CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“… is for your mother to come home and find a note saying… “Jessie’s eyes flashed open as she spoke these words to the empty room, and the first thing they saw was the empty glass: Gerald’s water-glass, still standing on the shelf Standing there near the cuff binding her wrist to the bedpost. Not the left wrist but the right.
…
Now Jessie understood the purpose of that old, hurtful memory; understood what Punkin had been trying to tell her all along. The answer had nothing to do with the old Adam, or with the faint mineral smell of the wet spot on her old cotton underpants. It had everything to do with half a dozen panes of glass carefully cut from the crumbling putty of an old shed window. She had lost the jar of Nivea cream, but there was still at least one other source of lubrication left to her, wasn’t there? One other way to ooze on over to the Promised Land. There was blood. Until it clotted, blood was almost as slippery as oil.
Yes, of course it would hurt like hell. But she thought she had heard or read somewhere that there were fewer nerves in the wrists than at any of the body’s vital checkpoints; that was why slitting one’s wrists, especially in a tubful of hot water, had been a preferred method of suicide ever since the original toga-parties in Imperial Rome. Besides, she was half- numb already.
“I was half-numb to let him lock me up in these things in the first place,” she croaked.
Yes, of course she would. But if she didn’t cut at all, she’d lie here until she died of seizures or dehydration… or until her friend with the bag of bones showed up tonight.
“Okay,” she said. Her heart was pumping very hard, and she was fully awake for the first time in hours. Time restarted with a ram and a Jerk, like a freight-train pulling out of a siding and back onto the main line. “Okay, that’s the convincer.”
“I’m listening,” she told the empty room. She was also looking. It was the glass she was looking at. One of a set of twelve she’d gotten on sale at Sears three or four years ago. Six or eight of them broken by now. Soon there would be another. She swallowed and grimaced. It was like trying to swallow around a flannel-covered stone lodged in her throat. “I’m listening very carefully, believe me.
She licked her dry lips with her dry tongue and caught at her flying, confused thoughts. Tried to put them in order as she had done before going after the sample jar of face cream which was now lying uselessly on the floor beside the bed. It was getting harder to think, she discovered. She kept hearing snatches of
that talking blues, kept smelling her father’s cologne, kept feeling that hard thing against her bottom. And then there was Gerald. Gerald seemed to be talking to her from his place on the floor.
She flicked her eyes toward him, then looked hastily back at the water-glass. Gerald appeared to be grinning ferociously at her with the part of his face which the dog had left intact. She made another effort to set her wits to work, and after some effort, the thoughts began to roll.
She took ten minutes, going over the steps again and again. There wasn’t much, in truth, to go over-her agenda was suicidally risky but not complicated. She mentally rehearsed each move several times just the same, looking for the minor mistake which might cost her her last chance at life. She couldn’t find it. In the end there was only one major drawback-it would have to be done very fast, before the blood could start to coagulate-and there were only two possible outcomes: a quick escape, or unconsciousness and death.
She reviewed the whole thing one more time-not putting off the necessary nasty business but examining it the way she would have examined a scarf she had knitted for runs and dropped stitches-while the sun continued its steady westward run. On the back stoop the dog got up, leaving the glistening knot of gristle upon which it had been gnawing. It ambled toward the woods. It had caught a whiff of that black scent again, and with its belly full, even a whiff was too much.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Stay out, dog!” she called shrilly, with no idea that the dog had retreated to the stand of woods beyond the head of the driveway some minutes before. She hesitated a moment longer, considering another prayer, and then decided she had done all the praying she intended to do. Now she would depend on her voices… and on herself.
She reached for the glass with her right hand, moving without her former tentative care. Part of her-probably the part which had so liked and admired Ruth Neary- understood that this final job was not about care and caution but about bringing down the hammer and bringing it down hard.
She closed her fingers upon the glass she had worked so hard to get in the first place, looked at it curiously for a moment looked at it as a gardener might look at some unexpected specimen she had found growing in among her beans or peas-then gripped it. She stitted her eyes almost completely shut to protect them from flying splinters, then brought the glass down hard on the shelf, in the manner of one who cracks the shell of a hardboiled egg. The sound the glass made was absurdly familiar, absurdly
She did feel a single random chunk of glass strike low on her forehead, just above the eyebrow, but that was the only one to hit her face. Another piece-a big one, by the sound-spun off the shelf and shattered on the floor. Jessie’s lips were pressed together in a tight white line, anticipating what would surely be the major source of pain, at least to begin with: her fingers. They had been gripping the glass tightly when it shattered. But there was no pain, only a sense of faint pressure and even fainter heat. Compared with the cramps which had been ripping at her for the last couple of hours, it was nothing.
Then she raised her hand and saw the glass hadn’t broken lucky after all. Dark red blisters of blood were welling up at the tips of her thumb and three of her four fingers; only her pinky had escaped being cut. Shards of glass stuck out of her thumb, second, and third fingers like weird quills. The creeping numbness in her extremities-and perhaps the keen edges on the pieces of glass which had cut her-had kept her from feeling the lacerations much, but they were there. As she watched, fat drops of blood began to patter down on the pink quilted surface of the mattress, staining it a far darker color.
Those narrow darts of glass, sticking out of her middle two fingers like pins from a pincushion, made her feel like throwing up even though there was nothing at all in her stomach.
She felt panic flutter, forced it back, and returned her attention to the chunk of water-glass she was still holding. It was a curved upper section, probably a quarter of the whole, and on one side it had broken in two smooth arcs. They came to an almost perfect point which glittered cruelly in the afternoon sun. A lucky break, that… maybe. If she could keep her courage up. To her this curving prong of glass looked like a fantastic fairy-tale weapon tiny scimitar, something to be carried by a warlike pixie on its way to do battle beneath a toadstool.
The answer, of course, was no.
Jessie laid the quarter-section of drinking glass back down on the shelf, placing it carefully so she would be able to reach it without serious contortions. It lay on its smooth curved belly, the scimitar-shaped prong jutting out. A tiny spark of reflected sun glittered hotly at the tip. She thought it might do very well for the next job, if she was careful not to bear down too hard. If she did that, she would probably push the glass off the shelf or snap off the accidental blade-shape.
“Just be careful,” she said. “You won’t need to bear down if you’re careful, Jessie. just pretend
But the rest of that thought
didn’t seem very productive, so she blocked it before more than its leading edge could get through. She lifted her right arm, extending it until the handcuff chain was almost taut and her wrist hovered above the gleaming hook of glass. She wanted very much to sweep away the rest of the glass littering the shelf-she sensed it waiting for her up there like a minefield-but she didn’t dare. Not after her experience with the jar of Nivea cream. If she accidentally knocked the blade-shaped piece of glass off the shelf, or broke it, she would need to sift through the leftovers for an acceptable substitute. Such precautions seemed almost surreal to her, but she did not for a single moment try to tell herself they were unnecessary. If she was going to get out of this, she was going to have to bleed a lot more than she was bleeding now.
“No chickening out,” Jessie agreed in her harsh dust-in-the-cracks voice. She spread her hand and then shook her wrist, hoping to get rid of the glass poking out of her fingers. She mostly succeeded; only the sliver in her thumb, buried deeply in the tender flesh beneath the nail, refused to go. She decided to leave it and get on with the rest of her business.
