Not far from the butterfly (and clashing like mad, although she had never quite summoned enough nerve to point this out to her husband), Gerald’s Alpha Gamma Rho beer-stein hung from a chrome peg. Rho wasn’t a very bright star in the fraternity universe-the other frat-rats used to call it Alpha Grab A Hoe-but Gerald wore the pin with a perverse sort of pride and kept the stein on the wall and drank the first beer of the summer out of it each year when they came up here in June. It was the sort of ceremony that had sometimes made her wonder, long before today’s festivities, if she had been mentally competent when she married Gerald.
Somebody should have put a stop to it, she thought drearily. Somebodyreally should have, because just look how it turned out.
In the chair on the other side of the bathroom door, she could see the saucy little culotte skirt and the sleeveless blouse she had wore on this unseasonably warm fall day; her bra hung on the bathroom doorknob. And lying across the bedspread and her legs, turning the tiny soft hairs on her upper thighs to golden wires, was a bright band of afternoon sunlight. Not the square of light that lay almost dead center on the bedspread at one o'clock and not the rectangle which lay on it at two; this was a wide band that would soon narrow to a stripe, and although a power outage had buggered the readout of the digital clock-radio on the dresser (it flashed 12:00 a.m. over and over, as relentless as a neon barsign), the band of light told her it was going on four o'clock. Before long, the stripe would start to slide off the bed and she would see shadows in the corners and under the little table over by the wall. And as the stripe became a string, first slipping across the floor and then climbing up the far wall, fading as it went, those shadows would begin to creep out of their places and spread across the room like inkstains, eating the light as they grew. The sun was westering; in another hour, an hour and a half at most, it would be going down; forty minutes or so after that, it would be dark.
This thought didn’t cause panic-at least not yet-but it did lay a membrane of gloom over her mind and a dank atmosphere of dread over her heart. She saw herself lying here, handcuffed to the bed with Gerald dead on the floor beside and below her; saw them lying here in the dark long after the man with the chainsaw had gone back to his wife and kids and well-lighted home and the dog had wandered away and there was only that damned loon out there on the lake for company-only that and nothing more.
Mr and Mrs Gerald Burlingame, spending one last long night together.
Looking at the beer-stein and the batik butterfly, unlikely neighbors which could be tolerated only in a one-season-a-year house such as this one, Jessie thought that it was easy to reflect on the past and just as easy (although a lot less pleasant) to go wandering off into possible versions of the future. The really tough job seemed to be staying in the present, but she thought she’d better try her best to do it. This nasty situation was probably going to get a lot nastier if she didn’t. She couldn’t depend on some deus ex machina to get her out of the jam she was in, and that was a bummer, but if she succeeded in doing it herself, there would be a bonus: she’d be saved the embarrassment of lying here almost starkers while some sheriff’s deputy unlocked her, asked what the hell had happened, and got a nice long look at the new widow’s fair white body, all at the same time.
There were two other things going on as well. She would have given a lot to push them away, even temporarily, but she couldn’t. She needed to go to the bathroom, and she was thirsty. Right now the need to ship was stronger than the need to receive, but it was her desire for a drink of water that worried her. It wasn’t a big deal yet, but that would change if she wasn’t able to shuck the cuffs and get to a faucet. It would change in ways she didn’t like to think of.
It’d be funny if I died of thirst two hundred yards from the ninth biggest lake in Maine, she thought, and then she shook her head. This wasn’t the ninth-biggest lake in Maine; what had she been thinking of? That was Dark Score Lake, the one where she and her parents and her brother and sister had gone all those years ago. Back before the voices. Back before-
She cut that off. Hard. It had been a long time since she’d thought about Dark Score Lake, and she didn’t intend to start now, handcuffs or no handcuffs. Better to think about being thirsty.
What’s to think about, toots? It’s psychosomatic, that’s all. You’re thirsty because you know you can’t get up and get a drink. It’s as simple as that.
But it wasn’t. She’d had a fight with her husband, and the two swift kicks she’d dealt him had started a chain reaction which finally resulted in his death. She herself was suffering the aftereffects of a major hormone-spill. The technical term for it was shock, and one of the commonest symptoms of shock was thirst. She should probably count herself lucky that her mouth was no drier than it was, at least so far, and-
And maybe that’s one thing I can do something about.
Gerald was the quintessential creature of habit, and one of his habits was keeping a glass of water on his side of the shelf above the headboard of the bed. She twisted her head up and to the right and yes, there it was, a tall glass of water with a little cluster of melting ice-cubes floating on top. The glass was no doubt sitting on a coaster so it wouldn’t leave a ring on the shelf that was Gerald, so considerate about the little things. Beads of condensation stood out on the glass like sweat.
Looking at these, Jessie felt her first, pang of real thirst. It made her lick her lips. She slid to the right as far as the chain on the left handcuff would allow. This was only six inches, but it brought her onto Gerald’s side of the bed. The movement also exposed several dark spots on the left side of the coverlet. She stared at these vacantly for several moments before remembering how Gerald had voided his bladder in his last agony. Then she quickly turned her eyes back to the glass of water, sitting up there on a round of cardboard which probably advertised some brand of yuppie suds, Beck’s or Heineken being the most likely.
She reached out and up, doing it slowly, willing her reach to be long enough. It wasn’t. The tips of her fingers stopped three inches short of the glass. The pang of thirst-a slight tightening in the throat, a slight prickle on the tongue-came and went again.
If no one comes or I can’t think of a way to wiggle free by tomorrowmorning, I won’t even be able to look at that glass.
This idea had about it a cold reasonableness that was terrifying in and of itself. But she wouldn’t still be here tomorrow morning, that was the thing. The idea was totally ridiculous. Insane. Loopy. Not worth thinking about. It-
Stop, the no-bullshit voice said. Just stop. And so she did.
The thing she had to face was that the idea wasn’t totally ridiculous. She refused to accept or even entertain the possibility that she could die here-that was loopy, of course-but she could be in for some long, uncomfortable hours if she didn’t dust away the cobwebs on the old thinking machine and get it running.
Long, uncomfortable…and maybe painful, the Goodwife said nervously. But the pain would be an act of atonement, wouldn’t it? After all, you brought this on yourself. I hope. I’m not being tiresome, butif you’d just let him shoot his squirt-