Part 2: Sowisa
'She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.'
V. Lisey and The Long, Long Thursday
(Stations of the Bool)
1
It didn't take Lisey long to realize this was far worse than Amanda's three previous breaks with reality—her periods of 'passive semi-catatonia,' to use the shrink's phrase. It was as if her usually irritating and sometimes troublesome sister had become a large breathing doll. Lisey managed (with considerable effort) to tug Amanda into a sitting position and swivel her around so she was sitting on the edge of the bed, but the woman in the white cotton nightgown—who might or might not have spoken in the voice of Lisey's dead husband a few moments before dawn—would not respond to her name when it was spoken, or called, or shouted, almost desperately, into her face. She only sat with her hands in her lap, looking fixedly at her younger sister. And when Lisey stepped away, Amanda looked fixedly into the space where she had been.
Lisey went into the bathroom to wet a cloth with cold water, and when she came back, Amanda had subsided into a prone position again with her upper half on the bed and her feet on the floor. Lisey began to pull her back up, then stopped when Amanda's buttocks, already close to the bed's edge, began to slide. If she persisted, Amanda would end up on the floor.
'Manda-Bunny!'
No response to the childhood nickname this time. Lisey decided to go whole hog.
'Big sissa Manda-Bunny!'
Nothing. Instead of being frightened (that would come shortly), Lisey was swept by the sort of rage Amanda had hardly ever been able to provoke in her younger sister when she had actually tried.
'Stop this! Stop it and scoot your ass back on the bed so you can sit up!'
Zip. Zero. She bent, wiped Amanda's expressionless face with the cold washcloth, and got more nothing. The eyes didn't blink even when the washcloth passed over them. Now Lisey did begin to be scared. She looked at the digital clock-radio beside the bed and saw it had just gone six. She could call Darla with no worries of waking Matt, who would be sleeping the sleep of the just up in Montreal, but she didn't want to do that. Not yet. Calling Darla would be the same as admitting defeat, and she wasn't ready to do that.
She circled the bed, grabbed Amanda under the armpits, and hauled her backward. It was harder to do than she expected, given Amanda's scrawny bod.
Because she's dead weight now, babyluv. That's why.
'Shut up,' she said, with no idea who she was talking to. 'Just shut it.'
She got on the bed herself with her knees on either side of Amanda's thighs and her hands planted on either side of Amanda's neck. In this position, that of the lover superior, she could look directly down into her sister's upturned, staring face. During Manda's previous breaks, she had been biddable…almost the way a person under hypnosis is biddable, Lisey had thought at the time. This seemed very different. She could only hope it wasn't, because there were certain things a person had to do in the morning. If, that was, the person wanted to go on living a private life in her little Cape Cod home.
'Amanda!' she yelled down into her sister's face. Then, for good measure, and feeling only slightly ridiculous (it was only the two of them, after all): 'Big…sissa…Manda-Bunny! I want you…to stand up…stand UP!…and go into the shithouse…and use the TOIDY! Use the TOIDY, Manda-Bunny! On three! ONE…and TWO!…and THREE!' On THREE Lisey again yanked Amanda to a sitting position, but Amanda still wouldn't stand. Once, at around twenty past six, Lisey actually got her off the bed and into a kind of half-assed crouch. She felt the way she had when she'd had her first car, a 1974 Pinto, and after two endless minutes of grinding the starter the motor would finally catch and run just before the battery died. But instead of straightening up and letting Lisey lead her into the bathroom, Amanda fell back onto the bed—fell crooked, too, so that Lisey had to lunge, catch her under the arms, and shove her, cursing, to keep her from going on the floor.
'You're faking, you bitch!' she shouted at Amanda, knowing perfectly well that Amanda wasn't. 'Well, go on! Go on and—' She heard how loud she'd gotten—she'd wake up Mrs. Jones across the road if she didn't look out—and made herself lower her voice. 'Go on and lie there. Yeah. But if you think I'm going to spend the whole morning dancing attendance around you, you're full of shite. I'm going downstairs to make coffee and oatmeal. If any of it smells good to Your Royal Majesty, give me a holler. Or, I don't know, send down your smucking footman for take- out.'
She didn't know if it smelled good to big sissa Manda-Bunny, but it smelled fine to Lisey, especially the coffee. She had one cup of straight black before her bowl of oatmeal, another with double cream and sugar afterward. Sipping that one, she thought: All I need now is a ciggy and I could ride this day like a pony. A smucking Salem Light.
Her mind tried to turn toward her dreams and memories of the night just past (SCOTT AND LISEY THE EARLY YEARS for sure, she thought), and she wouldn't let it. Nor would she let it try to examine what had happened to her on waking. There might be time later to think about it, but not now. Now she had big sissa to deal with.
And suppose big sissa's found a nice pink disposable razor on top of the medicine cabinet and decided to slit her wrists with it? Or her throat?
Lisey got up from the table in a hurry, wondering if Darla had thought to clean the sharps out of the upstairs bathroom…or any of the upstairs rooms, for that matter. She took the stairs at a near-run, dreading what she might discover in the master bedroom, nerving herself to find nothing in the bed but a pair of dented pillows.
Amanda was still there, still staring up at the ceiling. She appeared not to have moved so much as an inch. Lisey's relief was replaced by foreboding. She sat on the bed and took her sister's hand in her own. It was warm but unresponsive. Lisey willed Manda's fingers to close on her own but they remained limp. Waxy.
'Amanda, what are we going to do with you?'
There was no response.
And then, because they were alone except for their reflections in the mirror, Lisey said: 'Scott didn't do this, did he, Manda? Please say Scott didn't do it by…I don't know…by coming in?'
Amanda said nothing one way or the other, and after a little while Lisey went prospecting in the bathroom for sharp objects. She guessed that Darla had indeed been here before her, because all she found was a single pair of nail-scissors at the back of the lower drawer in Manda's small, not-veryvain vanity. Of course, even those would have been enough, in a dedicated hand. Why, Scott's own father
