Rose Madder (17 page)

“How worried are you about him?” Anna asked.

Rosie's attention had wandered a little; now it snapped back in a hurry. At first she wasn't even sure who Anna was talking about.

“Your husband—how worried are you? I know that in your first two or three weeks here, you expressed fears that he would come after you . . . that he'd ‘track you down,' in your words. How do you feel about that now?”

Rosie considered the question carefully. First of all,
fear
was an inadequate word to express her feelings about Norman during her first week or two at D
&
S; even terror didn't completely serve, because the core of her feelings concerning him was lapped about—and to some degree altered—by other emotions: shame at having failed in her marriage, homesickness for a few possessions she had cared deeply about (Pooh's Chair, for instance), a sensation of euphoric freedom which seemed to renew itself at some point each day, and a relief so cold it was somehow horrible; the sort of relief a wire-walker might feel after tottering at the furthest edge of balance while crossing a deep canyon . . . and then recovering.

Fear had been the keychord, though; there was no doubt about that. During those first two weeks at D & S she'd had the same dream over and over: she was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the porch when a brand-new red Sentra pulled up to the curb in front. The driver's door opened and Norman got out. He was wearing a black tee-shirt with a map of South Vietnam on it. Sometimes the words beneath the map said
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART
is; sometimes they said
HOMELESS & HAVE AIDS
. His pants were splattered with blood. Tiny bones—finger-bones, they looked like—dangled from his earlobes. In one hand he held some sort of mask which was splattered with blood and dark clots of meat. She tried to get up from the chair she was in and couldn't; it was as if she were paralyzed. She could only sit and watch him come slowly up the walk toward her with his bone earrings bobbing. Could only sit there as he told her he wanted to talk to her up close. He smiled and she saw his teeth were also covered with blood.

“Rosie?” Anna asked softly. “Are you here?”

“Yes,” she said, speaking in a little breathless rush. “I'm here, and yes, I'm still afraid of him.”

“That's not exactly surprising, you know. On some level I suppose you'll always be afraid of him. But you'll be all right as long as you remember that you're going to have longer and longer periods when you're not afraid of anything . . . and when you don't even
think
of him. But that isn't exactly what I asked, either. I asked if you're still afraid that he'll come after you.”

Yes, she was still afraid. No, not
as
afraid. She had heard a lot of his business-related telephone conversations over the last fourteen years, and she'd heard him and his colleagues discuss a lot of cases, sometimes in the rec room downstairs, sometimes out on the patio. They barely noticed her when she brought them warm-ups for their coffee or fresh bottles of beer. It was almost always Norman who led these discussions, his voice quick and impatient as he leaned over the table with a beer bottle half-buried in one big fist, hurrying the others along, overriding their doubts, refusing to entertain their speculations. On rare occasions he had even discussed cases with her. He wasn't interested in her ideas, of course, but she was a handy wall against which to bounce his own. He was quick, a man who wanted results yesterday, and he had a tendency to lose interest in cases once they were three weeks old. He called them what Gert had called her self-defense moves: leftovers.

Was
she
a leftover to him now?

How much she wanted to believe that. How hard she had tried. And yet, she couldn't . . . quite . . . do it.

“I don't know,” she said. “A part of me thinks that if he was going to show up, he would have already. But there's another part that thinks he's probably still looking. And he's not a truck-driver or a plumber; he's a cop. He knows
how
to look for people.”

Anna nodded. “Yes, I know. That makes him especially dangerous, and that means you'll have to be especially careful. It's also important for you to remember
you're not alone.
The days when you were are over for you, Rosie. Will you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And if he
does
show up, what will you do?”

“Slam the door in his face and lock it.”

“And then?”

“Call 911.”

“With no hesitation?”

“None at all,” she said, and that was the truth, but she would be afraid. Why? Because Norman was a cop and
they
would be cops, the people she called. Because she knew Norman had a way of getting his way—he was an alpha-dog. Because of what Norman had told her, again and again and again: that all cops were brothers.

“And after you call 911? What would you do then?”

“I'd call you.”

Anna nodded. “You're going to be fine. Absolutely fine.”

“I know.” She spoke with confidence, but part of her still wondered . . . would
always
wonder, she supposed, unless he showed up and took the matter out of the realm of speculation. If that happened, would all of this life she had lived over the last month and a half—D & S, the Whitestone Hotel, Anna, her new friends—fade like a dream on waking the moment she opened her door to an evening knock and found Norman standing there? Was that possible?

Rosie's eyes shifted to her picture, leaning against the wall beside the door to the office, and knew it was not. The picture was facing inward so only the backing showed, but she found she could see it anyway; already the image of the woman on the hill with the thundery sky above and the half-burned temple below was crystal clear in her mind, not the least dreamlike. She didn't think
anything
could turn her picture into a dream.

And with luck, these questions of mine will never have to be answered,
she thought, and smiled a little.

“What about the rent, Anna? How much?”

“Three hundred and twenty dollars a month. Will you be all right for at least two months?”

“Yes.” Anna knew that, of course; if Rosie hadn't had enough runway to assure her of a safe take-off, they would not have been having this discussion. “That seems very reasonable. As far as the room-rent goes, I'll be fine to start with.”

“To start with,” Anna repeated. She steepled her fingers under her chin and directed a keen look across the cluttered desk at Rosie. “Which brings me to the subject of your new
job. It sounds absolutely wonderful, and yet at the same time it sounds . . .”

“Iffy? Impermanent?” These were words which had occurred to her on her walk home . . . along with the fact that, despite Robbie Lefferts's enthusiasm, she didn't really know if she could
do
this job yet, and wouldn't—not for sure—until next Monday morning.

Anna nodded. “They aren't the words I would have chosen myself—I don't know what words
would
be, exactly—but they'll do. The point is, if you leave the Whitestone, I can't absolutely
guarantee
I could get you back in, especially on short notice. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority.”

“Of course. I understand that.”

“I'd do what I could, naturally, but—”

“If the job Mr. Lefferts offered me doesn't pan out, I'll look for work waitressing,” Rosie said quietly. “My back is much better now, and I think I could do it. Thanks to Dawn, I can probably get a late-shift job in a Seven-Eleven or a Piggly-Wiggly, if it comes to that.” Dawn was Dawn Verecker, who gave rudimentary clerking lessons on a cash register that was kept in one of the back rooms. Rosie had been an attentive student.

Anna was still looking at Rosie keenly. “But you don't think it will come to that, do you?”

“No.” She directed another glance down at her picture. “I think it will work out. In the meantime, I owe you so much . . .”

“You know what to do about that, don't you?”

“Pass it on.”

Anna nodded. “That's right. If you should see a version of yourself walking down the street someday—a woman who looks lost and afraid of her own shadow—just pass it on.”

“Can I ask you something, Anna?”

“Anything at all.”

“You said your parents founded Daughters and Sisters. Why? And why do you carry it on? Or pass it on, if you like that better?”

Anna opened one of her desk drawers, rummaged, and brought out a thick paperback book. She tossed it across the desk to Rosie, who picked it up, stared at it, and experienced a moment of recall so vivid it was like one of the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes suffered. In that instant she did
not just remember the wetness on the insides of her thighs, a sensation like small, sinister kisses, but seemed to re-experience it. She could see Norman's shadow as he stood in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She could see his shadow-fingers pulling restlessly at a shadow-cord. She could hear him telling the person on the other end that of
course
it was an emergency, his wife was pregnant. And then she saw him come back into the room and start picking up the pieces of the paperback he had torn out of her hands before beginning to hit her. The same redhead was on the cover of the book Anna had tossed her. The time she was dressed in a ballgown and caught up in the arms of a handsome gypsy who had flashing eyes and—apparently—a pair of rolled-up socks in the front of his breeches.

This is the trouble,
Norman had said.
How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?

“Rose?” It was Anna, sounding concerned. She also sounded very far away, like the voices you sometimes heard in dreams. “Rose, are you all right?”

She looked up from the book
(Misery's Lover,
the title proclaimed in that same red foil, and, below it,
Paul Sheldon's Most Torrid Novel!)
and forced a smile. “Yes, I'm fine. This looks hot.”

“Bodice-rippers are one of my secret vices,” Anna said. “Better than chocolate because they don't make you fat and the men in them are better than real men because they don't call you at four in the morning, drunk and whining for a second chance. But they're trash, and do you know why?”

Rosie shook her head.

“Because the whole round world is explained in them. There are reasons for
everything.
They may be as farfetched as the stories in the supermarket tabloids and they may run counter to everything a halfway intelligent person understands about how people behave in real life, but they're
there,
by God. In a book like
Misery's Lover,
Anna Stevenson would undoubtedly run Daughters and Sisters because she had been an abused woman herself . . . or because her mother had been. But I was never abused, and so far as I know, my mother never was, either. I was often
ignored
by my husband—we've been divorced for twenty years, in case Pam or Gert hasn't told you—but never abused. In life, Rosie, people sometimes do things, both bad and good,
just-because.
Do you believe that?”

Rosie nodded her head slowly. She was thinking of all the times Norman had hit her, hurt her, made her cry . . . and then one night, for no reason at all, he might bring her half a dozen roses and take her out to dinner. If she asked why, what the occasion was, he usually just shrugged and said he “felt like treating her.”
Just-because,
in other words. Mommy, why do I have to go to bed at eight even in the summertime, when the sky is still light outside?
Just-because.
Daddy, why did Grandpa have to die?
Just-because.
Norman undoubtedly thought these occasional treats and whirlwind dates made up for a lot, that they must offset what he probably thought of as his “bad temper.” He would never know (and never understand even if she told him) that they terrified her even more than his anger and his bouts of rage. Those, at least, she knew how to deal with.

“I
hate
the idea that everything we do gets done because of the things people have done to us,” Anna said moodily. “It takes everything out of our hands, it doesn't account
in the least
for the occasional saints and devils we glimpse among us, and most important of all, it doesn't ring true to my heart. It's good in books like Paul Sheldon's, though. It's comforting. Lets you believe, at least for a little while, that God is sane and nothing bad will happen to the people that you like in the story. May I have my book back? I'm going to finish it tonight. With lots of hot tea.
Gallons.”

Rosie smiled, and Anna smiled back.

“You'll come for the picnic, won't you, Rosie? It's going to be at Ettinger's Pier. We'll need all the help we can get. We always do.”

“Oh, you bet,” Rosie said. “Unless Mr. Lefferts decides I'm a prodigy and wants me to work on Saturdays, that is.”

“I doubt that.” Anna got up and came around the desk; Rosie also stood. And now that their talk was almost over, the most elementary question of all occurred to her.

“When can I move in, Anna?”

“Tomorrow, if you want.” Anna bent and picked up the picture. She looked thoughtfully at the words charcoaled on the backing, then turned it around.

“You said it was odd,” Rosie said. “Why?”

Anna tapped the glass fronting with one nail. “Because the woman is at the center, and yet her back is turned. That seems an extremely peculiar approach to this sort of painting, which has been otherwise quite conventionally executed.”
Now she glanced over at Rosie, and when she went on, her tone was a bit apologetic. “The building at the bottom of the hill is out of perspective, by the way.”