Gerald's Game(53)
Check again, Tom said, smiling.
When she looked back into the reflector-box, she saw that the brilliant circle was no longer a perfect circle; a crescent of darkness now dented the right-hand side. A shiver slipped down her neck. Tom, who had been watching her instead of the image inside his own reflector-box, saw it.
Punkin? All right?
Yes, hut...it's a little scary, isn't it?
Yes, he said. She glanced at him and was deeply relieved to see he meant it. He looked almost as scared as she felt, and this only added to his winning boyishness. The idea that they might be afraid of different things never entered her mind. Want to sit on my lap, Jess?
Can I?
You bet.
She slipped onto his lap, still holding her own reflector-box in her hands. She wiggled around to get comfortable against him, liking the smell of his faintly sweaty, sunwarmed skin and a faint trace of some aftershave-Redwood, she thought it was called. The sundress rode up on her thighs (it could hardly do anything else, as short as it was), and she barely noticed when he put his hand on one of her legs. This was her father, after all-Daddy-not Duane Corson from down at the marina, or Richie Ashlocke, the boy she and her friends moaned and giggled over at school.
The minutes passed slowly. Every now and then she squirmed around, trying to get comfortable-his lap seemed strangely full of angles this afternoon-and at one point she must have dozed off for three or four minutes. It might have been even longer, because the puff of breeze that came strolling down the deck and woke her up was surprisingly cold against her sweaty arms, and the afternoon had changed somehow; colors which had seemed bright before she leaned back against his shoulder and closed her eyes were now pale pastels, and the light itself had weakened somehow. It was as if, she thought, the day had been strained through cheesecloth. She looked into her reflector-box and was surprised-almost stunned, actually-to see that only half the sun was there now. She looked at her watch and saw it was nine minutes past five.
It's happening, Daddy! The sun's going out!
Yes, he agreed. His voice was odd, somehow-deliberate and thoughtful on top, somehow blurry down below. Right onschedule.
She noticed in a vague sort of way that his hand had slipped higher-quite a bit higher, actually-on her leg while she had been dozing.
Can I look through the smoked glass yet, Dad?
Not yet, he said, and his hand slid higher still along her thigh. It was warm and sweaty but not unpleasant. She put her own hand over it, turned to him, and grinned.
It's exciting, isn't it?
Yes, he said in that same odd blurry tone. Yes it is, Punkin.Quite a bit more than I thought it would be, actually.
More time passed. In the reflector-box, the moon continued to nibble away at the sun as five-twenty-five passed, and then five-thirty. Almost all of her attention was now focused on the diminishing image in the reflector-box, but some faint part of her became aware once again of how oddly hard his lap was this afternoon. Something was pressing against her bottom. It wasn't painful, but it was insistent. To Jessie, it felt like the handle of some tool-a screwdriver, or maybe her mother's trackhammer.
Jessie wriggled again, wanting to find a more comfortable spot on his lap, and Tom drew in a quick hissing mouthful of air over his bottom lip.
Daddy? Am I too heavy? Did I hurt you?
No. You're fine,
She glanced at her watch. Five-thirty-seven now; four minutes to totality, maybe a little more if her watch was running fast.
Can I look at it through the glass yet
Not yet, Punkin, But very soon.
She could hear Debbie Reynolds singing something from the Dark Ages, courtesy of WNCH: "The old hooty-owl...hooty-hoosto the dove...Tammy...Tammy...Tammy's in love." It finally drowned in a sticky swirl of violins and was replaced by the disc jockey, who told them it was getting dark in Ski Town, USA (this was the way the "NCH deejays almost always referred to North Conway), but that the skies were too cloudy over on the New Hampshire side of the border to actually see the eclipse. The deejay told them there were a lot of disappointed folks wearing sunglasses across the street on the town common.
We're not disappointed folks, are we, Daddy?
Not a bit, he agreed, and shifted beneath her again. We're aboutthe most happy folks in the universe, I guess.
Jessie peered into the reflector-box again, forgetting everything except the tiny image which she could now look at without narrowing her eyes down to protective slits behind the heavily tinted Polaroid sunglasses. The dark crescent on the right which had signalled the onset of the eclipse had now become a blazing crescent of sunlight on the left. It was so bright it almost seemed to float over the surface of the reflector-box.
Look out on the lake, Jessie!
She did, and behind the sunglasses her eyes widened. In her rapt examination of the shrinking image in the reflector-box, she had missed what was going on all around her. Pastels had now faded to ancient watercolors. A premature twilight, both entrancing and horrifying to the ten-year-old girl, was slipping across Dark Score Lake. Somewhere in the woods, an old hooty-owl cried out softly, and Jessie felt a sudden hard shudder bend its way through her body. On the radio, an Aamco Transmission had ended and Marvin Gaye began to sing: "Oww,listen everybody,especially you girls, is it right to be left alone when the one you love isnever home?"
The owl hooted again in the woods to the north of them. It was a scary sound, Jessie suddenly realized-a very scary sound. This time when she shivered, Tom slipped an arm around her. Jessie leaned gratefully back against his chest.