Lisey's Story(36)

"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 war-whoop. All the sounds of a college town on a Friday night, in other words. And she's tempted to holler down to him, but if she does that, even if it's just his name she hollers, he'll know she's not pissed at him anymore. Not as pissed, anyway.

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