Rose Madder (46 page)

“Great,” she said, and then, gravely, like a man doing a job, he kissed her cool wet cheeks high up and in toward her nose—first under her right eye and then under her left. His kisses were as soft as fluttering eyelashes. She had never felt anything like them, and she suddenly put her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely, with her face against the shoulder of his jacket and her eyes, still trickling tears, shut tight. He held her, the hand which had been pressed against her back now stroking the plait of her hair.

After awhile she pulled back from him and rubbed her arm across her eyes and tried to smile. “I don't always cry,” she said. “You probably don't believe that, but it's true.”

“I believe it,” he said, and took off his own helmet. “Come on, give me a hand with this cooler.”

She helped him unsnap the elastic cords which held it, and they carried it down to one of the picnic tables. Then she stood looking down at the water. “This must be the most beautiful place in the world,” she said. “I can't believe there's nobody here but us.”

“Well, Highway 27's a little off the regular tourist-track. I first came here with my folks, when I was just a little kid. My dad said he found it almost by accident, rambling on his
bike. Even in August there aren't many people here, when the rest of the lakeside picnic areas are jammed.”

She gave him a quick glance. “Have you brought other women here?”

“Nope,” he said. “Would you like to take a walk? We could work up an appetite for lunch, and there's something I could show you.”

“What?”

“It might be better to just show you,” he said.

“All right.”

He led her down by the water, where they sat side by side on a big rock and took off their footgear. She was amused by the fluffy white athletic socks he had on under the motorcycle boots; they were the kind she associated with junior high school.

“Leave them or take them?” she asked, holding up her sneakers.

He thought about it. “You take yours, I'll leave mine. Damn boots are almost impossible to get back on even when your feet are dry. If they're wet, you can forget it.” He stripped off the white socks and laid them neatly across the blocky toes of the boots. Something in the way he did it and the prim way they looked made her smile.

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Come on, show me your surprise.”

They walked north along the shore, Rosie with her sneakers in her left hand, Bill leading the way. The first touch of the water was so cold it made her gasp, but after a minute or two it felt good. She could see her feet down there like pale shimmering fish, slightly separated from the rest of her body at the ankles by refraction. The bottom felt pebbly but not actually painful.
You could be cutting them to pieces and not know,
she thought.
You're numb, sweetheart.
But she wasn't cutting them. She felt he would not
let
her cut them. The idea was ridiculous but powerful.

About forty yards along the shore they came to an overgrown path winding up the embankment, grainy white sand amid low, tough juniper bushes, and she felt a small shiver of
déjà vu
, as if she had seen this path in a barely remembered dream.

He pointed to the top of the rise and spoke in a low voice. “We're going up there. Be as quiet as you can.”

He waited for her to slip into her sneakers and then led the way. He stopped and waited for her at the top, and when she joined him and started to speak, he first put a finger on her lips and then pointed with it.

They were at the edge of a small brushy clearing, a kind of overlook fifty feet or so above the lake. In the center was a fallen tree. Beneath the tangle of the soil-encrusted roots lay a trim red fox, giving suck to three kits. Nearby a fourth was busily chasing his own tail in a patch of sunlight. Rosie stared at them, entranced.

He leaned close to her, his whisper tickling her ear and making her feel shivery. “I came down day before yesterday to see if the picnic area was still here, and still nice. I hadn't been here in five years, so I couldn't be sure. I was walking around and found these guys.
Vulpes fulva
—the red fox. The little ones are maybe six weeks old.”

“How do you know so much about them?”

Bill shrugged. “I like animals, that's all,” he said. “I read about them, and try to see them in the wild when I can.”

“Do you hunt?”

“God, no. I don't even take pictures. I just look.”

The vixen had seen them now. Without moving she grew even more still within her skin, her eyes bright and watchful.

Don't you look straight at her,
Rosie thought suddenly. She had no idea of what this thought meant; she only knew it wasn't her voice she was hearing in her head.
Don't you look straight at her, that's not for the likes of you.

“They're beautiful,” Rosie breathed. She reached out for his hand and enfolded it in both of hers.

“Yes, they are,” he said.

The vixen turned her head to the fourth kit, who had given up on his tail and was now pouncing at his own shadow. She uttered a single high-pitched bark. The kit turned, looked impudently at the newcomers standing at the head of the path, then trotted to his mother and lay down beside her. She licked the side of his head, grooming him quickly and competently, but her eyes never left Rosie and Bill.

“Does she have a mate?” Rosie whispered.

“Yeah, I saw him before. A good-sized dog.”

“Is that what they're called?”

“Uh-huh, dogs.”

“Where is he?”

“Somewhere around. Hunting. The little ones probably
see a lot of gulls with broken wings dragged home for dinner.”

Rosie's eyes drifted to the roots of the tree behind which the foxes had made their den, and she felt
déjà vu
touch her again. A brief image of a root moving, as if to clutch, came to her, shimmered, then slipped away.

“Are we scaring her?” Rosie asked.

“Maybe a little. If we tried to get closer, she'd fight.”

“Yes,” Rosie said. “And if we messed with them, she'd repay.”

He looked at her oddly. “Well, I guess she'd try, yeah.”

“I'm glad you brought me to see them.”

His smile lit his whole face. “Good.”

“Let's go back. I don't want to scare her. And I'm hungry.”

“All right. I am, too.”

He raised one hand and waved solemnly. The vixen watched with her bright, still eyes . . . and then wrinkled back her snout in a soundless growl, showing a row of neat white teeth.

“Yeah,” he said, “you're a good mama. Take care of them.”

He turned away. Rosie started to follow, then looked back once, into those bright, still eyes. The vixen's snout was still rolled back, exposing her teeth as she suckled her kits in the silent sunshine. Her fur was orange rather than red, but something about that shade—its violent contrast to the lazy green around it—made Rosie shiver again. A gull swooped overhead, printing its shadow across the brushy clearing, but the vixen's eyes never left Rosie's face. She felt them on her, watchful and deeply concentrated in their stillness, even when she turned to follow Bill.

“W
ill they be all right?” she asked when they reached the waterside again. She held his shoulder, balancing, as she removed first her left sneaker and then her right.

“You mean will the kits be hunted down?”

Rosie nodded.

“Not if they stay out of gardens and henhouses, and Mom
and Pop'll be wise enough to keep them away from farms—if they keep normal, that is. The vixen's four years old at least, the dog maybe seven. I wish you'd seen him. He's got a brush the color of leaves in October.”

They were halfway back to the picnic area, ankle deep in the water. She could see his boots up ahead on the rock where he'd left them with the prim white socks lying across the square toes.

“What do you mean, ‘if they keep normal'?”

“Rabies,” he said. “More often than not it's rabies that leads them to gardens and henhouses in the first place. Gets them noticed. Gets them killed. The vixens get it more often than the dogs, and they teach the kits dangerous behavior. It knocks the dogs down quick, but a vixen can carry rabies a long time, and they keep getting worse.”

“Do they?” she asked. “What a shame.”

He stopped, looked at her pale, thoughtful face, then gathered her into his arms and hugged her. “It doesn't have to happen,” he said. “They've got along fine so far.”

“But it could happen. It
could.”

He considered this, and nodded. “Sure, yeah,” he said at last. “Anything could. Come on, let's eat. What do you say?”

“I say that sounds like a good idea.”

But she thought she wouldn't eat much, that she'd been haunted out of her appetite by the vixen's bright regard. When he began laying out the food, however, she was instantly ravenous. Breakfast had been orange juice and a single slice of dry toast; she'd been as excited (and fearful) as a bride on the morning of her wedding. Now, at the sight of bread and meat, she forgot all about the foxes' earth north of the beach.

He kept taking food out of the cooler—cold beef sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, chicken salad, potato salad, coleslaw, two cans of Coke, a Thermos of what he said was iced tea, two pieces of pie, a large slab of cake—until it made her think of clowns piling out of the little car at the circus, and she laughed. It probably wasn't polite, but she had enough confidence in him now not to feel she had to be merely polite. That was good, because she wasn't sure she could have helped herself, anyway.

He looked up, holding a salt shaker in his left hand and a pepper shaker in his right. She saw he had carefully put
Scotch tape over the holes in case they fell over, and that made her laugh harder than ever. She sat down on the bench running down one side of the picnic table and put her hands over her face and tried to get a grip. She'd almost made it when she peeked through her fingers and saw that amazing stack of sandwiches—half a dozen for two people, each cut on the diagonal and neatly sealed in a Baggie. That set her off again.

“What?” he asked, smiling himself. “What, Rosie?”

“Were you expecting friends to drop by?” she asked, still giggling. “A Little League team, maybe? Or a Boy Scout troop?”

His smile widened, but his eyes continued to hold that serious look. It was a complicated expression, one that said he understood both what was funny here and what was not, and in it she finally saw that he really
was
her own age, or close enough not to matter. “I wanted to make sure you'd have something that you liked, that's all.”

Her giggles were tapering off, but she continued to smile at him. What struck her most was not his sweetness, which made him seem younger, but his openness, which now made him seem somehow older.

“Bill, I can eat just about anything,” she said.

“I'm sure you can,” he said, sitting down beside her, “but that's not what this is about. I don't care so much about what you can stand or what you can manage as I do about what you like and want to have. Those are the kinds of things I want to give to you, because I'm crazy about you.”

She looked at him solemnly, the laughter gone, and when he took her hand, she covered it with her other one. She was trying to get what he'd just said straight in her mind and finding it hard going—it was like trying to get a bulky, balky piece of furniture through a narrow doorway, turning it this way and that, trying to find an angle where everything would finally work.

“Why?” she asked. “Why me?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. Fact is, Rosie, I don't know very much about women. I had a girlfriend when I was a junior in high school, and we probably would have slept together eventually, but she moved away before it could happen. I had a girlfriend when I was a freshman in college, and I
did
sleep with her. Then, five years ago, I got engaged to a wonderful girl I met in the city zoo, of all
places. Her name was Bronwyn O'Hara. Sounds like something out of Margaret Mitchell, doesn't it?”

“It's a lovely name.”

“She was a lovely girl. She died of a brain aneurysm.”

“Oh, Bill, I'm so sorry.”

“Since then, I've dated a couple of girls, and I'm not exaggerating—I've dated a couple of girls, period, end of story. My parents fight over me. My father says I'm dying on the vine, my mother says ‘Leave the boy alone, stop scolding.' Only she says it
scoldink.”

Rosie smiled.

“Then you walked into the shop and found that picture. You knew you had to have it from the word go, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“That's how I felt about you. I just wanted you to know that. Nothing that's happening here is happening out of kindness, or charity, or duty. None of what's happening here is happening because poor Rosie has had such a hard, hard life.” He hesitated and then said, “It's happening because I'm in love with you.”

“You can't know that. Not yet.”

“I know what I know,” he said, and she found the gentle insistence in his tone a little frightening. “Now that's enough soap opera. Let's eat.”

They did. When they were done and Rosie's stomach felt stretched drumhead-tight against the waistband of her pants, they repacked the cooler and Bill strapped it onto the Harley's carrier again. No one had come; Shoreland was still all theirs. They went back down to the waterside and sat on the big rock again. Rosie was starting to feel very strongly about this rock; it was, she thought, the kind of rock you could come to visit once or twice a year, just to say thanks . . . if things turned out well, that was. And she thought they were, at least so far. She could not, in fact, think of a day that had been better.