Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Shu-

There! What’d I tell you?

Leave me alone!

I’m pretty familiar with that one, too. You know what hurt me the most, Jessie? It wasn’t the trust thing-I knew even then that it was nothing personal, that you felt you couldn’t trust anyone with the story of what happened that day, including yourself. What hurt was knowing how close you came to spilling it all, there in the kitchen of the Neuworth Parsonage. We were sitting with our backs against the door and our arms around each other and you started to talk. You said, “I could never tell, would have killed my Mom, and even if it didn’t, she would have left him and I loved him. We all loved him, we all needed him, they would have blamed me, and he didn’t do anything, not really.” I asked you who didn’t do anything and it came out of you so fast it was like you’d spent the last nine years waiting for someone to pop the question. “My father,” you said. “We were at Dark Score Lake on the day the sun went out.” You would have told me the rest-I know you would-hut that was when that dumb bitch came in and asked, “Is she all right?” As if you looked all right, you know what I mean? Jesus, sometimes I can’t believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner’s permit, before you’re allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker’s Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems. But that’s not the way things are, and as soon as Hart Hall’s answer to Florence Nightingale came in, you closed up like a clam. There was nothing I could do to make you open up again'. although God knows I tried.

You should have just left me alone! Jessie returned. The glass of water was starting to shake in her hand, and the makeshift purple straw was trembling between her lips. You should have stopped meddling! It didn’t concern you!

Sometimes friends can’t help their concern, Jessie, the voice inside said, and it was so full of kindness that Jessie was silenced. I looked it up, you know, I figured out what you must have been talking about and I looked it up. I didn’t remember anything at all about an eclipse back in the early sixties, hut of course I was in Florida at the time, and a lot more interested in snorkeling and the Delray lifeguard-I had the most incredible crush on him-than I was in astronomical phenomena. I guess I wanted to make sure the whole thing wasn’t some kind of crazy fantasy or something-maybe brought on by that girl with the horrible burns on her bazooms. It was no fantasy. There was a total solar eclipse in Maine, and your summer house on Dark Score Lake would have been right in the path of totality. July of 1963. Just a girl and her Dad, watching the eclipse. You wouldn’t tell me what good old Dad did to you, hut I knew two things, Jessie: that he was your father, which was bad, and that you were ten-going-on-eleven, on the childhood rim of puberty… and that was worse.

Ruth, please stop. You couldn’t have picked a worse time to start raking up all that old-

But Ruth would not be stopped. The Ruth who had once been Jessie’s roommate had always been determined to have her say every single word of it-and the Ruth who was now Jessie’s headmate apparently hadn’t changed a bit.

The next thing I knew, you were living off-campus with three little Sorority Susies-princesses in A -line jumpers and Ship “n” Shore blouses, each undoubtedly owning a set of those underpants with the days of the week sewn on them. I think you made a conscious decision to go into training for the Olympic Dusting and Floor- Waxing Team right around then. You unhappened that night at the Neuworth Parsonage, you unhappened the tears and the hurt and the anger, you unhappened me. Oh, we still saw each other once in awhile-split the occasional pizza and pitcher of Molson’s down at Pat’s-hut our friendship was really over, wasn’t it? When it came down to a choice between me and what happened to you in July of 1963, you chose the eclipse.

The glass of water was trembling harder.

“Why now, Ruth?” she asked, unaware that she was actually mouthing the words in the darkening bedroom. Why now, that’s what I want to know-given that in this incarnation you’re really a part of me, why now? Why at the exact time when I can least afford being upset and distracted?

The most obvious answer to that question was also the most unappetizing: because there was an enemy inside, a sad, bad bitch who liked her just the way she was-handcuffed, aching, thirsty, scared, and miserable-just fine. Who didn’t want to see that condition alleviated in the slightest. Who would stoop to any dirty trick to see that it wasn’t.

The total solar eclipse lasted just over a minute that day, Jessie… except in your mind. In there, it’s still going on, isn’t it?

She closed her eyes and focused all her thought and will on steadying the glass in her hand. Now she spoke mentally to Ruth’s voice without self-consciousness, as if she really were speaking to another person instead of to a part of her brain that had suddenly decided this was the right time to do a little work on herself, as Nora Callighan would have put it.

Let me alone, Ruth. If you still want to discuss these things after I’ve taken a stab at getting a drink, okay. But for now, will you please just-

“ -shut the fuck up,” she finished in a low whisper.

Yes, Ruth replied at once. I know there’s something or someone inside you, trying to throw dirt in the works, and I know it sometimes uses my voice-it’s a great ventriloquist, no doubt about that-but it’s not me. I loved you then, and I love you now. That was why I kept trying to stay in touch as long as I did… because I loved you. And, I suppose, because us high-riding bitches have to stick together.

Jessie smiled a little, or tried to, around the makeshift straw.

Now go for it, Jessie, and go hard.

Jessie waited for a moment, but there was nothing else. Ruth was gone, at least for the time being. She opened her eyes again, then slowly bent her head forward, the rolled-up card jutting out of her mouth like FDR’s cigarette holder.

Please God, I’m begging you… let this work.

Her makeshift straw slid into the water. Jessie closed her eyes and sucked. For a moment there was nothing, and clear despair rose up in her mind. Then water filled her mouth, cool and sweet and there, surprising her into a kind of ecstasy. She would have sobbed with gratitude if her mouth hadn’t been so strenuously puckered around the end of the rolled-up subscription card; as it was, she could make only a foggy hooting sound through her nose.

She swallowed the water, feeling it coating her throat like liquid satin, and then began to suck again. She did this as ardently and as mindlessly as a hungry calf working at its mother’s teat. Her straw was a long way from perfect, delivering only sips and slurps and rills instead of a steady stream, and most of what she was sucking into the tube was spilling out again from the imperfect seats and crooked folds. On some level she knew this, could hear water pattering to the coverlet like raindrops, but her grateful mind still fervently believed that her straw was one of the greatest inventions ever created by the mind of woman, and that this moment, this drink from her dead husband’s water-glass, was the apogee of her life.