Jessie raised her right hand and looked at it critically. The third and fourth fingers still hung limply. She wondered briefly just how much nerve-damage she had done to her hand, then dismissed the thought. It might matter later on--as some of the other things she had dismissed for the duration of this gruelling fourth-quarter drive downfield might matter later on--but for the time being, nerve-damage to her right hand was no more important to her than the price of hogbelly futures in Omaha. The important thing was that the thumb and first two fingers on that hand were still taking messages. They shook a little, as if expressing shock at the sudden loss of their lifelong neighbors, but they still responded.
Jessie bent her head and spoke to them.
"You have to stop doing that. Later on you can shake like mad, if you want, but right now you have to help me. You have to." Yes. Because the thought of dropping the keys or knocking them off the bureau after getting this far ... that was unthinkable. She stared sternly at her fingers. They didn't stop trembling, not entirely, but as she watched, their jitters quieted to a barely visible thrumming.
"Okay," she said softly. "I don't know if that's good enough or not, but we're going to find out."
At least the keys were the same, which gave her two chances. She found nothing at all strange in the fact that Gerald had brought them both; he was nothing if not methodical. Planning for contingencies, he often said, was the difference between being good and being great. The only contingencies he hadn't planned on this time were the heart attack and the kick which had provoked it. The result, of course, was that he was neither good nor great, only dead.
"The doggy's dinner," Jessie muttered, once again having no idea at all she was speaking aloud. "Gerald used to be a winner, but now he's just the doggy's dinner. Right, Ruth? Right, Punkin?"
She tweezed one of the small steel keys between the thumb and forefinger of her sizzling right hand (as she touched the metal, that pervasive feeling that all this was a dream recurred), picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the cuff which enclosed her left wrist. The lock was a small circle pressed into its side; to Jessie it looked like the sort of doorbell a rich person might have at the tradesman's entrance of the manor house. To open the lock, you simply stuck the hollow barrel of the key into the circle until you heard it click into place, then turned it.
She lowered the key toward the lock, but before she could slip the barrel in, another wave of that peculiar darkheadedness rolled through her mind. She swayed on her feet and found herself once again thinking of Karl Wallenda. Her hand began to shake again.
"Stop that!" she cried fiercely, and jammed the key desperately at the lock. "Stop th--"
The key missed the circle, struck the hard steel beside it instead, and turned in her blood-slicked fingers. She held onto it a second longer, and then it squirted out of her grasp--went greasy, one might have said--and fell to the floor. Now there was only the one key left, and if she lost that--
You won't, Punkin said. I swear you won't. Just go for it before you lose your courage.
She flexed her right arm once, then raised the fingers toward her face. She looked at them closely. The shakes were abating again, not enough to suit her, but she couldn't wait. She was afraid she would black out if she did.
She reached out with her faintly trembling hand, and came very close to pushing the remaining key over the edge of the bureau in her first effort to grip it. It was the numbness--the goddam numbness that simply wouldn't leave her fingers. She took a deep breath, held it, made a fist in spite of the pain and the fresh flow of blood it provoked, then let the air out of her lungs in a long, whistling sigh. She felt a little better. This time she pressed her first finger to the small head of the key and dragged it toward the edge of the bureau instead of trying to pick it up immediately. She didn't stop until it was sticking out over the edge.
If you drop it, Jessie! the Goodwife moaned. Oh, if you drop this one, too!
"Shut up, Goody," Jessie said, and pushed her thumb up against the bottom of the key, creating a pincers. Then, trying not to think at all about what was going to happen to her if this went wrong, she lifted the key and brought it to the cuff. There was a bad run of seconds when she was unable to align the shaking barrel of the key with the lock, and a worse one when the lock itself momentarily doubled... then quadrupled. Jessie squeezed her eyes shut, took another deep breath, then popped them open. Now she saw only one lock again, and she jabbed the key into it before her eyes could do any more tricks.
"Okay," she breathed. "Let's see."
She applied clockwise pressure. Nothing happened. Panic tried to jump up into her throat, and then she suddenly remembered the rusty old pickup truck Bill Dunn drove on his caretaking rounds, and the joke sticker on the back bumper: LEFTY LOOSEY, RIGHTY TIGHTY, it said. Above the words was a drawing of a large screw.
"Lefty loosey," Jessie muttered, and tried turning the key counter-clockwise. For one moment she did not understand that the cuff had popped open; she thought the loud click she heard was the sound of the key breaking off in the lock, and she shrieked, sending a spray of blood from her cut mouth to the top of the dresser. Some of it spattered Gerald's tie, red on red. Then she saw the notched latch-lock was standing open, and realized she had done it--she had actually done it.
Jessie Burlingame pulled her left hand, a little puffy around the wrist but otherwise unharmed, free of the open cuff, which fell back against the headboard as its mate had done. Then, with an expression of deep, wondering awe, she raised both hands slowly up to her face. She looked from the left to the right and back to the left again. She was unmindful of the fact that the right was covered with blood: it was not blood she was interested in, at least not yet. For the moment she only wanted to make absolutely sure she was really free.
She looked back and forth between her hands for almost thirty seconds, her eyes moving like those of a woman watching a Ping-Pong match. Then she drew in a deep breath, cocked her head back, and uttered another high-pitched, drilling shriek. She felt a fresh wave of darkness, big and smooth and vicious, thunder through her, but she ignored it and went on shrieking. It seemed to her that she had no choice; it was either shriek or die. The brittle broken-glass edge of madness in that shriek was unmistakable, but it was still a scream of utter triumph and victory. Two hundred yards away, in the woods at the head of the driveway, the former Prince lifted its head from its muzzle and looked uneasily toward the house.
She couldn't seem to take her eyes off her hands, couldn't seem to stop shrieking. She had never felt anything remotely like what she was feeling now, and some distant part of her thought: If sex was even half this good, people would be doing it on every streetcorner--they just wouldn't be able to help themselves.
Then she ran out of breath and swayed backward. She grabbed for the headboard, but a moment too late --she lost her balance and spilled onto the bedroom floor. As she went down, Jessie realized that part of her had been expecting the handcuff chains to snub her before she fell. Pretty funny, when you thought about it.
She struck the open wound on the inside of her wrist as she landed. Pain lit up her right arm like the lights on a Christmas tree and this time when she screamed it was all pain. She bit it off quickly when she felt herself drifting away from consciousness again. She opened her eyes and stared into her husband's torn face. Gerald looked back at her with an expression of endless, glazed surprise--This wasn't supposed to happen to me, I'm a lawyer with my name on the door. Then the fly which had been washing its front legs on his upper lip disappeared up one of his nostrils and Jessie turned her head so quickly she thumped it on the floorboards and saw stars. When she opened her eyes this time, she was looking up at the headboard, with its gaudy drips and runnels of blood. Had she been standing way up there only a few seconds ago? She was pretty sure she had been, but it was hard to believe--from here, the fucking bed looked approximately as tall as the Chrysler Building.
Get moving, Jess! It was Punkin, once more y
elling in that urgent, annoying voice of hers. For someone with such a sweet little face, Punkin could certainly be a bitch when she set her mind to it.
"Not a bitch," she said, letting her eyes slip closed. A small, dreamy smile touched the corners of her mouth. "A squeaky wheel."
Get moving, damn it!
Can't. Need a little rest first.
If you don't get. moving right away, you can rest forever! Now shag your fat ass!
That got to her. "Nothing fat about it, Miss Smart-mouth," she muttered pettishly, and tried to struggle to her feet. It took only two efforts (the second thwarted by another of those paralyzing cramps across her diaphragm) to convince her that getting up was, at least for the time being, a bad idea. And doing so would actually create more problems than it would solve, because she needed to get into the bathroom, and the foot of the bed now lay across the doorway like a roadblock.
Jessie went under the bed, moving with a gliding, swimming motion that was almost graceful, blowing a few errant dust bunnies out of her way as she went. They drifted off like small gray tumbleweeds. For some reason the dust bunnies made her think of the woman in her vision again--the woman kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip in a white pile beside her. She slid into the gloom of the bathroom and a new smell smote her nostrils: the dark, mossy smell of water. Water dripping from the tub faucets; water dripping from the shower head; water dripping from the wash-basin taps. She could even smell the peculiar waiting-to-be-mildew odor of a damp towel in the basket behind the door. Water, water, everywhere, and every drop to drink. Her throat shrank dryly inside her neck, seeming to cry out, and she became aware that she was actually touching water--a small puddle from the leaky pipe under the sink, the one the plumber never seemed to get to no matter how many times he was asked. Gasping, Jessie pulled herself over to the puddle, dropped her head, and began to lick the linoleum. The taste of the water was indescribable, the silky feel of it on her lips and tongue beyond all dreams of sweet sensuousness.
The only problem was that there wasn't enough. That enchantingly dank, enchantingly green smell was all around her, but the puddle below the sink was gone and her thirst wasn't slaked but only awake. That smell, the smell of shady springs and old hidden wellheads, did what even Punkin's voice hadn't been able to do: it got Jessie on her feet again.
She used the edge of the sink to haul herself up. She caught just a glimpse of an eight-hundred-year-old woman looking out of the mirror at her, and then she twisted the basin tap marked C. Fresh water--att the water in the world--came gushing out. She tried to voice that triumphant shriek again, but this time managed nothing but a harsh susurrant whisper. She bent over the basin, her mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish, and lunged into that mossy wellhead perfume. It was also the bland mineral smell which had so haunted her over all the years since her father had molested her during the eclipse, but now it was all right; now it was not the smell of fear and shame but of life. Jessie inhaled it, then coughed it out joyously again as she shoved her open mouth into the water jetting from the tap. She drank until a powerful but painless cramp caused her to heave it all back up again. It came still cool from its short visit in her stomach and sprayed the mirror with pink droplets. Then she gasped in several breaths and tried again.
The second time the water stayed down.
33
The water brought her back wonderfully, and when she at last turned off the tap and looked at herself in the mirror again, she felt like a reasonable facsimile of a human being--weak, hurting, and shaky on her feet... but alive and aware, just the same. She thought she would never again experience anything as deeply satisfying as those first few swallows of cold water from the gushing tap, and in all her previous experience, only her first orgasm came close to rivalling that moment. In both cases she had been totally commanded by the cells and tissues of her physical being for a few brief seconds, conscious thought (but not consciousness itself) wiped away, and the result had been ecstasy. I'll never forget it, she thought, knowing she had forgotten it already, just as she had forgotten the gorgeous honeyed sting of that first orgasm as soon as the nerves had stopped firing off. It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.
Never mind all that, Jessie--you have to hurry!
Can't you stop yapping at me? she responded. Her wounded wrist was no longer gushing, but it was still doing a hell of a lot more than trickling, and the bed she saw reflected in the bathroom mirror was a horror --the mattress soaked with blood and the headboard streaked with it. She had read that people could lose a great deal of blood and keep on functioning, but when they started to tip over, everything went at once. And she had to be pushing the envelope.
She opened the medicine cabinet, looked at the box of Band-Aids, and uttered a harsh caw of laughter. Her eye happened on the small box of Always maxi-pads sitting discreetly behind a clutter of perfumes and colognes and aftershaves. She knocked two or three of the bottles over dragging the box out, and the air filled with a gagging combination of scents. She stripped the paper cover from one of the pads, which she then wrapped around her wrist like a fat white bracelet. Poppies began to bloom on it almost at once.
Who would have thought the lawyer's wife had so much blood in her? she mused, and uttered another harsh caw of laughter. There was a tin wheel of Red Cross tape on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. She took it, using her left hand. Her right now seemed capable of very little except bleeding and howling with pain. Yet she still felt a deep love for it, and why not? When she'd needed it, when there had been absolutely nothing else, it had grasped the remaining key, put it in the lock, and turned it. No, she had nothing at all against Ms. Right.
That was you, Jessie, Punkin said. I mean . . . we're all you. You do know that, don't you?
Yes. She knew that perfectly well.
She pushed the cover off the adhesive tape and held the roll clumsily with her right hand while she used her left thumb to lift up the end of the tape. She returned the roll to her left hand, pressed the end of the tape to her makeshift bandage, and revolved the roll around her right wrist several times, binding the already damp sanitary pad as tightly against the slash on the inside of her wrist as she could. She tore the tape off the roll with her teeth, hesitated, and then added a white, overlapping armlet of adhesive tape just below her right elbow. Jessie had no idea how much good such a makeshift tourniquet could do, but she didn't think it could do any harm.
She tore the tape a second time, and as she dropped the much-diminished roll back onto the counter, she saw a green bottle of Excedrin standing on the middle shelf of the medicine cabinet. No childproof cap, either--God be thanked. She took it down with her left hand and used her teeth to pry off the white plastic top. The smell of the aspirin tablets was acrid, sharp, faintly vinegary.
I don't think that's a good idea at all, Goodwife Burlingame said nervously. Aspirin thins the blood and slows clotting.
That was probably true, but the exposed nerves on the back of her right hand were now shrieking like a fire-alarm, and if she didn't do something to damp them down a little, Jessie thought she would soon be rolling around on the floor and baying at the reflections on the ceiling. She shook two Excedrin into her mouth, hesitated, shook in two more. She turned on the tap again, swallowed them, then looked guiltily at the makeshift bandage on her wrist. The red was still sinking through the layers of paper; soon she would be able to take the pad off and wring blood out of it like hot red water. An awful image... and once she had it in her head, she could not seem to get rid of it.
If you made that worse--Goody began dolefully.
Oh, give me a break, the Ruth-voice responded. It spoke briskly but not unkindly. If I die of blood-loss now, am I supposed to blame it on four aspirin after I damned near scalped my right hand in order to get off the bed in the first place? That's surreal!
Yes indeed. Everything seemed surreal now. Except that wasn't exactly the right word. The righ
t word was...
"Hyper-real," she said in a low, musing voice.
Yes, that was it. Definitely it. Jessie turned around so she was facing out the bathroom door again, then gasped in alarm. The part of her head which monitored equilibrium reported that she was still turning. For a moment she imagined dozens of Jessies, an overlapping chain of them, documenting the arc of her turn like frames of movie-film. Her alarm deepened as she observed that the golden bars of light slanting in through the west window had taken on an actual texture--they looked like swatches of bright yellow snakeskin. The dust motes spinning through them had become sprays of diamond grit. She could hear the fast light beat of her heart, could smell the mixed aromas of blood and well-water. It was like sniffing an ancient copper pipe.
I'm getting ready to pass out.
No, Jess, you're not. You can't afford to pass out.
That was probably true, but she was pretty sure it was going to happen, anyway. There was nothing she could do about it.
Yes, there is. And you know what.
She looked down at her skinned hand, then raised it. There would be no need to actually do anything except relax the muscles of her right arm. Gravity would take care of the rest. If the pain of her peeled hand striking the edge of the counter weren't enough to drag her out of this terrible bright place she suddenly found herself in, nothing would be. She held the hand beside her blood-smeared left breast for a long moment, trying to nerve herself up enough to do it. Finally she lowered it to her side again. She couldn't--simply could not. It was one thing too much. One pain too much.
Then get moving before you pass out.
I can't do that, either, she responded. She felt more than tired; she felt as if she had just smoked a whole bong of absolutely primo Cambodian Red by herself. All she wanted to do was stand here and watch the motes of diamond-dust spin their slow circles in the sunbeams coming in through the west window. And maybe get one more drink of that dark-green, mossy-tasting water.