Rose Madder (6 page)

And so thinking, she slipped not into sleep, but into that umbilical cord which connects sleeping and waking. Here
she moved slowly back and forth like a bubble, faintly aware of the diesel engine's steady hum, the sound of the tires on the pavement, of a kid four or five rows up asking his mother when they were going to get to Aunt Norma's. But she was also aware that she had come untethered from herself, and that her mind had opened like a flower (a rose, of course), opened as it does only when one is in neither one place nor the other.

I'm really Rosie . . .

Carole King's voice, singing Maurice Sendak's words. They came floating up the corridor she was in from some distant chamber, echoing, accompanied by the glassy, ghostly notes of a piano.

. . . and I'm Rosie Real . . .

I'm going to sleep after all,
she thought.
I think I really am. Imagine that!

You better believe me . . . I'm a great big deal . . .

She was no longer in the gray corridor but in some dark open space. Her nose, her entire head, was filled with smells of summer so sweet and so strong that they were almost overwhelming. Chief among them was the smell of honeysuckle, drifts of it. She could hear crickets, and when she looked up she saw the polished bone face of the moon, riding high overhead. Its white glow was everywhere, turning the mist rising from the tangled grasses around her bare legs to smoke.

I'm really Rosie . . . and I'm Rosie Real . . .

She raised her hands with the fingers splayed and the thumbs almost touching; she framed the moon like a picture and as the night wind stroked her bare arms she felt her heart first swell with happiness and then contract with fright. She sensed a dozing savagery in this place, as if there might be animals with big teeth loose in the perfumed undergrowth.

Rose. Come over here, sweetheart. I want to talk to you up close.

She turned her head and saw his fist rushing out of the dark. Icy strokes of moonlight gleamed on the raised letters of his Police Academy ring. She saw the stressful grimace of his lips, pulled back in something like a smile—

—and jerked awake in her seat, gasping, her forehead damp with sweat. She must have been breathing hard for some time, because her window was humid with her condensed
breath, almost completely fogged in. She swiped a clear path on the glass with the side of her hand and looked out. The city was almost gone now; they were passing an exurban litter of gas stations and fast-food franchises, but behind them she could see stretches of open field.

I've gotten away from him,
she thought.
No matter what happens to me now, I've gotten away from him. Even if I have to sleep in doorways, or under bridges, I've gotten away from him. He'll never hit me again, because I've gotten away from him.

But she discovered she did not entirely believe it. He would be furious with her, and he would try to find her. She was sure of it.

But how can he? I've covered my trail; I didn't even have to write down my old school chum's name in order to get my ticket. I threw away the bank card, that's the biggest thing. So how can he find me?

She didn't know, exactly . . . but finding people
was
what he did, and she would have to be very, very careful.

I'm really Rosie . . . and I'm Rosie Real . . .

Yes, she supposed both sides of that were the truth, but she had never felt less like a great big deal in her whole life. What she felt like was a tiny speck of flotsam in the middle of a trackless ocean. The terror which had filled her near the end of her brief dream was still with her, but so were traces of the exhilaration and happiness; a sense of being, if not powerful, at least free.

She leaned against the high-backed bus seat and watched the last of the fast-food restaurants and muffler shops fall away. Now it was just the countryside—newly opened fields and belts of trees that were turning that fabulous cloudy green that belongs only to April. She watched them roll past with her hands clasped loosely in her lap and let the big silver bus take her on toward whatever lay ahead.

S
he had a great many bad moments during the first weeks of her new life, but even at what was very nearly the worst of them all—getting off the bus at three in the morning and entering a terminal four times the size of Portside—she did not regret her decision.

She was, however, terrified.

Rosie stood just inside the doorway of Gate 62, clutching her purse tightly in both hands and looking around with wide eyes as people rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As she watched, a man sprinted toward a woman who had just gotten off Rosie's bus, seized her, and spun her around so violently that her feet left the ground. The woman crowed with delight and terror, her cry as bright as a flashgun in the crowded, confused terminal.

There was a bank of video games to Rosie's right, and although it was the darkest hour of the morning, kids—most with their baseball caps turned around backward and at least eighty per cent of their hair buzzed off—were bellied up to all of them. “Try again, Space Cadet!” the one nearest to Rosie invited in a grinding, inhuman voice. “Try again, Space Cadet! Try again, Space Cadet!”

She walked slowly past the video games and into the terminal, sure of only one thing: she didn't dare go out at this hour of the morning. She felt the chances were excellent that she would be raped, killed, and stuffed into the nearest garbage can if she did. She glanced left and saw a pair of uniformed policemen coming down the escalator from the upper level. One was twirling his nightstick in a complex pattern. The other was grinning in a hard, humorless way that made her think of a man eight hundred miles behind her. He grinned, but there was no grin in his constantly moving eyes.

What if their job is to tour the place every hour or so and kick out everyone who doesn't have a ticket? What will you do then?

She'd handle that if it came up, that was what she'd do. For the time being she moved away from the escalator and toward an alcove where a dozen or so travelers were parked in hard plastic contour chairs. Small coin-op TVs were bolted to the arms of these chairs. Rosie kept an eye on the cops as she went and was relieved to see them move across the floor of the terminal and away from her. In two and a half hours, three at the most, it would be daylight. After that they could catch her and kick her out. Until then she wanted to stay right here, where there were lights and lots of people.

She sat down in one of the TV chairs. Two seats away on her left, a girl wearing a faded denim jacket and holding a backpack on her lap was dozing. Her eyes rolled beneath her purple-tinged eyelids, and a long, silvery strand of saliva depended from her lower lip. Four words had been tattooed on the back of her right hand, straggling blue capitals that announced
I LOVE MY HUNNEY
.
Where's your honey now, sweetheart?
Rosie thought. She looked at the blank screen of the TV, then at the tiled wall on her right. Here someone had scrawled the words
SUCK MY AIDS-INFECTED COCK
in red Magic Marker. She looked away hastily, as if the words would burn her retinas if she looked at them too long, and gazed across the terminal. On the far wall was a huge lighted clock. It was 3:16 a.m.

Two and a half more hours and I can leave,
she thought, and began to wait them through.

S
he'd had a cheeseburger and a lemonade when the bus made a rest-stop around six o'clock the previous evening, nothing since then, and she was hungry. She sat in the TV alcove until the hands of the big clock made it around to four a.m., then decided she'd better get a bite. She crossed to the small cafeteria near the ticket windows, stepping over several sleeping people on her way. Many of them had their arms curled protectively around bulging, tape-mended plastic garbage bags, and by the time Rosie got coffee and juice and a bowl of Special K, she understood that she had been needlessly worried about being kicked out by the cops. These sleepers weren't through-travelers; they were homeless
people camping out in the bus terminal. Rosie felt sorry for them, but she also felt perversely comforted—it was good to know there would be a place for
her
tomorrow night, if she really needed one.

And if he comes here, to this city, where do you think he'll check first? What do you think will be his very first stop?

That was silly—he wasn't going to find her, there was absolutely no way he
could
find her—but the thought still sent a cold finger up her back, tracing the curve of her spine.

The food made her feel better, stronger and more awake. When she had finished (lingering over her coffee until she saw the Chicano busboy looking at her with unconcealed impatience), she started slowly back to the TV alcove. On the way, she caught sight of a blue-and-white circle over a booth near the rental-car kiosks. The words bending their way around the circle's blue outer stripe were
TRAVELERS AID
, and Rosie thought, not without a twinkle of humor, that if there had ever been a traveler in the history of the world who needed aid, it was her.

She took a step toward the lighted circle. There was a man sitting inside the booth under it, she saw—a middle-aged guy with thinning hair and hornrimmed glasses. He was reading a newspaper. She took another step in his direction, then stopped again. She wasn't really going over there, was she? What in God's name would she tell him? That she had left her husband? That she had gone with nothing but her purse, his ATM card, and the clothes she stood up in?

Why not?
Practical-Sensible asked, and the total lack of sympathy in her voice struck Rosie like a slap.
If you had the guts to leave him in the first place, don't you have the guts to own up to it?

She didn't know if she did or not, but she knew that telling a stranger the central fact of her life at four o'clock in the morning would be very difficult.
And probably he
'
d just tell me to get lost, anyway. Probably his job is helping people to replace their lost tickets, or making lost-children announcements over the loudspeakers.

But her feet started moving in the direction of the Travelers Aid booth just the same, and she understood that she
did
mean to speak to the stranger with the thinning hair and the hornrimmed glasses, and that she was going to do it for the simplest reason in the universe; she had no other choice. In the days ahead she would probably have to tell a lot of people
that she had left her husband, that she had lived in a daze behind a closed door for fourteen years, that she had damned few life-skills and no work-skills at all, that she needed help, that she needed to depend on the kindness of strangers.

But none of that is really my fault, is it?
she thought, and her own calmness surprised her, almost stunned her.

She came to the booth and put the hand not currently clutching the strap of her purse on the counter. She looked hopefully and fearfully down at the bent head of the man in the hornrimmed glasses, looking at his brown, freckled skull through the strands of hair laid across it in neat thin rows. She waited for him to look up, but he was absorbed in his paper, which was written in a foreign language that looked like either Greek or Russian. He carefully turned a page and frowned at a picture of two soccer players tussling over a ball.

“Excuse me?” she asked in a small voice, and the man in the booth raised his head.

Please let his eyes be kind,
she thought suddenly.
Even if he can't do anything, please let his eyes be kind . . . and let them see me,
me,
the real person who is standing here with nothing but the strap of this Kmart purse to hold onto.

And, she saw, his eyes
were
kind. Weak and swimmy behind the thick lenses of his glasses . . . but kind.

“I'm sorry, but can you help me?” she asked.

T
he Travelers Aid volunteer introduced himself as Peter Slowik, and he listened to Rosie's story in attentive silence. She told as much as she could, having already come to the conclusion that she could not depend on the kindness of strangers if she held what was true about her in reserve, out of either pride or shame. The only important thing she didn't tell him—because she couldn't think of a way to express it—was how
unarmed
she felt, how totally unprepared for the world. Until the last eighteen hours or so, she'd had no conception of how much of the world she knew only from TV, or from the daily paper her husband brought home.

“I understand that you left on the spur of the moment,” Mr. Slowik said, “but while you were riding the bus did you
have any idea about what you should do or where you should go when you got here? Any ideas at all?”

“I thought I might be able to find a women's hotel, to start with,” she said. “Are there still such places?”

“Yes, at least three that I know of, but the cheapest has rates that would probably leave you broke in a week. They're hotels for well-to-do ladies, for the most part—ladies who've come to spend a week in the city touring the shops, or visiting relatives who don't have room to put them up.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, then, what about the YWCA?”

Mr. Slowik shook his head. “They closed down the last of their boarding facilities in 1990. They were being overrun by crazy people and drug addicts.”