by Stephen King
Sometimes she wishes she had never met him at all.
9
“That’s not true,” she whispered to the shadowy barn, but she felt the deadweight of his study above her as a denial—all those books, all those stories, all that gone life. She didn’t repent her marriage, but yes, sometimes she did wish she had never met her troubling and troublesome man. Had met someone else instead. A nice safe computer programmer, for instance, a fellow who made seventy thousand a year and would have given her three children. Two boys and a girl, one by now grown up and married, two still in school. But that was not the life she had found. Or the one that had found her.
Instead of turning immediately to the Bremen bed (that seemed too much, too soon), Lisey turned to her pathetic little excuse for an office, opened the door, and surveyed it. What had she meant to do in here while Scott wrote his stories upstairs? She couldn’t remember, but knew what had drawn her here now: the answering machine. She looked at the red 1 glowing in the window with UNPLAYED MESSAGES printed beneath it, and wondered if she should call in Deputy Alston to listen. She decided not to. If it was Dooley, she could play it for him later.
Of course it’s Dooley—who else?
She steeled herself for more threats delivered in that calm, superficially reasonable voice and pushed PLAY. A moment later a young woman named Emma was explaining the really extraordinary savings Lisey could enjoy by switching to MCI. Lisey killed this rapturous message in mid-flow, pushed ERASE, and thought: So much for women’s intuition.
She left the office laughing.
10
Lisey looked at the swaddled shape of the Bremen bed with neither sorrow nor nostalgia, although she supposed she and Scott had made love in it—or fucked, anyway; she couldn’t remember how much actual love there had been during SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY—hundreds of times. Hundreds? Was that possible during a mere nine-month stretch, especially when there had been days, sometimes whole working weeks, when she didn’t see him from the time he sleepwalked out the door at seven AM with his briefcase banging his knee to the time he shuffled back in, usually half-lit, at ten PM or quarter to eleven? Yes, she supposed it was, if you spent whole weekends having what Scott sometimes called “smuckaramas.” Why would she hold any affection for this silent sheeted monstrosity, no matter how many times they had bounced on it? She had better cause to hate it, because she understood in some way that wasn’t intuitive but was rather the working of subconscious logic (Lisey’s smart as the devil, as long as she doesn’t think about it, she had once overheard Scott telling someone at a party, and hadn’t known whether to feel flattered or ashamed) that their marriage had almost broken in that bed. Never mind how nasty-fine the sex had been, or that he’d fucked her to effortless multiple orgasms and tossed her salad until she thought she might go out of her mind from the nerve-popping pleasure of it; never mind the place she’d found, the one she could touch before he came and sometimes he’d just shudder but sometimes he’d scream and that made her go goosebumps all over, even when he was deep inside her and as hot as…well, as hot as a suck-oven. She thought it was right the goddam thing should be shrouded like an enormous corpse, because—in her memory, at least—everything that had occurred between them there had been wrong and violent, one choke-hold shake after another on the throat of their marriage. Love? Make love? Maybe. Maybe a few times. Mostly what she remembered was one uglyfuck after another. Choke…and let go. Choke…and let go. And every time it took longer for the thing that was Scott-and-Lisey to breathe again. Finally they left Germany. They took the QE2 back to New York from Southampton, and on the second day out she had come back from a walk on the deck and had paused outside their stateroom with her key in her hand, head tilted, listening. From inside had come the slow but steady click of his typewriter, and Lisey had smiled.
She wouldn’t allow herself to believe it was all right, but standing outside that door and hearing his resumption, she had known it could be. And it was. When he told her he’d made arrangements to have what he called the Mein Gott Bed shipped stateside, she had said nothing, knowing they would never sleep in it or make love in it again. If Scott had suggested they do so—Just vunce, liddle Leezie, for old dimes’ zake!—she would have refused. In fact, she would have told him to go smuck himself. If ever there was a haunted piece of furniture, it was this one.
She approached it, dropped onto her knees, swept back the hem of the dropcloth that covered it, and peered beneath. And there, in that musty, enclosed space where the smell of old chickenshit had come creeping back (like a dog to its vomit, she thought), was what she had been looking for.
There in the shadows was Good Ma Debusher’s cedar box.
VIII. Lisey and Scott
(Under the Yum-Yum Tree)
1
She had no more than entered her sunny kitchen with the cedar box clasped in her arms when the phone began to ring. She put the box on the table and answered with an absent hello, no longer fearing Jim Dooley’s voice. If it was him, she would just tell him she had called the police and then hang up. She was currently too busy to be scared.
It was Darla, not Dooley, calling from the Greenlawn Visitors’ Lounge, and Lisey wasn’t exactly surprised to find that Darla had the guilts about calling Canty in Boston. And if it had been the other way around, Canty in Maine and Darla in Boston? Lisey thought it would have been about the same deal. She didn’t know how much Canty and Darla still loved each other, but they still used each other the way drunks used the booze. When they were kids, Good Ma used to say that if Cantata caught the flu, Darlanna ran her fever.
Lisey tried to make all the right responses, just as she had earlier while on the phone with Canty, and for exactly the same reason: so she could get past this shite and go on with her business. She supposed she would come back to caring about her sisters later—she hoped so—but right now Darla’s guilty conscience mattered as little to her as Amanda’s gorked-out state. As little as Jim Dooley’s current whereabouts, come to that, as long as he wasn’t in the room with her, waving a knife.
No, she assured Darla, she hadn’t been wrong to call Canty. Yes, she had been right to tell Canty to stay put down there in Boston. And yes indeed, Lisey would be up to visit Amanda later on that day.
“It’s horrible,” Darla said, and in spite of her own preoccupation, Lisey heard the misery in Darla’s voice. “She’s horrible.” Then, immediately, in a rush: “I don’t mean that, she’s not, of course she’s not, but it’s horrible to see her. She only sits there, Lisey. The sun was hitting the side of her face when I was in, the morning sun, and her skin looks so gray and old…”
“Take it easy, hon,” Lisey said, running the tips of her fingers over the smooth, lacquered surface of Good Ma’s box. Even closed she could smell its sweetness. When she opened it, she would bend forward into that aroma and it would be like inhaling the past.
“They’re feeding her through a tube,” Darla said. “They put it in and then take it out. If she doesn’t start to eat on her own, I suppose they’ll just leave it in all the time.” She gave a huge, watery sniff. “They’re feeding her through a tube and she’s already so thin and she won’t talk and I spoke to a nurse who said sometimes they go on this way for years, sometimes they never come back, oh Lisey, I don’t think I can stand it!”
Lisey smiled a little at this as her fingers moved to the hinges at the back of the box. It was a smile of relief. Here was Darla the Drama Queen, Darla the Diva, and that meant they were back on safe ground, two sisters with well-worn scripts in hand. At one end of the wire is Darla the Sensitive. Give her a hand, ladies and gentlemen. At the other end, Little Lisey, Small But Tough. Let’s hear it for her.
“I’ll be up this afternoon, Darla, and I’ll have another talk with Dr. Alberness. They’ll have a clearer picture of her condition by then—”
Darla, doubtful: “Do you really think so?”
Lisey, with no smucking idea: “Absolutely. And what you need is to go home and
put your feet up. Maybe take a nap.”
Darla, in tones of dramatic proclamation: “Oh, Lisey, I could never sleep!”
Lisey didn’t care if Darla ate, busted a joint, or took a shit in the begonias. She just wanted to get off the phone. “Well, you come on back, honey, and take it easy for a little while, anyway. I have to get off the phone—I’ve got something in the oven.”
Darla was instantly delighted. “Oh, Lisey! You?” Lisey found this extremely annoying, as if she had never cooked anything more strenuous in her life than…well, Hamburger Helper. “Is it banana bread?”
“Close. Cranberry bread. I’ve got to go check it.”
“But you’ll be coming to see Manda later, right?”
Lisey felt like screaming. Instead she said, “Right. This afternoon.”
“Well, then…” Doubt was back. Convince me, it said. Stay on the phone another fifteen minutes or so and convince me. “I guess I’ll come on home.”
“Good deal. Bye, Darl.”
“And you really don’t think I was wrong to call Canty?”
No! Call Bruce Springsteen! Call Hal Holbrook! Call Condi Smucking Rice! Just LEAVE ME ALONE!
“Not at all. I think it’s good that you did. Keep her…” Lisey thought of Amanda’s Little Notebook of Compulsions. “Keep her in the loop, you know.”
“Well…okay. Goodbye, Lisey. I guess I’ll see you later.”
“Bye, Darl.”
Click.
At last.
Lisey closed her eyes, opened the box, and inhaled the strong scent of cedar. For a moment she allowed herself to be five again, wearing a pair of Darla’s hand-me-down shorts and her own scuffed but beloved Li’l Rider cowboy boots, the ones with the faded pink swoops up the sides.
Then she looked into the box to see what there was, and where it would take her.
2
On top was a foil packet, six or eight inches long, maybe four inches wide and two inches deep. Two lumps poked out of it, rounding the foil. She didn’t know what it was as she lifted it out, caught a ghostly whiff of peppermint—had she been smelling it already, along with the cedar-scent of the box?—and remembered even before she unfolded one side and saw the rock-hard slice of wedding cake. Embedded in it were two plastic figures: a boy-doll in morning-coat and top-hat, a girl-doll in a white wedding dress. Lisey had meant to save this for a year and then share it with Scott on their first anniversary. Wasn’t that the superstition? If so, she should have put it in the freezer. Instead, it had wound up here.
Lisey chipped off a piece of the frosting with her nail and put it in her mouth. It had almost no taste, just a ghost of sweetness and a last fading whisper of peppermint. They had been married in the Newman Chapel at the University of Maine, in a civil ceremony. All of her sisters had come, even Jodi. Lincoln, Dad Debusher’s surviving brother, came up from Sabbatus to give away the bride. Scott’s friends from Pitt and UMO had been there, and his literary agent had done the best-man honors. No Landon family, of course; Scott’s family was dead.
Below the petrified slice of cake was a pair of wedding invitations. She and Scott had handwritten them, each doing half, and she had saved one of Scott’s and one of her own. Below those was a souvenir matchbook. They had discussed having both the invitations and matchbooks printed, it was an expense they probably could have managed even though the money from the Empty Devils paperback sale hadn’t begun to flow yet, but in the end they had decided on handmade as more intimate (not to mention funkier). She remembered buying a fifty-count box of plain paper matches at the Cleaves Mills IGA and hand-lettering them herself, using a red pen with a fine-point ball. The matchbook in her hand was quite likely the last of that tribe, and she examined it with the curiosity of an archaeologist and the ache of a lover.
Scott and Lisa Landon
November 19th, 1979
“Now we are two.”
Lisey felt tears prick her eyes. Now we are two had been Scott’s idea, he said it was a riff on a Winnie-the-Pooh title. She remembered the one he meant at once—how many times had she pestered either Jodotha or Amanda into reading her away to the Hundred-Acre Wood?—and thought Now we are two was brilliant, perfect. She had kissed him for it. Now she could hardly bear to look at the matchbook with its foolishly brave motto. This was the other end of the rainbow, now she was one, and what a stupid number it was. She tucked the matchbook away in the breast pocket of her blouse and then wiped tears from her cheeks—some few had spilled after all. It seemed investigating the past was wet work.
What’s happening to me?
She would have given the price of her pricey Beemer and more to know the answer to that question. She had seemed so all right! Had mourned him and gone on; had put away her weeds and gone on. For over two years now the old song seemed to be true: I get along without you very well. Then she had begun the work of cleaning out his study, and that had awakened his ghost, not in some ethery out-there-spirit-world, but in her. She even knew when and where it had begun: at the end of the first day, in that not-quite-triangular corner Scott liked to call his memory nook. That was where the literary awards hung on the wall, citations under glass: his National Book Award, his Pulitzer for fiction, his World Fantasy Award for Empty Devils. And what had happened?
“I broke,” Lisey said in a small, frightened voice, and sealed the foil back over the fossilized slice of wedding cake.
There was no other word for it. She broke. Her memory of it wasn’t terribly clear, only that it started because she was thirsty. She went to get a glass of water in that stupid smucking bar alcove—stupid because Scott no longer used the booze, although his adventures with alcohol had lasted years longer than his love-affair with the smokes—and the water wouldn’t come, nothing came but the maddening sound of chugging pipes blowing up blasts of air, and she could have waited for the water, it would have come eventually, but instead she turned off the faucets and went back to the doorway between the alcove and the so-called memory nook, and the overhead light was on, but it was the kind on a rheostat and dialed low. With the light like that everything looked normal—everything the same, ha-ha. You almost expected him to open the door from the outside stairway, walk in, crank the tunes, and start to write. Just like he hadn’t come unstrapped forever. And what had she expected to feel? Sadness? Nostalgia? Really? Something as polite, as dear-dear-lady, as nostalgia? If so, that was a real knee-slapper, because what had come over her then, both fever-hot and freezing cold, was
3
What comes over her—practical Lisey, Lisey who always stays cool (except maybe on the day she had to swing the silver spade, and even on that day she flatters herself that she did okay), little Lisey who keeps her head when those all about her are losing theirs—what comes over her is a kind of seamless and bulging rage, a divine fury that seems to push her mind aside and take control of her body. Yet (she doesn’t know if this is a paradox or not) this fury also seems to clarify her thinking, must, because she finally understands. Two years is a long time, but the penny finally drops. She gets the picture. She sees the light.
He has kicked the bucket, as the saying is. (Do you like it?)
He has popped off. (Do you love it?)
He is eating a dirt sandwich. (It’s a big one I caught in the pool where we all go down to drink and fish.)
And when you boil it down, what’s left? Why, he has jilted her. Done a runner. Put an egg in his shoe and beat it, hit the road, Jack, took the Midnight Special out of town. He lit out for the Territories. He left the woman who loved him with every cell in her body and every brain in her not-so-smart head, and all she has is this shitty…smucking…shell.
She breaks. Lisey breaks. As she bolts forward into his stupid smucking memory nook she seems to hear him saying SOWISA, babyluv—Strap On Whenever It Seems Appropriate, and then that is gone and she begins tearing his plaques and pictures and framed citations from the walls. She picks up the bust of Lovecraft the World Fantasy Award judges gave him for Empty D
evils, that hateful book, and throws it the length of the study, screaming “Fuck you, Scott, fuck you!” It’s one of the few times she’s used the word in its unvarnished form since the night he put his hand through the greenhouse glass, the night of the blood-bool. She was angry with him then but never in her life has she been so angry with him as she is now; if he were here, she might kill him all over again. She’s on a full-bore rampage, tearing all that useless vanity crap off the walls until they are bare (few of the things she throws down break on the floor because of the deep-pile carpet—lucky for her, she’ll think later on, when sanity returns). As she whirls around and around, a tornado now for sure, she screams his name again and again, screams Scott and Scott and Scott, crying for grief, crying for loss, crying for rage; crying for him to explain how he could leave her so, crying for him to come back, oh to come back. Never mind everything the same, nothing is the same without him, she hates him, she misses him, there’s a hole in her, a wind even colder than the one that blew all the way down from Yellowknife now blows through her, the world is so empty and so loveless when there’s no one in it to holler your name and holler you home. At the end she seizes the monitor of the computer that sits in the memory nook and something in her back gives a warning creak as she lifts it but smuck her back, the bare walls mock her and she is raging. She spins awkwardly with the monitor in her arms and heaves it against the wall. There is a hollow shattering noise—POOMP!, it sounds like—and then silence again.
No, there are crickets outside.
Lisey collapses to the littered carpet, sobbing weakly, all in. And does she call him back somehow? Does she call him back into her life by the very force of her angry delayed grief? Has he come like water through a long-empty pipe? She thinks the answer to that is