Gerald's Game(15)

What's a woman? some other voice-a UFO voice-whispered softly from a well of darkness deep inside her. A life-support systemfor a cunt.

Go away, Jessie thought. Go away, you're not helping.

But the UFO voice declined the order. Why does a woman havea mouth and a cunt? it asked instead. So she can piss and moan at thesame time. Any other questions, little lady?

No. Given the unsettlingly surreal quality of the answers, she had no other questions. She rotated her hands inside the cuffs. The scant flesh of her wrists dragged against the steel, making her wince, but the pain was minor and her hands turned easily enough. Gerald might or might not have believed that a woman's only purpose in life was to serve as a life-support system for a cunt, but he hadn't tightened the cuffs enough to hurt; she would have balked at that even before today, of course (or so she told herself, and none of the interior voices were mean enough to dispute her on the subject). Still, they were too tight to slip out Of.

Or were they?

Jessie gave them an experimental tug. The cuffs slid up her wrists as her hands came down, and then the steel bracelets wedged firmly against the junctions of bone and cartilage where the wrists made their complex and marvellous alliances with her hands.

She yanked harder. Now the pain was much more intense. She suddenly remembered the time Daddy had slammed the driver s-side door of their old Country Squire station wagon on Maddy's left hand, not knowing she was sliding out on his side for a change instead of on her own. How she had screamed! It had broken some bone-Jessie couldn't remember the name of it but she did remember Maddy proudly showing off her soft cast and saying, "I also tore my posterior ligament." That had struck Jess and Will as funny, because everyone knew that your posterior was the scientific name for your situpon. They had laughed, more in surprise than in scorn, but Maddy had gone storming off just the same, her face as dark as a thundercloud, to tell Mommy.

Posterior ligament, she thought, deliberately applying more pressure in spite of the escalating pain. Posterior ligament and radio-ulnarsomething-or-other. Doesn't matter. If you can slip out of these cuffs, Ithink you better do it, toots, and let some doctor worry about puttingHumpty back together again later on.

Slowly, steadily, she increased the pressure, willing the handcuffs to slip down and off. If they would just go a little way-a quarter of an inch might do it, and a half was almost for sure she would be past the bulkiest ridges of bone and would have more yielding tissue to deal with. Or so she hoped. There were bones in her thumbs, of course, but she would worry al?out them when and if the time came.

She pulled down harder, her lips parting to show her teeth in a grimace of pain and effort. The muscles on her upper arms now stood out in shallow white arcs. Sweat began to bead her brow, her cheeks, even the slight indentation of her philtrum below her nose. She poked out her tongue and licked off this last without even being aware of it.

There was a lot of pain, but the pain wasn't what caused her to stop. What did was the simple realization that she had gotten to the point of maximum pull her muscles would provide and it hadn't moved the cuffs a whit farther down than they were right now. Her brief hope of simply squeezing out of this flickered and died.

Are you sure you pulled as hard as you could? Or are you maybe onlykidding yourself a little because it hurt so much?

"No," she said, still not opening her eyes. "I pulled as hard as I could. Really."

But that other voice remained, actually more glimpsed than heard: something like a comic-book question-mark.

There were deep white grooves in the flesh of her wrists-below the pad of the thumb, across the back of the hand, and over the delicate blue tracings of vein below-where the steel had bitten in, and her wrists continued to throb painfully even though she had taken off all the pressure of the cuffs by raising her hands until she could grip one of the headboard slats.

"Oh boy," she said, her voice shaky and uneven. "Doesn't this just suck the big one."

Had she pulled as hard as she could? Had she really?

Doesn't matter, she thought, looking up at the shimmers of reflection on the ceiling. Doesn't matter and I'll tell you why-if Iam capable of pulling harder, what happened to Maddy's left wrist whenthe car door slammed on it is going to happen to both of mine: bones aregoing to break, posterior ligaments are going to snap like rubber bands,and radio-ulnar whojiggies are going to explode like clay pigeons in ashooting gallery. The only thing that would change is that, instead oflying here chained and thirsty, I'd he lying here chained, thirsty, and with a pair of broken wrists thrown into the bargain. They'd swell, too.What I think is this: Gerald died before be ever bad a chance to climbinto the saddle, but he tucked me good and proper just the same.

Okay; what other options were there?

None, Goodwife Burlingame said in the watery tone of a woman who is just a teardrop away from breaking down completely.

Jessie waited to see if the other voice-Ruth's voice-would weigh in with an opinion. It didn't. For all she knew, Ruth was floating around in the office water-cooler with the rest of the loons. In any case, Ruth's abdication left Jessie to fend for herself.

So, okay, fend, she thought. What are you going to do about thehandcuffs, now that you've ascertained simply slipping out of them isimpossible? What can you do?

There are two handcuffs in each set-the young voice, the one she hadn't yet found a name for, spoke up hesitantly. You've tried toslip out of the ones with your hands inside them and it didn't work...but what about the others? The ones hooked to the bedposts? Have youthought about them?