Lisa
83 days since leaving Grace
Thursday had been endless and extreme, like a marathon, only instead of running—meditative, physical—it had been mental warfare.
Except, the other side had no idea they were at war.
Ever since Miles’s birthday party, Mother had been … escalating. In small ways, maybe—a few more passive aggressive digs about Singer here, undercutting Jake’s role in the house there—but after yet another new therapist this morning, Lisa had been her target all day.
“We’ll get sushi for dinner.” Mother was clearly oblivious to the very real feeling of collapse beginning to crackle along Lisa’s muscle groups, as if her body were preparing to protect itself by any means necessary, and that included playing dead.
Mother would take death as a challenge. She had apparently taken joining a cult as one.
Lisa bit off an entirely inappropriate explosion of laughter—a cult! I joined a cult! (was it really laughter if it was torn from your body like a scream?)—and excused herself to her room.
The kitchen door opened at the same time, and Jake, carrying Miles, as usual, almost bumped into her.
“Oh, hey, Lisa. Listen, we’re going to my brother’s for dinner. Okay?” He glanced over her shoulder, toward the living room, almost as if he understood that she might not be okay.
Then he looked back at her face and added, seriously, too seriously, “Come with us. You’ve never seen Carey’s place before, and Alice is a painter. And I wouldn’t mind the company, either.”
“Isn’t Singer—”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. And Emery will be there.” He smiled.
“I can’t do this more tonight,” she whispered to Singer’s boyfriend (and kid), standing in the hallway of what had once been her home. “I can’t tell who’s crazier, her or me.”
“We’re supposed to be there at six. I’ll text you when we get close to ready.”
She nodded and unlocked her door. She’d make some excuse, maybe about her dislike for sushi, which could definitely be played up, and she’d escape with them for a little while. Any plan was better than no plan.
*
Alice and Carey had clearly received warning that Singer’s crazy sister was coming to dinner. They were all smiles and welcome.
Carey actually shook her hand. Which was funny. “You want the penny tour?”
“Sure.” Weird, watching Carey, this Carey, when the Carey she’d known in school had never smiled, except with the Derries. Never laughed out loud ever. He’d been moody and—dark, Lisa settled on, though it hadn’t been a show, like with some kids. No trench coats, no eyeliner, no boots. She almost thought there was some kind of scandal when they were younger, one of those creepy priest stories, but who knew if what she remembered was real or rumor.
“So our bedroom’s at the end of the hall”—to her relief, no offer was made to enter—“and this is my office, here.”
Carey’s office reminded her of her scrapbooking room. Prepared for use, without actually being inhabited.
“And this is Alice’s studio.”
She could tell by his voice that it was meant to be a declaration. That in another context, she would be expected to give up at least an “ahh” if not an “ooh.”
Then she saw Alice’s studio.
“Oh my god.”
The smile, the entirely smug smile Carey was wearing, should have annoyed her. But instead Lisa’s feet propelled her into the room without any interference from propriety or politeness.
Paintings leaned up against all the walls, some four or five deep. There was a stack of three canvasses on the nearest table, beside a higher stack. The top of the first stack showed an incredible painting of hands twisted around each other, anchored in space by ropes, knotted at the wrist and extending beyond the edges of the canvas. God, god, Lisa thought, wanting to touch it, to verify what her brain was telling her must be true: there are no hands there. But something about it, far more than a photograph, seemed three-dimensional.
“I don’t come in here at night, when the lights are off.” Carey had stayed behind her, to the side of the door. “She’s been working on hands almost since we moved in. One of the cousins has a friend who models for her, and Emery takes the photographs so she can paint from them later.”
More hands, a few of ankles, though these were not nearly as well defined, the ropes blurred from far away and almost indistinguishable up close. (Snakes? Not snakes.) In the back corner of the room a second table was set up, and this one held notebooks and notebooks. Some, open, were sketches of a young man, bound with rope, in pencil, mostly. A few in charcoal. And then, larger, another sketch. Emery, unmistakable, looking down on a boy, one hand out, hovering just over his bent head, camera in his other hand.
“I mostly stay away from the nudes in this sequence, but that one is … compelling.”
The boy was naked, though the rope coiling around his arms and chest almost disguised it.
She gestured to the man above the boy. “It’s Emery, isn’t it?”
“Yes. He and Alice have known each other for almost their entire lives, and I have to believe that does something for the art. I think all of her work is miraculous, but this series contains some of my favorites.” Carey moved to stand beside her at the table. “I don’t know where all her Emerys went—there are entire notebooks—and in some of them you can see this look on his face, serious and humorous at once. But that one is a particularly good perspective on—I don’t know—the way he watches. Like a heron, very still.”
Lisa glanced over.
“Are you impressed? Alice tells me I live vicariously through her. But I can’t help but feel weirdly proud, standing here looking at her work.”
“Yeah. I think that’s appropriate. Wow.”
Carey grinned. And that expression was new to him, as an adult. Teenage Carey could never have opened his face like that, shared that kind of smile. “That’s the whole tour. Which I basically offered to give you only for this room.”
“I can’t imagine being able to do this.”
“Me neither. The places Alice goes in her head astound me. In a good way.” He paused. “Well, never in a bad way, at least. I hope you like pizza. We’re having a pizza buffet.”
“Stop hiding!” Alice shouted from somewhere else in the house.
Oh god, was she hiding again? She couldn’t seem to stop hiding. Lisa turned to the door and froze at the sight of a noose hanging from the ceiling. Her chest seized, throat closing, and she couldn’t breathe or swallow and her heartbeat took over her entire awareness—
Carey froze, not quite reaching out. “She meant me. I’m the one who’s hiding.” Pause. “That’s a lasso. A gift from a friend of Alice’s before she moved to the wild West.”
The words fell around her, out of order, and all she could think was, I’m dying, I’m dying, the snake is a noose and this is death and I am dead and that noose is proof—
“Hold your breath. I know it sounds weird, but it works for me. Hold your breath and focus on something until you think you can inhale again. Something real, something tangible, with texture, and scent. Lisa, hold your breath and focus.”
Her toes curled inside her shoes, and both of her hands came up to her chest, clenched and crossing, like she was a mummy, dead and buried.
“Lisa. You’re here with us, having pizza, and also listening to Alice’s crazy ideas about family expansion, which is fitting, since you are an expansion of our family. Focus on something and breathe.”
Tears blurred everything, but she could still see the drawing of Emery, looking down, careful and intense and holding his camera, the strap loose around his wrist, and she could feel the weight of a camera strap if she tried, she could feel the swing of it as if the drawing weren’t just a moment trapped on paper.
“Breathe,” Carey said. “Not too fast.”
She looked at the sketch and for a second imagined that she was the one on her knees, that she was the one Emery was looking at like in his gaze even Lisa could be whole.
“You guys ready for pizza?” Alice asked from the doorway.
“We’ll be out in a sec.” Then, lower, “You good?”
She didn’t know how long it took before she could get herself back from the speedy panic in her lungs. But when she did, she nodded, and Carey nodded in reply. No fanfare. No discussion.
One fuckup to another: You good?
Lisa wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, but she followed him out to the main room and sat beside Emery, who, whether he knew it or not, had grounded her enough to stop dying.
He smiled at her, and some deep fault line in her shifted, the broken pieces knitting back together.