had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.
Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of
There was a tap at the door, and Jessie’s first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost… but not quite.
“Meggie? That you?”
“None other, ma'am.”
“Come on in.”
Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass, Jessie’s right wrist began to itch madly. This didn’t always happen, but it wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar reaction, either. At least the twitches and that weird my-skin-is-crawling-right-off-the-bones sensation had pretty much stopped. There had been awhile there, before Christmas, when Jessie had really believed she was going to spend the rest of her life drinking out of a plastic cup.
“How’s yet paw today?” Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie’s itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie’s questions-and the intuitions which prompted them-a little creepy, but never ridiculous.
The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove-for that was what it was-had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn’t grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life’s few reliable hedges against insanity.
“Not too bad, Meggie.”
Meggie’s left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don’t-believe-you height. “No? If you’ve been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you’ve been in here, I bet it’s singing “Ave Maria.'”
“Have I really been here for-?” She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn’t strayed as far from the truth as Meggie’s lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn’t that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she’d had to.
She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:
No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I’ll be damned if I can.
My hand was hurting like hell-whatever help I’d gotten from the aspirin was long gone-but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I’d forgotten. At first I couldn’t remember what it was. I don’t think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He’d been in the back seat, and he’d leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.
I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I
The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called
But Megan wasn’t looking at the pc’s screen; she was looking at the sweeping view of Eastern Prom and Casco Bay beyond it. The sun was still shining and the snow was still falling, although now it was clearly winding down.
“Devil’s beating his wife,” Meggie remarked.
“I beg your pardon?” Jessie asked, smiling.
“That’s what my mother used to say when the sun came out before the snow stopped.” Meggie looked a little embarrassed as she held her hand out for the empty glass. “What it means I’m not sure I could say.”
Jessie nodded. The embarrassment on Meggie Landis’s face had lensed into something else-something that looked to Jessie like unease. For a moment she hadn’t any idea what could have made Meggie look that way, and then it came to her-a thing so obvious it was easy to overlook. It was the smile. Meggie wasn’t used to seeing Jessie smile. Jessie wanted to assure her that it was all right, that the smile didn’t mean she was going to leap from her chair and attempt to tear Meggie’s throat out.
Instead, she told her, “My own mother used to say, “The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.” I never knew what that one meant either.”
The housekeeper did look in the Mac’s direction now, but it was the merest flick of dismissal:
Soup and sandwich-kid food, the lunch you had after sledding all morning on the day when school was cancelled because of a nor'easter; food you ate with the cold still blazing redly in your cheeks like bonfires. It sounded absolutely great, but…
“I’m going to pass, Meg.”
Meggie’s brow furrowed and the corners of her mouth drew down. This was an expression Jessie had seen often in the early days of Meggie’s employment, when she had sometimes felt she needed an extra pain pill so badly that she had cried. Megan had never given in to her tears, however. Jessie supposed that was why she had hired the little Irishwoman-she had guessed from the first that Meggie wasn’t a giver-inner. She was, in fact, one hard spring potato when she had to be. but Meggie would not be getting her way this time.
“You need to eat, Jess. You re nothing but a scarecrow.” Now it was the overflowing ashtray which bore the dour whiplash of her glance. “And you need to quit
“Jessie? Are you all right? Is there a draft?”
“No. A goose walked over my grave, that’s all.” She smiled wanly. “We’re a regular packet of old sayings today, aren’t we?”
“You’ve been warned time and time again about not overdoing-”
Jessie reached out her black-clad right hand and tentatively touched Meggie’s left hand with it. “My hand’s really getting better, isn’t it?”
“Yes. If you could use it on that machine, even part of the time, for three hours or more and not be yelling for that pill the second I showed my face in here, then I guess you’re getting better even faster than Dr Magliore expected. All the same-”
“All the same it’s getting better, and that’s good… right?”
“Of course it’s good.” The housekeeper looked at Jessie as if she were mad.
“Well, now I’m trying to get the rest of me better. Step one is writing a letter to an old friend of mine. I promised myself-last October, during my hard time-that if I got out of the mess I was in, I’d do that. But I kept putting it off. Now I’m finally trying, and I don’t dare stop. I might lose my guts if I do.” “But the pill-”
“I think I’ve got just enough time to finish this and stick the printout in an envelope before I get too sleepy to work. Then I can take a long nap, and when I wake up I’ll eat an early supper.” She touched Meggie’s left hand with her right again, a gesture of reassurance which was both clumsy and rather sweet. “A nice big one.”
Meggie’s frown remained. “It’s not good to skip meals, Jessie, and you know it.”
Very gently, Jessie said: “Some things are more important than meals. You know that as well as I do, don’t you?”
Meggie glanced toward the VDT again, then sighed and nodded. When she spoke, it was in the tone of a woman bowing to some conventional sentiment in which she herself does not really believe. “I guess so. And even if I don’t, you’re the boss.”
Jessie nodded, realizing for the first time that this was now more than just a fiction the two of them maintained for the sake of convenience. “I suppose I am, at that.”
Meggie’s eyebrow had climbed to half-mast again. “If I brought the sandwich in and left it here on the corner of your desk?”
Jessie grinned. “Sold!”
This time Meggie smiled back. When she brought the sandwich in three minutes later, Jessie was sitting before the glowing screen again, her skin an unhealthy comic-book green in its reflected glow, lost in whatever she was slowly picking out on the keyboard. The little Irish housekeeper made no effort to be quiet-she was that sort of woman who would probably be unable to tiptoe if her life depended on it-but Jessie still did not hear her come or go. She had taken a stack of newspaper clippings out of the top drawer of her desk and stopped typing to riffle through them. Photographs accompanied most, photographs of a man with a strange, narrow face that receded at the chin and bulged at the brow. His deep-set eyes were dark and round and perfectly blank, eyes that made Jessie think simultaneously of Dondi, the comic-strip waif, and Charles Manson. Pudgy lips as thick as slices of cut fruit pooched out below his blade of a nose.
Meggie stood beside Jessie’s shoulder for a moment, waiting to be acknowledged, then uttered a low “Humph!” and left the room. Forty-five minutes or so later, Jessie glanced to the left and saw the toasted cheese sandwich. It was now cold, the cheese coagulated into lumps, but she wolfed it nevertheless in five quick bites. Then she turned back to the Mac. The cursor began to dance ahead once more, leading her steadily deeper into the forest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
That eased my mind a little bit but then I thought, “He could be crouched down back there so the mirror doesn’t show him.” So I managed to get turned around, although I could hardly believe how weak I was. Even the slightest bump made my hand feel like someone was jabbing it with a red-hot poker. No one was there, of course, and I tried to tell myself that the last time I saw him, he really
