Gerald's Game(32)

She thrust her head as far forward as she could, pooching her lips out like the heroine of some corny old black-and-white romance movie. She got so close to the glass that she could see tiny sprays of air-bubbles caught in the last few slivers of ice, close enough to actually smell the minerals in the well-water (or to imagine she did), but she did not get quite close enough to drink from it. When she reached the point where she could simply stretch no farther, her puckered kiss-me lips were still a good four inches from the glass. It was almost enough, but almost, as Gerald (and her father as well, now that she thought about it) had been fond of saying, only counted in horseshoes.

"I don't believe it," she heard herself saying in her new hoarse Scotch-and-Marlboros voice. "I just don't believe it."

Anger suddenly woke inside her and screamed at her in Ruth Neary's voice to throw the glass across the room; if she could not drink from it, Ruth's voice proclaimed harshly, she would punish it; if she could not satisfy her thirst with what was in it, she could at least satisfy her mind with the sound of it shattering to a thousand bits against the wall.

Her grip on the glass tightened and the steel chain softened to a lax arc as she drew her hand back to do just that. Unfair! It was just so unfair!

The voice which stopped her was the soft, tentative voice of Goodwife Burlingame.

Maybe there's a way, Jessie. Don't give up yet-maybe there's still away.

Ruth made no verbal reply to this, but there was no mistaking her sneer of disbelief; it was as heavy as iron and as bitter as a squirt of lemon-juice. Ruth still wanted her to throw the glass. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly have said that Ruth was heavily invested in the concept of payback.

Don't pay any attention to her, the Goodwife said. Her voice had lost its unusual tentative quality; it sounded almost excited now. Put it back on the shelf, Jessie.

And what then? Ruth asked. What then, 0 Great White Guru, 0Goddess of Tupperware and Patron Saint of the Church of Shop-by-Mail?

Goody told her, and Ruth's voice fell silent as Jessie and all the other voices inside her listened.

CHAPTER TEN

She put the glass back on the shelf carefully, taking care to make sure she didn't leave it hanging over the edge. Her tongue now felt like a piece of #5 sandpaper and her throat actually seemed infected with thirst. It reminded her of the way she had felt in the autumn of her tenth year, when a combined case of the flu and bronchitis had kept her out of school for a month and a half. There had been long nights during that siege when she had awakened from confused, jangling nightmares she couldn't remember

(except you can Jessie; you dreamed about the smoked glass; you dreamedabout how the sun went out; you dreamed about the flat and tearful smellthat was like minerals in well-water; you dreamed about his hands)

and she was drenched with sweat but felt too weak to reach for the pitcher of water on the bed-table. She remembered lying there, wet and sticky and fever-smelling on the outside, parched and full of phantoms on the inside; lying there and thinking that her real disease was not bronchitis but thirst. Now, all these years later, she felt exactly the same way.

Her mind kept trying to return to the horrible moment when she had realized she wasn't going to be able to bridge the last sliver of distance between the glass and her mouth. She kept seeing the tiny sprays of air-bubbles in the melting ice, kept smelling the faint aroma of minerals trapped in the aquifer far beneath the lake. These images taunted her like an unreachable itch between the shoulderblades.

Nevertheless, she made herself wait. The part of her that was Goody Burlingame said she needed to take some time in spite of the taunting images and her throbbing throat. She needed to wait for her heart to slow down, for her muscles to stop trembling, for her emotions to settle a bit.

Outside, the last color was fading from the air; the world was going a solemn and melancholy gray. On the lake, the loon lifted its piercing cry into the evening gloom.

"Shut your yap, Mr Loon," Jessie said, and chuckled. It sounded like a rusty hinge.

All right, dear, the Goodwife said. I think it's time to try. Beforeit gets dark. Better dry your hands again first, though.

She cupped both hands around the bedposts this time, rubbing them up and down until they produced squeaks. She held up her right hand and wiggled it in front of her eyes. They laughed whenI sat down at the piano, she thought. Then, carefully, she reached just beyond the place where the glass stood on the edge of the shelf. She began to patter her fingers along the wood again. The handcuff clinked against the side of the glass once and she froze, waiting for it to overturn. When it didn't, she resumed her cautious exploration.

She had almost decided that what she was looking for had slid down the shelf-or entirely off it-when she finally touched the corner of the blow-in card. She tweezed it between the first and second fingers of her right hand and brought it carefully up and away from the shelf and the glass. Jessie steadied her grip on the card with her thumb and looked at it curiously.

It was bright purple, with noisemakers dancing tipsily along the upper edge. Confetti and streamers drifted down between the words. Newsweek was celebrating BIG BIG SAVINGS, the card announced, and it wanted her to join the party. Newsweek's writers would keep her up to date on world events, take her behind the scenes with world leaders, and offer her in-depth coverage of arts, politics, and the sporting life. Although it did not come right out and say so, the card pretty much implied that Newsweek could help Jessie make sense of the entire cosmos. Best of all, those lovable lunatics in Newsweek's subscription department were offering a deal so amazing it could make your urine steam and your head explode: if she used THIS VERY CARD to subscribe to Newsweek for three years, she would get each issue AT LESS THAN HALF THE NEWSSTAND PRICE! And was money a problem? Absolutely not! She would be billed later.