she was too stiff to do it? What if she got halfway to the porch only to be doubled up and then dropped flopping to the ground by charley horses in the big muscles of her thighs?
In matters of life and death, her mind told her implacably, the right time only comes around once—once and then it’s gone.
Her breathing and heart rate had speeded up. Her body was aware she was going to make the try before her mind was. Then she was wrapping her shirt more firmly about her right hand, her left hand was settling on the doorhandle, and she knew. There had been no conscious decision she was aware of; suddenly she was simply going. She was going now, while Tad slept deeply and there was no danger he would bolt out after her.
She pulled the doorhandle up, her hand sweat-slick. She was holding her breath, listening for any change in the world.
The bird sang again. That was all.
If he’s bashed the door too far out of shape it won’t even open, she thought. That would be a kind of bitter relief. She could sit back then, rethink her options, see if there was anything she had left out of her calculations . . . and get a little thirstier . . . a little weaker . . . a little slower . . . .
She brought pressure to bear against the door, slugging her left shoulder against it, gradually settling more and more of her weight upon it. Her right hand was sweating inside the cotton shirt. Her fist was so tightly clenched that the fingers ached. Dimly, she could feel the crescents of her nails biting into her palm. Over and over in her mind’s eye she saw herself punching through the glass beside the knob of the porch door, heard the tinkle of the shards striking the boards inside, saw herself reaching for the handle . . .
But the car door wasn’t opening. She shoved as hard as she could, straining, the cords in her neck standing out. But it wasn’t opening. It—
Then it did open, all of a sudden. It swung wide with a terrible clunking sound, almost spilling her out on all fours. She grabbed for the doorhandle, missed, and grabbed again. She held the handle, and suddenly a panicky certainty stole into her mind. It was as cold and numbing as a doctor’s verdict of inoperable cancer. She had gotten the door open, but it wouldn’t close again. The dog was going to leap in and kill them both. Tad would have perhaps one confused moment of waking, one last merciful instant in which to believe it was a dream, before Cujo’s teeth ripped his throat open.
Her breath rattled in and out, quick and quick. It felt like hot straw. It seemed that she could see each and every piece of gravel in the driveway, but it was hard to think. Her thoughts tumbled wildly. Scenes out of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seem to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime.
The garbage disposal regurgitating a nasty green mess all over the kitchen ceiling, backing up through the bar sink.
Falling off the back porch when she was five and breaking her wrist.
Looking down at herself during period 2—algebra—one day when she was a high school freshman and seeing to her utter shame and horror that there were spots of blood on her light blue linen skirt, she had started her period, how was she ever going to get up from her seat when the bell rang without everybody seeing, without everyone knowing that Donna-Rose was having her period?
The first boy she had ever kissed with her mouth open. Dwight Sampson.
Holding Tad in her arms, newborn, then the nurse taking him away; she wanted to tell the nurse not to do that—Give him back, I’m not done with him, those were the words that had come to mind—but she was too weak to talk and then the horrible, squelching, gutty sound of the afterbirth coming out of her; she remembered thinking I’m puking up his life-support systems, and then she had passed out.
Her father, crying at her wedding and then getting drunk at the reception.
Faces. Voices. Rooms. Scenes. Books. The terror of this moment, thinking I AM GOING TO DIE—
With a tremendous effort, she got herself