"I want you to eat these eggs, Amanda - right now! "
Lisey opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. They would get to where they were going more quickly if Darla saw for herself. And where were they going? Greenlawn, very likely. Greenlawn Recovery and Rehab in Auburn. The place she and Scott had looked into briefly after Amanda's last outletting, in the spring of 2001. Only it turned out that Scott's dealings with Greenlawn had gone a little further than his wife had suspected, and thank God for that.
Darla got the eggs into Amanda's mouth and turned to Lisey with the beginnings of a triumphant smile. "There! I think she just needed a firm h - "
At this point Amanda's tongue appeared between her slack lips, once more pushing canary-colored eggs before it, and plop. Onto the front of her nightgown, still damp from its last sponging-off.
"You were saying?" Lisey asked mildly.
Darla took a long, long look at her older sister. When she turned her eyes back to Lisey, the jut-jawed determination was gone. She looked like what she was: a middle-aged woman who'd been harried out of bed too early by a family emergency. She wasn't crying, but she was close; her eyes, the bright blue all the Debusher girls shared, swam with tears. "This isn't like before, is it?"
"No."
"Did anything happen last night?"
"No." Lisey didn't hesitate.
"No crying fits or tantrums?"
"No."
"Oh, hon, what are we going to do?"
Lisey had a practical answer for that, and no surprise there; Darla might think differently, but Lisey and Jodi had always been the practical ones. "Lay her back down, wait for business hours, then call that place," she said. "Greenlawn. And hope she doesn't piss the bed again in the meantime."
4
While they waited, they drank coffee and played cribbage, a game each of the Debusher girls had learned from Dandy long before they'd taken their first rides on the big yellow Lisbon Falls schoolbus. Every third or fourth hand, one of them would check on Amanda. She was always the same, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. In the first game, Darla skunked her younger sister; in the second she skipped out with a run of three in the crib, leaving Lisey stuck in the mudhole. That this should put her in a good humor even with Manda gorked out upstairs gave Lisey something to think about...but nothing she wanted to say right out loud. It was going to be a long day, and if Darla started it with a smile on her face, terrific. Lisey declined a third game and the two of them watched some country singer on the last segment of the Today show. Lisey could almost hear Scott saying, He ain't gonna put Ole Hank out of business. By whom he meant, of course, Hank Williams. When it came to country music, for Scott there had been Ole Hank...and then all the rest of them.
At five past nine, Lisey sat down in front of the telephone and got the Greenlawn number from Directory Assistance. She gave Darla a wan and nervous smile. "Wish me luck, Darl."
"Oh, I do. Believe me, I do."
Lisey dialed. The phone on the other end rang exactly once. "Hello," a pleasant female voice said. "This is Greenlawn Recovery and Rehabilitation, a service of Fedders Health Corporation of America."
"Hello, my name is - " Lisey got this far before the pleasant female voice began enumerating all the possible destinations one could reach...if, that was, one were possessed of a touch-tone phone. It was a recording. Lisey had been booled. Yeah, but they've gotten so good, she thought, punching 5 for Patient Intake Information.
"Please hold while your call is processed," the pleasant female voice told her, and was replaced by the Prozac Orchestra playing something that vaguely resembled Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound."
Lisey looked around to tell Darla she was on hold, but Darla had gone up to check on Amanda.
Bullshit, she thought. She just couldn't take the susp -
"Hello, this is Cassandra, how may I help you?"
A name of ill omen, babyluv, opined the Scott who kept house in her head.
"My name is Lisa Landon...Mrs. Scott Landon?"
She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn't hard to understand why she had done so now. It was what Scott called "the fame-card," and he himself had played it sparingly. Partly, he said, because doing so made him feel like a conceited ass**le, and partly because he was afraid it wouldn't work; that if he murmured some version of Don't you know who I am? in the headwaiter's ear, the headwaiter would murmur back, Non, Monsieur - who ze f**k air you?