She gets the tea. Still sitting on her stool and working with one-handed care, Scott fills the basin with more not-quite-hot water. Then he opens the box of Lipton teabags. "Paul thought this up," he says excitedly. It's a kid's excitement, she thinks. Look at the neat model airplane I made all by myself, look at the invisible ink I made with the stuff from my chemistry set. He dumps the teabags in, all eighteen or so. They immediately begin staining the water a dull amber as they sink to the bottom of the basin. "It stings a little but it works really really good. Watch!"
Really really good, Lisey notes.
He puts his hand in the weak tea he has made, and for just a moment his lips skin back, revealing his teeth, which are crooked and a bit discolored. "Hurts a little," he says, "but it works. It really really works, Lisey."
"Yes," she says. It's bizarre, but she supposes it might actually do something about preventing infection, or promoting healing, or both. Chuckie Gendron, the short-order cook at the restaurant, is a big fan of the Insider, and she sometimes sneaks a look. Just a couple of weeks ago she read an article on one of the back pages about how tea is supposed to be good for all sorts of things. Of course it was on the same page as an article about Bigfoot bones being found in Minnesota. "Yes, I suppose you're right."
"Not me, Paul." He's excited, and all his color has come back. It's almost as if he never hurt himself at all, she thinks.
Scott jerks his chin at his breast pocket. "Cigarette me, babyluv."
"Should you be smoking with your hand all - "
"Sure, sure."
So she takes his cigarettes out of his breast pocket and puts one in his mouth and lights it for him. Fragrant smoke (she will always love that smell) rises in a blue stack toward the kitchen's sagging, water-stained ceiling. She wants to ask him more about bools, blood-bools in particular. She is starting to get a picture.
"Scott, did your Dad and Mom raise you and your brother?"
"Nope." He's got the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and one eye's squinted shut against the smoke. "Mumma died havin me. Daddy always said I killed her by bein a sleepyhead and gettin too big." He laughs at this as though it's the funniest joke in the world, but it's also a nervous laugh, a kid's laugh at a dirty joke he doesn't quite understand.
She says nothing. She's afraid to.
Chapter 7
He's looking down at the place where his hand disappears into the basin, which is now filled with bloodstained tea. He puffs rapidly on his Herbert Tareyton and the ash grows long. His eye is still squinted shut and it makes him look different, somehow. Not like a stranger, exactly, but different. Like...
Oh, say like an older brother. One who died.
"But Daddy said it wasn't my fault I stayed asleep when it was time to come out. He said she should have slap me awake and she didn't so I growed too big and she got kilt for it, bool the end." He laughs. The ash falls off his cigarette onto the counter. He doesn't seem to notice. He looks at his hand in the murky tea but says no more. Which leaves Lisey in a delicate dilemma. Should she ask another question or not?
She's afraid he won't answer, that he'll snap at her (he can snap, this she knows; she has audited his Moderns seminar on occasion). She's also afraid he will answer. She thinks he will.
"Scott?" She says this very softly.
"Mmmm?" The cigarette is already three quarters of the way down to what looks like a filter but is, on a Herbert Tareyton, only a kind of mouthpiece.
"Did your Daddy make bools?"
"Blood-bools, sure. For when we didn't dare or to let out the bad-gunky. Paul made good bools. Fun bools. Like treasure hunts. Follow the clues. 'Bool! The End!' and get a prize. Like candy or an RC." The ash falls off his cigarette again. Scott's eyes are on the bloody tea in the basin. "But Daddy gives a kiss." He looks at her and she suddenly understands he knows everything she has been too timid to ask and is answering as well as he can. As well as he dares. "That's Daddy's prize. A kiss when the hurting stops."
19
She has no bandage in her medicine cabinet that will satisfy her, so Lisey ends up tearing long strips from a sheet. The sheet is old, but she mourns its passing just the same
- on a waitress's salary (supplemented by niggardly tips from the Lost Boys and only slightly better ones from the faculty members who lunch at Pat's) she can ill afford to raid her linen closet. But when she thinks of the crisscrossing cuts on his hand - and the deeper, longer gill on his forearm - she doesn't hesitate.
Scott's asleep almost before his head hits the pillow on his side of her ridiculously narrow bed; Lisey thinks she will be awake for some time, mulling over the things he's told her. Instead she falls asleep almost at once.
She wakes twice during the night, the first time because she needs to pee. The bed is empty. She sleepwalks to the bathroom, hiking the oversized University of Maine teeshirt she sleeps in to her hips as she goes, saying "Scott, hurry up, okay, I really have to g
- " But when she enters the bathroom, the night-light she always leaves burning shows her an empty room. Scott isn't there. Nor is the toilet-seat up, the way he always leaves it after he takes a whiz.