Lisey’s Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

that a spot had been burned black in the film of their memories. That spot might stretch over five minutes, five hours, or five days. Sometimes disconnected fragments and images would surface years or even decades later. The neurologist called it a defense mechanism.
    It made sense to Lisey.
    From the hospital she’d gone back to the motel where she was staying. It wasn’t a very good room—in back, with nothing to look at but a board fence and nothing to listen to except a hundred or so barking dogs—but she was far past caring about such things. Certainly she wanted nothing to do with the campus where her husband had been shot. And as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the hard double bed, she thought: Darkness loves him.
    Was that true?
    How could she say, when she didn’t even know what it meant?
    You know. Daddy’s prize was a kiss.
    Lisey had turned her head so swiftly on the pillow she might have been slapped by an invisible hand. Shut up about that!
    No answer . . . no answer . . . and then, slyly: Darkness loves him. He dances with it like a lover and the moon comes up over the purple hill and what was sweet smells sour. Smells like poison.
    She had turned her head back the other way. And outside the motel room the dogs—every smucking dog in Nashville, it sounded like—had barked as the sun went down in orange August smoke, making a hole for the night. As a child she had been told by her mother there was nothing to fear in the dark, and she had believed it to be true. She had been downright gleeful in the dark, even when it was lit by lightning and ripped by thunder. While her years-older sister Manda cowered under her covers, little Lisey sat atop her own bed, sucking her thumb and demanding that someone bring the flashlight and read her a story. She had told this to Scott once and he had taken her hands and said, “You be my light, then. Be my light, Lisey.” And she had tried, but—
    â€œI was in a dark place,” Lisey murmured as she sat in his deserted study with the U-Tenn Nashville Review in her hands. “Did you say that, Scott? You did, didn’t you?”
    â€” I was in a dark place and you found me. You saved me.
    Maybe in Nashville that had been true. Not in the end.
    â€” You were always saving me, Lisey. Do you remember the first night I stayed at your apartment?
    Sitting here now with the book in her lap, Lisey smiled. Of course she did. Her strongest memory was of too much peppermint schnapps, it had given her an acidy stomach. And he’d had trouble first getting and then maintaining an erection, although in the end everything went all right. She’d assumed then it was the booze. It wasn’t until later that he’d told her he’d never been successful until her: she’d been his first, she’d been his only, and every story he’d ever told her or anyone else about his crazy life of adolescent sex, both gay and straight, had been a lie. And Lisey? Lisey had seen him as an unfinished project, a thing to do before going to sleep. Coax the dishwasher through the noisy part of her cycle; set the Pyrex casserole dish to soak; blow the hotshot young writer until he gets some decent wood.
    â€” When it was done and you went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay, and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I’ve ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don’t care if you understand me.