Gerald's Game(97)

Her bulging eyes noted that the long white face was now half-hidden in her hair and its grinning mouth was almost kissing her ear as it whispered its delicious secret over and over and over: Jessie! Nora! Goody! Punkin! Jessie! Jessie! Jessie!"

There was a white airburst inside her eyes, and what it left behind was a big dark hole. As Jessie dove into it, she had one final coherent thought: I shouldn't have looked-it burned my eyesafter all.

Then she fell forward toward the wheel in a faint. As the Mercedes struck one of the large pines which bordered this section of the road, the seatbelt locked and jerked her backward again. The crash would probably have triggered the airbag, if the Mercedes had been a model recent enough to have come equipped with the system. It was not hard enough to damage the engine or even cause it to stall; good old German efficiency had triumphed again. The bumper and grille were dented and the hood ornament was knocked askew, but the engine idled contentedly away to itself.

After about five minutes, a microchip buried in the dashboard sensed that the motor was now warm enough to turn on the heater. Blowers under the dash began to whoosh softly. Jessie had slumped sideways against the driver's door, where she lay with her cheek pressed to the window, looking like a tired child who has finally given up and gone to sleep with grandma's house just over the next hill. Above her, the rearview mirror reflected the empty back seat and the empty moonlit lane behind it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It had been snowing all morning-gloomy, but good letter-writing weather-and when a bar of sun fell across the keyboard of the Mac, Jessie glanced up in surprise, startled out of her thoughts. What she saw out the window did more than charm her; it filled her with an emotion she had not experienced for a long time and hadn't expected to experience again for a long time to come, if ever. It was joy, a deep, complex joy she could never have explained.

The snow hadn't stopped-not entirely, anyway-but a bright February sun had broken through the clouds overhead, turning both the fresh six inches on the ground and the snow still floating down through the air to a brilliant diamantine white. The window offered a sweeping view of Portland's Eastern Promenade, and it was a view which had soothed and fascinated Jessie in all weathers and seasons, but she had never seen anything quite like this; the combination of snow and sun had turned the gray air over Casco Bay into a fabulous jewel-box of interlocking rainbows.

If there were real people living in those snow-globes where you can shakeup a blizzard any time you want to, they'd see this weather all the time, she thought, and laughed. This sound was as fabulously strange to her ears as that feeling of joy was to her heart, and it only took a moment's thought to realize why: she hadn't laughed at all since the previous October. She referred to those hours, the last ones she ever intended to spend by Kashwakamak (or any other lake, for that matter), simply as "my hard time." This phrase told what was necessary and not one thing more, she felt. Which was just the way she liked it.

No laughs at all since then? Zilch? Zero? Are you sure?

Not absolutely sure, no. She supposed she might have laughed in dreams-God knew she had cried in enough of them-but as far as her waking hours went, it had been a shutout until now. She remembered the last one very clearly: reaching across her body with her left hand so she could get the keys out of the right pocket of her culotte skirt, telling the windy darkness she was going to make like an amoeba and split. That, so far as she knew, had been the last laugh until now.

"Only that and nothing more," Jessie murmured. She took a pack of cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and lit one. God, how that phrase brought it all back-the only other thing with the power to do it so quickly and completely, she had discovered, was that awful song by Marvin Gaye. She'd heard it once on the radio when she'd been driving back from one of the seemingly endless doctor's appointments which had made up her life this winter, Marvin wailing "Everybody knows... especially you girls... "in that soft, insinuating voice of his. She had turned the radio off at once, but she'd still been shaking too badly to drive. She had parked and waited for the worst of the shakes to pass. Eventually they had, but on the nights when she didn't wake up muttering that phrase from "The Raven" over and over into her sweat-soaked pillow, she heard herself chanting, "Witness, witness." As far as Jessie was concerned, it was six of one and half a million of the other.

She dragged deep on her cigarette, puffed out three perfect rings, and watched them rise slowly above the humming Mac.

When people were stupid enough or tasteless enough to ask about her ordeal (and she had discovered she knew a great many more stupid, tasteless people than she ever would have guessed), she told them she couldn't remember much of what had happened. After the first two or three police interviews, she began to tell the cops and all but one of Gerald's colleagues the same thing. The single exception had been Brandon Milheron. To him she had told the truth, partly because she needed his help but mostly because Brandon had been the only one who had displayed the slightest understanding of what she had gone through... was still going through. He hadn't wasted her time with pity, and what a relief that had been. Jessie had also discovered that pity came cheap in the aftermath of tragedy, and that all the pity in the world wasn't worth a pisshole in the snow.

Anyway, the cops and the newspaper reporters had accepted her amnesia-and the rest of her story-at face value, that was the important thing, and why not? People who underwent serious physical and mental trauma often blocked out the memories of what had happened; the cops knew that even better than the lawyers, and Jessie knew it better than any of them. She had learned a great deal about physical and mental trauma since last October. The books and articles had helped her find plausible reasons not to talk about what she didn't want to talk about, but otherwise they hadn't helped much. Or maybe it was just that she hadn't come to the right case histories yet-the ones dealing with handcuffed women who were forced to watch as their husbands became Purina Dog Chow.