Gerald's Game - Stephen King [40]
Jessie's tongue slipped out and swiped across her upper lip, not imparting much moisture.
I want to drink! the scared, demanding voice of the child — of somebody's sweet little Punkin — yelled. I want it and I want it right . . . NOW!
But she couldn't reach the glass. It was a clear-cut case of so near and yet so far.
Ruth: Don't give up so easy — if you could hit the goddam dog with an ashtray, tootsie, maybe you can get the glass. Maybe you can.
Jessie raised her right hand again, straining as hard as her throbbing shoulder would allow, and still came up at least two and a half inches short. She swallowed, grimacing at the sandpapery jerk and clench of her throat.
'See?' she asked. 'Are you happy now?'
Ruth didn't reply, but Goody did, She spoke up softly, almost apologetically, inside jessie's head. She said get it, not reach it. They . . . they might not be the same thing, Goody laughed in an embarrassed who-am-I-to-stick-my-oar-in way, and Jessie had a moment to think again how surpassingly odd it was to feel a part of yourself laughing like that, as if it really were an entirely separate entity. If I had a few more voices, Jessie thought, we could have a goddam bridge tournament in here.
She looked at the glass a moment longer, then let herself flop back down on the pillows so she could study the underside of the shelf. It wasn't attached to the wall, she saw; it lay on four steel brackets that looked like upside-down capital L's. And the shelf wasn't attached to them, either — she was sure of it. She remembered once when Gerald had been talking on the phone, and had absentmindedly attempted to lean on the shelf. Her end had started to come up, levitating like the end of a seesaw, and if Gerald hadn't snatched his hand away immediately, he would have flipped the shelf like a tiddlywink.
The thought of the telephone distracted her for a moment, but only a moment. It sat on the low table in front of the east window, the one with its scenic view of the driveway and the Mercedes, and it might as well have been on another planet, for all the good it could do in her current situation. Her eyes returned to the underside of the shelf, first studying the plank itself and then scanning the L-shaped brackets again.
When Gerald leaned on his end, her end had tilted. If she exerted enough pressure on her end to tilt his, the glass of water . . .
'It might slide down,' she said in a hoarse, musing voice. 'It might slide down to my end.' Of course it might also go sliding gaily right past her to shatter on the floor, and it might bang into some unseen obstacle up there and overturn before it ever got to her, but it was worth trying, wasn't it?
Sure, I guess so, she thought. I mean, I was planning to fly to New York in my Learjet — eat at Four Seasons, dance the night away at Birdland — but with Gerald dead I guess that would be a little tacky. And with all the good hooks currently out of reach — all the had ones, too, as far as that goes — I guess I might as well try for the consolation prize.
All right; how was she supposed to go about it?
'Very carefully,' she said. 'That's how.'
She used the handcuffs to pull herself up again and studied the glass some more. Not being able to actually see the surface of the shelf now struck her as a drawback. She had a pretty good idea of what was on her end, but was less sure about Gerald's and the no-man's-land in the middle. Of course it wasn't surprising; who but someone with an eidetic memory could reel off a complete inventory of the items on a bedroom shelf? Who would have ever thought such things could matter?
Well, they matter now, I'm living in a world where all the perspectives have changed.
Yes indeed. In this world a stray dog could be scarier than Freddy Krueger, the phone was in the Twilight Zone, the sought-for