Lisey's Story(88)

"Happened again, too," she said. "Happened that night."

She was so smucking thirsty. Wanted another drink of water in the worst way, but of course the bar alcove was behind her, she was going the wrong way for water and she could remember Scott singing one of Ole Hank's songs as they drove back that Sunday, singing All day I've faced the barren waste, Without a single taste of water, cool water. You'll get your drink, babyluv.

"Will I?" Still nothing but a crow-croak. "A drink of water would surely help. This hurts so bad."

To this there was no reply, and perhaps she didn't need one. She had finally reached the scatter of objects around the overturned cedar box. She reached out for the yellow square, plucked it off the purple menu, and closed it tight in her hand. She lay on her side - the one that didn't hurt - and looked at it closely: the little lines of knits and purls, those tiny locks. There was blood on her fingers and it smeared on the wool, but she hardly noticed. Good Ma had knitted dozens of afghans out of squares like this, afghans of rose and gray, afghans of blue and gold, afghans of green and burnt orange. They were Good Ma's specialty and spilled from her needles, one after the other, as she sat in front of the chattering TV at night. Lisey remembered how, as a child, she had thought such knitted blankets were called "africans." Their female cousins (Angletons, Darbys, Wiggenses, and Washburns as well as Debushers almost beyond counting) had all been gifted with africans when they married; each of the Debusher girls had gotten at least three. And with each african came one extra square in the same shade or pattern. Good Ma called these extra squares "delights." They were meant as table decorations, or to be framed and hung on the wall. Because the yellow african had been Good Ma's wedding present to Lisey and Scott, and because Scott had always loved it, Lisey had saved the accompanying delight in the cedar box. Now she lay bleeding on his carpet, holding the square, and gave up trying to forget. She thought, Bool! The End!, and began to cry. She understood she was incapable of coherence, but maybe that was all right; order would come later, if it was needed.

And, of course, if there was a later.

The gomers and the bad-gunky. For the Landons and the Landreaus before them, it's always been one or the other. And it always comes out.

It was really no surprise Scott had recognized Amanda for what she was - he'd known about cutting behavior firsthand. How many times had he cut himself? She didn't know. You couldn't read his scars the way you could read Amanda's, because...well, because. The one incidence of self-multilation she knew about for sure - the night of the greenhouse - had been spectacular, however. And he had learned about cutting from his father, who only turned his knife on his boys when his own body would not suffice to let the bad-gunky out.

Gomers and bad-gunky. Always one or the other. It always comes out. And if Scott had missed the worst of the bad-gunky, what did that leave?

In December of 1995, the weather had turned rottenly cold. And something started going wrong with Scott. He had a number of speaking gigs planned after the turn of the year at schools in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (what he referred to as The Scott Landon 1996 Western Yahoo Tour), but called his literary agent and had him cancel the whole deal. The booking agency screamed blue murder (no surprise there, that was three hundred thousand dollars' worth of speaking dates he was talking about flushing down the commode), but Scott held firm. He said the tour was impossible, said he was sick. He was sick, all right; as that winter sank its claws in deeper, Scott Landon had been a sick man, indeed. Lisey knew as early as November that something 2

She knows something's wrong with him, and it isn't bronchitis, as he's been claiming. He has no cough, and his skin's cool to the touch, so even though he won't let her take his temperature, won't even let her put one of those fever-strip thingies on his forehead, she's pretty sure he's not running a fever. The problem seems to be mental rather than physical, and that scares the hell out of her. The one time she gets up enough courage to suggest he go see Dr. Bjorn, he just about tears her head off, accuses her of being a doctor-junkie "like the rest of your nut-box sisters."

And how is she supposed to respond to that? What, exactly, are the symptoms he's displaying? Would any doctor - even a sympathetic one like Rick Bjorn - take them seriously? He's stopped listening to music when he writes, that's one thing. And he's not writing much, that's another, much bigger, thing. Forward progress on his new novel -

which Lisey Landon, admittedly no great book critic, happens to love - has slowed from his usual all-out sprint to a labored crawl. Bigger still...dear Christ, where's his sense of humor? That boisterous sense of good humor can be wearing, but its sudden absence as fall gives way to cold weather is downright spooky; it's like the moment in one of those old jungle movies where the native drums suddenly fall silent. He's drinking more, too, and later into the night. She has always gone to bed earlier than he does - usually much earlier - but she almost always knows when he turns in and what she smells on his breath when he does. She also knows what she sees in his trashcans up in his study, and as her worries grow, she makes a special point to look every two or three days. She's used to seeing beer cans, sometimes a great lot of them, Scott has always liked his beer, but in December of 1995 and early January of 1996 she also begins to see Jim Beam bottles. And Scott is suffering hangovers. For some reason this bothers her more than all the rest. Sometimes he wanders the house - pale, silent, ill - until the middle of the afternoon before finally perking up. On several occasions she has heard him vomiting behind the closed bathroom door, and she knows by the speed with which the aspirin is disappearing that he's suffering bad headaches. Nothing unusual in that, you might say; drink a case of beer or a bottle of Beam between nine and midnight, you're gonna pay the price, Patrick. And maybe that's all it is, but Scott has been a heavy drinker since the night she met him in that University lounge, when he had a bottle squirreled away in his jacket pocket (he shared it with her), and he's never suffered more than the mildest of hangovers. Now when she sees the empties in his wastebasket and that only a page or two has been added to the Outlaw's Honeymoon manuscript on his big desk (some days there are no new pages at all), she wonders just how much more he's drinking than what she knows about. For a little while she's able to forget her worries in the round of year-end holiday visiting and the jostle of Christmas shopping. Scott has never been much of a shopper even when things are slow and the stores are empty, but this season he throws himself into it with hectic good cheer. He's out with her every smucking day, doing battle at either the Auburn Mall or the Main Street shops in Castle Rock. He's recognized often but cheerfully refuses the frequent autograph requests from people who smell the chance for a one-of-a-kind gift, telling them that if he doesn't stick with his wife, he probably won't see her again until Easter. He may have lost his sense of humor but she never sees him lose his temper, not even when some of the folks who want autographs get pushy, and so for awhile there he seems sort of all right, sort of himself in spite of the drinking, the canceled tour, and his slow progress on the new book.