driveway for good around eightthirty, 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 to 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.
According to Dr. Alberness (this Lisey got over the phone, in response to her appreciative little Uh-huhs and Oh, reallys and I'd forgottens), Scott had told him at this lunch of theirs that he was convinced Amanda Debusher was headed for a more serious break with reality, perhaps a permanent one, and after reading the
