Gerald's Game Read online

  Nothing changed. She felt no serenity, no courage, most certainly no wisdom. She was still only a woman with dead arms and a dead husband, cuffed to the posts of this bed like a cur-dog chained to a ringbolt and left to die unremarked and unlamented in a dusty back yard while his tosspot master serves thirty days in the county clink for driving without a license and under the influence.

  "Oh please don't let it hurt," she said in a low, trembling voice. "If I'm going to die, God, please don't let it hurt. I'm such a baby about pain."

  Thinking about dying at this point is probably a really bad idea, toots. Ruth's voice paused, then added: On second thought, strike the probably.

  Okay, no argument--thinking about dying was a bad idea. So what did that leave?

  Living. Ruth and Goodwife Burlingame said it at the same time.

  All right, living. Which brought her around full circle to her arms again.

  They're asleep because I've been hanging on them all night. I'm still hanging on them. Getting the weight off is step one.

  She tried to push herself backward and upward with her feet again, and felt a sudden weight of black panic when they at first also refused to move. She lost herself for a few moments then, and when she came back she was pistoning her legs rapidly up and down, pushing the coverlet, the sheets, and the mattress-pad down to the foot of the bed. She was gasping for breath like a bicycle-racer topping the last steep hill in a marathon race. Her butt, which had also gone to sleep, sang and zipped with wake-up needles.

  Fear had gotten her fully awake, but it took the half-assed aerobics which accompanied her panic to kick her heart all the way up into passing gear. At last she began to feel tingles of sensation--bone-deep and as ominous as distant thunder--in her arms.

  If nothing else works, toots, keep your mind on those last two or three sips of water. Keep reminding yourself that you're never going to get hold of that glass again unless your hands and arms are in good working order, let alone drink from it.

  Jessie continued to push with her feet as the morning brightened. Sweat plastered her hair against her temples and streamed down her cheeks. She was aware--vaguely--that she was deepening her water-debt every moment she persisted in this strenuous activity, but she saw no choice.

  Because there is none, toots--none at all.

  Toots this and toots that, she thought distractedly. Would you please put a sock in it, you mouthy bitch?

  At last her bottom began to slide up toward the head of the bed. Each time it moved, Jessie tensed her stomach muscles and did a mini sit-up. The angle made by her upper and lower body slowly began to approach ninety degrees. Her elbows began to bend, and as the drag of her weight began to leave her arms and shoulders, the tingles racing through her flesh increased. She didn't stop moving her legs when she was finally sitting up but continued to pedal, wanting to keep her heart-rate up.

  A drop of stinging sweat ran into her left eye. She flicked it away with an impatient shake of her head and went on pedaling. The tingles continued to increase, darting upward and downward from her elbows, and about five minutes after she'd reached her current slumped position (she looked like a gawky teenager draped over a movie theater seat), the first cramp struck. It felt like a blow from the dull side of a meat-cleaver.

  Jessie threw her head back, sending a fine mist of perspiration flying from her head and hair, and shrieked. As she was drawing breath to repeat the cry, the second cramp struck. This one was much worse. It felt as if someone had dropped a glass-encrusted noose of cable around her left shoulder and then yanked it tight. She howled, her hands snapping shut into fists with such sudden savagery that two of her fingernails splintered away from the quick and began to bleed. Her eyes, sunk into brown hollows of puffy flesh, were squeezed tightly shut, but tears escaped nevertheless and went trickling down her cheeks, mixing with the runnels of sweat from her hairline.

  Keep pedaling, toots--don't stop now.

  "Don't you call me toots!" Jessie screamed.

  The stray dog had crept back to the rear stoop just before first light, and at the sound of her voice, its head jerked up. There was an almost comical expression of surprise on its face.

  "Don't you call me that, you bitch! You hateful bi--"

  Another cramp, this one as sharp and sudden as a thunderbolt coronary, punched through her left triceps all the way to the armpit, and her words dissolved into a long, wavering scream of agony. Yet she kept on pedaling.

  Somehow she kept on pedaling.

  20

  When the worst of the cramps had passed--at least she hoped the worst of them had--she took a breather, leaning back against the slatted mahogany crossboards which formed the head of the bed, her eyes closed and her breath gradually slowing down--first to a lope, then a trot, and finally to a walk. Thirst or no thirst, she felt surprisingly good. She supposed part of the reason lay in that old joke, the one with the punchline that went "It feels so good when I stop." But she had been an athletic girl and an athletic woman until five years ago (well, all right, maybe it was closer to ten), and she could still recognize an endorphin rush when she was having one. Absurd, given the circumstances, but also very nice.

  Maybe not so absurd, Jess. Maybe useful. Those endorphins clear the mind, which is one reason why people work better after they've taken some exercise.

  And her mind was clear. The worst of her panic had blown away like industrial smogs before a strong wind, and she felt more than rational; she felt wholly sane again. She never would have believed it possible, and she found this evidence of the mind's tireless adaptability and almost insectile determination to survive a little spooky. All of this and I haven't even had my morning coffee, she thought.

  The image of coffee--black, and in her favorite cup with the blue flowers around its middle--made her lick her lips. It also made her think of the Today program. If her interior clock was right, Today would be coming on just about now. Men and women all over America --unhandcuffed, for the most part--were sitting at kitchen tables, drinking juice and coffee, eating bagels and scrambled eggs (or maybe one of those cereals that are supposed to simultaneously soothe your heart and excite your bowels). They were watching Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric yuck it up with Joe Garagiola. A little later they would watch Willard Scott wish a couple of centenarians a happy day. There would be guests--one who would talk about something called the prime rate and something else called the Fed, one who would show viewers how they could keep their pet Chows from chewing up their slippers, and one who would plug his latest movie--and none of them would realize that over in western Maine there was an accident in progress; that one of their more-or-less-loyal viewers was unable to tune in this morning because she was handcuffed to a bed less than twenty feet from her naked, dogchewed, flyblown husband.

  She turned her head to the right and looked up at the glass Gerald had set down carelessly on his side of the shelf shortly before the festivities had commenced. Five years ago, she reflected, that glass probably wouldn't have been there, but as Gerald's nightly Scotch consumption increased, so had his daily intake of all other liquids--mostly water, but he also drank tons of diet soda and iced tea. For Gerald, at least, the phrase "drinking problem" seemed to have been no euphemism but the literal truth.

  Well, she thought drearily, if he did have a drinking problem, it's certainly cured now, isn't it?

  The glass was exactly where she had left it, of course; if her visitor of the previous night had not been a dream (Don't be silly, of course it was a dream, the Goodwife said nervously), it must not have been thirsty.

  I'm going to get that glass, Jessie thought. I'm also going to be extremely careful, in case there are more muscle-cramps. Any questions?

  There weren't, and this time getting the glass turned out to be a cakewalk, because it was a lot easier to reach; there was no need for the balancing act. She discovered an added bonus when she picked up her makeshift straw. As it dried, the blow-in card had curled up along the folds she had made. This
strange geometrical construct looked like free-form origami and worked much more efficiently than it had the previous night. Getting the last of the water was even easier than getting the glass, and as Jessie listened to the Malt Shoppe crackle from the bottom of the glass as her weird straw tried to suck up the last couple of drops, it occurred to her that she would have lost a lot less water to the coverlet if she had known she could "cure" the straw. Too late now, though, and no use crying over spilled water.

  The few sips did little more than wake up her thirst, but she would have to live with that. She put the glass back on the shelf, then laughed at herself. Habit was a tough little beast. Even under bizarre circumstances such as these, it was a tough little beast. She had risked cramping up all over again to return the empty glass to the shelf instead of just bombing it over the side of the bed to shatter on the floor. And why? Because Neatness Counts, that was why. That was one of the things Sally Mahout had taught her tootsie, her little squeaky wheel who never got quite enough grease and who was never able to let well enough alone--her little tootsie who had been willing to go to any lengths, including seducing her own father, to make sure that things would continue to go the way she wanted them to go.

  In the eye of her memory, Jessie saw the Sally Mahout she had seen so often back then: cheeks flushed with exasperation, lips pressed tightly together, hands rolled into fists and planted on her hips.

  "And you would have believed it, too," Jessie said softly. "Wouldn't you, you bitch?"

  Not fair, part of her mind responded uneasily. Not fair, Jessie!

  Except it was fair, and she knew it. Sally had been a long way from the ideal mother, especially during those years when her marriage to Tom had been laboring along like an old car with dirt in the transmission. Her behavior during those years had often been paranoid, and sometimes irrational. Will had for some reason been almost completely spared her tirades and suspicions, but she had sometimes frightened both of her daughters badly.

  That dark side was gone now. The letters Jessie got from Arizona were the banal, boring notes of an old lady who lived for Thursday Night Bingo and saw her child-rearing years as a peaceful, happy time. She apparently did not remember screaming at the top of her lungs that the next time Maddy forgot to wrap her used tampons in toilet paper before throwing them in the trash she would kill her, or the Sunday morning when she had --for no reason Jessie had ever been able to understand--stormed into Jessie's bedroom, thrown a pair of high-heeled shoes at her, and then stormed out again.

  Sometimes when she got her mother's notes and postcards--All well here, sweetheart, heard from Maddy, she writes so faithfully, my appetite's a little better since it cooled off--Jessie felt an urge to snatch up the telephone and call her mother and scream: Did you forget everything, Mom? Did you forget the day you threw the shoes at me and broke my favorite vase and I cried because I thought you must know, that he must have finally broken down and told you, even though it had been three years since the day of the eclipse by then? Did you forget how often you scared us with your screams and your tears?

  That's unfair, Jessie. Unfair and disloyal.

  Unfair it might be, but that did not make it untrue.

  If she had known what happened that day--

  The image of the woman in stocks recurred to Jessie again, there and gone almost too fast to be recognized, like subliminal advertising: the pinned hands, the hair covering the face like a penitent's shroud, the little knot of pointing, contemptuous people. Mostly women.

  Her mother might not have come right out and said so, but yes--she would have believed it was Jessie's fault, and she really might have thought it was a conscious seduction. It wasn't that much of a stretch from squeaky wheel to Lolita, was it? And the knowledge that something sexual had happened between her husband and her daughter very likely would have caused her to stop thinking about leaving and actually do it.

  Believed it? You bet she would have believed it.

  This time the voice of propriety didn't bother with even a token protest, and a sudden insight came to Jessie: her father had grasped instantly what it had taken her almost thirty years to figure out. He had known the true facts just as he had known about the odd acoustics of the living room/dining room in the lake house.

  Her father had used her in more ways than one on that day.

  Jessie expected a flood of negative emotions at this sorry realization; she had, after all, been played for a sucker by the man whose primary jobs had been to love and protect her. No such flood came. Perhaps this was partly because she was still flying on endorphins, but she had an idea it had more to do with relief: no matter how rotten that business had been, she had finally been able to get outside it. Her chief emotions were amazement that she had held onto the secret for as long as she had, and a kind of uneasy perplexity. How many of the choices she had made since that day had been directly or indirectly influenced by what had happened during the final minute or so she had spent on her Daddy's lap, looking at a vast round mole in the sky through two or three pieces of smoked glass? And was her current situation a result of what had happened during the eclipse?

  Oh, that's too much, she thought. If he'd raped me, maybe it would be different. But what happened on the deck that day was really just another accident, and not a very serious one, at that--if you want to know what a serious accident is, Jess, look at the situation you're in here. I might as well blame old Mrs. Gilette for slapping my hand at that lawn-party, the summer I was four. Or a thought I had coming down the birth-canal. Or sins from some past life that still needed expiation. Besides, what he did to me on the deck wasn't anything compared to what he did to me in the bedroom.

  And there was no need to dream that part of it; it was right there, perfectly clear and perfectly accessible.

  21

  When she looked up and saw her father standing in the bedroom doorway, her first, instinctive gesture had been to cross her arms over her breasts. Then she saw the sad and guilty look on his face and dropped them again, although she felt heat rising in her cheeks and knew that her own face was turning the unlovely, patchy red that was her version of a maidenly blush. She had nothing to show up there (well, almost nothing), but she still felt more naked than naked, and so embarrassed she could almost swear she felt her skin sizzling. She thought: Suppose the others come back early? Suppose she walked in right now and saw me like this, with my shirt off?

  Embarrassment became shame, shame became terror, and still, as she shrugged into the blouse and began to button it, she felt another emotion underlying these. That feeling was anger, and it was not much different from the drilling anger she would feel years later when she realized that Gerald knew she meant what she was saying but was pretending he didn't. She was angry because she didn't deserve to feel ashamed and terrified. After all, he was the grownup, he was the one who had left that funny-smelling crud on the back of her underpants, he was the one who was supposed to be ashamed, and that wasn't the way it was working. That wasn't the way it was working at all.

  By the time her blouse was buttoned and tucked into her shorts, the anger was gone, or--same difference--banished back to its cave. And what she kept seeing in her mind was her mother coming back early. It wouldn't matter that she was fully dressed again. The fact that something bad had happened was on their faces, just hanging out there, big as life and twice as ugly. She could see it on his face and feel it on her own.

  "Are you all right, Jessie?" he asked quietly. "Not feeling faint, or anything?"

  "No." She tried to smile, but this time she couldn't quite manage it. She felt a tear slip down one cheek and wiped it away quickly, guiltily, with the heel of her hand.

  "I'm sorry." His voice was trembling, and she was horrified to see tears standing in his eyes--oh, this just got worse and worse and worse. "I'm so sorry." He turned abruptly, ducked into the bathroom, grabbed a towel off the rack, and wiped his face with it. While he did this, Jessie thought fast and hard.

  "Daddy?"r />
  He looked at her over the towel. The tears in his eyes were gone. If she hadn't known better, she would have sworn they had never been there at all.

  The question almost stuck in her throat, but it had to be asked. Had to be.

  "Do we ... do we have to tell Mom about it?"

  He took a long, sighing, trembling breath. She waited, her heart in her mouth, and when he said "I think we have to, don't you?" it sank all the way to her feet.

  She crossed the room to him, staggering a little--her legs seemed to have no feeling in them at all--and wrapped her arms around him. "Please, Daddy. Don't. Please don't tell. Please don't. Please ..." Her voice blurred, collapsed into sobs, and she pressed her face against his bare chest.

  After a moment he slipped his arms around her, this time in his old, fatherly way.

  "I hate to," he said, "because things have been pretty tense between the two of us just lately, hon. I'd be surprised if you didn't know that, actually. A thing like this could make them a lot worse. She hasn't been very ... well, very affectionate lately, and that was most of the problem today. A man has ... certain needs. You'll understand about that somed--"

  "But if she finds out, she'll say it was my fault!"

  "Oh, no--I don't think so," Tom said, but his tone was surprised, considering... and, to Jessie, as dreadful as a death-sentence. "No-ooo ... I'm sure--well, fairly sure--that she..."

  She looked up at him, her eyes streaming and red. "Please don't tell her, Daddy! Please don't! Please don't!"

  He kissed her brow. "But Jessie ... I have to. We have to."

  "Why? Why, Daddy?"

  "Because--"

  22

  Jessie shifted a little. The chains jingled; the cuffs themselves rattled on the bedposts. The light was now streaming in through the east windows.