Lisey's Story(7)

She had turned her head back the other way. And outside the motel room the dogs - every smucking dog in Nashville, it had sounded like - had barked as the sun went down in orange August smoke, making a hole for the night. As a child she had been told by her mother there was nothing to fear in the dark, and she had believed it to be true. She had been downright gleeful in the dark, even when it was lit by lightning and ripped by thunder. While her years-older sister Manda cowered under her covers, little Lisey sat atop her own bed, sucking her thumb and demanding that someone bring the flashlight and read her a story. She had told this to Scott once and he had taken her hands and said, "You be my light, then. Be my light, Lisey." And she had tried, but  -

"I was in a dark place," Lisey murmured as she sat in his deserted study with the U-Tenn Nashville Review in her hands. "Did you say that, Scott? You did, didn't you?"

-  I was in a dark place and you found me. You saved me.

Maybe in Nashville that had been true. Not in the end.

-  You were always saving me, Lisey. Do you remember the first night I stayed at your apartment?

Sitting here now with the book in her lap, Lisey smiled. Of course she did. Her strongest memory was of too much peppermint schnapps, it had given her an acidy stomach. And he'd had trouble first getting and then maintaining an erection, although in the end everything went all right. She'd assumed then it was the booze. It wasn't until later that he'd told her he'd never been successful until her: she'd been his first, she'd been his only, and every story he'd ever told her or anyone else about his crazy life of adolescent sex, both g*y and straight, had been a lie. And Lisey? Lisey had seen him as an unfinished project, a thing to do before going to sleep. Coax the dishwasher through the noisy part of her cycle; set the Pyrex casserole dish to soak; blow the hotshot young writer until he gets some decent wood.

-  When it was done and you went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay, and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I've ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don't care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I've never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.

"Daddy's prize was a kiss."

Lisey said it out loud this time, and although it was warm in the empty study, she shivered. She still didn't know what it meant, but she was pretty sure she remembered when Scott had told her that Daddy's prize was a kiss, that she had been his first, and nobody ever got enough safety: just before they were married. She had given him all the safety she knew how to give, but it hadn't been enough. In the end Scott's thing had come back for him, anyway - that thing he had sometimes glimpsed in mirrors and waterglasses, the thing with the vast piebald side. The long boy.

Lisey looked around the study fearfully for just a moment, and wondered if it was watching her now.

2

SHE OPENED THE U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review. The spine's crack was like a pistol-shot. It made her cry out in surprise and drop the book. Then she laughed (a little shakily, it was true). "Lisey, you nit."

This time a folded piece of newsprint fell out, yellowing and brittle to the touch. What she unfolded was a grainy photograph, caption included, starring a fellow of perhaps twenty-three who looked much younger thanks to his expression of dazed shock. In his right hand he held a short-handled shovel with a silver scoop. Said scoop had been engraved with words that were unreadable in the photo, but Lisey remembered what they were: COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY.

The young man was sort of . . . well . . . peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not just by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-'n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know. Nor, she was willing to bet, was he aware that grasping his left hand, also frozen forever in swarms of black photodots, was a man in what looked like a costumeball Motor Highway Patrolman's uniform: no gun, but a Sam Browne belt running across the chest and what Scott, laughing and making big eyes, might have called "a puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice". He also had a puffickly huh-yooge grin on his face, the kind of relieved oh-thank-you-God grin that said Son, you'll never have to buy yourself another drink in another bar where I happen to be, as long as I've got one dollar to rub against another 'un . In the background she could see Dashmiel, the little prig-southerner who had run away. Roger C. Dashmiel, it came to her, the big C stands for chickenshit.

Had she, little Lisey Landon, seen the happy campus security cop shaking the dazed young man's hand? No, but . . . say . . .

Saa-aaaay, chillums . . . looky-here . . . do you want a true-life image to equal such fairytale visions as Alice falling down her rabbit-hole or a toad in a top-hat driving a motorcar? Then check this out, over on the right side of the picture.