we give him veg'ables, but everything except the taters and onyums he slang away from him and one of his eyes - the one Daddy hurt before - had come over all milkywhite on top of the red. Also more of his teeth was fallin out and one of his elbows, it come over all crookit. He was fallin apart from being down 'ere, Lisey, and what wasn't fallin apart from no sunlight and wrong food he was beatin to death. Do you see?"

She nods.

"So I had this little idea I tole Daddy. He said, 'You think you're pretty motherf*cking smart for ten, don't you?' And I said no, I wasn't smart about hardly anything, and if he thought there was some other way that was safer and better, then okay. Only he didn't. He said, ' I think you're pretty motherf*cking smart for ten, tell you that. And you turned out to have some guts in you after all. Unless you back out.'