Gerald's Game(82)
Do it just the way you saw it, Jessie, that's all...and don't chickenout.
"No chickening out," Jessie agreed in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. She spread her hand and then shook her wrist, hoping to get rid of the glass poking out of her fingers. She mostly succeeded; only the sliver in her thumb, buried deeply in the tender flesh beneath the nail, refused to go. She decided to leave it and get on with the rest of her business.
What you're planning to do is absolutely crazy, a nervous voice told her. No UFO here; this was a voice Jessie knew well. It was the voice of her mother. Not that I'm surprised, you understand; it's atypical Jessie Mahout overreaction, and if I've seen it once, I've seen it athousand times. Think about it, Jessie-why cut yourself up and maybebleed to death? Someone will come and rescue you; anything else is simplyunthinkable, Dying in one's summer house? Dying in handcuffs? Utterly ridiculous, take my word for it. So rise above your usual whiny nature,Jessie-just this one time. Don't cut yourself on that glass. Don't you doit!
That was her mother, all right; the mimicry was so good it was eerie. She wanted you to believe you were hearing love and common sense masquerading as anger, and while the woman had not been entirely incapable of love, Jessie thought the real Sally Mahout was the woman who had one day marched into Jessie's room and thrown a pair of high heels at her without a single word of explanation, either then or later.
Besides, everything that voice had said was a lie. A scared lie.
"No," she said, "I won't take your word for it. No one's coming... except maybe the guy from last night. No chickening out." With that, Jessie lowered her right wrist toward the gleaming blade of glass.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was important that she see what she was doing, because she felt almost nothing at first; she could have cut her wrist to bleeding ribbons and felt little save those distant sensations of pressure and warmth. She was greatly relieved to find that seeing wasn't going to be a problem; she had smashed the glass at a good place on the shelf (A break at last! part of her mind rejoiced sarcastically), and her view was almost completely unobstructed.
Hand tilted back, Jessie sank her inner wrist-that part which bears the lines palm-readers call the Bracelets of Fortune-onto the broken curve of glass. She watched, fascinated, as the jutting point first dimpled her skin, then popped it. She kept pressing and her wrist kept eating the glass. The dimple filled up with blood and disappeared.
Jessie's first reaction was disappointment. The glass hook hadn't created the gusher she had hoped for (and half feared). Then the sharp edge severed the blue bundles of vein lying closest to the surface of her skin, and the blood began flowing out faster. It did not come in the pulsing jets she had expected but in a fast, steady flow, like water from a tap which has been spun almost all the way open. Then something bigger parted and the stream became a freshet. It coursed across the shelf and spilled down her forearm. Too late to back out now; she was for it. One way or the other, she was for it.
Pull back, at least! the mother-voice screamed. Don't make it anyworse-you've done enough! Try it now!
A tempting idea, but Jessie thought that what she had done so far was a long way from being enough. She didn't know the word "degloving," a technical term used most commonly by doctors in connection with burn-victims, but now that she had begun this grisly operation, she understood she could not depend on blood alone to slide her free. Blood might not be enough.
She slowly and carefully twisted her wrist, splitting the tight skin of her lower hand. Now she felt a weird tingling across her palm, as if she had cut into some small but vital sheath of nerves which had been half-dead to begin with. The third and fourth fingers of her right hand swooned forward as if they had been killed. The first two, along with the thumb, began to jitter wildly back and forth. As mercifully numb as her flesh was, Jessie still found something inexpressibly horrible in these signs of the damage she was doing herself. Those two crumpled fingers, so like little corpses, were somehow worse than all the blood she had spilled thus far.
Then both this horror and the growing feeling of heat and pressure in her wounded hand were overwhelmed as a fresh cramp moved into her side like a storm-front. It dug at her mercilessly, trying to tear her out of her twisted position, and Jessie fought back with terrified fury. She couldn't move now. She would almost certainly knock her improvised cutting tool to the floor if she did.
"No you don't," she muttered through her clenched teeth. "No, you bastard-get out of Dodge."
She held herself rigidly in position, trying to keep from bearing down on the fragile glass blade any harder than she already was, not wanting to snap it off and have to try finishing with some less apt tool. But if the cramp spread from her side to her right arm, as it was apparently trying to-
"No," she moaned. "Go away, do you hear? just go the f**k away!"
She waited, knowing she could not afford to wait, also knowing she could do nothing else; she waited and listened to the sound of her life's blood pattering to the floor from the bottom of the headboard. She watched more blood run off the shelf in little streamlets. Tiny sparkles of glass gleamed in some of these. She had begun to feel like a victim in a slasher movie.
You can't wait any longer, Jessie! Ruth rapped at her. You're allout of time!
What I'm really out of is luck, and I never had that goddam muchto start with, she told Ruth.