girl, somebody’s sweet little Punkin, smelling the sweet aroma of aftershave and looking up into the sky through a piece of smoked glass-and then it was mercifully gone.
She looked at the butterfly for a few moments longer, wanting to make sure those old memories were going to stay gone, and then she looked back at Gerald’s glass of water. Incredibly, there were still a few slivers of ice floating on top, although the darkening room continued to hold the heat of the afternoon sun and would for awhile longer.
Jessie let her gaze drift down the glass, let it embrace those chilly bubbles of condensation standing on it. She couldn’t actually see the coaster on which the glass stood-the shelf cut it off-but she didn’t have to see it to visualize the dark, spreading ring of moisture forming on it as those cool beads of condensation continued to trickle down the sides of the glass and pool around it at the bottom.
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 itright…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 withan 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 couldhave 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. Imean, I was planning to fly to NewYork in my Learjet-eat at Four Seasons, dance the night away atBirdland-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 desert oasis, goal of a thousand grizzled Foreign Legionnaires in a hundred desert romances, was a glass of water with a few last slivers of ice floating on top. In this new world order, the bedroom shelf had become a shipping lane as vital as the Panama Canal and an old paperback western or mystery in the wrong place could become a lethal roadblock.
Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? she asked herself uneasily, but in truth she did not. This would be a long-odds operation under the best of circumstances, but if there was junk on the runway, forget it. A single skinny Hercule Poirot-or one of the Star Trek novels Gerald read and then dropped like used napkins-wouldn’t show above the angle of the shelf, but it would be more than enough to stop or overturn the water-glass. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. The perspectives of this world really bad changed, and enough to make her think of that science fiction movie where the hero started to shrink and went on getting smaller until he was living in his daughter’s dolihouse and going in fear of the family cat. She was going to learn the new rules in a hurry… learn them and live by them.
Don’t lose your courage, Jessie, Ruth’s voice whispered.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to try-I really am. But sometimes it’s good to know what you’re up against. I think sometimes that makes a difference.”
She rotated her right wrist outward from her body as far as it would go, then raised her arm. In this position she looked like a woman-shape in a line of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She began to patter her fingers on the shelf again, feeling for obstructions along the stretch where she hoped the glass would finish up.
She touched a piece of fairly heavy-gauge paper and thumbed it for a moment, trying to think what it might be. Her first guess was a sheet from the note-pad that usually hid in the clutter on the telephone table, but it wasn’t thin enough for that. Her eye happened on a magazine-either Time or Newsweek, Gerald had brought both along-lying face-down beside the phone. She remembered him thumbing rapidly through one of the magazines while he took off his socks and unbuttoned his shirt. The piece of paper on the shelf was probably one of those annoying blow-in subscription cards with which the newsstand copies of magazines are always loaded. Gerald often laid such cards aside for later use as bookmarks. It might be something else, but Jessie decided it didn’t matter to her plans in any case. It wasn’t solid enough to stop the glass or overturn it. There was nothing else up there, at least within reach of her stretching, wriggling fingers.
“Okay,” Jessie said. Her heart had started to pound hard. Some sadistic pirate broadcaster in her mind tried to transmit a picture of the glass tumbling off the shelf and she immediately blocked the image out. “Easy; easy does it. Slow and easy wins the race. I hope.”
Holding her right hand where it was, although bending it away from her body in that direction didn’t work very well and hurt like the devil, Jessie raised her left hand (My ashtray-throwing hand, she thought with a grim glint of humor) and gripped the shelf with it well beyond the last supporting bracket on her side of the bed.
Here we go, she thought, and began to exert downward pressure with her left hand. Nothing happened.
I’m probably pulling too close to that last bracket to get enough leverage,The problem is the goddam handcuff chain. I don’t have enough slack to get as far out on the shelf as I need to be.
Probably true, but the insight didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t doing a thing to the shelf with her left hand where it was. She would have to spider her fingers out a little farther-if she could, that was-and hope it would be enough. It was funnybook physics, simple but deadly. The irony was that she could reach under the shelf and push it up any time she liked. There was one small problem with that, however-it would tip the glass the wrong way, off Gerald’s end and onto the floor. When you considered it closely, you saw that the situation really did have its amusing side; it was like an America’s Funniest Home Videos segment sent in from hell.
Suddenly the wind dropped and the sounds from the entry seemed very loud. “Are you enjoying him, shithead?” Jessie screamed. Pain ripped at her throat, but she didn’t-couldn’t-stop. “I hopeso, because the first thing I’m going to do when I get out of these cuffs is blow your head off!”
Big talk, she thought. Very big talk for a woman who no longereven remembers if Gerald’s old shotgun-the one that belonged to his dad-is here or in the attic of the Portland house.
Nevertheless, there was a gratifying moment of silence from the shadowy world beyond the bedroom door. It was almost as if the dog were giving this threat its soberest, most thoughtful consideration.
Then the smackings and chewings began again.
Jessie’s right wrist twanged warningly, threatening to cramp up, warning her that she had better get on with her business right away… if she actually had any business to do, that was.
She leaned to the left and stretched her hand as far as the chain would allow. Then she began to put the pressure on the shelf again. At first there was nothing. She pulled harder, eyes slitted almost shut, the corners of her mouth turned down. It was the face of a child who expects a dose of bad medicine. And, just before she reached the maximum downward pressure her aching arm muscles could exert, she felt a tiny shift in the board, a change in the uniform drag of gravity so minute that it was more intuited than actually sensed.
Wishful thinking, Jess-that’s all you felt. Only that and nothingmore.
No. It was the input of senses which had been jacked into the stratosphere by terror, perhaps, but it wasn’t wishful thinking.
She let go of the shelf and just lay there for a few moments, taking long slow breaths and letting her muscles recover. She didn’t want them spasming or cramping up at the critical moment; she had quite enough problems without that, thanks. When she thought she felt as ready as she could feel, she curled her left fist loosely around the bedpost and slid it up and down until the sweat on her palm dried and the mahogany squeaked. Then she stretched out her arm and gripped the shelf again, It was time.
Got to be careful, though. The shelf moved, no question about that,and it’ll move more, but it’s going to take all my strength to get thatglass in motion…if I can do it at all, that is. And when a persongets near the end of their strength, control gets spotty.
That was true, but it wasn’t the kicker. The kicker was this: she had no feet for the shelf’s tip-point. Absolutely none at all.
Jessie remembered seesawing with her sister Maddy on the playground behind Falmouth Grammar School-they had come back early from the lake one summer and it seemed to her she had spent that whole August going up and down on those paintpeeling teeterboards with Maddy as her partner-and how they had been able to balance perfectly whenever they felt like it. All it took was for Maddy, who weighed a little more, to move a butt’s length in toward the middle. Long hot afternoons of practice, singing jump-rope songs to each other as they went up and own, had enabled them to find each seesaw’s tip-point with an almost scientific exactitude; those half a dozen warped green boards standing in a row on the sizzling hot-top had seemed almost like living things to them. She felt none of that eager liveliness under her fingers now. She would simply have to try her best and hope it was good enough.
And whatever the Bible may say to the contrary, don’t let your lefthand forget what your right hand is supposed to be doing. Your leftmay be your ashtray-throwing hand, but your right had better be yourglass-catching hand, Jessie. There’s only a few inches of shelf where you’ll have a chance to get hold of it. if it slides past that area, it won’t matterif it stays up-it’ll he as out of reach as it is right now.
