Gerald's Game - Stephen King [115]
Can I look through the smoked glass yet, Dad?
Not yet. His hand, heavy and warm on her leg. She puts her own hand over it, then turns to him and grins.
It's exciting, isn't it?
Yes. Yes it is, Punkin. Quite a bit more than I thought it would be, actually —
She wriggles again, wanting to find a way to coexist with the hard part of him against which her bottom is now resting. He draws in a quick hissing mouthful of air over his bottom lip.
Daddy? Am I too heavy? Did I hurt you?
No. You're fine.
Can I look at it through the glass yet?
Not yet, Punkin. But very soon.
The world no longer has the look it gets when the sun dives into a cloud; now it seems as if twilight has come in the middle of the afternoon. She hears the old hooty-owl in the woods, and the sound makes her shiver. On WNCH Debbie Reynolds is fading out, and the deejay who comes in on top of them will soon be replaced by Marvin Gaye.
Look out on the lake! Daddy tells her, and when she does, she sees a weird twilight creeping over a lackluster world from which every strong color has been subtracted, leaving nothing but subdued pastels. She shivers and tells him it's creepy; he tells her to try not to be too scared to enjoy it, a statement she will examine carefully — too carefully, perhaps — for double meanings years later. And now . . .
Dad? Daddy? It's gone. Can I —
Yes, Now it's okay. But when I say you have to stop, you have to stop. No arguments, understand?
He gives her three panes of smoked glass in a stack, but first he gives her a potholder. He gives it to her because he made the viewers from panes of glass cut from an old shed window, and he is less than confident of his abilities with the glass-cutter. And as she looks down at the potholder in this experience which is both dream and memory, her mind suddenly leaps even further back, as nimbly as an acrobat turning a flip, and she hears him say The last thing I need . . .
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - N I N E
' . . . is for your mother to come home and find a note saying . . . ' Jessie's eyes flashed open as she spoke these words to the empty room, and the first thing they saw was the empty glass: Gerald's water-glass, still standing on the shelf Standing there near the cuff binding her wrist to the bedpost. Not the left wrist but the right.
. . . a note saying I've taken you to the Emergency Room so they can try to sew a couple of your fingers back on.
Now Jessie understood the purpose of that old, hurtful memory; understood what Punkin had been trying to tell her all along. The answer had nothing to do with the old Adam, or with the faint mineral smell of the wet spot on her old cotton underpants. It had everything to do with half a dozen panes of glass carefully cut from the crumbling putty of an old shed window. She had lost the jar of Nivea cream, but there was still at least one other source of lubrication left to her, wasn't there? One other way to ooze on over to the Promised Land. There was blood. Until it clotted, blood was almost as slippery as oil.
It's going to hurt like hell, Jessie.
Yes, of course it would hurt like hell. But she thought she had heard or read somewhere that there were fewer nerves in the wrists than at any of the body's vital checkpoints; that was why slitting one's wrists, especially in a tubful of hot water, had been a preferred method of suicide ever since the original toga-parties in Imperial Rome. Besides, she was half-numb already.
'I was half-numb to let him lock me up in these things in the first place,' she croaked.
If you cut too deep, you'll