Gerald's Game(98)

Jessie surprised herself by laughing again-a good loud laugh this time. Was that funny? Apparently it was, but it was also one of those funny things you could never, ever tell anyone else. Like how your Dad once got so excited about a solar eclipse that he blew a load all over the seat of your underpants, for instance. Or how-here's a real yuck-you actually thought a little come on your fanny might make you pregnant.

Anyway, most of the case histories suggested that the human mind often reacted to extreme trauma the way a squid reacts to danger-by covering the entire landscape with a billow of obscuring ink. You knew something had happened, and that it had been no day in the park, but that was all. Everything else was gone, hidden by that ink. A lot of the case-history people said that-people who had been raped, people who had been in car crashes, people who had been caught in fires and had crawled into closets to die, even one skydiving lady whose parachute hadn't opened and who had been recovered, badly hurt but miraculously alive, from the large soft bog in which she had landed.

What was it like, coming down? they had asked the skydiving lady. What did you think about when you realized your chute hadn'topened, wasn't going to open? And the skydiving lady had replied, I can't remember. I remember the starter patting me on the back, and Ithink I remember the pop-out, but the next thing I remember is being ona stretcher and asking one of the men putting me into the back of theambulance how badly I was hurt. Everything in the middle is just ahaze. I suppose I prayed, but I can't even remember that for sure.

Or maybe you really remembered everything, my skydiving friend, Jessie thought, and lied about it, just like I did. Maybe even for thesame reasons. For all I know, every damned one of the case-history peoplein every damned one of the hooks I read was lying,

Maybe so. Whether they were or not, the fact remained that she did remember her hours handcuffed to the bed-from the click of the key in the second lock right up to that final freezing moment when she had looked into the rearview mirror and seen that the thing in the house had become the thing in the back seat, she remembered it all. She remembered those moments by day and relived them by night in horrible dreams where the water-glass slid past her along the inclined plane of the shelf and shattered on the floor, where the stray dog bypassed the cold buffet on the floor in favor of the hot meal on the bed, where the hideous night-visitor in the corner asked Do you love me, Punkin? in her father's voice and maggots squirmed like se**n from the tip of its erect penis.

But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not confer an obligation to tell about a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream. She had lost ten pounds since October (well, that was shading the truth a bit; it was actually more like seventeen), taken up smoking again (a pack and a half a day, plus a joint roughly the size of an El Producto before bedtime), her complexion had gone to hell, and all at once her hair was going gray all over her head, not just at the temples. That last was something she could fix-hadn't she been doing so for five years or more?-but so far she simply hadn't been able to summon up enough energy to dial Oh Pretty Woman in Westbrook and make an appointment. Besides, who did she have to look good for? Was she planning to maybe hit a few singles bars, check out the local talent?

Good idea, she thought. Some guy will ask if he can buy me a drink,I'll say yes, and then, while we wait for the bartender to bring them,I'll tell him-just casually-that I have this dream where my fatherejaculates maggots instead of se**n, With a line of interesting conversational patter like that, I'm sure he'll ask me back to his apartmentright away. He won't even want to see a doctor's certificate saying I'mHIV-negative.

In mid-November, after she had begun to believe the police were really going to leave her alone and the story's sex angle was going to stay out of the papers (she was very slow coming to believe this, because the publicity was the thing she had dreaded the most), she decided to try therapy with Nora Callighan again. Maybe she didn't want this sitting inside and sending out poison fumes for the next thirty or forty years as it rotted. How much different might her life have been if she had managed to tell Nora what had happened on the day of the eclipse? For that matter, how much difference might it have made if that girl hadn't come into the kitchen when she did that ni ht at Neuworth Parsonage? Maybe none... but maybe a lot.

Maybe an awful lot.

So she dialed New Today, New Tomorrow, the loose association of counsellors with which Nora had been affiliated, and was shocked to silence when the receptionist told her Nora had died of leukemia the year before-some weird, sly variant which had hidden successfully in the back alleys of her limbic system until it was too late to do a damned thing about it. Would Jessie perhaps care to meet with Laurel Stevenson? the receptionist asked, but Jessie remembered Laurel-a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who wore high heels with sling backs and looked as if she would enjoy sex to the fullest only when she was on top. She told the receptionist she'd think it over. And that had been it for counselling.

In the three months since she had learned of Nora's death, she'd had good days (when she was only afraid) and bad days (when she was too terrified even to leave this room, let alone the house) but only Brandon Milheron had heard anything approaching the complete story of Jessie Mahout's hard time by the lake... and Brandon hadn't believed the crazier aspects of that story. Had sympathized, yes, but not believed. Not at first, anyway.

"No pearl earring," he had reported the day after she first told him about the stranger with the long white face. "No muddy footprint, either. Not in the written reports, at least."