Lisey's Story(108)

He got off on doing it - you know that, don't you?

Of course she did.

And he'll be back. No matter what you promise - no matter what you deliver -  he'll be back. Do you know that, too?

Yes, she knew that, too.

Because to Jim Dooley, his deal with Woodbody and Scott's manuscripts are all just so much ding-dong for the freesias. There's a reason why he went for your boob instead of your earlobe or maybe a finger.

"Sure," she told her empty kitchen - shady, then suddenly bright as the sun sailed out from behind a cloud. "It's the Jim Dooley version of great sex. And next time it will be my pu**y, if the cops don't stop him."

You stop him, Lisey. You.

"Don't be silly, dollink," she told the empty kitchen in her best Zsa Zsa Gabor voice. Once again using her right hand, she opened the cupboard over the toaster, took out a box of Lipton teabags, and put them into the white basin. She added the bloody square of the african from Good Ma's cedar box, although she had absolutely no idea why she was still carrying it. Then she began trudging toward the stairs.

What's silly about it? You stopped Blondie, didn't you? Maybe you didn't get the credit, but you were the one who did it.

"That was different." She stood looking up the stairs with the white plastic basin under her right arm, held against her hip so the box of tea and the piece of knitting wouldn't fall out. The stairs looked approximately eight miles high. Lisey thought there really ought to be clouds swirling around the top.

If it was different, why are you going upstairs?

"Because that's where the Vicodin is!" she cried to the empty house. "The damned old feel-better pills!"

The voice said one more thing and fell silent.

"SOWISA, babyluv is right," Lisey agreed. "You better believe it." And she began the long, slow trek up the stairs.

2

Halfway up the wings came back, darker than ever, and for a moment Lisey was sure she was going to black out. She was telling herself to fall forward, onto the stairs, rather than backward into space, when her vision cleared again. She sat down with the basin drawn across her legs and stayed that way, head hung over, until she had counted to a hundred with a Mississippi between each number. Then she got up again and finished her climb. The second floor was cross-drafted and even cooler than the kitchen, but by the time Lisey got there she was sweating profusely again. The sweat ran into the laceration across her breast, and soon there was a maddening salt-sting on top of the deeper ache. And she was thirsty again. Thirsty all the way down her throat and into her stomach, it seemed. That, at least, could be remedied, and the sooner the better. She glanced into the guest room as she made her slow way by. It had been redone since 1996 - twice, actually - but she found it was all too easy to see the black rocking chair with the University of Maine seal on the back...and the blank eye of the television...and the windows filled with frost that changed color as the lights in the sky changed...

Let it go, little Lisey, it's in the past.

"It's all in the past but none of it's done! " she cried irritably. "That's the smucking trouble! "

To that there was no answer, but here, at long last, was the master bedroom and its adjacent bathroom - what Scott, never known for his delicacy, had been wont to call Il Grande Poopatorium. She set down the basin, dumped out the toothglass (still two brushes, now both of them hers, alas), and filled the tumbler to the brim with cold water. This she drank off greedily, then she did take a moment to look at herself. At her face, anyway.

What she saw was not encouraging. Her eyes were glittering blue sparks peering out of dark caves. The skin beneath them had gone a dark blackish brown. Her nose was canted to the left. Lisey didn't think it was broken, but who knew? At least she could breathe through it. Below her nose was a great crust of dried blood that had broken both right and left around her mouth, giving her a grotesque Fu Manchu mustache. Look, Ma, I'm a biker, she tried to say, but the words wouldn't quite come out. It was a shitty joke, anyway.

Her lips were so severely swollen they actually turned out from the inside, giving her battered face a grotesquely exaggerated come-and-kiss-me pout.

Was I thinking of going up to Greenlawn, home of the famous Hugh Alberness, in this condish? Was I really? Pretty funny - they'd get one look and then call for an ambulance to take me to a real hospital, the kind where they've got an ICU. That isn't what you were thinking. What you were thinking -

But she closed that off, remembering something Scott used to say: Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but for the time being she'd do well to take this as she had the stairs: head down and one step at a time.

Lisey had another bad moment when she couldn't find the Vicodin. She almost gave up, thinking one of the three spring-cleaning girls might have walked away with the bottle, before finding it hiding behind Scott's multi-vitamins. And, wonder of wonders, the expiration on these babies was this very month.

"Waste not, want not," Lisey said, and washed down three of them. Then she filled the plastic basin with lukewarm water and threw in a handful of teabags. She watched the clear water begin to stain amber for a moment or two, then shrugged and dumped in the rest of the teabags. They settled to the bottom of the darkening water and she thought of a young man saying It stings a little but it works really really good. In another life, that had been. Now she would see for herself.