She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:
No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I’ll be damned if I can.
My hand was hurting like hell-whatever help I’d gotten from the aspirin was long gone-but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I’d forgotten. At first I couldn’t remember what it was. I don’t think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He’d been in the back seat, and he’d leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.
I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I
The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: “Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we’d be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”
Good question, Jessie thought, and let her eyes wander from the VDT screen to Meggie Landis’s face. Jessie liked the energetic Irishwoman, liked her a lot-hell, owed her a lot-but if she had caught the little housekeeper looking at the words on the Mac’s screen, Meggie would have been headed down Forest Avenue with her severance pay in her pocket before you could say Dear Ruth, I suppose you’re surprised to hear from me after all theseyears.
But Megan wasn’t looking at the pc’s screen; she was looking at the sweeping view of Eastern Prom and Casco Bay beyond it. The sun was still shining and the snow was still falling, although now it was clearly winding down.
“Devil’s beating his wife,” Meggie remarked.
“I beg your pardon?” Jessie asked, smiling.
“That’s what my mother used to say when the sun came out before the snow stopped.” Meggie looked a little embarrassed as she held her hand out for the empty glass. “What it means I’m not sure I could say.”
Jessie nodded. The embarrassment on Meggie Landis’s face had lensed into something else-something that looked to Jessie like unease. For a moment she hadn’t any idea what could have made Meggie look that way, and then it came to her-a thing so obvious it was easy to overlook. It was the smile. Meggie wasn’t used to seeing Jessie smile. Jessie wanted to assure her that it was all right, that the smile didn’t mean she was going to leap from her chair and attempt to tear Meggie’s throat out.
Instead, she told her, “My own mother used to say, “The sun doesn’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.” I never knew what that one meant either.”
The housekeeper did look in the Mac’s direction now, but it was the merest flick of dismissal: Time to put your toys away, Missus, her glance said. “That pill’s going to make you sleepy if you don’t dump a little food atop it. I’ve got a sandwich waiting for you, and soup heating on the stove.”
Soup and sandwich-kid food, the lunch you had after sledding all morning on the day when school was cancelled because of a nor'easter; food you ate with the cold still blazing redly in your cheeks like bonfires. It sounded absolutely great, but…
“I’m going to pass, Meg.”
Meggie’s brow furrowed and the corners of her mouth drew down. This was an expression Jessie had seen often in the early days of Meggie’s employment, when she had sometimes felt she needed an extra pain pill so badly that she had cried. Megan had never given in to her tears, however. Jessie supposed that was why she had hired the little Irishwoman-she had guessed from the first that Meggie wasn’t a giver-inner. She was, in fact, one hard spring potato when she had to be. but Meggie would not be getting her way this time.
“You need to eat, Jess. You re nothing but a scarecrow.” Now it was the overflowing ashtray which bore the dour whiplash of her glance. “And you need to quit that shit, too.”
I’ll make you quit them, me proud beauty, Gerald said in her mind, and Jessie shuddered.
“Jessie? Are you all right? Is there a draft?”
“No. A goose walked over my grave, that’s all.” She smiled wanly. “We’re a regular packet of old sayings today, aren’t we?”
“You’ve been warned time and time again about not overdoing-”
Jessie reached out her black-clad right hand and tentatively touched Meggie’s left hand with it. “My hand’s really getting better, isn’t it?”
“Yes. If you could use it on that machine, even part of the time, for three hours or more and not be yelling for that pill the second I showed my face in here, then I guess you’re getting better even faster than Dr Magliore expected. All the same-”
“All the same it’s getting better, and that’s good… right?”
“Of course it’s good.” The housekeeper looked at Jessie as if she were mad.
“Well, now I’m trying to get the rest of me better. Step one is writing a letter to an old friend of mine. I promised myself-last October, during my hard time-that if I got out of the mess I was in, I’d do that. But I kept putting it off. Now I’m finally trying, and I don’t dare stop. I might lose my guts if I do.” “But the pill-”
“I think I’ve got just enough time to finish this and stick the printout in an envelope before I get too sleepy to work. Then I can take a long nap, and when I wake up I’ll eat an early supper.” She touched Meggie’s left hand with her right again, a gesture of reassurance which was both clumsy and rather sweet. “A nice big one.”
Meggie’s frown remained. “It’s not good to skip meals, Jessie, and you know it.”
Very gently, Jessie said: “Some things are more important than meals. You know that as well as I do, don’t you?”
Meggie glanced toward the VDT again, then sighed and nodded. When she spoke, it was in the tone of a woman bowing to some conventional sentiment in which she herself does not really believe. “I guess so. And even if I don’t, you’re the boss.”
Jessie nodded, realizing for the first time that this was now more than just a fiction the two of them maintained for the sake of convenience. “I suppose I am, at that.”
Meggie’s eyebrow had climbed to half-mast again. “If I brought the sandwich in and left it here on the corner of your desk?”
Jessie grinned. “Sold!”
This time Meggie smiled back. When she brought the sandwich in three minutes later, Jessie was sitting before the glowing screen again, her skin an unhealthy comic-book green in its reflected glow, lost in whatever she was slowly picking out on the keyboard. The little Irish housekeeper made no effort to be quiet-she was that sort of woman who would probably be unable to tiptoe if her life depended on it-but Jessie still did not hear her come or go. She had taken a stack of newspaper clippings out of the top drawer of her desk and stopped typing to riffle through them. Photographs accompanied most, photographs of a man with a strange, narrow face that receded at the chin and bulged at the brow. His deep-set eyes were dark and round and perfectly blank, eyes that made Jessie think simultaneously of Dondi, the comic-strip waif, and Charles Manson. Pudgy lips as thick as slices of cut fruit pooched out below his blade of a nose.