"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)
creeping into his voice. "Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled.
Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral." On the nighttable beside the lamp is an ashtray sitting on top of his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five (Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions), and he flicks his cigarette into it. Outside, the wind gusts and the old inn creaks.
It suddenly seems to Lisey that perhaps this isn't such a good idea after all, that the good idea would be to just roll over and go to sleep, but she is two-hearted and her curiosity drives her on. "And Paul's cuts that day - the day you jumped from the bench - were bad? Not just nicks? I mean, you know the way kids see things...any busted pipe looks like a flood..."
She trails off. There's a very long pause while he watches the smoke from his cigarette rise out of the lamp's beam and disappear. When he speaks again, his voice is dry and flat and certain. "Daddy cut deep."
She opens her mouth to say something conventional that will put an end to this discussion (all kinds of warning bells are going off in her head, now; whole banks of red lights are flashing), but before she can, he goes on.