Lisey's Story(90)

"Maybe," he allows, and she sees something that is both terrible and sad: he is afraid.

"If you sleep spoons with me."

"As cold as it is tonight? Are you kidding? Come on, turn off the TV and come back to bed."

He does, and she lies there listening to the wind and luxuriating in the man-driven warmth of him.

She begins to see her butterflies. This is what almost always happens to her when she begins to drift into sleep. She sees great red and black butterflies opening their wings in the dark. It has occurred to her that she will see them when her dying-time comes around. The thought scares her, but only a little.

"Lisey?" It's Scott, from far away. He's drifting, too. She senses that.

"Hmmmm?"

"It doesn't like me to talk."

"What doesn't?"

"I don't know." Very faint and far. "Maybe it's the wind. The cold north wind. The one that comes down from..."

The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there's no way to tell for sure because by then she's lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day.

3

There's a period of time - two weeks, maybe - when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she'll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a glass of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later -  later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool - that she'll realize he hasn't added a single page to the manuscript of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he's currently using, she'll find one piece of paper - a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top - upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It's only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she'll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It's only later that she'll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she's able to give herself a pass, because those empties were wellhidden. 4

The first couple of days of 1996 are unseasonably warm; it is what the oldtimers call the January Thaw. But as early as January third, the weather forecasters begin warning of a big change, an awesome cold wave rolling down from the white wastes of central Canada. Mainers are told to make sure their fuel-oil tanks are topped up, that their waterpipes are insulated, and that they have plenty of "warm space" for their animals. Temperatures are going to drop to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the temperatures are going to be the very least of it. They're going to be accompanied by gale-force winds that will drive the chill-factor to sixty or seventy below.

Lisey is frightened enough to call their general contractor after failing to raise any real concern in Scott. Gary assures her that the Landons have got the tightest house in Castle View, tells her he'll keep a close eye on Lisey's kinfolk (especially on Amanda, it almost goes without saying), and reminds her that cold weather is just a part of living in Maine. A few three-dog nights and we'll be on the way to spring, he says. But when the subzero cold and screaming winds finally roll in on the fifth of January, it's worse than anything Lisey can remember, even casting her mind back to childhood, when every thunderbuster she rode out gleefully as a child seemed magnified into a great tempest and every snow flurry was a blizzard. She keeps all the thermostats in the house turned up to seventy-five and the new furnace runs constantly, but between the sixth and ninth, the temperature inside never rises above sixty-two. The wind doesn't just hoot around the eaves, it screams like a woman being gutted an inch at a time by a madman: one with a dull knife. The snow left on the ground by the January thaw is lifted by those forty-mile-anhour winds (the gusts kick up to sixty-five, high enough to knock down half a dozen radio towers in central Maine and New Hampshire) and blown across the fields like dancing ghosts. When they hit the storm windows, the granular particles rattle like hail. On the second night of this extravagant Canadian cold, Lisey wakes up at two in the morning and Scott is gone from their bed once more. She finds him in the guest room, again bundled up in Good Ma's yellow african, once more watching The Last Picture Show. Hank Williams warbles "Kaw-Liga"; Sam the Lion is dead. She has difficulty rousing him, but at last Lisey manages. She asks him if he's all right and Scott says yeah he is. He tells her to look out the window, tells her it's beautiful but to be careful, not to look too long. "My Daddy said it would burn your eyes when it's that bright," he advises. She gasps for the beauty of it. There are great drifting theater curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn't it, exactly; she thinks no one has ever named the shade she's seeing. When Scott twitches the back of her nightgown and tells her that's enough, she ought to stop, she's stunned to look at the digital clock built into the VCR and discover that she's been looking out the frost-framed window at the northern lights for ten minutes.