Lisey’s Story Read Free

she said. “Just look.”
    Manda was holding out the first page. Written on the blue lines, crammed in from the little wire loops on the left to the edge of the sheet on the right ( like a coded message from one of those street-crazies you’re always running into in New York because there’s not enough money for the publicly funded mental institutions anymore, Lisey thought wearily), were numbers. Most had been circled. A very few had been enclosed in squares. Manda turned the page and now here were two pages filled with more of the same. On the following page, the numbers stopped halfway down. The final one appeared to be 846.
    Amanda gave her the sidelong, red-cheeked, and somehow hilarious expression of hauteur that had meant, when she was twelve and little Lisey only two, that Manda had gone and Taken Something On Herself; tears for someone would follow. Amanda herself, more often than not. Lisey found herself waiting with some interest (and a touch of dread) to see what that expression might mean this time. Amanda had been acting nutty ever since turning up. Maybe it was just the sullen, sultry weather. More likely it had to do with the sudden absence of her longtime boyfriend. If Manda was headed for another spell of stormy emotional weather because Charlie Corriveau had jilted her, then Lisey supposed she had better buckle up herself. She had never liked or trusted Corriveau, banker or not. How could you trust a man after overhearing, at the spring library bake sale, that the guys down at The Mellow Tiger called him Shootin’ Beans? What kind of nickname was that for a banker? What did it even mean? And surely he had to know that Manda had had mental problems in the past—
    â€œLisey?” Amanda asked. Her brow was deeply furrowed.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Lisey said, “I just kind of . . . went off there for a second.”
    â€œYou often do,” Amanda said. “I think you got it from Scott. Pay attention, Lisey. I made a little number on each of his magazines and journals and scholarly things. The ones piled over there against the wall.”
    Lisey nodded as if she understood where this was going.
    â€œI made the numbers in pencil, just light,” Amanda went on. “Always when your back was turned or you were somewhere else, because I thought if you saw, you might have told me to stop.”
    â€œI wouldn’t’ve.” She took the little notebook, which was limp with its owner’s sweat. “Eight hundred and forty-six! That many!” And she knew the publications running along the wall weren’t the sort she herself might read and have in the house, ones like O and Good Housekeeping and Ms., but rather Little Sewanee Review and Glimmer Train and Open City and things with incomprehensible names like Piskya.
    â€œQuite a few more than that,” Amanda said, and cocked a thumb at the piles of books and journals. When Lisey really looked at them, she saw that her sister was right. Many more than eight hundred and forty-some. Had to be. “Almost three thousand in all, and where you’ll put them or who’d want them I’m sure I can’t say. No, eight hundred and forty-six is just the number that have pictures of you.”
    This was so awkwardly stated that Lisey at first didn’t understand it. When she did, she was delighted. The idea that there might be such an unexpected photo-resource—such a hidden record of her time with Scott—had never crossed her mind. But when she thought about it, it made perfect sense. They had been married over twenty-five years at the time of his death, and Scott had been an inveterate, restless traveler during those years, reading, lecturing, crisscrossing the country with hardly a pause when he was between books, visiting as many as ninety campuses a year and never losing a beat in his seemingly endless stream of short stories. And on most of those rambles she was with him. In