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