The minutes passed slowly. Every now and then she squirmed around, trying to get comfortable-his lap seemed strangely full of angles this afternoon-and at one point she must have dozed off for three or four minutes. It might have been even longer, because the puff of breeze that came strolling down the deck and woke her up was surprisingly cold against her sweaty arms, and the afternoon had changed somehow; colors which had seemed bright before she leaned back against his shoulder and closed her eyes were now pale pastels, and the light itself had weakened somehow. It was as if, she thought, the day had been strained through cheesecloth. She looked into her reflector-box and was surprised-almost stunned, actually-to see that only half the sun was there now. She looked at her watch and saw it was nine minutes past five.
It’s happening, Daddy! The sun’s going out!
Yes, he agreed. His voice was odd, somehow-deliberate and thoughtful on top, somehow blurry down below. Right onschedule.
She noticed in a vague sort of way that his hand had slipped higher-quite a bit higher, actually-on her leg while she had been dozing.
Can I look through the smoked glass yet, Dad?
Not yet, he said, and his hand slid higher still along her thigh. It was warm and sweaty but not unpleasant. She put her own hand over it, turned to him, and grinned.
It’s exciting, isn’t it?
Yes, he said in that same odd blurry tone. Yes it is, Punkin.Quite a bit more than I thought it would be, actually.
More time passed. In the reflector-box, the moon continued to nibble away at the sun as five-twenty-five passed, and then five-thirty. Almost all of her attention was now focused on the diminishing image in the reflector-box, but some faint part of her became aware once again of how oddly hard his lap was this afternoon. Something was pressing against her bottom. It wasn’t painful, but it was insistent. To Jessie, it felt like the handle of some tool-a screwdriver, or maybe her mother’s trackhammer.
Jessie wriggled again, wanting to find a more comfortable spot on his lap, and Tom drew in a quick hissing mouthful of air over his bottom lip.
Daddy? Am I too heavy? Did I hurt you?
No. You’re fine,
She glanced at her watch. Five-thirty-seven now; four minutes to totality, maybe a little more if her watch was running fast.
Can I look at it through the glass yet
Not yet, Punkin, But very soon.
She could hear Debbie Reynolds singing something from the Dark Ages, courtesy of WNCH: “The old hooty-owl…hooty-hoosto the dove…Tammy…Tammy…Tammy’s in love.” It finally drowned in a sticky swirl of violins and was replaced by the disc jockey, who told them it was getting dark in Ski Town, USA (this was the way the “NCH deejays almost always referred to North Conway), but that the skies were too cloudy over on the New Hampshire side of the border to actually see the eclipse. The deejay told them there were a lot of disappointed folks wearing sunglasses across the street on the town common.
We’re not disappointed folks, are we, Daddy?
Not a bit, he agreed, and shifted beneath her again. We’re aboutthe most happy folks in the universe, I guess.
Jessie peered into the reflector-box again, forgetting everything except the tiny image which she could now look at without narrowing her eyes down to protective slits behind the heavily tinted Polaroid sunglasses. The dark crescent on the right which had signalled the onset of the eclipse had now become a blazing crescent of sunlight on the left. It was so bright it almost seemed to float over the surface of the reflector-box.
Look out on the lake, Jessie!
She did, and behind the sunglasses her eyes widened. In her rapt examination of the shrinking image in the reflector-box, she had missed what was going on all around her. Pastels had now faded to ancient watercolors. A premature twilight, both entrancing and horrifying to the ten-year-old girl, was slipping across Dark Score Lake. Somewhere in the woods, an old hooty-owl cried out softly, and Jessie felt a sudden hard shudder bend its way through her body. On the radio, an Aamco Transmission had ended and Marvin Gaye began to sing: “Oww,listen everybody,especially you girls, is it right to be left alone when the one you love isnever home?”
The owl hooted again in the woods to the north of them. It was a scary sound, Jessie suddenly realized-a very scary sound. This time when she shivered, Tom slipped an arm around her. Jessie leaned gratefully back against his chest.
It’s creepy, Dad.
It won’t last long, honey, and you’ll probably never see another one.Try not to he too scared to enjoy it.
She looked into her reflector-box. There was nothing there.
“I love too hard, my friends sometimes say…”
Dad? Daddy? It’s gone. Can I-
Yes. Now it’s okay. But when I say you have to stop, you have tostop. No arguments, understand?
She understood, all right. She found the idea of retinal burns-burns you apparently didn’t even know you were getting until it was too late to do anything about them-a lot scarier than the hooty-owl off in the woods. But there was no way she wasn’t going to at least have a peek, now that it was actually here, actually happening. No way.
“But I believe,” Marvin sang with the fervor of the converted, “Yes I believe…that a woman should be loved that way…”
Tom Mahout gave her one of the oven potholders, then three panes of smoked glass in a stack. He was breathing fast, and Jessie suddenly felt sorry for him. The eclipse had probably given him the creeps, too, but of course he was an adult and wasn’t supposed to let on. In a lot of ways adults were sad creatures. She thought about turning around to comfort him, then decided that would probably make him feel even worse. Make him feel stupid. Jessie could sympathize. She hated to feel stupid worse than anything. Instead, she held the smoked panes of glass up in front of her, then slowly raised her head from her reflector-box to look through them.
“Now you chicks should all agree,” Marvin sang, “this ain’t the wayit’s s'posed to be, So lemme hear ya! Lemme hearya say YEAH YEAH!”
What Jessie saw when she looked through the makeshift viewer-
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At this point the Jessie handcuffed to the bed in the summer house on the north shore of Kashwakamak Lake, the Jessie who was not ten but thirty-nine and a widow of almost twelve hours, suddenly realized two things; that she was asleep, and that she was not so much dreaming about the day of the eclipse as reliving it. She had gone on awhile thinking it was a dream, only a dream, like her dream of Will’s birthday party, where most of the guests had either been dead or people she wouldn’t actually meet for years. This new mindmovie had the surreal-but-sensible quality of the earlier one, but that was an untrustworthy yardstick because that whole day had been surreal and dreamlike. First the eclipse, and then her father-
No more, Jessie decided. No more, I’m getting out of this.
She made a convulsive effort to rise out of the dream or retollection or whatever it was. Her mental effort translated into a wholebody twitch, and the handcuff chains jingled mutedly as she twisted violently from side to side. She almost made it; for a moment she was almost out. And she could have made it, would have made it, if she hadn’t thought better of it at the last moment. What stopped her was an inarticulate but overwhelming terror of a shape-some waiting shape that might make what had happened that day on the deck seem insignificant by comparison… if she had to face it, that was.