Gerald’s Game

discovered an added bonus when she picked up her makeshift straw. As it dried, the blow-in card had curled up along the folds she had made. This strange geometrical construct looked like free-form origami and worked much more efficiently than it had the previous night. Getting the last of the water was even easier than getting the glass, and as Jessie listened to the Malt Shoppe crackle from the bottom of the glass as her weird straw tried to suck up the last couple of drops, it occurred to her that she would have lost a lot less water to the coverlet if she had known she could “cure” the straw. Too late now, though, and no use crying over spilled water.

The few sips did little more than wake up her thirst, but she would have to live with that. She put the glass back on the shelf, then laughed at herself. Habit was a tough little beast. Even under bizarre circumstances such as these, it was a tough little beast. She had risked cramping up all over again to return the empty glass to the shelf instead of just bombing it over the side of the bed to shatter on the floor. And why? Because Neatness Counts, that was why. That was one of the things Sally Mahout had taught her tootsie, her little squeaky wheel who never got quite enough grease and who was never able to let well enough alone-her little tootsie who had been willing to go to any lengths, including seducing her own father, to make sure that things would continue to go the way she wanted them to go.

In the eye of her memory, Jessie saw the Sally Mahout she had seen so often back then: cheeks flushed with exasperation, lips pressed tightly together, hands rolled into fists and planted on her hips.

“And you would have believed it, too,” Jessie said softly. “Wouldn’t you, you bitch?”

Not fair, part of her mind responded uneasily. Not fair, Jessie!

Except it was fair, and she knew it. Sally had been a long way from the ideal mother, especially during those years when her marriage to Tom had been laboring along like an old car with dirt in the transmission. Her behavior during those years had often been paranoid, and sometimes irrational. Will had for some reason been almost completely spared her tirades and suspicions, but she had sometimes frightened both of her daughters badly.

That dark side was gone now. The letters Jessie got from Arizona were the banal, boring notes of an old lady who lived for Thursday Night Bingo and saw her child- rearing years as a peaceful, happy time. She apparently did not remember screaming at the top of her lungs that the next time Maddy forgot to wrap her used tampons in toilet paper before throwing them in the trash she would kill her, or the Sunday morning when she had-for no reason Jessie had ever been able to understand-stormed into Jessie’s bedroom, thrown a pair of high-heeled shoes at her, and then stormed out again.

Sometimes when she got her mother’s notes and postcards-All well here, sweetheart, heard from Maddy, she writes so faithfully, my appetite’s a little better since it cooled off-Jessie felt an urge to snatch up the telephone and call her mother and scream: Did you forget everything, Mom? Did you forget the day you threw the shoes at me and broke my favorite vase and I cried because I thought you must know, that he must have finally broken down and told you, even though it had been three years since the day of the eclipse by then? Did you forget how often you scared us with your screams and your tears

That’s unfair, Jessie. Unfair and disloyal.

Unfair it might be, but that did not make it untrue.

If she had known what happened that day-

The image of the woman in stocks recurred to Jessie again, there and gone almost too fast to be recognized, like subliminal advertising: the pinned hands, the hair covering the face like a penitent’s shroud, the little knot of pointing, contemptuous people. Mostly women.

Her mother might not have come right out and said so, but yes-she would have believed it was Jessie’s fault, and she really might have thought it was a conscious seduction. It wasn’t that much of a stretch from squeaky wheel to Lolita, was it? And the knowledge that something sexual had happened between her husband and her daughter very likely would have caused her to stop thinking about leaving and actually do it.

Believed it? You bet she would have believed it.

This time the voice of propriety didn’t bother with even a token protest, and a sudden insight came to Jessie: her father had grasped instantly what it had taken her almost thirty years to figure out. He had known the true facts just as he had known about the odd acoustics of the living room/dining room in the lake house.

Her father had used her in more ways than one on that day.

Jessie expected a flood of negative emotions at this sorry realization; she had, after all, been played for a sucker by the man whose primary jobs had been to love and protect her. No such flood came. Perhaps this was partly because she was still flying on endorphins, but she had an idea it had more to do with relief: no matter how rotten that business had been, she had finally been able to get outside it. Her chief emotions were amazement that she had held onto the secret for as long as she had, and a kind of uneasy perplexity. How many of the choices she had made since that day had been directly or indirectly influenced by what had happened during the final minute or so she had spent on her Daddy’s lap, looking at a vast round mole in the sky through two or three pieces of smoked glass? And was her current situation a result of what had happened during the eclipse?

Oh, that’s too much, she thought. If he’d raped me, maybe it would be different. But what happened on the deck that day was really just another accident, and not a very serious one, at that-if you want to know what a serious accident is, Jess, look at the situation you’re in here. I might as well blame old Mrs Gilette for slapping my hand at that lawn-party, the summer I was four. Or a thought I had coming down the birth-canal. Or sins from some past life that still needed expiation. Besides, what be did to me on the deck wasn’t anything compared to what he did to me in the bedroom.

And there was no need to dream that part of it; it was right there, perfectly clear and perfectly accessible.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When she looked up and saw her father standing in the bedroom doorway, her first, instinctive gesture had been to cross her arms over her breasts. Then she saw the sad and guilty look on his face and dropped them again, although she felt heat rising in her cheeks and knew that her own face was turning the unlovely, patchy red that was her version of a maidenly blush. She had nothing to show up there (well, almost nothing), but she still felt more naked than naked, and so embarrassed she could almost swear she felt her skin sizzling. She thought: Suppose the others come back early? Suppose she walked in right now and saw me like this, with my shirt off?

Embarrassment became shame, shame became terror, and still, as she shrugged into the blouse and began to button it, she felt another emotion underlying these. That feeling was anger, and it was not much different from the drilling anger she would feel years later when she realized that Gerald knew she meant what she was saying but was pretending he didn’t. She was angry because she didn’t deserve to feel ashamed and terrified. After all, he was the grownup, he was the one who had left that funny-smelling crud on the back of her underpants, he was the one who was supposed to be ashamed, and that wasn’t the way it was working. That wasn’t the way it was working at all.

By the time her blouse was buttoned and tucked into her shorts, the anger was gone, or-same difference-banished back to its cave. And what she kept seeing in her mind was her mother coming back early. It wouldn’t matter that she was fully dressed again. The fact that something bad had happened was on their faces, just hanging out there, big as life and twice as ugly. She could see it on his face and feel it on her own.

“Are you all right, Jessie?” he asked quietly. “Not feeling faint, or anything?”

“No.” She tried to smile, but this time she couldn’t quite manage it. She felt a tear slip down one cheek and wiped it away quickly, guiltily, with the heel of her hand.

“I’m sorry.” His voice was trembling, and she was horrified to see tears standing in his eyes-oh, this just got worse and worse and worse. “I’m so sorry.” He turned abruptly, ducked into the bathroom, grabbed a towel off the rack, and wiped his face with it. While he did this, Jessie thought fast and hard.

“Daddy?”

He looked at her over the towel. The tears in his eyes were gone. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn they had never been there at all.

The question almost stuck in her throat, but it had to be asked. Had to be.

“Do we… do we have to tell Mom about it?” He took a long, sighing, trembling breath. She waited, her heart in her mouth, and when he said “I think we have to, don’t you?” it sank all the way to her feet.

She crossed the room to him, staggering a little-her legs seemed to have no feeling in them at all-and wrapped her arms around him. “Please, Daddy. Don’t. Please don’t tell. Please don’t. Please… “Her voice blurred, collapsed into sobs, and she pressed her face against his bare chest.

After a moment he slipped his arms around her, this time in his old, fatherly way.

“I hate to,” he said, “because things have been pretty tense between the two of us just lately, hon. I’d be surprised if you didn’t know that, actually. A thing like this could make them a lot worse. She hasn’t been very… well, very affectionate lately, and that was most of the problem today. A man has… certain needs. You’ll understand about that somed -”

“But if she finds out, she’ll say it was my fault!”

“Oh, no-I don’t think so,” Tom said, but his tone was surprised, considering… and, to Jessie, as dreadful as a deathsentence. “No-ooo… I’m sure-well, fairly sure-that she… “She looked up at him, her eyes streaming and red. “Please don’t tell her, Daddy! Please don’t! Please don’t!”

He kissed her brow. “But Jessie… I have to. We have to.”

“Why? Why, Daddy?”

“Because-”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jessie shifted a little. The chains jingled; the cuffs themselves rattled on the bedposts. The light was now streaming in through the east windows.

“'Because you couldn’t keep it a secret,'” she said dully. “'Because if it’s going to come out, Jessie, it’s better for both of us that it should come out now, rather than a week from now, or a month from now, or a year from now. Even ten years from now.'”

How well he had manipulated her-first the apology, then the tears, and finally the hat-trick: turning his problem into her problem. Br'er Fox, Br'er Fox, whatever else Y'all do, don’t th'ow me in dat briar patch! Until, finally, she had been swearing to him that she would keep the secret forever, that torturers couldn’t drag it out of her with tongs and hot coals.

She could in fact remember promising him something just like that through a rain of hot, frightened tears. Finally he had stopped shaking his head and had only looked across the room with his eyes narrowed and his lips pressed tightly together-this she saw in the mirror, as he almost surely knew she would.

“You could never tell anyone,” he’d said at last, and Jessie remembered the swooning relief she’d felt at those words. What he was saying was less important than the tone in which he was saying it. Jessie had heard that tone a good many times before, and knew it drove her mother crazy that she, Jessie, could cause him to speak that way more often than Sally