61 pages • 2 hours read
Stephen KingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
It is February, and Jessie is now in Portland, Maine, where it is snowing. She laughs at the thought that it can always be snowing for people living in snow globes, and she claims that it is the first time she has laughed since escaping the house in October. She has gone to countless doctor’s appointments this winter, and she refers to the incident in October as her “hard time” to avoid discussing it in any depth. Still, she finds that a lot of people, even friends, are “stupid” or “tasteless” enough to ask her for specific details about being handcuffed to a bed for two days. Mirroring case studies, Jessie tells most people, and the police, that she does not remember much from those days, and they seem to believe her.
Jessie has lost weight since the incident, and she has also started smoking cigarettes again. She is not happy with the way she looks, and she has a pessimistic outlook on dating in the future. Jessie tried to reach Nora Callighan in November but found out that Nora died the previous year of leukemia. Jessie has only told one person about the majority of her experience: Brandon, one of Gerald’s former colleagues who became Jessie’s closest friend during her recovery. He does not believe all of her story and tells Jessie that no pearl earring or footprints were found in the house. During her recovery, Jessie starts to believe that the stranger was not real, until she sees him in the newspaper as Raymond Andrew Joubert.
In December, Jessie hires Megan Landis, or Meggie, to help with housekeeping, as well as bringing Jessie medication for her right hand. Now, Jessie is writing a letter to Ruth Neary that explains the aftermath of her ordeal. She relates that she woke up in the car the morning after crashing it. Meggie interrupts Jessie’s writing to tell her that she needs to eat to keep her painkillers from making her sleepy, but Jessie wants to finish her letter to Ruth. She is distracted by pictures of Joubert, but she dedicates herself to finishing the letter.
This chapter focuses on the text of Jessie’s letter to Ruth. In the letter, Jessie describes what happened after she woke up after crashing the car. She managed to drive to a store, where Jimmy Eggart, a local, found her and called for help. Initially, Jessie thought that Jimmy was Joubert wearing Jimmy’s face. She was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery and skin-grafts. Next, Jessie tells Ruth about Brandon, noting that he was Gerald’s coworker and that he was assigned to control the media in relation to Gerald’s death. During his time monitoring Jessie’s communication with the press, he seems to have developed feelings for Jessie, and she appreciates that he treats her like a real person.
Jessie relates that she and Brandon told the police the following: that Jessie and Gerald went to the lake house and had sex, then Gerald had a heart attack while Jessie was in the shower. She fell, hitting her head, then woke up with Prince chewing on her hand. She fought the dog off but passed out again on the bed before waking up and driving into town. She relates that Brandon used his connections with the police to manipulate the story, but the police supposedly did not find anything related to Joubert. Jessie’s main point of curiosity is whether they will find her wedding rings, which she threw into Joubert’s coffin-box. Brandon told Jessie that there was not another person in the house, and he warned her that evidence of another person might lead the police to suspect that Jessie planned to give Gerald a heart attack with an accomplice.
When Jessie told Brandon about the phone line being cut in the bedroom, he revealed that the phones in the hall and bedroom were unplugged, but the phone in the kitchen was still connected. Jessie notes that Brandon, like the police, seemed to make assumptions because Jessie is a woman, commenting that there was an air of condescension about them. Jessie adds in the letter that it is time to talk about Joubert, but she looks away from the computer screen, hearing sounds in the house that make her panic. She thinks that Joubert might be in the house, but she reminds herself that he is in jail. Punkin’s voice chimes in to tell her that she needs to confront her fears in the letter, and she continues to write.
The letter continues. When Jessie first found out about Joubert, she asked Brandon to investigate him, and Brandon finally believed that Jessie was telling the truth about the stranger at the lake house. Starting in the mid-1980s, Joubert began desecrating graves and stealing jewelry and body parts from corpses. This behavior progressed into sexual desecration of male corpses, which Jessie suspects is why Joubert had no interest in harming her. The police took years to catch Joubert because his crimes were limited to the dead, and most of his crimes took place in towns with minimal police enforcement. However, officers from across the state would discuss and compare notes on the various cases of grave desecration. Joubert was finally caught by two police officers as he was breaking into a crypt. They found him breaking into a coffin, and he did not resist arrest. Joubert has acromegaly, a pituitary disorder that causes abnormal growth of the hands, feet, and face. For this reason, his appearance is frightening to many people, including the police and Jessie. In Joubert’s van, they found various body parts, including some that he seemed to wear or intended to eat. In Joubert’s home, they found the bodies of his step-parents. Joubert had eaten most of his father and had stolen goods and preserved the body parts of his other victims.
As a child, Joubert was abused by his family members, and he was institutionalized after he attempted to repeat that abuse on one of his young cousins. Joubert spent most of his life in and out of such institutions, but, in the mid-1980s, he was released as “cured,” got a driver’s license, and presumably started robbing graves and campsites with the help of his step-parents. Jessie remembers that she offered to let Joubert have sex with her in the lake house if her would unlock the handcuffs, and she realizes that she would still have done so if she had known it was Joubert and not her father standing in the corner. This realization disturbs her. She resumes her story, relating that she told Brandon that she wanted to see Joubert, and although he tried to convince her otherwise, Jessie convinced him by crying. She realized that the voices in her head started when she was initially abused by her father, and she knows that if she followed Brandon’s advice to pretend that Joubert was never at the lake house, they would likely come back.
The letter continues. Jessie relates that when she went to court with Brandon to see Joubert, Brandon insisted that Jessie wear a veil to cover her face. In the courtroom, however, Jessie promptly approached Joubert, who was drawing a lewd cartoon on a legal pad. Jessie raised her veil and got Joubert’s attention. Brandon tried to stop her, and the judge called them both to the bench, but Joubert clearly recognized Jessie. Joubert raised his arms in an imitation of being handcuffed to bedposts, and he parroted back what Jessie said to him in the bedroom of the lake house, saying that she is not real and is only made of moonlight.
The letter continues. In that moment in the courtroom, the voices in Jessie’s head pushed her to do something that would make a difference for her. Even though Brandon started to pull her back and the bailiff began to come over to them, Jessie managed to spit in Joubert’s face.
As she writes the letter, Jessie begins to cry. Jessie ends the letter by apologizing to Ruth for distancing herself from her, and she asks that Ruth call. After putting the letter in an envelope with instructions for Meggie to mail it, even if Jessie changes her mind, she goes to bed. Jessie sleeps without nightmares, and she smiles in her sleep.
The concluding chapters present the aftermath of Jessie’s escape from the lake house in the past tense, with Jessie writing a letter to Ruth months later. This stylistic choice conveys the fact that Jessie almost fully recovered, and it also glosses over the more laborious details of her recovery, such as surgical procedures, legal and law enforcement struggles, and her developing relationship with Brandon. The choice to elide such information allows King to focus on Jessie’s psychological recovery, as evidenced by the detailed letter she writes to the real Ruth. In addition to providing the novel with a much-needed denouement, the letter enumerates the ways in which Jessie has managed to address her traumas, including both the escape from the lake house and the abuse she suffered as a child. By the end of the narrative, it is clear that Jessie understands the voices in her head to be manifestations of her own feelings, reflecting a resolution of the theme of Identity as a Combination of Personality. In support of this point, she notes that the voices originally appeared just after the eclipse and continued until she hit her brother Will, then reappeared in the lake house. Given that the voices were sometimes “kind and supportive,” but often expressed Jessie’s inner fear, confusion, and sense of self-loathing, the narrative suggests that the voices served the practical purpose of allowing Jessie to engage with aspects of herself that she would much prefer to keep hidden and buried, even from her own awareness. Her need for comfort is met in some voices, but the dominant threads are highly negative, which is normal for someone who has experienced assault, especially as a child. Only by confronting her experiences rather than repressing them can Jessie overcome these feelings, and she acknowledges that repressing her most recent trauma, with Joubert and the handcuffs, would only lead to further suffering in the future, thus resolving the theme of The Lasting Effects of Unresolved Trauma.
In the midst of her recovery, it is significant that Jessie befriends Gerald’s coworker, Brandon, who seems to be a helpful influence in Jessie’s life. However, despite his honesty regarding his job of keeping Jessie and Gerald’s life somewhat secret, he also displays significant traits of Objectifying Women Through Toxic Masculinity, as shown in “the kind of smile men always seem to get on their faces when they’re thinking about how silly women are" (428). Thus, despite his overt show of support, Brandon nonetheless falls into the same category of man who triggers all of Jessie’s deepest fears and resentments, for just like Gerald and Tom, Brandon also perceives women to be inferior or incompetent, and this perception of women as “silly” reflects the ways in which all these men have hurt Jessie throughout her life, either inadvertently or intentionally. In a further extension of this theme, Jessie also realizes that even the police “drew most of their conclusions not from what [she had] said or from any evidence they’d found in the house, but only from the fact that [she is] a woman” (429). Thus, by infusing this dangerously condescending attitude even within the police—the supposed paragons of social order—King delivers a sharp social critique and emphasizes that even those whose job it is to discern the truth of traumatic events are often blinded by their own prejudices in this regard. Ironically, however, the fact that the police make such assumptions works in Jessie’s favor, largely because it spares her any suspicion in Gerald’s death. Even so, she notes how demeaning it is to be viewed as less rational or competent than men. However, Jessie manages to use these perceptions to her advantage, as well, by crying in Brandon’s presence. She knows that crying will likely convince Brandon to help her see Joubert, and she uses this tactic rather than the more pointed threat of going to the press with her real story.
The reveal of Raymond Andrew Joubert serves to validate Jessie’s concern in the lake house of a legitimate threat to her well-being, and in the tradition of classic horror stories, he also serves as an example of the “bogeyman” trope. Because he is a victim of child abuse himself, Joubert’s desire to sexually assault other men and male corpses stems from a similar frustration to Jessie’s, as he is unable to resolve the trauma he suffered as a child. Though his crimes are gruesome, his goal of removing male genitalia expresses a unique understanding, like Jessie’s, of the violent sexual urges that characterize toxic masculinity.
By Stephen King