7
"Trying to live," she murmured, running her palm over the glossy page in the U-Tenn Nashville Review. Over the picture of Scott with his foot poised on that dopey silver shovel. She closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the dusty back of the booksnake. Her appetite for pictures - for memories - was more than sated for one day. There was a nasty throb starting up behind her right eye. She wanted to take something for it, not that sissy Tylenol but what her late husband had called head-bonkers. A couple of his Excedrin would be just the ticket, if they weren't too far off the shelf-date. Then a little lie-down in their bedroom until the incipient headache passed. She might even sleep awhile.
I'm still thinking of it as our bedroom, she mused, going to the stairs that lead down to the barn, which was now not really a barn at all but just a series of storage cubbies...though still redolent of hay and rope and tractor-oil, the old sweet-stubborn farm smells. Still as ours, even after two years.
And so what? What of that?
She shrugged. "Nothing, I suppose."
She was a little shocked at the mumbly, half-drunk sound of the words. She supposed all that vivid remembering had worn her out. All that relived stress. There was one thing to be grateful for: no other picture of Scott in the belly of the booksnake could call up such violent memories, he'd only been shot once and none of those colleges would have sent him photos of his fa -
(shut up about that just hush) "That's right," she agreed as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and with no real idea of what she'd been on the edge (Scoot you old Scoot) of thinking about. Her head was hanging and she felt sweaty all over, like someone who has just missed being in an accident. "Shut-upsky, enough is enough."
And, as if her voice had activated it, a telephone began to ring behind the closed wooden door on her right. Lisey came to a stop in the barn's main downstairs passage. Once that door had opened upon a stabling area large enough for three horses.
Now the sign on it simply said HIGH VOLTAGE! This had been Lisey's idea of a joke. She had intended to put a small office in there, a place where she could keep records and pay the monthly bills (they had - and she still had - a full-time moneymanager, but he was in New York and could not be expected to see to such minutiae as her monthly tab at Hilltop Grocery).
She'd gotten as far as putting in the desk, the phone, the fax, and a few filing cabinets...and then Scott died. Had she even been in there since then? Once, she remembered. Early this spring. Late March, a few stale stoles of snow still on the ground, her mission just to empty the answering machine attached to the phone. The number 21 had been in the gadget's window. Messages one through seventeen and nineteen through twenty-one had been from the sort of hucksters Scott had called "phone-lice." The eighteenth (this didn't surprise Lisey at all) had been from Amanda. "Just wanted to know if you ever hooked this damn thing up," she'd said. "You gave me and Darla and Canty the number before Scott died." Pause. "I guess you did." Pause. "Hook it up, I mean." Pause. Then, in a rush: "But there was a very long time between the message and the bleep, sheesh, you must have a lot of messages on there, little Lisey, you ought to check the damn things in case somebody wants to give you a set of Spode or something."
Pause. "Well...g'bye."
Now, standing outside the closed office door, feeling pain pulse in sync with her heartbeat behind her right eye, she listened to the telephone ring a third time, and a fourth.
Halfway through the fifth ring there was a click and then her own voice, telling whoever was on the other end that he or she had reached 727-5932. There was no false promise of a callback, not even an invitation to leave a message at the sound of what Amanda called the bleep. Anyway, what would be the point? Who would call here to talk to her? With Scott dead, the motor was out of this place. The one left was really just little Lisey Debusher from Lisbon Falls, now the widow Landon. Little Lisey lived alone in a house far too big for her and wrote grocery lists, not novels.
The pause between the message and the beep was so long that she thought the tape for replies had to be full. Even if it wasn't, the caller would get tired and hang up, all she'd hear through the closed office door would be that most annoying of recorded phone voices, the woman who tells you (scolds you), "If you'd like to make a call...please hang up and dial your operator!" She doesn't add smuckhead or shit-for-brains, but Lisey always sensed it as what Scott would have called "a subtext."
Instead she heard a male voice speak three words. There was no reason for them to chill her, but they did. "I'll try again," it said.
There was a click.
Then there was silence.