Gerald's Game(13)

No one, she thought back meekly, and knew at once that the no-bullshit voice would never accept that, so she added: The Goodwife.It was her.

No, it wasn't, Ruth's voice returned at once. She sounded disgusted at this half-assed effort to shift the blame. Goody's a littlestupid and right now she's a lot scared, hut she's a sweet enough thing atthe bottom, and her intentions have always been good. The intentions ofwhoever re-edited Nora's list were actively evil, Jessie. Don't you see that? Don't you-

"I don't see anything, because my eyes are closed," she said in a trembling, childish voice. She almost opened them, but something told her that was apt to make the situation worse instead of better.

Who was the one, Jessie? Who taught you that you were ugly andworthless? Who picked out Gerald Burlingame as your soulmate andPrince Charming, probably years before you actually met him at thatRepublican Party mixer? Who decided he wasn't only what you neededbut exactly what you deserved?

With a tremendous effort, Jessie swept this voice-all the voices, she fervently hoped-out of her mind. She began the mantra again, this time speaking it aloud.

"One is my toes, all in a row, two is my legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, what's right can't be wrong, four is my hips, curving and sweet, five is my stomach, where I store what I eat." She couldn't remember the rest of the rhymes (which was probably a mercy; she had a strong suspicion that Nora had whomped them up herself, probably with an eye toward publication in one of the soft and yearning self-help magazines which sat on the coffee-table in her waiting room) "and so went on without them: "Six is my br**sts, seven's my shoulders, eight's, my neck..."

She paused to take a breath and was relieved to find her heartbeat had slowed from a gallop to a fast run.

"... nine is my chin, and ten is my eyes. Eyes, open wide!"

She suited the action to the words and the bedroom jumped into bright existence around her, somehow new and-for a moment, at least-almost as delightful as it had been to her when she and Gerald had spent their first summer in this house. Back in 1979, a year which once had the ring of science fiction and now seemed impossibly antique.

Jessie looked at the gray barnboard walls, the high white ceiling with its reflected shimmers from the lake, and the two big windows, one on either side of the bed. The one to her left looked west, giving a view of the deck, the sloping land beyond it, and the heartbreaking bright blue of the lake. The one on her right provided a less romantic vista-the driveway and her gray dowager of a Mercedes, now eight years old and beginning to show the first small speckles of rust along the rocker-panels.

Directly across the room she saw the framed batik butterfly hanging on the wall over the bureau, and remembered with a superstitious lack of surprise that it had been a thirtieth-birthday present from Ruth. She couldn't see the tiny signature stitched in red thread from over here, but she knew it was there: Neary,'83. Another science-fiction year.

Not far from the butterfly (and clashing like mad, although she had never quite summoned enough nerve to point this out to her husband), Gerald's Alpha Gamma Rho beer-stein hung from a chrome peg. Rho wasn't a very bright star in the fraternity universe-the other frat-rats used to call it Alpha Grab A Hoe-but Gerald wore the pin with a perverse sort of pride and kept the stein on the wall and drank the first beer of the summer out of it each year when they came up here in June. It was the sort of ceremony that had sometimes made her wonder, long before today's festivities, if she had been mentally competent when she married Gerald.

Somebody should have put a stop to it, she thought drearily. Somebodyreally should have, because just look how it turned out.

In the chair on the other side of the bathroom door, she could see the saucy little culotte skirt and the sleeveless blouse she had wore on this unseasonably warm fall day; her bra hung on the bathroom doorknob. And lying across the bedspread and her legs, turning the tiny soft hairs on her upper thighs to golden wires, was a bright band of afternoon sunlight. Not the square of light that lay almost dead center on the bedspread at one o'clock and not the rectangle which lay on it at two; this was a wide band that would soon narrow to a stripe, and although a power outage had buggered the readout of the digital clock-radio on the dresser (it flashed 12:00 a.m. over and over, as relentless as a neon barsign), the band of light told her it was going on four o'clock. Before long, the stripe would start to slide off the bed and she would see shadows in the corners and under the little table over by the wall. And as the stripe became a string, first slipping across the floor and then climbing up the far wall, fading as it went, those shadows would begin to creep out of their places and spread across the room like inkstains, eating the light as they grew. The sun was westering; in another hour, an hour and a half at most, it would be going down; forty minutes or so after that, it would be dark.

This thought didn't cause panic-at least not yet-but it did lay a membrane of gloom over her mind and a dank atmosphere of dread over her heart. She saw herself lying here, handcuffed to the bed with Gerald dead on the floor beside and below her; saw them lying here in the dark long after the man with the chainsaw had gone back to his wife and kids and well-lighted home and the dog had wandered away and there was only that damned loon out there on the lake for company-only that and nothing more.

Mr and Mrs Gerald Burlingame, spending one last long night together.

Looking at the beer-stein and the batik butterfly, unlikely neighbors which could be tolerated only in a one-season-a-year house such as this one, Jessie thought that it was easy to reflect on the past and just as easy (although a lot less pleasant) to go wandering off into possible versions of the future. The really tough job seemed to be staying in the present, but she thought she'd better try her best to do it. This nasty situation was probably going to get a lot nastier if she didn't. She couldn't depend on some deus ex machina to get her out of the jam she was in, and that was a bummer, but if she succeeded in doing it herself, there would be a bonus: she'd be saved the embarrassment of lying here almost starkers while some sheriff's deputy unlocked her, asked what the hell had happened, and got a nice long look at the new widow's fair white body, all at the same time.