"My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh..."
"Lisey!" Amanda sounded just as bright as a new-minted penny. Would anyone believe she'd been totally zonked only eight hours ago? Nay, madam. Nay, good sir. The spirits have done it all in one night, Lisey thought. Yay, spirits. Dr. Jantzen feels that surgery is warranted. Something called a thoracotomy. And Lisey thought, The boys came back from Mexico. They came back to Anarene. Because Anarene was home.
Which boys, pray tell? The black-and-white boys. Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms. The boys from The Last Picture Show.
In that movie it's always now and they are always young, she thought. They are always young and Sam the Lion is always dead.
"Lisey?"
She opened her eyes and there was big sissa standing in the alcove doorway, her eyes as bright as her voice, and of course in her hand she was holding the VCR box containing The Last Picture Show and the feeling was...well, coming home. The feeling was coming home, me-oh-my-oh.
And why would that be? Because drinking from the pool had its little perks and privileges? Because you sometimes brought back to this world what you picked up in that world? Picked up or swallowed? Yes, yes, and yes.
Chapter 23
"Lisey, honey, are you all right?"
Such warm concern, such smucking motherliness, was so foreign to Amanda's usual nature that it made Lisey feel unreal. "Fine," she said. "I was just resting my eyes."
"Would it be all right if I watched some of this? I found it with the rest of Scott's tapes. Most of them look pretty junky, but I always meant to see this one and never got around to it. Maybe it'll take my mind off things."
"Fine by me," Lisey said, "but I should warn you, I'm pretty sure there's a blank spot in the middle of it. It's an old tape."
Amanda was studying the back of the box. "Jeff Bridges looks like such a kid. "
"He does, doesn't he?" Lisey said wanly.
"And Ben Johnson's dead, of course..." She stopped. "Maybe I better not. We might not hear your boyf...we might not hear Dooley, if he comes."
Lisey pushed the top off the shoebox, took out the Pathfinder, and pointed it at the stairs leading down to the barn. "I locked the door to the outside stairs," she said, "so that's the only way up here. And I'm watching it."
"He could start a fire down there in the barn," Amanda said nervously.
"He doesn't want me cooked - what fun would that be?" Also, Lisey thought, there's a place I can go. As long as my mouth tastes as sweet as it does right now, there's a place I can go, and I don't think I'd have any trouble taking you with me, Manda. Not even two helpings of Hamburger Helper and two glasses of cherry Kool-Aid had taken away that lovely sweet taste in her mouth.
"Well, if you're sure it won't be bothering you..."
"Do I look like I'm studying for finals? Go ahead."
Amanda went back into the alcove. "Sure hope this VCR still works." She sounded like a woman who has discovered a wind-up gramophone and a stack of ancient acetate records.
Lisey looked at the many drawers of Dumbo's Big Jumbo, but going through them seemed like make-work now...and probably was. She had an idea that there was very little of actual interest up here. Not in the drawers, not in the filing cabinets, not hiding on the computer hard drives. Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end. But all the real horses were out of the barn. The Scott Landon stuff that had pleased regular readers - people stuck on airplanes between L.A. and Sydney, people stuck in hospital waiting rooms, people idling their way through long, rainy summer vacation days, taking turns between the novel of the week and the jigsaw puzzle out on the sun-porch - all that stuff had been published. The Secret Pearl, published a month after his death, had been the last.
No, Lisey, a voice whispered, and at first she thought it was Scott's, and then - how crazy - she thought it was the voice of Ole Hank. But that was crazy, because it wasn't a man's voice at all. Was that Good Ma's voice, going whisper-whisper-whisper in her head?
I think he wanted me to tell you something. Something about a story. Not Good Ma's voice - although Good Ma's yellow afghan had figured in it somewhere - but Amanda's. They had been sitting together on those stone benches, looking out at the good ship Hollyhocks, which always rode at anchor but never quite set sail. Lisey had never realized how much alike their mother and her oldest sister sounded until this memory of the benches. And -
Something about a story. Your story. Lisey's story.
Had Amanda actually said that? It was like a dream now and Lisey couldn't be completely sure, but she thought yes.