Gerald's Game(10)

The card had borne a blurry Arizona postmark and the information that Ruth had joined a lesbian commune. Jessie hadn't been terribly surprised at the news; had even mused that perhaps her old friend, who could be wildly irritating and surprisingly, wistfully sweet (sometimes in the same breath) had finally found the hole on the great gameboard of life which had been drilled to accept her own oddly shaped peg.

She had put Ruth's card in the top left drawer of her desk, the one where she kept various odd lots of correspondence which would probably never be answered, and that had been the last time she'd thought about her old roomie until now-Ruth Neary, who lusted to own a Harley-Davidson barn-burner but who had never been able to master any standard transmission, even the one on Jessie's tame old Ford Pinto; Ruth, who often got lost on the UNH campus even after three years there; Ruth, who always cried when she forgot she was cooking something on the hotplate and burned it to a crisp. She did that last so often it was really a miracle she had never set their room-or the whole dorm-on fire. How odd that the confident no-bullshit voice in her head should turn out to be Ruth's.

The dog began to bark again. It sounded no closer, but it sounded no farther away, either. Its owner wasn't hunting birds, that was for sure; no hunter would have anything to do with such a canine blabbermouth. And if dog and master were out for a simple afternoon walk, how come the barks had been coming from the same place for the last five minutes or so?

Because you were right before, her mind whispered. There is nomaster. This voice wasn't Ruth's or Goodwife Burlingame's, and it certainly wasn't what she thought of as her own voice (whatever that was); it was very young and very scared. And, like Ruth's voice, it was strangely familiar. It's just a stray, out here on its own.It won't help you, Jessie. It won't help us.

But that was maybe too gloomy an assessment. After all, she didn't know the dog was a stray, did she? Not for sure. And until she did, she refused to believe it. "If you don't like it, sue me," she said in a low, hoarse voice.

Meanwhile, there was the question of Gerald. In her panic and subsequent pain, he had kind of slipped her mind.

"Gerald?" Her voice still sounded dusty, not really there. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Gerald!"

Nothing. Zilch. No response at all.

That doesn't mean he's dead, though, so keep your fur on, woman-don't go off on another rip.

She was keeping her fur on, thank you very much, and she had no intention whatever of going off on another rip. All the same, she felt a deep, welling dismay in her vitals, a feeling that was like some awful homesickness. Gerald's lack of response didn't mean he was dead, that was true, but it did mean he was unconscious, at the very least.

And probably dead, Ruth Neary added. I don't want to piss onyour parade, Jess-really-but you don't hear him breathing, do you? I mean, you usually can bear unconscious people breathing; they take thesebig snory, blubbery snatches of air, don't they?

"How the f**k would I know?" she said, but that was stupid. She knew because she had been an enthusiastic candystriper for most of her high school years, and it didn't take long for you to get a pretty good fix on what dead sounded like; it sounded like nothing at all. Ruth had known all about the time she had spent in Portland City Hospital-what Jessie herself had sometimes called The Bedpan Years-but this voice would have known it even if Ruth hadn't, because this voice wasn't Ruth; this voice was her. She had to keep reminding herself of that, because this voice was so weirdly its own self.

Like the voices you heard before, the young voice murmured. Thevoices you heard after the dark day.

But she didn't want to think about that. Never wanted to think about that. Didn't she have enough problems already?

But Ruth's voice was right: unconscious people-especially those who'd gotten unconscious as the result of a good hard rap on the noggin-usually did snore. Which meant...

"He's probably dead," she said in her dusty voice. "Okay, yeah."

She leaned to the left, moving carefully, mindful of the muscle which had cramped so painfully at the base of her neck on that side. She had not quite reached the farthest extent of the chain binding her right wrist when she saw one pink, chubby arm and half of one hand-the last two fingers, actually. It was his right hand; she knew this because there was no wedding ring on his third finger. She could see the white crescents of his nails. Gerald had always been very vain about his hands and his nails. She had never realized just how vain until right now. It was funny how little you saw, sometimes. How little you saw even after you thought you'd seen it all.

I suppose, but I'll tell you one thing, sweetie: right now you can pulldown the shades, because I don't want to see any more. No, not one thing more. But refusing to see was a luxury in which she could not, at least for the time being, indulge.

Continuing to move with exaggerated care, babying her neck and shoulder, Jessie slid as far to the left as the chain would allow. It wasn't much-another two or three inches, tops-but it fattened the angle enough for her to see part of Gerald's upper arm, part of his right shoulder, and a tiny bit of his head. She wasn't sure, but she thought she could also see tiny beads of blood at the edges of his thinning hair. She supposed it was at least technically possible that this last was just imagination. She hoped so.

"Gerald?" she whispered. "Gerald, can you hear me? Please say you can."