Gerald's Game(48)

Well-Ill...you know...just a little. She widened her eyes, trying to communicate the idea that she was saying a little but meaning a lot. In truth she didn't know if she was still scared of old Pooh-pooh Breath or not, but she did know she considered Mrs Gilette a boring old blue-haired booger, and she had no intention of spending the only total eclipse of the sun she'd probably ever see in her company if she could possibly work things around so she could watch it with her Daddy, whom she adored beyond the power of words to tell.

She evaluated his skepticism and concluded with relief that it was friendly, perhaps even conspiratorial. She smiled and added: But I also want to stay with you.

He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers like a French monsieur. He hadn't shaved that day -he often didn't when he was at camp-and the rough scrape of his whiskers sent a pleasurable shiver of goosebumps up her arms and back.

Comme tu es douce, he said. Ma j'olie mademoiselle. Je t'aime.

She giggled, not understanding his clumsy French but suddenly sure it was all going to work out just the way she had hoped it would.

It would be fun, she said happily. Just the two of us. I could makean early supper and we could eat it right here, on the deck.

He grinned. Eclipse Burgers a deux?

She laughed, nodding and clapping her hands with delight.

Then he had said something that struck her as a little odd even at the time, because he was not a man who cared much about clothes and fashions. You could wear your pretty new sundress.

Sure, if you want, she said, although she had already made a mental note to ask her mother to try and exchange the sundress. It was pretty enough-if you weren't offended by red and yellow stripes almost bright enough to shout, that was-but it was also too small and too tight. Her mother had ordered it from Sears, going mostly by guess and by gosh, filling in a single size larger than that which had fit Jessie the year before. As it happened, she had grown a little faster than that, in a number of ways. Still, if Daddy liked it... and if he would come over to her side of this eclipse business and help her push...

He did come over to her side, and pushed like Hercules himself. He began that night, suggesting to his wife after dinner (and two or three mellowing glasses of vin rouge) that Jessie be excused from tomorrow's "eclipse-watch" outing to the top of Mount Washington. Most of their summer neighbors were going; just after Memorial Day they'd begun having informal meetings on the subject of how and where to watch the upcoming solar phenomenon (to Jessie these meetings had seemed like ordinary run-of-the-mill summer cocktail parties), and had even given themselves a name-The Dark Score Sun Worshippers. The Sun Worshippers had rented one of the school district's mini-buses for the occasion and were planning to voyage to the top of New Hampshire's tallest mountain equipped with box lunches, Polaroid sunglasses, specially constructed reflector-boxes, specially filtered cameras... and champagne, of course. Lots and lots of champagne. To Jessie's mother and older sister, all this had seemed to be the very definition of frothy, sophisticated fun. To Jessie it had seemed the essence of all that was boring... and that was before you added Pooh-Pooh Breath into the equation.

She had gone out on the deck after supper on the evening of the 19th, ostensibly to read twenty or thirty pages of Mr C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet before the sun went down. Her actual purpose was a good deal less intellectual: she wanted to listen as her father made his-their-pitch, and to silently root him on. She and Maddy had been aware for years that the combination living roorn/dining room of the summer house had peculiar acoustical qualities, probably caused by its high, steeply angled ceiling; Jessie had an idea that even Will knew about the way sound carried from in there to out here on the deck. Only their parents seemed unaware that the room might as well have been bugged, and that most of the important decisions they had made in that room as they sipped after-dinner cognac or cups of coffee were known (to their daughters, at least) long before the marching orders were handed down from staff headquarters.

Jessie noticed she was holding the Lewis novel upside down and made haste to rectify that situation before Maddy happened by and gave her a big, silent horselaugh. She felt a little guilty about what she was doing-it was a lot closer to eavesdropping than to rooting, when you got right down to it-but not quite guilty enough to stop. And in fact she considered herself still to be on the right side of a thin moral line. After all, it wasn't as if she were hiding in the closet, or anything; she was sitting right out here in full view, bathed in the bright light of the westering sun. She was sitting out here with her book, and wondering if there were ever eclipses on Mars, and if there were Martians up there to watch them if there were. If her parents thought no one could hear what they were saying just because they were sitting at the table in there, was that her fault? Was she supposed to go in and tell them?

"I don't theenk so, my deah," Jessie whispered in her snottiest Elizabeth Taylor Cat on a Hot Tin Roof voice, and then cupped her hands over a big, goofy grin. And she guessed she was also safe from her big sister's interference, at least for the time being; she could hear Maddy and Will below her in the rumpus room, squabbling good-naturedly over a game of Cootie or Parcheesi or something like that.

I really don't think it would hurt her to stay here with me tomorrow,do you? her father was asking in his most winning, good-humored voice.

No, of course not, Jessie's mother replied, but it wouldn't exactlykill her to go someplace with the rest of us this summer, either. She'sturned into a complete Daddy's girl,