“Gerald?” Her voice sounded thin and uncertain, the voice of a girl who has broken something valuable at a friend’s birthday party. “Gerald, are you all right?”
It was a stupid question, of course, incredibly stupid, but it was a lot easier to ask than the ones which were really on her mind: Gerald, how badly are you hurt? Gerald, do you think you might die?
Of course he’s not going to die, the Goodwife said nervously. You’ve hurt him, indeed you have, and you ought to be sorry, but he’s not goingto die. Nobody is going to die around here.
Gerald’s pursed, puckered mouth continued to quiver soundlessly, but he didn’t answer her question. One of his hands had gone to his belly; the other had cupped his wounded testes. Now they both rose slowly and settled just above his left nipple. They settled like a pair of pudgy pink birds too tired to fly farther. Jessie could see the shape of a bare foot-her bare foot-rising on her husband’s round stomach. It was a bright, accusatory red against his pink flesh.
He was exhaling, or trying to, sending out a dour fog that smelled like rotting onions. That’s tidal breath, she thought. Thebottom ten per cent of our lungs is reserved for tidal breath, isn’t thatwhat they taught us in high school biology? Yes, I think so. Tidalbreath, the fabled last gasp of drowners and chokers. Once you expel that,you either faint or…
“Gerald!” she cried in a sharp, scolding voice. “Gerald, breathe!”
His eyes bulged from their sockets like blue marbles stuck in a clod of Play-Doh, and he did manage to drag in a single small sip of air. He used it to speak a final word to her, this man who had sometimes seemed made of words.
“… heart…”
That was all.
“Gerald!” Now she sounded shocked as well as scolding, an old-maid schoolteacher who has caught the second-grade flirt pulling up her skirt to show the boys the bunnies on her underpants.
“Gerald, stop fooling around and breathe, goddammit!”
Gerald didn’t. Instead, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, disclosing yellowish whites. His tongue blew out of his mouth and made a farting sound. A stream of cloudy, orange-tinted urine arced out of his deflated penis and her knees and thighs were doused with feverishly hot droplets. Jessie voiced a long, piercing shriek. This time she was unaware of yanking against the handcuffs, of using them to draw herself as far back from him as possible, awkwardly curling her legs beneath her as she did so.
“Stop it, Gerald! just stop it before you fall off the b-”
Too late. Even if he were still hearing her, which her rational mind doubted, it was too late. His bowed back arched the top half of his body beyond the edge of the bed and gravity took over, Gerald Burlingame, with whom Jessie had once eaten Creamsicles in bed, fell over backward with his knees up and his head down, like a clumsy kid trying to impress his friends during Free Swim at the YMCA pool. The sound of his skull meeting the hardwood floor made her shriek again. It sounded like some enormous egg being cracked against the lip of a stone bowl. She would have given anything not to have heard that.
Then there was silence, broken only by the distant roar of the chainsaw. A large gray rose was opening in the air before Jessie’s wide eyes. The petals spread and spread, and when they closed around her again like the dusty wings of huge colorless moths, blocking out everything for awhile, the only clear feeling she had was one of gratitude.
CHAPTER TWO
She seemed to be in a long, cold hall filled with white fog, a hall that was canted severely to one side like the halls people were always walking down in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and TV shows like The Twilight Zone. She was naked and the cold was really getting to her, making her muscles ache-particularly those of her back and neck and shoulders.
I’ve got to get out of here or I’ll be sick, she thought. I’m alreadygetting cramps from the fog and the damp.
(Although she knew it was not the fog and the damp.)
Also, something’s wrong with Gerald. I can’t remember exactly whatit is, but I think he might he sick.
(Although she knew that sick wasn’t exactly the right word.)
But, and this was odd, another part of her really didn’t want to escape the tilted, foggy corridor at all. This part suggested that she’d be a lot better off staying here. That if she left she’d be sorry. So she did stay for awhile.
What finally got her going again was a barking dog. It was an exceedingly ugly bark, bottomheavy but breaking to shrill bits in its upper registers. Each time the animal let go with it, it sounded as if it were puking up a throatful of sharp splinters. She had heard that bark before, although it might be better-quite a bit better, actually-if she managed not to remember when, or where, or what had been happening at the time.
But at least it got her moving-left foot, right foot, hayfoot, strawfoot-and suddenly it occurred to her that she could see through the fog better if she opened her eyes, so she did. It wasn’t some spooky Twilight Zone hallway she saw but the master bedroom of their summer house on the north end of Kashwakamak Lake-the area that was known as Notch Bay. She guessed the reason she had felt cold was that she was wearing nothing but a pair of bikini panties, and her neck and shoulders hurt because she was handcuffed to the bedposts and her bottom had slid down the bed when she fainted. No tilted corridor; no foggy damp. Only the dog was real, still barking its fool head off. It now sounded quite close to the house. If Gerald heard that-
The thought of Gerald made her twitch, and the twitch sent complex spiral-sparkles of feeling through her cramped biceps and triceps. These tingles faded away to nothing at her elbows, and Jessie realized with soupy, just-waking-up dismay that her forearms were mostly without feeling and her hands might as well have been gloves stuffed with congealed mashed potatoes.
This is going to hurt, she thought, and then everything came back to her… especially the image of Gerald doing his header off the side of the bed. Her husband was on the floor, either dead or unconscious, and she was lying up here on the bed, thinking about what a drag it was that her lower arms and hands had gone to sleep. How selfish and self-centered could you get?
If he’s dead, it’s his own damned fault, the no-bullshit voice said. It tried to add a few other home truths as well, but Jessie gagged it. In her still-not-quite-conscious state she had a clearer sightline into the deeper archives of her memory banks, and she suddenly realized whose voice - slightly nasal, clipped, always on the verge of a sarcasm-tinged laugh-that was. It belonged to her college roommate, Ruth Neary. Now that Jessie knew, she found she wasn’t a bit surprised. Ruth had always been extremely generous with pieces of her mind, and her advice had often scandalized her nineteen-year-old wet-behind-the-ears roommate from Falmouth Foreside… which had undoubtedly been the idea, or part of it; Ruth’s heart had always been in the right place, and Jessie had never doubted that Ruth actually believed sixty per cent of the things she said and had actually done forty per cent of the things she claimed to have done. When it came to things sexual, the percentage was probably even higher. Ruth Neary, the first woman Jessie had ever known who absolutely refused to shave her legs and her armpits; Ruth, who had once filled an unpleasant floor-counsellor’s pillowcase with strawberry-scented foam douche; Ruth, who on general principles went to every student rally and attended every experimental student play. If all else fails, tootsie,some good-looking guy will probably take hit clothes off, she had told an amazed but fascinated Jessie after coming back from a student effort entitled “The Son of Noah’s Parrot'. I mean, it doesn’t always happen, but it usually does-I think that’s really what student-written-and-produced plays are for-so guys and girls can take off their clothesand make out in public.