Darla blew first one side of her nose and then the other onto Amanda's darkening lawn in a pair of unladylike honks. 'What a freakin mess, maybe you're right, maybe a place like Greenlawn's the answer…if it's private, that is…and discreet…I just don't know…maybe you can do something with her, probably you can, she listens to you, she always has, I'm at my wits' end…'
'Come on, Darl,' Lisa said soothingly, and here was a revelation: she didn't really want cigarettes at all. Cigarettes were yesterday's bad habit. Cigarettes were as dead as her late husband, collapsed at a reading two years ago and died shortly thereafter in a Kentucky hospital, bool, the end. What she wanted to be holding wasn't a Salem Light but the handle of that silver spade.
There was comfort you didn't even have to light.
3
It's a bool, Lisey!
She heard it again as she turned on the light in Amanda's kitchen. And saw him again, walking toward her up the shadowy lawn behind her apartment in Cleaves Mills. Scott who could be crazy, Scott who could be brave, Scott who could be both at the same time, under the right circumstances.
And not just any bool, it's a blood-bool!
Behind the apartment where she taught him to fuck and he taught her to say smuck and they taught each other to wait, wait, wait for the wind to change. Scott wading through the heavy, heady smell of mixed flowers because it was almost summer and Parks Greenhouse was down there and the louvers were open to let in the night air. Scott walking out of all that perfumed exhalation, that late-spring night, and into the light of the back door where she stood waiting. Pissed off at him, but not as pissed; in fact almost ready to make up. She had, after all, been stood up before (although never by him), and she'd had boyfriends turn up drunk before (including him). And oh when she had seen him—
Her first blood-bool.
And now here was another. Amanda's kitchen was daubed and smeared and splattered with what Scott had sometimes been pleased to call—usually in a bad Howard Cosell imitation—'the claret.' Red droplets of it ran across Manda's cheery yellow Formica counter; a smear of it bleared the glass front of the microwave; there were blips and blots and even a single foottrack on the linoleum. A dishtowel dropped in the sink was soaked with it.
Lisey looked at all this and felt her heart speed up. It was natural, she told herself; the sight of blood did that to people. Plus, she was at the end of a long and stressful day. The thing you want to remember is that it almost certainly looks worse than it really is. You can bet she spread it around on purpose—there was never anything wrong with Amanda's sense of the dramatic. And you've seen worse, Lisey. The thing she did to her belly-button, for instance. Or Scott back in Cleaves. Okay?
'What?' Darla asked.
'I didn't say anything,' Lisey replied. They were standing in the doorway, looking at their unfortunate older sister, who sat at the kitchen table—also surfaced in cheery yellow Formica—with her head bent and her hair hanging in her face.
'You did, you said okay.'
'Okay, I said okay,' Lisey replied crossly. 'Good Ma used to say people who talk to themselves have money in the bank.' And she did. Thanks to Scott, she had just over or just under twenty million, depending on how the market in T-bills and certain stocks had done that day.
The idea of money didn't seem to draw much water when you were in a blood-smeared kitchen, however. Lisey wondered if Mandy had never used shit simply because she'd never thought of it. If so, that was genuine by-God good fortune, wasn't it?
'You took away the knives?' she asked Darla, sotto voce.
'Of course I did,' Darla said indignantly…but in the same low voice. 'She did it with pieces of her teacup, Lisey. While I was having a pee.'
Lisey had figured that out for herself and had already made a mental note to go to Wal-Mart for new ones just as soon as she could. Fun Yellow to match the rest of the kitchen if possible, but the real requirement was that they be the plastic ones with the little stickers reading UNBREAKABLE on the sides.
She knelt beside Amanda and moved to take her hand. Darla said, 'That's what she cut, Lise. She did both palms.' Doing so very gently, Lisey plucked Amanda's hands out of her lap. She turned them over and winced. The cuts were starting to clot, but they still made her stomach hurt. And of course they made her think again of Scott coming out of the summer darkness and holding out his dripping hand like a goddam loveoffering, an act of atonement for the terrible sins of getting drunk and forgetting they had a date. Sheesh, and they called Cole crazy?
Amanda had cut diagonally from the base of her thumbs to the base of her pinky fingers, severing heartlines, lovelines, and all the other lines along the way. Lisey could understand how she'd done the first one, but the second? That must have been hard cheese indeed (as the saying was). But she had managed, and then she had gone around the kitchen like a woman putting the icing on a madcake—Hey, looka me! Looka me! You not numbah one crazy baby, I numbah one! Manda numbah one crazy baby, you bet! All while Darla had been on the toilet, doing no more than whizzing a little lemonade and blotting the old bush, way to go Amanda, you also numbah one speed-devil baby.
'Darla—these are beyond Band-Aids and hydrogen peroxide, hon. She's got to go to the Emergency Room.'
'Oh, ratfuck,' Darla said dismally, and began to cry again.
Lisey looked into Amanda's face, which was still barely visible through the screening wings of her hair. 'Amanda,' she said.
Nothing. No movement.
'Manda.'
Nothing. Amanda's head dropped like a doll's. Damned Charlie Corriveau! Lisey thought. Damned smucking Frenchy Corriveau! But of course if it hadn't been 'Shootin' Beans,' it would have been someone or something else. Because the Amandas of the world were just made that way. You kept expecting them to fall down and thinking it was a miracle they didn't, and finally the miracle got tired of happening and fell over and took a seizure and died.
'Manda-Bunny.'
It was the childhood name that finally got through. Amanda slowly raised her head. And what Lisey saw in her face wasn't the bloody, doped-out vacancy she'd expected (yes, Amanda's lips were all red, and that surely wasn't Max Factor on them) but rather the sparkling, childish, tripwire expression of hauteur and mischief, the one that meant Amanda had Taken Something On Herself, and tears would follow for someone.
'Bool,' she whispered, and Lisey Landon's interior temperature seemed to fall thirty degrees in an instant.
4
They got her into the living room, Amanda walking docilely between them, and sat her on the couch. Then Lisey and Darla went back into the kitchen doorway, where they could keep an eye on her and still consult without being overheard.
'What did she say to you, Lisey? You're as white as a damn ghost.'
Lisey wished Darla had said sheet. She didn't like hearing the word ghost, especially now that the sun had gone down. Stupid but true.
'Nothing,' she said. 'Well…boo. Like, 'Boo on you, Lisey, I'm covered with blood, how do you like it?' Look, Darl, you're not the only one stressing out.'
'If we take her to the ER, what'll they do to her? Keep her on suicide watch, or something?'
'They might,' Lisey admitted. Her head was clearer now. That word, that bool, had worked on her oddly like a slap, or a whiff of smelling salts. Of course it had also scared the hell out of her, but…if Amanda had something to tell her, Lisey wanted to know what it was. She had a sense that all the things that had been happening to her, maybe even 'Zack McCool''s telephone call, were somehow tied together by…what? Scott's ghost? Ridiculous. By Scott's blood-bool, then? How about that?
