Lisey's Story(67)

4

It was Cantata, calling from Boston. Of course it was. Darla had called her. Darla always called Canty when there was trouble, usually sooner rather than later. Canty wanted to know if she should come home. Lisey assured her sister that there was absolutely no reason to return from Boston early no matter how distressed Darla might have sounded. Amanda was resting comfortably, and there was really nothing Canty could do. "You can visit, but unless there's been a big change - which Dr. Alberness told us not to expect - you won't be able to tell if she even knows you're there."

"Jesus," Canty said. "That's so awful, Lisa."

"Yes. But she's with people who understand her situation - or understand how to care for people in her situation, at least. And Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loo - " Lisey had been pacing around the bedroom with the cordless phone. Now she stopped, staring at the notebook that had slid most of the way from the right rear pocket of her discarded blue jeans. It was Amanda's Little Notebook of Compulsions, only now Lisey was the one who felt compelled.

Chapter 11

"Lisa?" Canty was the only one who called her that on a regular basis, and it always made her feel like the sort of woman who showed off the prizes on some TV game show or other - Lisa, show Hank and Martha what they've won! "Lisa, are you still there?"

"Yeah, honey." Eyes on the notebook. Little rings gleaming in the sun. Little steel loops. "I said Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loops. Loop." The notebook was still curved with the shape of the buttock against which it had spent so many hours, and as she looked at it, Canty's voice seemed to be fading. Lisey heard herself saying she was sure Canty would have done all the same things if she'd been the one on the spot. She bent over and slipped the notebook the rest of the way out of the jeans pocket. She told Cantata she would call that evening, told Cantata she loved her, told Cantata goodbye and tossed the cordless phone on the bed without so much as a glance. She had eyes only for the battered little notebook, seventy-nine cents at any Walgreen's or Rexall. And why should she be so fascinated? Why, now that it was morning and she was rested? Clean and rested? With fresh sunshine pouring in, her compulsive search for the cedar box the night before seemed silly, nothing but a behavioral externalization of all the day's anxieties, but this notebook didn't seem silly, no, not at all.

And just to add to the fun, Scott's voice spoke to her, more clearly than ever. God, but that voice was clear! And strong.

I left you a note, babyluv. I left you a bool.

She thought of Scott under the yum-yum tree, Scott in the weird October snow, telling her that sometimes Paul would tease him with a hard bool...but never too hard. She hadn't thought of that in years. Had pushed it away, of course, with all the other things she didn't want to think of; she'd put it behind her purple curtain. But what was so bad about this?

"He was never mean," Scott had said. There had been tears in his eyes but none in his voice; his voice had been clear and steady. As always when he had a story to tell, he meant to be heard. "When I was little, Paul was never mean to me and I was never mean to him. We stuck together. We had to. I loved him, Lisey. I loved him so."

By now she had flipped past the pages of numbers - poor Amanda's numbers, all crammed madly together. She found nothing but blank pages beyond. Lisey thumbed through them faster and faster, her certainty that there was something here to find waning, then reached a page near the end with a single word printed on it:

HOLLY HOCKS

Why was that familiar? At first it wouldn't come, and then it did. What's my prize? she'd asked the thing in Amanda's nightgown, the thing turned away from her. A drink, it had said. A Coke? An RC? she had asked, and it had said -  "It said...she or he said...'Shut up, we want to watch the hollyhocks,'" Lisey murmured.

Yes, that was right, or almost right; close enough for government work, anyway. It meant nothing to her, and yet it almost did. She stared at the word a moment or two longer, then thumbed through to the end of the notebook. All the pages were blank. She was about to toss it aside when she saw ghostly words behind the last page. She flipped it up and found this printed on the bent inner surface of the notebook's back cover:

4th Station: Look under the Bed But before bending to look under the bed, Lisey flipped first back to the numbers at the front of the book and then to HOLLYHOCKS, which she had found half a dozen pages from the end, confirming what she already knew: Amanda printed her fours with a right angle and a downward slash, as they had been taught in grammar school: Y. It was Scott who had made fours that looked a little like an ampersand: 4. It had been Scott who looped his o's together and had been in the habit of drawing a line under his jotted notes and memos. And it had always been Amanda's habit to print in tiny capitals...with slightly lazy round letters: C's, G's, Y's, and S's.

Lisey flipped back and forth between HOLLYHOCKS and 4th Station: Look Under the Bed. She thought that if she put the two writing samples in front of Darla and Canty, they would without hesitation identify the former as Amanda's work and the latter as Scott's.

And the thing in the bed with her yesterday morning... "It sounded like both of them," she whispered. Her flesh was creeping. She hadn't realized flesh could actually do that. "People would call me crazy, but it really did sound like both of them."