Gerald's Game - Stephen King [142]
What was it like, coming down? they had asked the skydiving lady. What did you think about when you realized your chute hadn't opened, wasn't going to open? And the skydiving lady had replied, I can't remember. I remember the starter patting me on the back, and I think I remember the pop-out, but the next thing I remember is being on a stretcher and asking one of the men putting me into the back of the ambulance how badly I was hurt. Everything in the middle is just a haze. I suppose I prayed, but I can't even remember that for sure.
Or maybe you really remembered everything, my skydiving friend, Jessie thought, and lied about it, just like I did. Maybe even for the same reasons. For all I know, every damned one of the case-history people in every damned one of the hooks I read was lying,
Maybe so. Whether they were or not, the fact remained that she did remember her hours handcuffed to the bed — from the click of the key in the second lock right up to that final freezing moment when she had looked into the rearview mirror and seen that the thing in the house had become the thing in the back seat, she remembered it all. She remembered those moments by day and relived them by night in horrible dreams where the water-glass slid past her along the inclined plane of the shelf and shattered on the floor, where the stray dog bypassed the cold buffet on the floor in favor of the hot meal on the bed, where the hideous night-visitor in the corner asked Do you love me, Punkin? in her father's voice and maggots squirmed like semen from the tip of its erect penis.
But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not confer an obligation to tell about a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream. She had lost ten pounds since October (well, that was shading the truth a bit; it was actually more like seventeen), taken up smoking again (a pack and a half a day, plus a joint roughly the size of an El Producto before bedtime), her complexion had gone to hell, and all at once her hair was going gray all over her head, not just at the temples. That last was something she could fix — hadn't she been doing so for five years or more? — but so far she simply hadn't been able to summon up enough energy to dial Oh Pretty Woman in Westbrook and make an appointment. Besides, who did she have to look good for? Was she planning to maybe hit a few singles bars, check out the local talent?
Good idea, she thought. Some guy will ask if he can buy me a drink, I'll say yes, and then, while we wait for the bartender to bring them, I'll tell him — just casually — that I have this dream where my father ejaculates maggots instead of semen, With a line of interesting conversational patter like that, I'm sure he'll ask me back to his apartment right away. He won't even want to see a doctor's certificate saying I'm HIV-negative.
In mid-November, after she had begun to believe the police were really going to leave her alone and the story's sex angle was going to stay out of the papers (she was very slow coming to believe this, because the publicity was the thing she had dreaded the most), she decided to try therapy with Nora Callighan again. Maybe she didn't want this sitting inside and sending out poison fumes for the next thirty or forty years as it rotted. How much different might her life have been if she had managed to tell Nora what had happened on the day of the eclipse? For that matter, how much difference might it have made if that girl hadn't come into the kitchen