Gerald's Game - Stephen King [50]
The glass of water was trembling harder.
'Why now, Ruth?' she asked, unaware that she was actually mouthing the words in the darkening bedroom. Why now, that's what I want to know — given that in this incarnation you're really a part of me, why now? Why at the exact time when I can least afford being upset and distracted?
The most obvious answer to that question was also the most unappetizing: because there was an enemy inside, a sad, bad bitch who liked her just the way she was — handcuffed, aching, thirsty, scared, and miserable — just fine. Who didn't want to see that condition alleviated in the slightest. Who would stoop to any dirty trick to see that it wasn't.
The total solar eclipse lasted just over a minute that day, Jessie . . . except in your mind. In there, it's still going on, isn't it?
She closed her eyes and focused all her thought and will on steadying the glass in her hand. Now she spoke mentally to Ruth's voice without self-consciousness, as if she really were speaking to another person instead of to a part of her brain that had suddenly decided this was the right time to do a little work on herself, as Nora Callighan would have put it.
Let me alone, Ruth. If you still want to discuss these things after I've taken a stab at getting a drink, okay. But for now, will you please just —
' — shut the fuck up,' she finished in a low whisper.
Yes, Ruth replied at once. I know there's something or someone inside you, trying to throw dirt in the works, and I know it sometimes uses my voice — it's a great ventriloquist, no doubt about that — but it's not me. I loved you then, and I love you now. That was why I kept trying to stay in touch as long as I did . . . because I loved you. And, I suppose, because us high-riding bitches have to stick together.
Jessie smiled a little, or tried to, around the makeshift straw.
Now go for it, Jessie, and go hard.
Jessie waited for a moment, but there was nothing else. Ruth was gone, at least for the time being. She opened her eyes again, then slowly bent her head forward, the rolled-up card jutting out of her mouth like FDR's cigarette holder.
Please God, I'm begging you . . . let this work.
Her makeshift straw slid into the water. Jessie closed her eyes and sucked. For a moment there was nothing, and clear despair rose up in her mind. Then water filled her mouth, cool and sweet and there, surprising her into a kind of ecstasy. She would have sobbed with gratitude if her mouth hadn't been so strenuously puckered around the end of the rolled-up subscription card; as it was , she could make only a foggy hooting sound through her nose.
She swallowed the water, feeling it coating her throat like liquid satin, and then began to suck again. She did this as ardently and as mindlessly as a hungry calf working at its mother's teat. Her straw was a long way from perfect, delivering only sips and slurps and rills instead of a steady stream, and most of what she was sucking into the tube was spilling out again from the imperfect seats and crooked folds. On some level she knew this, could hear water pattering to the coverlet like raindrops, but her grateful mind still fervently believed that her straw was one of the greatest inventions ever created by the mind of woman, and that this moment, this drink from her dead husband's water-glass, was the apogee of her life.
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