Gerald's Game(78)

That's not true, she told Punkin. I've tried everything, believe me. And you know what? I think that if I hadn't dropped that damned jar of face cream when the dog scared me, I might have been able to squeak out of the left cuff, It was bad luck, that dog coming in when it did. Or had karma. Bad something, anyway.

The girl drifted closer, the grass whispering beneath her bare feet.

Not the left cuff, Jessie. It's the right one you can squeak out of. It's an outside shot, I'll grant you that, hut it's possible. The real question now, I think, is whether you really want to live.

Of course I want to live!

Closer still. Those eyes-a smoke color that tried to be blue and didn't quite make it-now seemed to peer right through her skin and into the heart of her.

Do you? I wonder.

What are you, crazy? Do you think I want to still be here, handcuffed to this bed, when-

Jessie's eyes-still trying to be blue after all these years and still not quite making it-slowly opened again. They gazed around the room with an expression of terrified solemnity. Saw her husband, now lying in an impossibly twisted position, glaring UP at the ceiling.

"I don't want to still be handcuffed to this bed when it gets dark and the boogeyman comes back," she told the empty room.

Close your eyes, Jessie.

She closed them. Punkin stood there in her old flannel nightie, gazing at her calmly, and Jessie could now see the other girl as well-the fat one with the pimply skin. The fat girl hadn't been as lucky as Punkin; there had been no escape for her, unless death itself was an escape in certain cases-a hypothesis Jessie had become quite willing to accept. The fat girl had either choked to death or suffered some sort of seizure. Her face was the purpleblack color of summer thunderheads. One eye bulged from its socket; the other had burst like a squeezed grape. Her tongue, bloody where she had bitten it repeatedly in her last extremity, protruded between her lips.

Jessie turned back to Punkin with a shudder.

I don't want to end up like that. Whatever else may be wrong with me, I don't want to end up like that. How did you get out?

Slid out, Punkin replied promptly. Slid out of the devil's hand; oozed on over to the Promised Land.

Jessie felt a throb of anger through her exhaustion.

Haven't you heard a single word I've said? I dropped the goddam jar of Nivea! The dog came in and startled me and I dropped it! How can I-

Also, I remembered the eclipse. Punkin spoke abruptly, with the air of one who has become impatient with some complex but meaningless social formula; you curtsey, I bow, we all join hands. That's how I really got out; I remembered the eclipse and what happened on the deck while the eclipse was going on, And you'll have to remember, too. I think it's the only chance you have to get free. You can't run away anymore, Jessie. You have to turn and face the truth.

That again? Only that? Jessie felt a deep wave of exhaustion and disappointment. For a moment or two, hope had almost returned, but there was nothing here for her. Nothing at all.

You don't understand, she told Punkin. We've been down this path before-all the way down. Yes, I suppose that what my father did to me then might have something to do with what's happening to me now, I suppose that's at least possible, but why go through all that pain again when there's so much other pain to go through before God finally gets tired of torturing me and decides to pull down the blinds?

There was no answer. The little girl in the blue nightie, the little girl who had once been her, was gone. Now there was only darkness behind Jessie's closed lids, like the darkness of a movie screen after the show has ended, so she opened her eyes again and took a long look around the room where she was going to die. She looked from the bathroom door to the framed batik butterfly to the bureau to her husband's body, lying beneath its noxious throw-rug of sluggish autumn flies.

"Quit it, Jess. Go back to the eclipse."

Her eyes widened. That actually did sound real-a real voice coming not from the bathroom or the hall or from inside her own head, but seeming to seep out of the very air itself.

"Punkin?" Her voice was only a croak now. She tried to sit up a little more, but another ferocious cramp threatened her midsection and she lay back against the headboard at once, waiting for it to pass. "Punkin, is that you? Is it, dear?"

For a moment she thought she heard something, that the voice said something else, but if it did, she was unable to make out the words. And then it was entirely gone.

Go back to the eclipse, Jessie.

"No answers there," she muttered. "Nothing there but pain and stupidity and... "And what? What else?

The old Adam. The phrase rose naturally into her mind, lifted from some sermon she must have heard as a bored child sitting between her mother and father, kicking her feet in order to watch the light failing through the colored church windows shift and glimmer on her white patent-leather shoes. just some phrase that had caught on sticky flypaper in her subconscious and stayed with her. The old Adam-and maybe that was all it was, as simple as that. A father who had half-consciously arranged to be alone with his pretty, vivacious young daughter, thinking all the while There won't be any harm in it, no harm, not a bit of harm. Then the eclipse had started, and she had sat on his lap in the sundress that was both too tight and too short-the sundress he himself had asked her to wear-and what had happened had happened. Just a brief, goatish interlude that had shamed and embarrassed them both. He had squirted his squirt-that was the long and short of it (and if there was some sort of pun buried in there, she didn't give a shit about it); had shot it all over the back of her underwear, in fact-definitely not approved behavior for Daddies and definitely not a situation she had ever seen explored on The Brady Bunch, but...