Lisey's Story(92)

She returns the useless phone to its cradle and hurries back down the hall to him, her slippers whispering. He is as she left him. The whining '50s-vintage country-music soundtrack of The Last Picture Show in the middle of the night was bad but the silence is worse, worse, worst. And just before a giant gust of wind seizes the house and threatens to push it off its foundations (she can hardly believe they haven't lost the electric, surely they will before much longer), she realizes why even the big wind is a relief: she can't hear him breathing. He doesn't look dead, there's even some color in his cheeks, but how does she know he's not?

"Honey?" she murmurs, going to him. "Hon, can you talk to me? Can you look at me?"

He says nothing, and he doesn't look at her, but when she puts her chilly fingers against his neck, she finds that the skin there is warm and she feels the beat of his heart in the big vein or artery that lies just beneath the skin. And something else. She can feel him reaching out to her. In daylight, even cold daylight, windy daylight (like the kind that seems to pervade all the exteriors in The Last Picture Show, now that she thinks of it), she's sure she would scoff at that, but not now. Now she knows what she knows. He needs help, just as much as he did on that day in Nashville, first when the madman shot him and then as he lay shivering on the hot pavement, begging for ice.

"How do I help you?" she murmurs. "How do I help you now?"

It's Darla who answers, Darla as she was as a teenager - "Full of young tits n mean,"

Good Ma had once said, an uncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.

You aren't gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She's been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He's off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he's riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone's working again. Lisey hears Darla's laugh - that laugh of perfect teenage contempt - deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wide-eyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.

And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there's a way.

The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She's honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths - the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance

- behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There's a certain sound (the chuffing, dear God that low nasty grunting)  behind there, and certain sights (the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight) as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don't-think zone behind it.

They should. It's handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights.

There's all sorts of dusty old crapola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'other t'ing. All in all, it's quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott...and what do the kids say?

"Don't goinzee there," Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there...wherever there is.

Oh, but it's right next door.

That's the horror of it.

"You know, don't you?" she says, beginning to weep, but it isn't Scott she's asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness.

She had protested - she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same - and he had said, You don't understand the gone part.

I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.

But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.

7

Lying on her back in her dead husband's study, holding the bloody delight against her breast, Lisey said: "I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it." She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn't trust herself to get up, not just yet. "His hand was warm but the floor

8

The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn't holding Scott's, but it's small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the floorboards...and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber's pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.

Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your ass turns blue.

If you can do something for him, do it.

But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?

The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.

"He-never-told-me-about-that-because-I-never-asked." This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.