Lisey's Story(41)

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.

Chapter 7

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?"