Gerald's Game(113)

And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one; that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong... but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back not just yours or Punkin's or Nora Callighan's but my mother's and my sister's and my brother's and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctors" off ices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most of them would be those scary UFO voices.

I couldn't bear that, Ruth, because in the two months after my hard time in the house by the lake, I remembered a lot of things I had spent a lot of years repressing. I think the most important of those memories came to the surface between the first operation on my hand and the second, when I was "on medication" (this is the technical hospital term for "stoned out of your gourd") almost all the time. The memory was this: in the two years or so between the day of the eclipse and the day of my brother Will's birthday party-the one where he goosed me during the croquet game-I heard all those voices almost constantly. Maybe Will's goosing me acted as some kind of rough, accidental therapy. I suppose it's possible; don't they say that our ancestors invented cooking after eating what forest fires left behind? Although if some serendipitous therapy took place that day, I have an idea that it didn't come with the goose but when I hauled off and pounded Will one in the mouth for doing it... and at this point none of that matters. What matters is that, following that day on the deck, I spent two years sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices that passed judgment on my every word and action. Some were kind and supportive, but most were the voices of people who were afraid, people who were confused, people who thought Jessie was a worthless little baggage who deserved every bad thing that happened to her and who would have to pay double for every good thing. For two years I heard those voices, Ruth, and when they stopped, I forgot them. Not a little at a time, but all at once.

How could a thing like that happen? I don't know, and in a very real sense, I don't care. I might if the change had made things worse, I suppose, but it didn't-it made them immeasurably better. I spent the two years between the eclipse and the birthday party in a kind of fugue state, with my conscious mind shattered into a lot of squabbling fragments, and the real epiphany was this: if I let nice, kind Brandon Milheron have his way, I'd end up right back where I started headed down Nuthouse Lane by way of Schizophrenia Boulevard. And this time there's no little brother around to administer crude shock therapy; this time I have to do it myself just as I had to get out of Gerald's goddam handcuffs myself.

Brandon was watching me, trying to gauge the result of what he'd said. He must not have been able to, because he said it again, this time in a slightly different way. "You have to remember that, no matter how it looks, you could be wrong. And I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're never going to know, one way or the other, for sure."

"No, I don't."

He raised his eyebrows.

"There's still an excellent chance that I can find out for sure. And you're going to help me, Brandon."

He was starting to smile that less-than-pleasant smile again, the one I bet he doesn't even know is in his repertoire, the one that says you can't live with "em and you can't shoot "em. "Oh? And how am I going to do that?"

"By taking me to see Joubert," I said,

"Oh, no," he said. "That's the one thing I absolutely will not-can not-do, Jessie."

I'll spare you the hour of round-and-round which followed, a conversation that degenerated at one point to such intellectually profound statements as "You're crazy, Jess" and "Quit trying to run my life, Brandon." I thought of waving the cudgel of the press in front of him-it was the one thing I was almost sure would make him cave in-but in the end, I didn't have to. All I had to do was cry. In a way it makes me feel unbelievably sleazy to write that, but in another way it does not; in another way I recognize it as just another symptom of what's wrong between the fellers and the girls in this particular square-dance. He didn't entirely believe I was serious until I started to cry, you see.

To make a long story at least a little shorter, he got on the telephone, made four or five quick calls, and then came back with the news that Joubert was going to be arraigned the following day in Cumberland County District Court on a number of subsidiary charges-mostly theft. He said that if I was really serious-and if I had a hat with a veil-he'd take me. I agreed at once, and although Brandon's face said he believed he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life, he stuck by his word.

Jessie paused again, and when she began to type once more she did so slowly, looking through the screen to yesterday, when last night's six inches of snow had still been just a smooth white threat in the sky. She saw blue flashers on the road ahead, felt Brandon's blue Beamer slowing down.

We got to the hearing late because there was an overturned trailer truck on I-295-that's the city bypass. Brandon didn't say so, but I know he was hoping we'd get there too late, that Joubert would already have been taken back to his cell at the end of the County Jail's maximum-security wing, but the guard at the courthouse door said the hearing was still going on, although finishing up. As Brandon opened the door for me, he leaned close to my ear and murmured: "Put the veil down, Jessie, and keep it down." I lowered it and Brandon put a hand on my waist and led me inside. The courtroom...