Lisey's Story

"If someone comes I'll nip right back into the car." Manda looked back over her shoulder and flashed a grin. "Try it - the grass feels positively slinky. "

Lisey walked to the edge of the pavement on the balls of her feet, then stepped up into the green. Amanda was right, slinky was the one, the perfect fish from Scott's pool of words. And the view to the west was a straight shot to the eye and heart. Thunderheads were pouring toward them through the ragged teeth of the White Mountains, and Lisey counted seven dark spots where the high slopes had been smudged away by cauls of rain. Brilliant lightnings flashed inside those stormbags and between two of them, connecting them like some fantastic fairy bridge, was a double rainbow that arched over Mount Cranmore in a frayed loophole of blue. As Lisey watched that hole closed and another, over some mountain whose name she did not know, opened, and the rainbow reappeared. Below them Castle Lake was a dirty dark gray and Little Kin Pond beyond it a dead black goose-eye. The wind was rising but it was improbably warm, and when her hair lifted from her temples, Lisey lifted her arms as though she would fly - not on a magic carpet but on the ordinary alchemy of a summer storm.

"Manda!" she said. "I'm glad I'm alive!"

"So am I," Amanda said seriously, and held out her hands. The wind blew back her graying hair and made it fly like a child's. Lisey closed her fingers carefully around her sister's, trying to be mindful of Amanda's cuts but aware of a rising wildness in herself all the same. Thunder cracked overhead, the warm wind blew harder, and ninety miles to the west, thunderheads streamed through the ancient mountain passes. Amanda began to dance and Lisey danced with her, their bare feet in the grass, their linked hands in the sky.

"Yes!" Thunder cracked and Lisey had to yell it.

"Yes, what? " Manda hollered back. She was laughing again.

"Yes, I mean to kill him!"

"That's what I said! I'll help you!" Amanda shouted, and then the rain began and they ran back to the car, both of them laughing and holding their hands over their heads. 6

They were under cover before the first of that afternoon's half a dozen real downpours came, and so were spared a serious soaking, which they most certainly would have gotten had they dallied; thirty seconds after the first drops fell, they could no longer see the nearest picnic table, less than twenty yards away. The rain was cold, the inside of the car warm, and the windshield fogged up at once. Lisey started the engine and turned on the defroster. Amanda snared Lisey's cell phone. "Time to call Miss Buggy Bumpers," she said, using a childhood name for Darla Lisey hadn't heard in years. Lisey glanced at her watch and saw it was now after three. Not much chance of Canty and Darla (once known as Miss Buggy Bumpers, and how she'd hated it) still being at lunch. "They're probably on the road between Portland and Auburn by now," she said.

"Yes, they probably are," Amanda said, speaking to Lisey as though she were a child.

"That's why I'm going to call Miss Buggy's cell."

It's Scott's fault if I'm technologically challenged, Lisey thought of saying. Ever since he died, I keep falling farther behind the cutting edge. Why, I haven't even gotten around to buying a DVD player yet, and everybody has those.

What she did say was, "If you call Darla Miss Buggy Bumpers, she'll probably hang up even if she realizes it's you."

"I'd never do that." Amanda stared out at the pelting rain. It had turned the BMW's windshield into a glass river. "Do you know why me n Canty used to call her that, and why it was so mean of us?"

"No."

"When she was only three or four, Darla had a little red rubber dolly. She was the original Miss Buggy Bumpers. Darl loved that old thing. One cold night she left Miss Buggy on a radiator and she melted. Sweet baldheaded Christ, what a stink."

Lisey tried her best to hold back more laughter and failed. Because her throat was locked and her mouth was shut, it came out through her nose and she blew a large quantity of clear snot onto her fingers.

"Euwww, charming, high tea is served, madam," Amanda said.

"There are Kleenex in the glove compartment," Lisey said, blushing to the roots of her hair. "Would you give me some?" Then she thought of Miss Buggy Bumpers melting on the radiator, and this crossed with what had been Dandy's juiciest curse -  sweet baldheaded Christ - and she started laughing again, although she recognized the sadness hidden like a sweet-sour pearl within her hilarity, something that had to do with the neatly-put-together do-it-myway-darling adult Darla and the ghost child still hidden just beneath, that jam-smeared and often furious kid who had always seemed to need something.

"Oh, just wipe it on the steering wheel," Amanda said, now laughing again herself. She was holding the hand with the phone in it against her stomach. "I think I'm going to pee myself."

"If you pee in those pajamas, Amanda, they'll melt. Give me that damn box of Kleenex."

Amanda, still laughing, opened the glove compartment and handed over the Kleenex.

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