She had lost all interest in the eclipse, although she would never tell him that in a million years. She nodded instead, then turned back. Daddy, am I all right?
He looked surprised, unsure, wary--a combination which increased the feeling that angry hands were at work inside her, kneading her guts ... and she suddenly understood that he felt as bad as she did. Perhaps worse. And in an instant of clarity untouched by any voice save her own, she thought: You ought to! Jeepers, you started it!
Yes, he said ... but his tone did not entirely convince her. Right as rain, Jess. Now go on inside and fix yourself up.
All right.
She tried to smite--tried hard--and actually succeeded a little. Her father looked startled for a moment, and then he returned her smile. That relieved her somewhat, and the hands which had been working inside her temporarily loosened their grip. By the time she had reached the big upstairs bedroom she shared with Maddy, however, the feelings had begun to return. The worst by far was the fear that he would feel he had to tell her mother about what had happened. And what would her mother think?
That's our Jessie, isn't it? The squeaky wheel.
The bedroom had been divided off girls-at-camp-style with a clothesline strung down the middle. She and Maddy had hung some old sheets on this line, and then colored bright designs on them with Will's Crayolas. Coloring the sheets and dividing the room had been great fun at the time, but it seemed stupid and kiddish to her now, and the way her overblown shadow danced on the center sheet was actually scary; it looked like the shadow of a monster. Even the fragrant smell of pine resin, which she usually liked, seemed heavy and cloying to her, like an air-freshener you sprayed around heavily to cover up some unpleasant stink.
That's our Jessie, never quite satisfied with the arrangements until she gets a chance to put on the finishing touches. Never quite happy with someone else's plans. Never able to let well enough alone.
She hurried into the bathroom, wanting to outrun that voice, rightly guessing she wouldn't be able to. She turned on the light and pulled the sundress over her head in one quick jerk. She threw it into the laundry hamper, glad to be rid of it. She looked at herself in the mirror, wide-eyed, and saw a little girl's face surrounded by a big girl's hairdo ... one which was now coming loose from the pins in strands and puffs and locks. It was a little girl's body, too--flat-chested and slim-hipped--but it wouldn't be that way for long. It had already started to change, and it had done something to her father it had no business doing.
I never want boobs and curvy hips, she thought dully. If they make things like this happen, who would?
The thought made her aware of that wet spot on the seat of her underpants again. She slipped out of them --cotton pants from Sears, once green, now so faded they were closer to gray--and held them up curiously, her hands inside the waistband. There was something on the back of them, all right, and it wasn't sweat. Nor did it look like any kind of toothpaste she had ever seen. What it looked like was pearly-gray dish detergent. Jessie lowered her head and sniffed cautiously. She smelled a faint odor which she associated with the lake after a run of hot, still weather, and with their well-water all the time. She once took her father a glass of water which smelled particularly strong to her and asked if he could smell it.
He had shaken his head. Nope, he'd said cheerfully, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. It just means I smoke too damn much. My guess is that it's the smell of the aquifer, Punkin. Trace minerals, that's all. A little smelly, and it means your mother has to spend a fortune on fabric softener, but it won't hurt you. Swear to God.
Trace minerals, she thought now, and sniffed that bland aroma again. She was unable to think why it fascinated her, but it did. The smell of the aquifer, that's all. The smell of--
Then the more assertive voice spoke up. On the afternoon of the eclipse it sounded a bit like her mother's voice (it called her toolsie, for one thing, as Sally sometimes did when she was irritated with Jessie for shirking some chore or forgetting some responsibility), but Jessie had an idea it was really the voice of her own adult self. If its combative bray was a little distressing, that was only because it was too early for that voice, strictly speaking. It was here just the same, though. It was here, and it was doing the best it could to put her back together again. She found its brassy loudness oddly comforting.
It's the stuff Cindy Lessard was talking about, that's what it is--it's his spunk, tootsie. I suppose you ought to be grateful it ended up on your underwear instead of someplace else, but don't go telling yourself any fairy-tales about how it's the lake you smell, or trace minerals from deep down in the aquifer, or anything else. Karen Aucoin is a dipshit, there was never a woman in the history of the world who grew a baby in her throat and you know it, but Cindy Lessard is no dipshit. I think she's seen this stuff, and now you've seen it, too. Man's-stuff. Spunk.
Suddenly revetted--not so much by what it was as from whom it had originated--Jessie threw the underpants into the hamper on top of the sundress. Then she had a vision of her mother, who emptied the hampers and did the wash in the dank basement laundry room, fishing this particular pair of panties out of this particular hamper and finding this particular deposit. And what would she think? Why, that the family's troublesome squeaky wheel had gotten the grease, of course
what else?
Her revulsion turned to guilty horror, and Jessie quickly fished the underpants back out. All at once the flat odor seemed to fill her nose, thick and bland and sickening. Oysters and copper, she thought, and that was all it took. She fell on her knees in front of the toilet, the underpants wadded up in one clenched hand, and vomited. She flushed quickly, before the smell of partly digested hamburger could get into the air, then turned on the cold sink-tap and rinsed her mouth out. Her fear that she was going to spend the next hour or so in here. kneeling in front of the toilet and puking, began to subside. Her stomach seemed to be settling. If she could just keep from getting another whiff of that bland copper-creamy smell ...
Holding her breath, she thrust the panties under the cold tap, rinsed them, wrung them out, and Hung them back in the hamper. Then she took a deep breath, pushing her hair away from her temples with the backs of her damp hands at the same time. If her mother asked her what a damp pair of panties was doing in the dirty clothes--
Already you're thinking like a criminal, the voice that would one day belong to the Goodwife mourned. Do you see what being a badgirl gets you, Jessie? Do you? I certainly hope you d_
Be quiet, you little creep, the other voice snarled back. You can nag all you want later on, but right now we're trying to take care of a little business here, if you don't mind. Okay?
No answer. That was good. Jessie brushed nervously at her hair again, although very little of it had fallen back down against her temples. If her mother asked what the damp panties were doing in the dirty-clothes hamper, Jessie would simply say it was so hot she went for a dip without changing out of her shorts. All three of them had done that on several occasions this summer.
Then you better remember to run your shorts and shirt under the tap, too. Right, toots?
Right, she agreed. Good point.
She slipped into the robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and returned to the bedroom to get the shorts and the tee-shirt she'd been wearing when her mother, brother, and older sister left that morning ... a thousand years ago, it now seemed. She didn't see them at first, and got down on her knees to look under the bed.
The other woman is on her knees, too, a voice remarked, and she smells that same smell. That smell that's like copper and cream.
Jessie heard but didn't hear. Her mind was on her shorts and tee-shirt--on her cover story. As she had suspected, they were under the bed. She reached for them.
It's coming out of the well, the voice remarked further. The smell from the well.
Yes, yes, Jessie thought, grabbing the clothes and starting back to the bathroom. The smell from the well, very good, you're a poet and y
ou don't know it.
She made him fall down the well, the voice said, and that finally got through. Jessie came to a dead stop in the bathroom doorway, her eyes widening. She was suddenly afraid in some new and deadly way. Now that she was actually listening to it, she realized that this voice was not like any of the others; this one was like a voice you might pick up on the radio late at night, when conditions were exactly right--a voice that might come from far, far away.
Not that far, Jessie; she is in the path of the eclipse, too.
For one moment, the upper hallway of the house on Dark Score Lake seemed to be gone. What replaced it was a tangle of blackberry bushes, shadowless under the eclipse-darkened sky, and a clear smell of sea-salt. Jessie saw a skinny woman in a housedress with her salt-and-pepper hair put up in a bun. She was kneeling by a splintered square of boards. There was a puddle of white fabric beside her. Jessie was quite sure it was the skinny woman's slip. Who are you? Jessie asked the woman, but she was already gone ... if she had ever been there in the first place, that was.
Jessie actually glanced over her shoulder to see if perhaps that spooky skinny woman had gotten behind her. But the upstairs hallway was deserted; she was alone.
She looked down at her arms and saw they were rippled with gooseflesh.
You're losing your mind, the voice that would one day be Goodwife Burlingame mourned. Oh Jessie, you've been bad, you've been very bad, and now you're going to have to pay by losing your mind.
"I'm not," she said. She looked at her pale, strained face in the bathroom mirror. "I'm not!"
She waited for a moment in a kind of horrified suspension to see if any of the voices--or the image of the woman kneeling by the splintered boards with her slip puddled on the ground beside her--would come back, but she neither heard nor saw anything. That creepy other who had told Jessie some she had pushed some he down some well was apparently gone.
Strain, toots, the voice that would one day be Ruth advised, and Jessie had a clear idea that while the voice didn't exactly believe that, it had decided Jessie had better get moving again, and right away. You thought about a woman with a slip beside her because you've got underwear on the brain this afternoon, that's all. I'd forget the whole thing, if I were you.
That was great advice. Jessie quickly dampened her shorts and shirt under the tap, wrung them out, and then stepped into the shower. She soaped, rinsed, dried, hurried back to the bedroom. She ordinarily wouldn't have bothered with the robe again for the quick dash across the hall, but this time she did, only holding it shut instead of taking time to belt it closed.
She paused in the bedroom again, biting her lip, praying that the weird other voice wouldn't come back, praying that she wouldn't have another of those crazy hallucinations or illusions or whatever they were. Nothing came. She dropped the robe on her bed, hurried across to her bureau, pulled on fresh underwear and shorts.
She smells that same smell, she thought. Whoever that woman is, she smells the same smell coming out of the well she made the man fall into, and it's happening now, during the eclipse. I'm sure--
She turned, a fresh blouse in one hand, and then froze. Her father was standing in the doorway, watching her.
19
Jessie awoke in the mild, milky light of dawn with the perplexing and ominous memory of the woman still filling her mind--the woman with her graying hair pulled back in that tight countrywoman's bun, the woman who had been kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip puddled beside her, the woman who had been looking down through broken boards and smelling that awful bland smell. Jessie hadn't thought of that woman in years, and now, fresh from her dream of 1963 that hadn't been a dream but a recollection, it seemed to her that she had been granted some sort of supernatural vision on that day, a vision that had perhaps been caused by stress and then lost again for the same reason.
But it didn't matter--not that, not what had happened with her father out on the deck, not what had happened later, when she had turned around to see him standing in the bedroom door. All that had happened a long time ago, and as for what was happening right now--
I'm in trouble. I think I'm in very serious trouble.
She lay back against the pillows and looked up at her suspended arms. She felt as dazed and helpless as a poisoned insect in a spider's web, wanting no more than to be asleep again--dreamlessly this time, if possible--with her dead arms and dry throat in another universe.
No such luck.
There was a slow, somnolent buzzing sound somewhere close by. Her first thought was alarm clock. Her second, after two or three minutes of dozing with her eyes open, was smoke detector. That idea caused a brief, groundless burst of hope which brought her a little closer to real waking. She realized that what she was hearing didn't really sound very much like a smoke detector at all. It sounded like...well ... like .
It's flies, toots, okay? The no-bullshit voice now sounded tired and wan. You've heard about the Boys of Summer, haven't you? Well, these are the Flies of Autumn, and their version of the World Series is currently being played on Gerald Burlingame, the noted attorney and handcuff-fetishist.
"Jesus, I gotta get up," she said in a croaking, husky voice she barely recognized as her own.
What the hell does that mean? she thought, and it was the answer--Not a goddam thing, thanks very much--that finished the job of bringing her back to full wakefulness. She didn't want to be awake, but she had an idea that she had better accept the fact that she was and do as much with it as she could, while she could.
And you probably better start by waking up your hands and arms. If they will wake up, that is.
She looked at her right arm, then turned her head on the rusty armature of her neck (which was only partially asleep) and looked at her left. Jessie realized with sudden shock that she was looking at them in a completely new way--looking at them as she might have looked at pieces of furniture in a showroom window.
They seemed to have no business with Jessie Burlingame at all, and she supposed there was nothing so odd about that, not really; they were, after all, utterly without feeling. Sensation only started a little below her armpits.
She tried to pull herself up and was dismayed to find the mutiny in her arms had gone further than she had suspected. Not only did they refuse to move her; they refused to move themselves. Her brain's order was totally ignored. She looked up at them again, and they no longer looked like furniture to her. Now they looked like pallid cuts of meat hanging from butchers' hooks, and she let out a hoarse cry of fear and anger.
Never mind, though. The arms weren't happening, at least for the time being, and being mad or afraid or both wasn't going to change that a bit. How about the fingers? If she could curl them around the bedposts, then maybe ... ... or maybe not. Her fingers seemed as useless as her arms. After nearly a full minute of effort, Jessie was rewarded only by a single numb twitch from her right thumb.
"Dear God," she said in her grating dust-in-the-cracks voice. There was no anger in it now, only fear.
People died in accidents, of course--she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of "death-clips" on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the background, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn't had the slightest idea
they would never eat another cheese-burger, watch another round of Final Jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm was never going to be fulfilled, because you were going to be too busy being dead. Any morning you rolled out of bed might be your last.
It's a lot more than a case of might this morning, Jessie thought. I think now it's a case of probably. The house--our nice quiet lakeside house--may very well be on the news Friday or Saturday night. It'll be Doug Rowe wearing that white trenchcoat of his I hate so much and talking into his microphone and calling it "the house where prominent Portland lawyer Gerald Burlingame and his wife Jessie died. " Then he'll send it back to the studio and Bill Green will do the sports, and that isn't being morbid, Jessie, that isn't the Goodwife moaning or Ruth ranting. It's--
But Jessie knew. It was the truth. It was just a silly little accident, the kind of thing you shook your head over when you saw it reported in the paper at breakfast; you said "Listen to this, honey," and read the item to your husband while he ate his grapefruit. Just a silly little accident, only this time it was happening to her. Her mind's constant insistence that it was a mistake was understandable but irrelevant. There was no Complaint Department where she could explain that the handcuffs had been Gerald's idea and so it was only fair that she should be let off. If the mistake was going to be rectified, she would have to be the one to do it.
Jessie cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and spoke to the ceiling. "God? Listen a minute, would You? I need some help here, I really do. I'm in a mess and I'm terrified. Please help me get out of this, okay? I ... um ... I pray in the name of Jesus Christ." She struggled to amplify this prayer and could only come up with something Nora Callighan had taught her, a prayer which now seemed to be on the lips of every self-help huckster and dipshit guru in the world: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen."