“Mr Milheron, I would like you and your uninvited guest to approach the bench, and immediately!”
The bailiff, alerted by the whiplash in that tone, snaps out of his daze. The stenographer looks around. Jessie thinks Brandon takes her arm, meaning to make her comply with the judge’s order, but she cannot say for sure, and it doesn’t matter in any case, because she cannot move; she might as well be planted waist-deep in a plug of cement. It is the eclipse again, of course; the total, final eclipse. After all these years, the stars are once again shining in the daytime. They are shining inside her head.
She sits there and watches as the grinning creature in the orange overall raises its misshapen arms, still holding her with its muddy, red-rimmed gaze. It raises its arms until its long, narrow hands hang in the air about a foot from each of its pale ears. The mimicry is horribly effective: she can almost see the bedposts as the thing in the orange jumpsuit first revolves those splayed, long-fingered hands… and then shakes them back and forth, as if they are being held by restraints which only he and the woman in the turned-back veil can see. The voice that comes out of its grinning mouth is a bizarre contrast to the gross overdevelopment of the face from which it drifts; it is a reedy, whining voice, the voice of an insane child.
“I don’t think you’re anyone!” Raymond Andrew Joubert pipes up in that childish, wavering voice. It cuts through the stale, overheated air of the courtroom like a bright blade. “You’re only made of moonlight!”
And then it begins to laugh. It shakes its hideous hands back and forth within manacles only the two of them can see, and it laughs… laughs… laughs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jessie reached for her cigarettes, but succeeded only in knocking them all over the floor. She turned to the keyboard and the VDT again, without making any attempt to pick them up.
I felt myself going insane, Ruth-and I mean I really felt it happening. Then I heard some voice inside me, Punkin, I think; Punkin who showed me how to get out of the handcuffs in the first place and got me moving when Goody tried to interfere-Goody with her wistful, counterfeit logic, Punkin, God bless her.
“Don’t you give it the satisfaction, Jessie!” she said. “And don’t you let Brandon pull you away until you do what you have to do!”
He was trying, too. He had both hands on my shoulders and was pulling on me as if I were a tug-of-war rope, and the judge was hammering away with his gavel and the bailiff was running over and I knew I only had that one last second to do something that would matter, that would make a difference, that would show me that no eclipse lasts forever, so I…
CHAPTER FORTY
And now she leaned back suddenly in her desk chair, put her hands over her eyes, and began to weep. She wept for almost ten minutes-great noisy shaking sobs in the deserted house-and then she began to type again. She stopped frequently to swipe her arm across her streaming eyes, trying to clear her blurred vision. After awhile she began to get ahead of the tears.
… so I leaned forward and spit in his face, only it wasn’t just spit; I hit him with a really fine gobber. I don’t think he even noticed, but that’s all right. It wasn’t him I did it for, was it?
I will have to pay a fine for the privilege and Brandon says it will probably be a hefty one, but Brandon himself got out from under with only a reprimand, and that’s a hell of a lot more important to me than any fine I might have to pay, since I more or less twisted his arm up behind his back and then lockstepped him to the hearing.
And I guess that’s it. Finally it. I think I’m really going to mail this, Ruth, and then I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks sweating out your reply. I treated you shabbily all those years ago, and while it wasn’t strictly my fault I’ve only come to realize lately how often and how much we are moved by others, even when we are priding ourselves on our control and self-reliance-I still want to say I’m sorry. And I want to tell you something else, something I’m really starting to believe: I’m going to be okay. Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually. As okay as we mortals are privileged to get, anyway. It’s good to know that-good to know that survival is still an option, and that sometimes it even feels good. That sometimes it actually feels like victory.
I love you, dear Ruth. You and your tough talk were a big part of saving my life last October, even though you didn’t know it. I love you so much.
Your old friend,
P.S.: Please write me. Better yet, call… please
Ten minutes later she laid her letter, printed and sealed within a manila envelope (it had proven too bulky for an ordinary business-length envelope), on the table in the front hall. She had gotten Ruth’s address from Carol Rittenhouse-an address, anyway and had written it on the envelope in the careful, straggly letters which were all she could make with her left hand. Beside it, she put a note carefully written in the same straggly letters.
Meggie: Please mail this. If I should call downstairs and ask you notto, please agree…and then mail it anyway.
She went to the window in the parlor and stood there for awhile before going upstairs, looking out over the Bay. It was starting to get dark. For the first time in a long time, this simple realization didn’t fill her with terror.
“Oh, what the fuck,” she told the empty house. “Bring on the night.” Then she turned and slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor.
When Megan Landis came back from running her errands an hour later and saw the letter on the table in the front hall, Jessie was deeply asleep beneath two down comforters in the upstairs guest room… which she now called her room. For the first time in months her dreams were not unpleasant, and a tiny cat’s smile curled the corners of her mouth. When a cold February wind blew beneath the eaves and moaned in the chimney, she burrowed deeper beneath the comforters… but that small, wise smile did not fade.
November 16, 1991
Bangor, Maine