an
uncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.
You aren't gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She's been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He's off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he's riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone's working again. Lisey hears Darla's laugh—that laugh of perfect teenage contempt— deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wideeyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.
And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there's a way.
The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She's honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths—the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance—behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There's a certain sound
(the chuffing, dear God that low nasty grunting)
behind there, and certain sights
(the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight)
as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don't-think zone behind it. They should. It's handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights. There's all sorts of dusty old crapola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'other t'ing. All in all, it's quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott…and what do the kids say?
'Don't goinzee there,' Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there…wherever there is.
Oh, but it's right next door.
That's the horror of it.
'You know, don't you?' she says, beginning to weep, but it isn't Scott she's asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness. She had protested—she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same—and he had said, You don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.
But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.
7
Lying on her back in her dead husband's study, holding the bloody delight against her breast, Lisey said: 'I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it.' She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn't trust herself to get up, not just yet. 'His hand was warm but the floor
8
The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn't holding Scott's, but it's small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the
floorboards…and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber's pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.
Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your ass turns blue. If you can do something for him, do it.
But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?
The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.
'He-never-told-me-about-that-because-I-never-
asked.' This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.
If so, it's an exotic one-word lie. He answered her question about the tea-cure that night at The Antlers. In bed, after love. She asked him two or three questions, but the one that mattered, the key question, turned out to be that first one. Simple, too. He could have answered with a plain old yes or no, but when had Scott Landon ever answered anything with a plain old yes or no? And it turned out to be the cork in the neck of the bottle. Why? Because it returned them to Paul. And the story of Paul was, essentially, the story of his death. And the death of Paul led to—
'No, please,' she whispers, and realizes she's squeezing his hand far too tight. Scott, of course, makes no protest. In the parlance of the Landon family, he has gone gomer. Sounded funny when you put it that way, almost like a joke on Hee-Haw. Say, Buck, where's Roy?
Well, I tell yew, Minnie—Roy's gone gomer!
[Audience howls with laughter.]
But Lisey isn't laughing, and she doesn't need any of her interior voices to tell her Scott has gone to gomerland. If she wants to fetch him back, first she must follow him.
'Oh God no,' she moans, because what that means is already looming in the back of her mind, a large shape wrapped in many sheets. 'Oh God, oh God, do I have to?'
God doesn't answer. Nor does she need Him to. She knows what she needs to do, or at least how she needs to start: she must remember their second night at The Antlers, after love. They had been drowsing toward sleep, and she had thought What's the harm, it's Saintly Big Brother you want to know about, not Old Devil Daddy. Go ahead and ask him. So she did. Sitting on the floor with his hand (it's cooling now) folded into hers and the wind booming outside and the sky filled with crazy color, she peers around the curtain she's put up to hide her worst, most perplexing memories and sees herself asking him about the tea-cure. Asking him
9
'After that thing on the bench, did Paul soak his cuts in tea, the way you soaked your hand that night in my apartment?'
He's lying in bed next to her, the sheet pulled up to his hips, so she can see the beginning curl of his pubic hair. He's smoking what he calls the always fabulous post-coital cigarette, and the only light in the room is cast down on them by the lamp on his side of the bed. In the rose-dusty glow of that lamp the smoke rises and disappears into the dark, making her wonder briefly
(was there a sound, a clap of collapsing air under the yum-yum tree when we went, when we left)
about something she's already working to put out of her mind.
Meanwhile, the silence is stretching out. She has just about decided he won't answer when he does. And his tone makes her believe it was careful thought and not reluctance that made him pause. 'I'm pretty sure the tea- cure came later, Lisey.' He thinks a little more, nods. 'Yeah, I know it did, because by then I was doing fractions. One-third plus one-fourth equals seven-twelfths, stuff like-a dat.' He grins…but Lisey, who is coming to know his repertoire of expressions well, thinks it is a nervous grin.
'In school?' she asks.
'No, Lisey.' His tone says she should know better than this, and when he speaks again, she can hear that somehow chilling childishness
(I trite and I trite)
