Tears were trickling down her cheeks again, but she didn’t know if she was crying because of the possibility-finally articulated-that she actually could die here or because for the first time in at least four years she had come close to thinking about that other summer place, the one on Dark Score Lake, and about what happened there on the day when the sun went out.
Once upon a time she had almost spilled that secret at a women’s consciousness group… back in the early seventies that had been, and of course attending that meeting had been her roomie’s idea, but Jessie had gone along willingly, at least to begin with; it had seemed harmless enough, just another act in the amazing tie-dyed carnival that was college back then. For Jessie, those first two years of college-particularly with someone like Ruth Neary to tour her through the games, rides, and exhibits-had been for the most part quite wonderful, a time when fearlessness seemed usual and achievement inevitable. Those were the days when no dorm room was complete without a Peter Max poster and if you were tired of the Beatles-not that anybody was-you could slap on a little Hot Tuna or MC5. It had all been a little too bright to be real, like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life-threatening. In fact, those first two years had been a blast.
The blast had ended with that first meeting of a women’s consciousness group. In there, Jessie had discovered a ghastly gray world which seemed simultaneously to preview the adult future that lay ahead for her in the eighties and to whisper of gloomy childhood secrets that had been buried alive in the sixties… but did not lie quiet there. There had been twenty women in the living room of the cottage attached to the Neuworth Interdenominational Chapel, some perched on the old sofa, others peering out of the shadows thrown by the wings of the vast and lumpy parsonage chairs, most sitting cross-legged on the floor in a rough circle-twenty women between the ages of eighteen and fortysomething. They had joined hands and shared a moment of silence at the beginning of the session. When that was over, Jessie had been assaulted by ghastly stories of rape, of incest, of physical torture. If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the calm, pretty blonde girl who had pulled up her sweater to show the old scars of cigarette burns on the underside of her breasts.
That was when the carnival ended for Jessie Mahout. Ended? No, that wasn’t right. It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows. She saw that silent stupid sterile world waiting beyond the thin layer of patched canvas which was all that separated it from the razzle-dazzle brightness of the midway, the patter of the hucksters, and the glimmer-glamour of the rides, and it terrified her. To think that only this lay ahead for her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable.
After showing them the bottoms of her breasts, the pretty blonde girl had pulled her sweater back down and explained that she could say nothing to her parents about what her brother’s friends had done to her on the weekend her parents had gone to Montreal because it might mean that what her brother had been doing to her off and on all during the last year would come out, and her parents would never have believed that.
The blonde girl’s voice was as calm as her face, her tone perfectly rational. When she finished there was a thunderstruck pause-a moment during which Jessie had felt something tearing loose inside her and had heard a hundred ghostly interior voices screaming in mingled hope and terror-and then Ruth had spoken.
“Why wouldn’t they believe you?” she’d demanded. “Jesus, Liv-they burned you with live cigarettes! I mean, you had the burns as evidence! Why wouldn’t they believe you? Didn’t they love you?”
Yes, Jessie thought. Yes, they loved her. But-
“Yes,” the blonde girl said. “They loved me. They still do. But they idolized my brother Barry.”
Sitting beside Ruth, the heel of one not-quite-steady hand resting against her forehead, Jessie remembered whispering, “Besides, it would have killed her.”
Ruth turned to her, began, “What-?” and the blonde girl, still not crying, still eerily calm, said: “Besides, finding out something like that would have killed my mother.”
And then Jessie had known she was going to explode if she didn’t get out of there. So she had gotten up, springing out of her chair so fast she had almost knocked the ugly, bulky thing over. She had sprinted from the room, knowing they were all looking at her, not caring. What they thought didn’t matter. What mattered was that the sun had gone out, the very sun itself, and if she told, her story would be disbelieved only if God was good. If God was in a bad mood, Jessie would be believed… and even if it didn’t kill her mother, it would blow the family apart like a stick of dynamite in a rotten pumpkin.
So she had run out of the room and through the kitchen and would have belted right on through the back door, except the back door was locked. Ruth chased after her, calling for her to stop, Jessie, stop. She had, but only because that damned locked door made her. She’d put her face against the cold dark glass, actually considering-yes, for just a moment she had-slamming her head right through it and cutting her throat, anything to blot out that awful gray vision of the future ahead and the past behind, but in the end she had simply turned around and slid down to the floor, clasping her bare legs below the hem of the short skirt she’d been wearing and putting her forehead against her upraised knees and closing her eyes. Ruth sat down beside her and put an arm around her, rocking her back and forth, crooning to her, stroking her hair, encouraging her to give it up, get rid of it, sick it up, let it go.
Now, lying here in the house on the shore of Kashwakamak Lake, she wondered what had happened to the tearless, eerily calm blonde girl who had told them about her brother Barry and Barry’s friends-young men who had clearly felt a woman was just a life-support system for a cunt and that branding was a perfectly just punishment for a young woman who felt more or less okay about fucking her brother but not her brother’s goodbuddies. More to the point, Jessie wondered what she had said to Ruth as they sat with their backs against the locked kitchen door and their arms around each other. The only thing she could remember for sure was something like “He never burned me, he never burned me, he never hurt me at all.” But there must have been more to it than that, because the questions Ruth had refused to stop asking had all pointed clearly in just one direction: toward Dark Score Lake and the day the sun had gone out.
She had finally left Ruth rather than tell… just as she had left Nora rather than tell. She had run just as fast as her legs could carry her-Jessie Mahout Burlingame, also known as The Amazing Gingerbread Girl, the last wonder of a dubious age, survivor of the day the sun had gone out, now handcuffed to the bed and able to run no more.
“Help me,” she said to the empty bedroom. Now that she had remembered the blonde girl with the eerily calm face and voice and the stipple of old circular scars on her otherwise lovely breasts, Jessie could not get her out of her mind, nor the knowledge that it hadn’t been calmness, not at all, but some fundamental disconnection from the terrible thing that had happened to her. Somehow the blonde girl’s face became her face, and when Jessie spoke, she did so in the shaking, humbled voice of an atheist who has been stripped of everything but one final longshot prayer. “Please help me.”