Stephen King - Liseys Story

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2006 by Stephen King

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006044382

ISBN: 0-7432-9373-8

Jambalaya: Words and music by Hank Williams 1952 Sony /ATV Songs LLC and Hiriam Music.

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All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Why Dont You Love Me: Words and music by Hank Williams 1950 Sony/ATV Songs LLC and Hiriam Music. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Songs LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

When the Stars Go Blue: Written by Ryan Adams 2001 Barland Music (BMI)/Administered by BUG. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Under the title Lisey and the Madman, an excerpt from the opening of Liseys Story appeared in McSweeneys Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon (Vintage, 2004).

Bei Hennef by D. H. Lawrence, reproduced with kind permission of Pollinger Limited for the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.

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Where do you go when youre lonely?

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When the stars go blue.

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To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon. Her husband had won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, but Lisey had given only one interview in her life. This was for the well-known womens magazine that publishes the column Yes, Im Married to Him ! She spent roughly half of its five-hundred-word length explaining that her nickname rhymed with CeeCee. Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Liseys sister Amanda said that the picture accompanying the interview made Lisey look fat.

None of Liseys sisters was immune to the pleasures of setting the cat among the pigeons (stirring up a stink had been their fathers phrase for it), or having a good natter about someone elses dirty laundry, but the only one Lisey had a hard time liking was this same Amanda. Eldest (and oddest) of the onetime Debusher girls of Lisbon Falls, Amanda currently lived alone, in a house which Lisey had provided, a small, weather-tight place not too far from Castle View where Lisey, Darla, and Cantata could keep an eye on her. Lisey had bought it for her seven years ago, five before Scott died. Died Young. Died Before His Time, as the saying was. Lisey still had trouble believing hed been gone for two years. It seemed both longer and the blink of an eye.

When Lisey finally got around to making a start at cleaning out his office suite, a long and beautifully lit series of rooms that had once been no more than the loft above a country barn, Amanda had shown up on the third day, after Lisey had finished her inventory of all the foreign editions (there were hundreds) but before she could do more than start listing the furniture, with little stars next to the pieces she thought she ought to keep. She waited for Amanda to ask her why she wasnt moving faster, for heavens sake, but Amanda asked no questions. While Lisey moved from the furniture question to a listless (and day-long) consideration of the cardboard boxes of correspondence stacked in the main closet, Amandas focus seemed to remain on the impressive stacks and piles of memorabilia which ran the length of the studys south wall. She worked her way back and forth along this snakelike accretion, saying little or nothing but jotting frequently in a little notebook she kept near to hand.

What Lisey didnt say was What are you looking for? Or What are you writing down? As Scott had pointed out on more than one occasion, Lisey had what was surely among the rarest of human talents: she was a business-minder who did not mind too much if you didnt mind yours. As long as you werent making explosives to throw at someone, that was, and in Amandas case, explosives were always a possibility. She was the sort of woman who couldnt help prying, the sort of woman who would open her mouth sooner or later.

Her husband had headed south from Rumford, where they had been living (like a couple of wolverines caught in a drainpipe, Scott said after an afternoon visit he vowed never to repeat) in 1985. Her one child, named Intermezzo and called Metzie for short, had gone north to Canada (with a long-haul trucker for a beau) in 1989. One flew north, one flew south, one couldnt shut her everlasting mouth. That had been their fathers rhyme when they were kids, and the one of Dandy Dave Debushers girls who could never shut her everlasting mouth was surely Manda, dumped first by her husband and then by her own daughter.

Hard to like as Amanda sometimes was, Lisey hadnt wanted her down there in Rumford on her own; didnt trust her on her own, if it came to that, and although theyd never said so aloud, Lisey was sure Darla and Cantata felt the same. So shed had a talk with Scott, and found the little Cape Cod, which could be had for ninety-seven thousand dollars, cash on the nail. Amanda had moved up within easy checking range soon after.

Now Scott was dead and Lisey had finally gotten around to the business of cleaning out his writing quarters. Halfway through the fourth day, the foreign editions were boxed up, the correspondence was marked and in some sort of order, and she had a good idea of what furniture was going and what was staying. So why did it feel that she had done so little? Shed known from the outset that this was a job which couldnt be hurried. Never mind all the importuning letters and phone calls shed gotten since Scotts death (and more than a few visits, too). She supposed that in the end, the people who were interested in Scotts unpublished writing would get what they wanted, but not until she was ready to give it to them. They hadnt been clear on that at first; they werent down with it, as the saying was. Now she thought most of them were.

There were lots of words for the stuff Scott had left behind. The only one she completely understood was memorabilia, but there was another one, a funny one, that sounded like incuncabilla. That was what the impatient people wanted, the wheedlers, and the angry onesScotts incuncabilla. Lisey began to think of them as Incunks.

What she felt most of all, especially after Amanda showed up, was discouraged, as if shed either underestimated the task itself or overestimated (wildly) her ability to see it through to its inevitable conclusionthe saved furniture stored in the barn below, the rugs rolled up and taped shut, the yellow Ryder van in the driveway, throwing its shadow on the board fence between her yard and the Galloways next door.