Lisey's Story(80)

-  Not bad, Scott-O. Took you awhile, but you got there.

Paul opens his bottle, then Scott's. They clink the longnecks together. Paul says this is

"having a host," and when you do it you have to make a wish.

-  What do you wish for, Scott?

- I wish the Bookmobile comes this summer. What do you wish for, Paul?

His brother looks at him calmly. In a little while he will go downstairs and make them peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, taking the step-stool from the back porch, where their fatally noisy pet once slept and played, in order to get a fresh jar of Shedd's from the top shelf in the pantry. And he says

11

But here Scott falls silent. He looks at the bottle of wine, but the bottle of wine is empty. He and Lisey have taken off their parkas and laid them aside. It has grown more than warm under the yum-yum tree; it's hot, really just short of stifling, and Lisey thinks: We'll have to leave soon. If we don't, the snow lying on the fronds will melt enough to come crashing down on us.

12

Sitting in her kitchen with the menu from The Antlers in her hands, Lisey thought, I'll have to leave these memories soon, too. If I don't, something a lot heavier than snow will come crashing down on me.

But wasn't that what Scott had wanted? What he'd planned? And wasn't this bool hunt her chance to strap it on?

Oh, but I'm scared. Because now I'm so close.

Close to what? Close to what?

"Hush," she whispered, and shivered as if before a cold wind. One all the way down from Yellowknife, perhaps. But then, because she was two-minded, two-hearted: "Just a little more."

It's dangerous. Dangerous, little Lisey.

Chapter 13

She knew it was, could already see bits of the truth shining through holes in her purple curtain. Shining like eyes. Could hear voices whispering that there were reasons why you didn't look into mirrors unless you really had to (especially not after dark and never at twilight), reasons to avoid fresh fruit after sunset and to fast completely between midnight and six AM.

Reasons not to unbury the dead.

But she didn't want to leave the yum-yum tree. Not just yet.

Didn't want to leave him.

He had wished for the Bookmobile, even at the age of three a very Scott wish. And Paul? What was Paul's

13

"What, Scott?" she asks him. "What was Paul's wish?"

"He said, 'I wish Daddy dies at work. That he gets lectercuted and dies.'"

She looks at him, mute with horror and pity.

Abruptly Scott begins stuffing things back into the pack. "Let's get out of here before we roast," he says. "I thought I could tell you a lot more, Lisey, but I can't. And don't say I'm not like the old man, because that's not the point, okay? The point is that everyone in my family got some of it."

"Paul, too?"

"I don't know if I can talk about Paul anymore now."

"Okay," she says. "Let's go back. We'll take a nap, then build a snowman, or something."

The look of intense gratitude he shoots her makes her feel ashamed, because really, she was ready for him to stop - she's taken in all she can process, at least for the time being. In a word, she's freaked. But she can't leave it completely, because she's got a good idea of how the rest of this story must go. She almost thinks she could finish it for him. But first she has a question.

"Scott, when your brother went after the RC Colas that morning...the prizes for the good bool..."

He's nodding, smiling. "The great bool."

"Uh-huh. When he went down to that little store...Mulie's...didn't anybody think it was weird to see a six-year-old kid come in all covered with cuts? Even if the cuts were covered with Band-Aids?"

He stops doing up the buckles on the pack and looks at her very seriously. He's still smiling, but the flush in his cheeks has faded almost entirely; his skin looks pale, almost waxy. "The Landons are fast healers," he says. "Didn't I ever tell you that?"

"Yes," she agrees. "You did." And then, freaked or not, she pushes ahead a little farther. "Seven more years," she says.

"Seven, yes." He looks at her, the pack between his bluejeaned knees. His eyes ask how much she wants to know. How much she dares to know.

"And Paul was thirteen when he died?"

"Thirteen. Yes." His voice is calm enough, but now all the red is gone from his cheeks, although she can see sweat trickling down the skin there, and his hair is limp with it.

"Almost fourteen."

"And your father, did he kill him with his knife?"

"No," Scott says in that same calm voice, "with his rifle. His .30-06. In the cellar. But Lisey, it's not what you think."

Not in a rage, that's what she believes he's trying to tell her. Not in a rage but in cold blood. That is what she thinks under the yum-yum tree, when she still sees Part Three of her fiance's story as "The Murder of the Saintly Older Brother."

14

Hush, Lisey, hush, little Lisey, she told herself in the kitchen - badly frightened now, and not only because she had been so wrong in what she'd believed about the death of Paul Landon. She was frightened because she was realizing - too late, too late - that what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after.