by Stephen King
Darla had refused to believe Amanda wouldn’t eat until she tried the egg experiment for herself. She had to scramble fresh ones to do it; Lisey had scraped the remains of the first pair down the garbage disposal. Amanda’s thousand-yard stare had robbed her of any appetite she might have had for big sissa’s leftovers.
By the time Darla marched into the room, Amanda had slid back down from her propped-up position—oozed back down—and Darla helped Lisey get her back up again. Lisey was grateful for the help. Her back already hurt. She could barely imagine the mounting cost of caring for a person like this day in and day out, for an unlimited run.
“Amanda, I want you to eat these,” Darla said in the forbidding, I-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer tone Lisey remembered from a great many telephone conversations in her younger years. The tone, combined with the jut of Darla’s jaw and the set of Darla’s body, made it clear she thought Amanda was shamming. Fakin like a brakeman, Dandy would have said; just one of his hundred or so cheerful, colorful, nonsensical phrases. But (Lisey mused) hadn’t that almost always been Darla’s judgment when you weren’t doing what Darla wanted? That you were fakin like a brakeman?
“I want you to eat these eggs, Amanda—right now!”
Lisey opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. They would get to where they were going more quickly if Darla saw for herself. And where were they going? Greenlawn, very likely. Greenlawn Recovery and Rehab in Auburn. The place she and Scott had looked into briefly after Amanda’s last outletting, in the spring of 2001. Only it turned out that Scott’s dealings with Greenlawn had gone a little further than his wife had suspected, and thank God for that.
Darla got the eggs into Amanda’s mouth and turned to Lisey with the beginnings of a triumphant smile. “There! I think she just needed a firm h—”
At this point Amanda’s tongue appeared between her slack lips, once more pushing canary-colored eggs before it, and plop. Onto the front of her nightgown, still damp from its last sponging-off.
“You were saying?” Lisey asked mildly.
Darla took a long, long look at her older sister. When she turned her eyes back to Lisey, the jut-jawed determination was gone. She looked like what she was: a middle-aged woman who’d been harried out of bed too early by a family emergency. She wasn’t crying, but she was close; her eyes, the bright blue all the Debusher girls shared, swam with tears. “This isn’t like before, is it?”
“No.”
“Did anything happen last night?”
“No.” Lisey didn’t hesitate.
“No crying fits or tantrums?”
“No.”
“Oh, hon, what are we going to do?”
Lisey had a practical answer for that, and no surprise there; Darla might think differently, but Lisey and Jodi had always been the practical ones. “Lay her back down, wait for business hours, then call that place,” she said. “Greenlawn. And hope she doesn’t piss the bed again in the meantime.”
4
While they waited, they drank coffee and played cribbage, a game each of the Debusher girls had learned from Dandy long before they’d taken their first rides on the big yellow Lisbon Falls schoolbus. Every third or fourth hand, one of them would check on Amanda. She was always the same, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. In the first game, Darla skunked her younger sister; in the second she skipped out with a run of three in the crib, leaving Lisey stuck in the mudhole. That this should put her in a good humor even with Manda gorked out upstairs gave Lisey something to think about…but nothing she wanted to say right out loud. It was going to be a long day, and if Darla started it with a smile on her face, terrific. Lisey declined a third game and the two of them watched some country singer on the last segment of the Today show. Lisey could almost hear Scott saying, He ain’t gonna put Ole Hank out of business. By whom he meant, of course, Hank Williams. When it came to country music, for Scott there had been Ole Hank…and then all the rest of them.
At five past nine, Lisey sat down in front of the telephone and got the Greenlawn number from Directory Assistance. She gave Darla a wan and nervous smile. “Wish me luck, Darl.”
“Oh, I do. Believe me, I do.”
Lisey dialed. The phone on the other end rang exactly once. “Hello,” a pleasant female voice said. “This is Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation, a service of Fedders Health Corporation of America.”
“Hello, my name is—” Lisey got this far before the pleasant female voice began enumerating all the possible destinations one could reach…if, that was, one were possessed of a touch-tone phone. It was a recording. Lisey had been booled.
Yeah, but they’ve gotten so good, she thought, punching 5 for Patient Intake Information.
“Please hold while your call is processed,” the pleasant female voice told her, and was replaced by the Prozac Orchestra playing something that vaguely resembled Paul Simon’s “Homeward Bound.”
Lisey looked around to tell Darla she was on hold, but Darla had gone up to check on Amanda.
Bullshit, she thought. She just couldn’t take the susp—
“Hello, this is Cassandra, how may I help you?”
A name of ill omen, babyluv, opined the Scott who kept house in her head.
“My name is Lisa Landon…Mrs. Scott Landon?”
She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn’t hard to understand why she had done so now. It was what Scott called “the fame-card,” and he himself had played it sparingly. Partly, he said, because doing so made him feel like a conceited asshole, and partly because he was afraid it wouldn’t work; that if he murmured some version of Don’t you know who I am? in the headwaiter’s ear, the headwaiter would murmur back, Non, Monsieur—who ze fuck air you?
As Lisey spoke, recounting her sister’s previous episodes of self-mutilation and semi-catatonia and this morning’s great leap forward, she heard the soft clitter of computer keys. When Lisey paused, Cassandra said: “I understand your concern, Mrs. Landon, but Greenlawn is very full at the present time.”
Lisey’s heart sank. She instantly pictured Amanda in a closet-sized room at Stephens Memorial in No Soapa, wearing a foodstained johnnie and looking out a barred window at the blinker-light where Route 117 crossed 19. “Oh. I see. Um…are you sure? This wouldn’t be Medicaid or Blue Cross or any of those things—I’d be paying cash, you see…” Grasping at straws. Sounding dumb. When all else fails, chuck money. “If that makes a difference,” she finished lamely.
“It really doesn’t, Mrs. Landon.” She thought she detected a faint frost in Cassandra’s voice now, and Lisey’s heart sank even farther. “It’s a question of space and commitments. You see, we only have—”
Lisey heard a faint bing! then. It was very close to the sound her toaster-oven made when the Pop-Tarts or breakfast burritos were done.
“Mrs. Landon, can I put you on hold?”
“If you need to, of course.”
There was a faint click and the Prozac Orchestra returned, this time with what might once have been the theme from Shaft. Lisey listened with a mild sense of unreality, thinking that if Isaac Hayes heard it, he would probably crawl into his bathtub with a plastic bag over his head. The time on hold lengthened until she began to suspect she’d been forgotten—God knew it had happened to her before, especially when trying to buy airline tickets or change rental car arrangements. Darla came downstairs and held her hands out in a What’s happening? Give! gesture. Lisey shook her head, indicating both Nothing and I don’t know.
At that moment the horrific holdmusic was gone and Cassandra was back. The frost was gone from her voice, and for the first time she sounded to Lisey like a human being. In fact, she sounded familiar, somehow. “Mrs. Landon?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but I had a note on my computer to get in touch with Dr.
Alberness if either you or your husband called. Dr. Alberness is actually in his office now. May I transfer you?”
“Yes,” Lisey told her. Now she knew where she was, exactly where she was. She knew that before he told her anything else, Dr. Alberness would tell her how sorry he was for her loss, as if Scott had died last month or last week. And she would thank him. In fact, if Dr. Alberness promised to take the troublesome Amanda off their hands in spite of Greenlawn’s current booked-up state, Lisey would probably be happy to get on her knees and give him a nice juicy hummer. A wild laugh threatened to surge out of her at that, and she had to clamp her lips tightly shut for a few seconds. And she knew why Cassandra had suddenly sounded so familiar: it was how people had sounded when they suddenly recognized Scott, realized they were dealing with someone who’d been on the cover of smucking Newsweek magazine. And if that famous person had his famous arm around someone, why she must be famous, too, if only by association. Or, as Scott himself had once said, by injection.
“Hello?” a pleasantly rough male voice said. “This is Hugh Alberness. Am I speaking to Mrs. Landon?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Lisey said, motioning for Darla to sit down and stop pacing circles in front of her. “This is Lisa Landon.”
“Mrs. Landon, let me begin by saying how sorry I am for your loss. Your husband signed five of his books for me, and they are among my most treasured possessions.”
“Thank you, Dr. Alberness,” she said, and to Darla she made an It’s-in-the-bag circle with her thumb and forefinger. “That’s so very kind of you.”
5
When Darla got back from using the Pop’s Café ladies’ room, Lisey said she thought she had better make a visit, as well—it was twenty miles to Castle View, and often the afternoon traffic was slow. For Darla, that would just be the first leg. After packing a bag for Amanda—a chore they’d both forgotten that morning—she’d have to drive back to Greenlawn with it. Once it was delivered, a second return trip to Castle View. She’d be turning into her own driveway for good around eight-thirty, and only that early if luck—and traffic—was with her.
“I’d take a deep breath and hold your nose while you go,” Darla said.
“Bad?”
Darla shrugged, then yawned. “I’ve been in worse.”
So had Lisey, especially during her travels with Scott. She went with her thighs tensed and her bottom hovering over the seat—the well-remembered Book Tour Crouch—flushed, washed her hands, splashed water on her face, combed her hair, then looked at herself in the mirror. “New woman,” she told her reflection. “American Beauty.” She bared a great deal of expensive dental work at herself. The eyes above this gator grin, however, looked doubtful.
“Mr. Landon said if I ever met you, I should ask—”
Be quiet about that, leave it be.
“I should ask you about how he fooled the nurse—”
“Only Scott never said fooled,” she told her reflection.
Shut up, little Lisey!
“—how he fooled the nurse that time in Nashville.”
“Scott said booled. Didn’t he?”
That coppery taste was in her mouth again, the taste of pennies and panic. Yes, Scott had said booled. Sure. Scott had said that Dr. Alberness should ask Lisey (if he ever met her) how Scott booled the nurse that time in Nashville, Scott knowing perfectly well that she would get the message.
Had he been sending her messages? Had he, even then?
“Leave it alone,” she whispered at her reflection, and left the ladies’ room. It would have been nice to leave that voice trapped inside, but now it always seemed to be there. For a long time it had been quiet, either sleeping or agreeing with Lisey’s conscious mind that there were some things one simply did not speak about, not even among the various versions of one’s self. What the nurse had said on the day after Scott had been shot, for instance. Or
(hush do hush)
what had happened in
(Hush!)
the winter of 1996.
(YOU HUSH NOW!)
And for a blue-eyed wonder that voice did…but she sensed it watching and listening, and she was afraid.
6
Lisey exited the ladies’ room just in time to see Darla hanging up the pay telephone.
“I was calling that motel across from Greenlawn,” she said. “It looked clean, so I booked a room for tonight. I really don’t want to drive all the way back to Castle View, and this way I can see Manda first thing tomorrow morning. All I’ll have to do is be like the chicken and cross the road.” She looked at her younger sister with an apprehensive expression Lisey found rather surreal, given all the years she’d spent listening to Darla lay down the law, usually in a strident, take-no-prisoners tone of voice. “Do you think that’s silly?”
“I think it’s a great idea.” Lisey gave Darla’s hand a squeeze, and Darla’s relieved smile broke her heart a little. She thought: This is also what money does. It makes you the smart one. It makes you the boss. “Come on, Darl—I’ll drive back, how’s that?”
“Works for me,” Darla said, and followed her younger sister out into the latening day.
7
The drive back to Castle View was as slow as Lisey had feared it might be; they got behind an overloaded, waddling pulp truck, and on the hills and curves there was no place to pass. The best Lisey could do was hang back so they didn’t have to eat too much of the guy’s half-cooked exhaust. It gave her time to reflect on the day. At least there was that.
Speaking with Dr. Alberness had been like getting to a baseball game in the bottom of the fourth inning, but that was nothing new; playing catch-up had always been part of life with Scott. She remembered the day a furniture van from Portland had shown up with a two-thousand-dollar sectional sofa. Scott had been in his study, writing with the music cranked to its usual deafening levels—she could faintly hear Steve Earle singing “Guitar Town” in the house even with the soundproofing—and interrupting him was apt to do another two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to her ears, in Lisey’s opinion. The furniture guys said “the mister” told them she’d let them know where to put the new piece of furniture. Lisey had briskly directed them to carry the current sofa—the perfectly good current sofa—out to the barn, and place the new sectional where it had been. The color was at least a fair match for the room, and that was a relief. She knew she and Scott had never discussed a new sofa, sectional or otherwise, just as she knew Scott would declare—oh yes, most vehemently—that they had. She was sure he’d discussed it with her in his head; he just sometimes forgot to vocalize those discussions. Forgetting was a skill he had honed.
His luncheon with Hugh Alberness might have been only another case in point. He might have meant to tell Lisey all about it, and if you’d asked him six months or a year later, he might well have told you he had told her all about it: Lunch with Alberness? Sure, filled her in that very night. When what he’d really done that very night was go out to his study, put on the new Dylan CD, and work on a new short story.
Or maybe this time it had been different—not Scott just forgetting (as he’d once forgotten they’d had a date, as he’d forgotten to tell her about his extremely smucked-up childhood), but Scott hiding clues for her to find after a death he had already foreseen; laying out what he himself would have called “stations of the bool.”
In either case, Lisey had caught up with him before, and she got most of the blanks filled in on the phone, saying Uh-huh and Oh, really! And You know, I forgot about that! in all the right places.
When Amanda had tried to excise her navel in the spring of 2001 and then lapsed into a week-long state of sludge her shrink called semi-catatonia, the family had discussed the possibility of sending her to Greenlawn (or some mental care facility) at a long, emotional, and sometimes rancorous family dinner that Lisey remembered well. She also remembered that Scott had been unusually quiet through most of the discussion, and had only picked at his food that day. When the discussion began t
o wind down, he said that if nobody objected, he’d pick up some pamphlets and brochures they could all look at.
“You make it sound like a vacation cruise,” Cantata had said—rather snidely, Lisey thought.
Scott had shrugged, Lisey remembered as she followed the pulp truck past the bullet-pocked sign reading CASTLE COUNTY WELCOMES YOU. “She’s away, all right,” he had said. “It might be important for someone to show her the way home while she still wants to come.”
Canty’s husband had snorted at that. The fact that Scott had made millions from his books had never kept Richard from regarding him as your basic dewy-eyed dreamer, and when Rich nominated an opinion, Canty Lawlor could be depended upon to second it. It had never occurred to Lisey to tell them that Scott knew what he was talking about, but now that she thought back, she hadn’t eaten much herself that day.
In any case, Scott had brought home a number of Greenlawn brochures and folders; Lisey remembered finding them spread out on the kitchen counter. One, bearing a photograph of a large building that looked quite a bit like Tara in Gone With the Wind, had been titled Mental Illness, Your Family, and You. But she didn’t remember any further discussion of Greenlawn, and really, why would she? Once Amanda began to get better, she had improved quickly. And Scott had certainly never mentioned his lunch with Dr. Alberness, which had come in October of ’01—months after Amanda had resumed what in her passed for normality.