Dad? Daddy? It’s gone. Can I-

Yes, Now it’s okay. But when I say you have to stop, you have to stop. No arguments, understand?

He gives her three panes of smoked glass in a stack, but first he gives her a potholder. He gives it to her because he made the viewers from panes of glass cut from an old shed window, and he is less than confident of his abilities with the glass-cutter. And as she looks down at the potholder in this experience which is both dream and memory, her mind suddenly leaps even further back, as nimbly as an acrobat turning a flip, and she hears him say The last thing I need…

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“… is for your mother to come home and find a note saying… “Jessie’s eyes flashed open as she spoke these words to the empty room, and the first thing they saw was the empty glass: Gerald’s water-glass, still standing on the shelf Standing there near the cuff binding her wrist to the bedpost. Not the left wrist but the right.

… a note saying I’ve taken you to the Emergency Room so they cantry to sew a couple of your fingers back on.

Now Jessie understood the purpose of that old, hurtful memory; understood what Punkin had been trying to tell her all along. The answer had nothing to do with the old Adam, or with the faint mineral smell of the wet spot on her old cotton underpants. It had everything to do with half a dozen panes of glass carefully cut from the crumbling putty of an old shed window. She had lost the jar of Nivea cream, but there was still at least one other source of lubrication left to her, wasn’t there? One other way to ooze on over to the Promised Land. There was blood. Until it clotted, blood was almost as slippery as oil.

It’s going to hurt like hell, Jessie.

Yes, of course it would hurt like hell. But she thought she had heard or read somewhere that there were fewer nerves in the wrists than at any of the body’s vital checkpoints; that was why slitting one’s wrists, especially in a tubful of hot water, had been a preferred method of suicide ever since the original toga-parties in Imperial Rome. Besides, she was half-numb already.

“I was half-numb to let him lock me up in these things in the first place,” she croaked.

If you cut too deep, you’ll bleed to death just like those old Romans,

Yes, of course she would. But if she didn’t cut at all, she’d lie here until she died of seizures or dehydration… or until her friend with the bag of bones showed up tonight.

“Okay,” she said. Her heart was pumping very hard, and she was fully awake for the first time in hours. Time restarted with a ram and a Jerk, like a freight-train pulling out of a siding and back onto the main line. “Okay, that’s the convincer.”

Listen, a voice said urgently, and Jessie realized with amazement that it was the voice of Ruth and the Goodwife. They had merged, at least for the time being. Listen carefully, Jess.

“I’m listening,” she told the empty room. She was also looking. It was the glass she was looking at. One of a set of twelve she’d gotten on sale at Sears three or four years ago. Six or eight of them broken by now. Soon there would be another. She swallowed and grimaced. It was like trying to swallow around a flannel-covered stone lodged in her throat. “I’m listening very carefully, believe me.

Good. Because once you start this, you won’t he able to stop again.Everything’s got to happen fast, because your system is already dehydrated.But remember this: even if things go all wrong-

“-they’ll work out just fine,” she finished. And it was true, wasn’t it? The situation had taken on a simplicity that was, in its own ghastly way, sort of elegant. She didn’t want to bleed to death, of course-who would?-but it would be better than the intensifying cramps and the thirst. Better than him. It. The hallucination. Whatever it was.

She licked her dry lips with her dry tongue and caught at her flying, confused thoughts. Tried to put them in order as she had done before going after the sample jar of face cream which was now lying uselessly on the floor beside the bed. It was getting harder to think, she discovered. She kept hearing snatches of

(go greasy)

that talking blues, kept smelling her father’s cologne, kept feeling that hard thing against her bottom. And then there was Gerald. Gerald seemed to be talking to her from his place on the floor. It’s going to he back, Jessie. Nothing you can do will stop it. Itwill teach you a lesson, me proud beauty.

She flicked her eyes toward him, then looked hastily back at the water-glass. Gerald appeared to be grinning ferociously at her with the part of his face which the dog had left intact. She made another effort to set her wits to work, and after some effort, the thoughts began to roll.

She took ten minutes, going over the steps again and again. There wasn’t much, in truth, to go over-her agenda was suicidally risky but not complicated. She mentally rehearsed each move several times just the same, looking for the minor mistake which might cost her her last chance at life. She couldn’t find it. In the end there was only one major drawback-it would have to be done very fast, before the blood could start to coagulate-and there were only two possible outcomes: a quick escape, or unconsciousness and death.

She reviewed the whole thing one more time-not putting off the necessary nasty business but examining it the way she would have examined a scarf she had knitted for runs and dropped stitches-while the sun continued its steady westward run. On the back stoop the dog got up, leaving the glistening knot of gristle upon which it had been gnawing. It ambled toward the woods. It had caught a whiff of that black scent again, and with its belly full, even a whiff was too much.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock flashed, and whatever time it really was, it was time.

One more thing before you start. You’ve got yourself nerved up to thesticking point, and that’s good, but keep your focus. If you start off bydropping the damn glass on the floor, you really will be fucked.

“Stay out, dog!” she called shrilly, with no idea that the dog had retreated to the stand of woods beyond the head of the driveway some minutes before. She hesitated a moment longer, considering another prayer, and then decided she had done all the praying she intended to do. Now she would depend on her voices… and on herself.

She reached for the glass with her right hand, moving without her former tentative care. Part of her-probably the part which had so liked and admired Ruth Neary-understood that this final job was not about care and caution but about bringing down the hammer and bringing it down hard.

Now I must be Samurai Lady, she thought, and smiled.

She closed her fingers upon the glass she had worked so hard to get in the first place, looked at it curiously for a moment looked at it as a gardener might look at some unexpected specimen she had found growing in among her beans or peas-then gripped it. She stitted her eyes almost completely shut to protect them from flying splinters, then brought the glass down hard on the shelf, in the manner of one who cracks the shell of a hardboiled egg. The sound the glass made was absurdly familiar, absurdly normal, a sound no different from that made by the hundreds of glasses which had either slipped through her fingers during the washing-up or been knocked onto the floor by her elbow or straying hand in all the years since she had graduated from her plastic Dandy Duck cup at the age of five. Same old ker-smash; there was no special resonance to indicate the fact that she had just begun the unique job of risking her life in order to save it.