Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It had been snowing all morning-gloomy, but good letter-writing weather-and when a bar of sun fell across the keyboard of the Mac, Jessie glanced up in surprise, startled out of her thoughts. What she saw out the window did more than charm her; it filled her with an emotion she had not experienced for a long time and hadn’t expected to experience again for a long time to come, if ever. It was joy, a deep, complex joy she could never have explained.

The snow hadn’t stopped-not entirely, anyway-but a bright February sun had broken through the clouds overhead, turning both the fresh six inches on the ground and the snow still floating down through the air to a brilliant diamantine white. The window offered a sweeping view of Portland’s Eastern Promenade, and it was a view which had soothed and fascinated Jessie in all weathers and seasons, but she had never seen anything quite like this; the combination of snow and sun had turned the gray air over Casco Bay into a fabulous jewel-box of interlocking rainbows.

If there were real people living in those snow-globes where you can shakeup a blizzard any time you want to, they’d see this weather all the time, she thought, and laughed. This sound was as fabulously strange to her ears as that feeling of joy was to her heart, and it only took a moment’s thought to realize why: she hadn’t laughed at all since the previous October. She referred to those hours, the last ones she ever intended to spend by Kashwakamak (or any other lake, for that matter), simply as “my hard time.” This phrase told what was necessary and not one thing more, she felt. Which was just the way she liked it.

No laughs at all since then? Zilch? Zero? Are you sure?

Not absolutely sure, no. She supposed she might have laughed in dreams-God knew she had cried in enough of them-but as far as her waking hours went, it had been a shutout until now. She remembered the last one very clearly: reaching across her body with her left hand so she could get the keys out of the right pocket of her culotte skirt, telling the windy darkness she was going to make like an amoeba and split. That, so far as she knew, had been the last laugh until now.

“Only that and nothing more,” Jessie murmured. She took a pack of cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and lit one. God, how that phrase brought it all back-the only other thing with the power to do it so quickly and completely, she had discovered, was that awful song by Marvin Gaye. She’d heard it once on the radio when she’d been driving back from one of the seemingly endless doctor’s appointments which had made up her life this winter, Marvin wailing “Everybody knows… especially you girls… “in that soft, insinuating voice of his. She had turned the radio off at once, but she’d still been shaking too badly to drive. She had parked and waited for the worst of the shakes to pass. Eventually they had, but on the nights when she didn’t wake up muttering that phrase from “The Raven” over and over into her sweat-soaked pillow, she heard herself chanting, “Witness, witness.” As far as Jessie was concerned, it was six of one and half a million of the other.

She dragged deep on her cigarette, puffed out three perfect rings, and watched them rise slowly above the humming Mac.

When people were stupid enough or tasteless enough to ask about her ordeal (and she had discovered she knew a great many more stupid, tasteless people than she ever would have guessed), she told them she couldn’t remember much of what had happened. After the first two or three police interviews, she began to tell the cops and all but one of Gerald’s colleagues the same thing. The single exception had been Brandon Milheron. To him she had told the truth, partly because she needed his help but mostly because Brandon had been the only one who had displayed the slightest understanding of what she had gone through… was still going through. He hadn’t wasted her time with pity, and what a relief that had been. Jessie had also discovered that pity came cheap in the aftermath of tragedy, and that all the pity in the world wasn’t worth a pisshole in the snow.

Anyway, the cops and the newspaper reporters had accepted her amnesia-and the rest of her story-at face value, that was the important thing, and why not? People who underwent serious physical and mental trauma often blocked out the memories of what had happened; the cops knew that even better than the lawyers, and Jessie knew it better than any of them. She had learned a great deal about physical and mental trauma since last October. The books and articles had helped her find plausible reasons not to talk about what she didn’t want to talk about, but otherwise they hadn’t helped much. Or maybe it was just that she hadn’t come to the right case histories yet-the ones dealing with handcuffed women who were forced to watch as their husbands became Purina Dog Chow.

Jessie surprised herself by laughing again-a good loud laugh this time. Was that funny? Apparently it was, but it was also one of those funny things you could never, ever tell anyone else. Like how your Dad once got so excited about a solar eclipse that he blew a load all over the seat of your underpants, for instance. Or how-here’s a real yuck-you actually thought a little come on your fanny might make you pregnant.

Anyway, most of the case histories suggested that the human mind often reacted to extreme trauma the way a squid reacts to danger-by covering the entire landscape with a billow of obscuring ink. You knew something had happened, and that it had been no day in the park, but that was all. Everything else was gone, hidden by that ink. A lot of the case-history people said that-people who had been raped, people who had been in car crashes, people who had been caught in fires and had crawled into closets to die, even one skydiving lady whose parachute hadn’t opened and who had been recovered, badly hurt but miraculously alive, from the large soft bog in which she had landed.

What was it like, coming down? they had asked the skydiving lady. What did you think about when you realized your chute hadn’topened, wasn’t going to open? And the skydiving lady had replied, I can’t remember. I remember the starter patting me on the back, and Ithink I remember the pop-out, but the next thing I remember is being ona stretcher and asking one of the men putting me into the back of theambulance how badly I was hurt. Everything in the middle is just ahaze. I suppose I prayed, but I can’t even remember that for sure.

Or maybe you really remembered everything, my skydiving friend, Jessie thought, and lied about it, just like I did. Maybe even for thesame reasons. For all I know, every damned one of the case-history peoplein every damned one of the hooks I read was lying,

Maybe so. Whether they were or not, the fact remained that she did remember her hours handcuffed to the bed-from the click of the key in the second lock right up to that final freezing moment when she had looked into the rearview mirror and seen that the thing in the house had become the thing in the back seat, she remembered it all. She remembered those moments by day and relived them by night in horrible dreams where the water-glass slid past her along the inclined plane of the shelf and shattered on the floor, where the stray dog bypassed the cold buffet on the floor in favor of the hot meal on the bed, where the hideous night-visitor in the corner asked Do you love me, Punkin? in her father’s voice and maggots squirmed like semen from the tip of its erect penis.

But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not confer an obligation to tell about a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream. She had lost ten pounds since October (well, that was shading the truth a bit; it was actually more like seventeen), taken up smoking again (a pack and a half a day, plus a joint roughly the size of an El Producto before bedtime), her complexion had gone to hell, and all at once her hair was going gray all over her head, not just at the temples. That last was something she could fix-hadn’t she been doing so for five years or more?-but so far she simply hadn’t been able to summon up enough energy to dial Oh Pretty Woman in Westbrook and make an appointment. Besides, who did she have to look good for? Was she planning to maybe hit a few singles bars, check out the local talent?

Good idea, she thought. Some guy will ask if he can buy me a drink,I’ll say yes, and then, while we wait for the bartender to bring them,I’ll tell him-just casually-that I have this dream where my fatherejaculates maggots instead of semen, With a line of interesting conversational patter like that, I’m sure he’ll ask me back to his apartmentright away. He won’t even want to see a doctor’s certificate saying I’mHIV-negative.

In mid-November, after she had begun to believe the police were really going to leave her alone and the story’s sex angle was going to stay out of the papers (she was very slow coming to believe this, because the publicity was the thing she had dreaded the most), she decided to try therapy with Nora Callighan again. Maybe she didn’t want this sitting inside and sending out poison fumes for the next thirty or forty years as it rotted. How much different might her life have been if she had managed to tell Nora what had happened on the day of the eclipse? For that matter, how much difference might it have made if that girl hadn’t come into the kitchen when she did that ni ht at Neuworth Parsonage? Maybe none… but maybe a lot.

Maybe an awful lot.

So she dialed New Today, New Tomorrow, the loose association of counsellors with which Nora had been affiliated, and was shocked to silence when the receptionist told her Nora had died of leukemia the year before-some weird, sly variant which had hidden successfully in the back alleys of her limbic system until it was too late to do a damned thing about it. Would Jessie perhaps care to meet with Laurel Stevenson? the receptionist asked, but Jessie remembered Laurel-a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who wore high heels with sling backs and looked as if she would enjoy sex to the fullest only when she was on top. She told the receptionist she’d think it over. And that had been it for counselling.

In the three months since she had learned of Nora’s death, she’d had good days (when she was only afraid) and bad days (when she was too terrified even to leave this room, let alone the house) but only Brandon Milheron had heard anything approaching the complete story of Jessie Mahout’s hard time by the lake… and Brandon hadn’t believed the crazier aspects of that story. Had sympathized, yes, but not believed. Not at first, anyway.

“No pearl earring,” he had reported the day after she first told him about the stranger with the long white face. “No muddy footprint, either. Not in the written reports, at least.”

Jessie shrugged and said nothing. She could have said things, but it seemed safer not to. She had badly needed a friend in the weeks following her escape from the summer house, and Brandon had filled the bill admirably. She didn’t want to distance him or drive him away entirely with a lot of crazy talk. So she didn’t tell him what he was certainly smart enough to have figured out for himself-the pearl earring could have disappeared into someone’s pocket, and a single muddy footprint by the bureau could have been overlooked. The bedroom had, after all, been treated as the scene of an accident, not a murder.

And there was something else, too, something simple and direct: maybe Brandon was right. Maybe her visitor had just been a soupcon of moonlight, after all.

Little by little she had been able to persuade herself, at least in her waking hours, that this was the truth of it. Her space cowboy had been a kind of Rorschach pattern, one made not of ink and paper but of wind-driven shadows and imagination. She didn’t blame herself for any of this, however; quite the opposite. If not for her imagination, she never would have seen how she might be able to get the water-glass… and even if she had gotten it, she never would have thought of using a magazine blow-in card as a straw. No, she thought her imagination had more than earned its right to a few hallucinatory megrims, but it remained important for her to remember she’d been alone that night. If recovery began anywhere, she had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.

Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of the Press-Herald’s County News section. All her assumptions began to change then, and they had gone right on changing as the story of Raymond Andrew Joubert began its steady march from filler between the Community Calendar and the County Police Beat to banner headlines on the front page. Then, yesterday… seven days after Joubert’s name had first appeared on the County page…

There was a tap at the door, and Jessie’s first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost… but not quite.

“Meggie? That you?”

“None other, ma'am.”

“Come on in.”

Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass, Jessie’s right wrist began to itch madly. This didn’t always happen, but it wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar reaction, either. At least the twitches and that weird my-skin-is-crawling-right-off-the-bones sensation had pretty much stopped. There had been awhile there, before Christmas, when Jessie had really believed she was going to spend the rest of her life drinking out of a plastic cup.

“How’s yet paw today?” Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie’s itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie’s questions-and the intuitions which prompted them-a little creepy, but never ridiculous.

The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove-for that was what it was-had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn’t grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life’s few reliable hedges against insanity.

“Not too bad, Meggie.”

Meggie’s left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don’t-believe-you height. “No? If you’ve been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you’ve been in here, I bet it’s singing “Ave Maria."”

“Have I really been here for-?” She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn’t strayed as far from the truth as Meggie’s lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn’t that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she’d had to.

She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:

No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I’ll be damned if I can.

My hand was hurting like hell-whatever help I’d gotten from the aspirin was long gone-but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I’d forgotten. At first I couldn’t remember what it was. I don’t think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He’d been in the back seat, and he’d leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.

I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I

The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: “Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we’d be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”

Good question, Jessie thought, and let her eyes wander from the VDT screen to Meggie Landis’s face. Jessie liked the energetic Irishwoman, liked her a lot-hell, owed her a lot-but if she had caught the little housekeeper looking at the words on the Mac’s screen, Meggie would have been headed down Forest Avenue with her severance pay in her pocket before you could say Dear Ruth, I suppose you’re surprised to hear from me after all theseyears.

But Megan wasn’t looking at the pc’s screen; she was looking at the sweeping view of Eastern Prom and Casco Bay beyond it. The sun was still shining and the snow was still falling, although now it was clearly winding down.

“Devil’s beating his wife,” Meggie remarked.

“I beg your pardon?” Jessie asked, smiling.

“That’s what my mother used to say when the sun came out before the snow stopped.” Meggie looked a little embarrassed as she held her hand out for the empty glass. “What it means I’m not sure I could say.”

Jessie nodded. The embarrassment on Meggie Landis’s face had lensed into something else-something that looked to Jessie like unease. For a moment she hadn’t any idea what could have made Meggie look that way, and then it came to her-a thing so obvious it was easy to overlook. It was the smile. Meggie wasn’t used to seeing Jessie smile. Jessie wanted to assure her that it was all right, that the smile didn’t mean she was going to leap from her chair and attempt to tear Meggie’s throat out.

Instead, she told her, “My own mother used to say, “The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.” I never knew what that one meant either.”

The housekeeper did look in the Mac’s direction now, but it was the merest flick of dismissal: Time to put your toys away, Missus, her glance said. “That pill’s going to make you sleepy if you don’t dump a little food atop it. I’ve got a sandwich waiting for you, and soup heating on the stove.”

Soup and sandwich-kid food, the lunch you had after sledding all morning on the day when school was cancelled because of a nor'easter; food you ate with the cold still blazing redly in your cheeks like bonfires. It sounded absolutely great, but…

“I’m going to pass, Meg.”

Meggie’s brow furrowed and the corners of her mouth drew down. This was an expression Jessie had seen often in the early days of Meggie’s employment, when she had sometimes felt she needed an extra pain pill so badly that she had cried. Megan had never given in to her tears, however. Jessie supposed that was why she had hired the little Irishwoman-she had guessed from the first that Meggie wasn’t a giver-inner. She was, in fact, one hard spring potato when she had to be. but Meggie would not be getting her way this time.

“You need to eat, Jess. You re nothing but a scarecrow.” Now it was the overflowing ashtray which bore the dour whiplash of her glance. “And you need to quit that shit, too.”

I’ll make you quit them, me proud beauty, Gerald said in her mind, and Jessie shuddered.

“Jessie? Are you all right? Is there a draft?”

“No. A goose walked over my grave, that’s all.” She smiled wanly. “We’re a regular packet of old sayings today, aren’t we?”

“You’ve been warned time and time again about not overdoing-”

Jessie reached out her black-clad right hand and tentatively touched Meggie’s left hand with it. “My hand’s really getting better, isn’t it?”

“Yes. If you could use it on that machine, even part of the time, for three hours or more and not be yelling for that pill the second I showed my face in here, then I guess you’re getting better even faster than Dr Magliore expected. All the same-”

“All the same it’s getting better, and that’s good… right?”

“Of course it’s good.” The housekeeper looked at Jessie as if she were mad.

“Well, now I’m trying to get the rest of me better. Step one is writing a letter to an old friend of mine. I promised myself-last October, during my hard time-that if I got out of the mess I was in, I’d do that. But I kept putting it off. Now I’m finally trying, and I don’t dare stop. I might lose my guts if I do.” “But the pill-”

“I think I’ve got just enough time to finish this and stick the printout in an envelope before I get too sleepy to work. Then I can take a long nap, and when I wake up I’ll eat an early supper.” She touched Meggie’s left hand with her right again, a gesture of reassurance which was both clumsy and rather sweet. “A nice big one.”

Meggie’s frown remained. “It’s not good to skip meals, Jessie, and you know it.”

Very gently, Jessie said: “Some things are more important than meals. You know that as well as I do, don’t you?”

Meggie glanced toward the VDT again, then sighed and nodded. When she spoke, it was in the tone of a woman bowing to some conventional sentiment in which she herself does not really believe. “I guess so. And even if I don’t, you’re the boss.”

Jessie nodded, realizing for the first time that this was now more than just a fiction the two of them maintained for the sake of convenience. “I suppose I am, at that.”

Meggie’s eyebrow had climbed to half-mast again. “If I brought the sandwich in and left it here on the corner of your desk?”

Jessie grinned. “Sold!”

This time Meggie smiled back. When she brought the sandwich in three minutes later, Jessie was sitting before the glowing screen again, her skin an unhealthy comic-book green in its reflected glow, lost in whatever she was slowly picking out on the keyboard. The little Irish housekeeper made no effort to be quiet-she was that sort of woman who would probably be unable to tiptoe if her life depended on it-but Jessie still did not hear her come or go. She had taken a stack of newspaper clippings out of the top drawer of her desk and stopped typing to riffle through them. Photographs accompanied most, photographs of a man with a strange, narrow face that receded at the chin and bulged at the brow. His deep-set eyes were dark and round and perfectly blank, eyes that made Jessie think simultaneously of Dondi, the comic-strip waif, and Charles Manson. Pudgy lips as thick as slices of cut fruit pooched out below his blade of a nose.

Meggie stood beside Jessie’s shoulder for a moment, waiting to be acknowledged, then uttered a low “Humph!” and left the room. Forty-five minutes or so later, Jessie glanced to the left and saw the toasted cheese sandwich. It was now cold, the cheese coagulated into lumps, but she wolfed it nevertheless in five quick bites. Then she turned back to the Mac. The cursor began to dance ahead once more, leading her steadily deeper into the forest.