It's impossible to say to what extent "Daddy-Mummy" participated in what was going on before Joubert did away with them. It must have been a lot, because Joubert hadn't made the slightest effort to hide what he was doing. As for the neighbors, their motto seems to be, "They paid their bills and kept to themselves. Wasn't nothing to us." It's got a gruesome kind of perfection to it, wouldn't you say? New England Gothic, by way of The Journal of Aberrant Psychiatry.
They found another, bigger, wicker box in the cellar. Brandon got Xeroxes of the police photos documenting this particular find, but he was hesitant about showing them to me at first. Well ... that's actually a little too mild. It was the one and only place where he gave into the temptation all men seem to feet--you know the one I mean, to play John Wayne. "Come on, little lady, jest wait until we go by all them dead Injuns and keep lookin' off into the desert. I'll tell you when we're past."
"I'm willing to accept that Joubert was probably in the house with you," he said. "I'd have to be a goddam ostrich with my head stuck in the sand not to at least entertain the idea; everything fits. But answer me this: why are you going on with it, Jessie? What possible good can it do?"
I didn't know how to answer that, Ruth, but I did know one thing: there was nothing I could do that would make things any worse than they already were. So I hung tough until Brandon realized the little lady wasn't going to get back into the stagecoach until she had gotten her look at the dead Injuns. So I saw the pictures. The one I looked at the longest had a little sign saying STATE POLICE EXHIBIT 217 propped up in the corner. Looking at it was like looking at a videotape someone has somehow made of your worst nightmare. The photo showed a square wicker basket standing open so the photographer could shoot the contents, which happened to be heaps of bones with a wild collection of jewelry mixed in: some trumpery, some valuable, some stolen from summer homes and some doubtless stripped from the cold hands of corpses kept in small-town cold-storage.
I looked at that picture, so glaring and somehow bald, as police evidence photographs always are, and I was back in the lake house again--it happened right away, with no lag whatsoever. Not remembering, do you understand? I'm there, handcuffed and helpless, watching the shadows fly across his grinning face, hearing myself telling him that he is scaring me. And then he bends over to get the box, those feverish eyes never leaving my face, and I see him--I see it--reach--ing in with its twisted, misshapen hand, I see that hand starting to stir up the bones and jewels, and I hear the sounds they make, like dirty castanets.
And do you know what haunts me most of all? I thought it was my father, that was my Daddy, come back from the dead to do what he'd wanted to do before. "Go ahead," I told him. "Go ahead, but promise you'll unlock me and let me out afterward. Just promise me that."
I think I would have said the same if I'd known who he really was, Ruth. Think? I know I would have said the same. Do you understand? I would have let him put his cock--the cock he stuck down the rotting throats of dead men--into me, if only he would have promised me I didn't have to die the dog's death of muscle-cramps and convulsions that was waiting for me. If only he would have promised to SET ME FREE.
Jessie stopped for a moment, breathing so hard and fast she was almost panting. She looked at the words on the screen--the unbelievable, unspeakable admission on the screen--and felt a sudden strong urge to delete them. Not because she was ashamed for Ruth to read them; she was, but that wasn't it. What she didn't want to do was deal with them, and she supposed that if she didn't delete them, she would have to do just that. Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.
Not until they're out of your hands, they don't, Jessie thought, and reached out with the black-clad index finger of her right hand. She touched the DELETE button--stroked it, actuary--and then drew back. It was the truth, wasn't it?
"Yes," she said in the same muttery voice she'd used so often during her hours of captivity--only at least now it wasn't Goody or the mind-Ruth she was talking to; she had gotten back to herself without having to go all the way around Robin Hood's barn to do it. That was maybe progress of a sort. "Yes, it's the truth, all right."
And nothing but, so help her God. She wouldn't use the DELETE button on the truth, no matter how nasty some people--including herself, as a matter of fact--might find that truth to be. She would let it stand. She might decide not to send the letter after all (didn't know if it was even fair to send it, to burden a woman she hadn't seen in years with this ration of pain and madness), but she would not delete it. Which meant it would be best to finish now, in a rush, before the last of her courage deserted her and the last of her strength ran out.
Jessie leaned forward and began typing again.
Brandon said, "There's one thing you're going to have to remember and accept, Jessie--there's no concrete proof. Yes, I know your rings are gone, but about them you could have been right the first time--some light-fingered cop could have taken them."
"What about Exhibit 217?" I asked. "The wicker box?"
He shrugged, and I had one of those sudden bursts of understanding the poets call epiphanies. He was holding onto the possibility that the wicker box had just been a coincidence. That wasn't easy, but it was easier than having to accept all the rest--most of all the fact that a monster like Joubert could actually touch the life of someone he knew and liked. What I saw in Brandon Milheron's face that day was perfectly simple: he was going to ignore a whole stack of circumstantial evidence and concentrate on the lack of concrete evidence. He was going to hold onto the idea that the whole thing was simply my imagination, seizing on the Joubert case to explain a particularly vivid hallucination I'd had while I was handcuffed to the bed.
And that insight was followed by a second one, an even clearer one: that I could do it, too. I could come to believe I had been wrong . . . but if I succeeded in doing that, my life would be ruined. The voices would start to come back--not just yours or Punkin's or Nora Callighan's, but my mother's and my sister's and my brother's and kids I chummed with in high school and people I met for ten minutes in doctors' offices and God alone knows how many others. I think that most of them would be those scary UFO voices.
I couldn't bear that, Ruth, because in the two months after my hard time in the house by the lake, I remembered a lot of things I had spent a lot of years repressing. I think the most important of those memories came to the surface between the first operation on my hand and the second, when I was "on medication" (this is the technical hospital term for "stoned out of your gourd") almost all the time. The memory was this: in the two years or so between the day of the eclipse and the day of my brother Will's birthday party--the one where he goosed me during the croquet game--I heard all those voices almost constantly. Maybe Will's goosing me acted as some kind of rough, accidental therapy. I suppose it's possible; don't they say that our ancestors invented cooking after eating what forest fires left behind? Although if some serendipitous therapy took place that day, I have an idea that it didn't come with the goose but when I hauled off and pounded Will one in the mouth for doing it ... and at this point none of that matters. What matters is that, following that day on the deck, I spent two years sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices that passed judgment on my every word and action. Some were kind and supportive, but most were the voices of people who were afraid, people who were confused, people who thought Jessie was a worthless little baggage who deserved every bad thing that happened to her and who would have to pay double for every good thing. For two years I heard those voices, Ruth, and when they stopped, I forgot them. Not a little at a time, but all at once.
How could a thing like that happen? I don't know, and in a very real sense, I don't care. I might if the change had made things worse, I suppose, but it didn't--it made them immeasurably better. I spent the two years between the eclipse and the birthday party in a kind of fugue state, with my conscious mind shattered into a lot of squabbling fragments, and the real epiphany was this: if I let nic
e, kind Brandon Milheron have his way, I'd end up right back where started--headed down Nuthouse Lane by way of Schizophrenia Boulevard. And this time there's no little brother around to administer crude shock therapy; this time I have to do it myself, just as I had to get out of Gerald's goddam handcuffs myself.
Brandon was watching me, trying to gauge the result of what he'd said. He must not have been able to, because he said it again, this time in a slightly different way. "You have to remember that, no matter how it looks, you could be wrong. And I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're never going to know, one way or the other, for sure."
"No, I don't."
He raised his eyebrows.
"There's still an excellent chance that I can find out for sure. And you're going to help me, Brandon."
He was starting to smile that less-than-pleasant smile again, the one I bet he doesn't even know is in his repertoire, the one that says you can't live with 'em and you can't shoot 'em. "Oh? And how am I going to do that?"
"By taking me to see Joubert," I said.
"Oh, no," he said: "That's the one thing I absolutely will not--can not--do, Jessie."
I'll spare you the hour of round-and-round which followed, a conversation that degenerated at one point to such intellectually profound statements as "You're crazy, Jess" and "Quit trying to run my life, Brandon." I thought of waving the cudgel of the press in front of him--it was the one thing I was almost sure would make him cave in--but in the end, I didn't have to. All I had to do was cry. In a way it makes me feel unbelievably sleazy to write that, but in another way it does not; in another way I recognize it as just another symptom of what's wrong between the fellers and the girls in this particular square-dance. He didn't entirely believe I was serious until I started to cry, you see.
To make a long story at least a little shorter, he got on the telephone, made four or five quick calls, and then came back with the news that Joubert was going to be arraigned the following day in Cumberland County District Court on a number of subsidiary charges--mostty theft. He said that if I was really serious--and if I had a hat with a veil--he'd take me. I agreed at once, and although Brandon's face said he believed he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life, he stuck by his word.
Jessie paused again, and when she began to type once more she did so slowly, looking through the screen to yesterday, when last night's six inches of snow had still been just a smooth white threat in the sky. She saw blue flashers on the road ahead, felt Brandon's blue Beamer slowing down.
We got to the hearing late because there was an overturned trailer truck on 1-295--that's the city bypass. Brandon didn't say so, but I know he was hoping we'd get there too late, that Joubert would already have been taken back to his cell at the end of the County Jail's maximum-security wing, but the guard at the courthouse door said the hearing was still going on, although finishing up. As Brandon opened the door for me, he leaned close to my ear and murmured: "Put the veil down, Jessie, and keep it down." I lowered it and Brandon put a hand on my waist and led me inside. The courtroom . . .
Jessie stopped, looking out the window into the darkening afternoon with eyes that were wide and gray and blank.
Remembering.
38
The courtroom is illuminated by the sort of hanging glass globes Jessie associates with the five-and-dime stores of her youth, and it is as sleepy as a grammar school classroom at the end of a winter day. As she walks forward down the aisle, she is aware of two sensations--Brandon's hand, still on the incurve of her waist, and the veil tickling against her cheeks like cobwebs. These two sensations combine to make her feel strangely bridal.
Two lawyers stand before the judge's bench. The judge is leaning forward, looking down into their upturned faces, the three of them lost in some murmuring, technical conversation. To Jessie they look like a real-life re-creation of a Boz sketch from some Charles Dickens novel. The bailiff stands to the left, next to the American flag. Near him, the court stenographer is waiting for the current legal discussion, from which she has apparently been excluded, to be over. And, sitting at a long table on the far side of the rail which divides the room between the area set aside for the spectators and that which belongs to the combatants, is a skinny, impossibly tall figure clad in a bright-orange jailhouse overall. Next to him is a man in a suit, surely another lawyer. The man in the orange jumpsuit is hunched over a yellow legal pad, apparently writing something.
From a million miles away, Jessie feels Brandon Milheron's hand press more insistently against her waist. "This is close enough," he murmurs.
She moves away from him. He's wrong; it's not close enough. Brandon doesn't have the slightest idea of what she's thinking or feeling, but that's okay; she knows. For the time being, all her voices have become one voice; she is basking in unexpected unanimity, and what she knows is this: if she doesn't get closer to him now, if she doesn't get just as close as she can, he will never be far enough away. He will always be in the closet, or just outside the window, or hiding under the bed at midnight, grinning his pallid, wrinkled grin--the one that shows the glimmers of gold far back in his mouth.
She steps quickly up the aisle toward the rail divider with the gauzy stuff of the veil touching her cheeks like tiny, concerned fingers. She can hear Brandon grumbling unhappily, but the sound is coming from at least ten light-years away. Closer (but still on the next continent), one of the lawyers standing before the bench is muttering, ". . . feel the State has been intransigent in this matter, your honor, and if you'll just look at our citations--most notably Castonguay vs. Hollis . . ."
Closer still, and now the bailiff glances up at her, suspicious for a moment, then relaxing as Jessie raises her veil and smiles at him. Still holding her eye with his own, the bailiff jerks his thumb toward Joubert and gives his head a minute shake, a gesture which she can, in her heightened emotional and perceptual state, read as easily as a tabloid headline: Stay away from the tiger, ma'am. Don't get within reach of his claws. Then he relaxes even more as he sees Brandon catch up with her, a parfit gentle knight if ever there was one, but he clearly does not hear Brandon's low growl: "Put the veil down, Jessie, or I will, goddammit!"
She not only refuses to do what he says, she refuses to even glance his way. She knows his threat is empty --he will not cause a scene in these hallowed surroundings and will do almost anything to avoid being dragged into one--but it would not matter even if it weren't. She likes Brandon, she honestly does, but her days of doing things simply because it's a man doing the telling are over. She is only peripherally aware that Brandon is hissing at her, that the judge is still conferring with the defense lawyer and the County Prosecutor, that the bailiff has lapsed back into his semi-coma, his face dreamy and distant. Jessie's own face is frozen in the pleasant smile which disarmed the bailiff, but her heart is pounding furiously in her chest. She has now come within two steps of the rail--two short steps--and sees she was wrong about what Joubert is doing. He is not writing, after all. He is drawing. His picture shows a man with an erect penis roughly the size of a baseball bat. The man in the picture has his head down, and he is fellating himself. She can see the picture perfectly well, but she can still see only a small pale slice of the artist's cheek and the dank clots of hair which dangle against it.
"Jessie, you can't--" Brandon begins, grabbing at her arm.
She snatches it away without looking back; all her attention is now fixed on Joubert. "Hey!" she stage-whispers at him. "Hey, you!"
Nothing, at least not yet. She is swept by a feeling of unreality. Can it be she, doing this? Can it really?
And for that matter, is she doing it? No one seems to be noticing her, no one at all.
"Hey! Asshole!" Louder now, angry--still a whisper, but only just barely. "Pssst! Pssst! Hey, I'm talking to you!"
Now the judge looks up, frowning, so she is getting through to somebody, it seems. Brandon makes a groaning, despairing sound and clamps a hand on her shoulder. She would ha
ve yanked away from him if he had tried to pull her backward down the aisle, even if it meant ripping off the top half of her dress in the process, and perhaps Brandon knows this, because he only forces her to sit down on the empty bench just behind the defense table (all the benches are empty; this is technically a closed hearing), and at that moment, Raymond Andrew Joubert finally turns around.
His grotesque asteroid of a face, with its swollen, poochy lips, its knife-blade of a nose, and its bulging bulb of a forehead, is totally vacant, totally incurious ... but it is the face, she knows it at once, and the powerful feeling which fills her is mostly not horror. Mostly it is relief.
Then, all at once, Joubert's face lights up. Color stains his narrow cheeks like a rash, and the red-rimmed eyes take on a hideous sparkle she has seen before. They stare at her now as they stared at her in the house on Kashwakamak Lake, with the exalted raptness of the irredeemable lunatic, and she is held, hypnotized, by the awful rise of recognition she sees in his eyes.
"Mr. Milheron?" the judge is asking sharply from some other universe. "Mr. Milheron, can you tell me what you're doing here and who this woman is?"
Raymond Andrew Joubert is gone; this is the space cowboy, the specter of love. Its oversized lips wrinkle back once more, revealing its teeth--the stained, unlovely, and completely serviceable teeth of a wild animal. She sees the glimmer of gold like feral eyes far back in a cave. And slowly, oh so slowly, the nightmare comes to life and begins to move; slowly the nightmare begins to raise its freakishly long orange arms.
"Mr. Milheron, I would like you and your uninvited guest to approach the bench, and immediately!"
The bailiff, alerted by the whiplash in that tone, snaps out of his daze. The stenographer looks around. Jessie thinks Brandon takes her arm, meaning to make her comply with the judge's order, but she cannot say for sure, and it doesn't matter in any case, because she cannot move; she might as well be planted waist-deep in a plug of cement. It is the eclipse again, of course; the total, final eclipse. After all these years, the stars are once again shining in the daytime. They are shining inside her head.