Lisey's Story(81)

Even if the memories are insane.

"I don't have to remember," she said, bending the menu swiftly back and forth in her hands. "I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to unbury the dead, crazy shite like that doesn't happen, it

15

"It isn't what you think."

She will think what she thinks, however; she may love Scott Landon, but she isn't bound to the wheel of his terrible past, and she will think what she thinks. She will know what she knows.

"And you were ten when it happened? When your father - ?"

"Yes."

Just ten years old when his father killed his beloved older brother. When his father murdered his beloved older brother. And Part Four of this story has its own dark inevitability, doesn't it? There's no doubt in her mind. She knows what she knows. The fact that he was only ten doesn't change it. He was, after all, a prodigy in other ways.

"And did you kill him, Scott? Did you kill your father? You did, didn't you?"

His head is lowered. His hair hangs, obscuring his face. Then from below that dark curtain comes a single hard dry barking sob. It is followed by silence, but she can see his chest heaving, trying to unlock. Then:

"I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun and then dump him down the old dry well. It was in March, during the bad sleet-storm. I drug him outside by the feet. I tried to take him where Paul was burrit but I coont. I trite, I trite and I trite, but Lisey he woon't go. He was like the firs' shovel. So I dump him down the well. So far as I know he's still there, although when they auctioned the farm I was...I...Lisey...I...I...I was afraid..."

He reaches out for her blindly and if she hadn't been there he would have gone right on his face but she is there and then they are

They are

Somehow they are

16

"No!" Lisey snarled. She threw the menu, now so strenuously bent it was almost a tube, back into the cedar box and slammed the lid. But it was too late. She had gone too far. It was too late because

17

Somehow they're outside in the pouring snow.

She took him in her arms under the yum-yum tree, and then ( boom! bool! ) they are outside in the snow.

18

Lisey sat in her kitchen with the cedar box on the table before her, eyes closed. The sunlight pouring in the east window came through her lids and made a dark red beet soup that moved with the rhythm of her heart - a rhythm that was just now much too fast. She thought: All right, that one got through. But I guess I can live with just one. Just one won't kill me.

I trite and I trite.

She opened her eyes and looked at the cedar box sitting there on the table. The box for which she had searched so diligently. And thought of something Scott's father had told him. The Landons - and the Landreaus before them - split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky.

The bad-gunky was - among other things - a species of homicidal mania. And gomers? Scott had given her the lowdown on those that night. Gomers were your garden-variety catatonics, like her very own sister, up there in Greenlawn.

"If this is all about saving Amanda, Scott," Lisey whispered, "you can forget it. She's my sis and I love her, but not quite that much. I'd go back into that...that hell...for you, Scott, but not for her or anyone else."

In the living room the telephone began to ring. Lisey jumped in her seat as if stabbed, and screamed.

Part IX. Lisey and The Black Prince of The Incunks (The Duty of Love)

1

If Lisey didn't sound like herself, Darla didn't notice. She was too guilty. Also too happy and relieved. Canty was coming back from Boston to "help out with Mandy." As if she could. As if anyone can, including Hugh Alberness and the entire Greenlawn staff, Lisey thought, listening to Darla prattle on.

You can help, Scott murmured - Scott, who would always have his say. It seemed that not even death would stop him. You can, babyluv.

" - entirely her own idea," Darla was assuring.

"Uh-huh," Lisey said. She could have pointed out that Canty would still be enjoying her time away with her husband, entirely unaware that Amanda had a problem if Darla hadn't felt the need to call her (hadn't stuck her oar in, as the saying was), but the last thing Lisey wanted right now was an argument. What she wanted was to put the damned cedar box back under the mein gott bed and see if she could forget she had ever found it in the first place. While talking to Darla, another of Scott's old maxims had occurred to her: the harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside. She was sure you could adapt that to missing items - cedar boxes, for instance.

"Her flight gets into the Portland Jetport just a little past noon," Darla was saying, all in a rush. "She said she'd rent a car and I said no, that's silly, I said I'll come down and pick you up." Here she paused, gathering herself for the final leap. "You could meet us there, Lisey. If you wanted. We could have lunch at the Snow Squall - just us girls, like in the good old days. Then we could go up to see Amanda."

Now which good old days would those be? Lisey thought. The ones when you used to pull my hair, or the ones when Canty used to chase me around and call me Miss Lisa No Tits? What she said was, "You go on down and I'll join you if I can, Darl. I've got some things here I have to - "

"More cooking?" Now that she had confessed to guilting Cantata into coming north, Darla sounded positively roguish.