Rose Madder (5 page)

I'm really Rosie,
she thought as the cabbie drove across the Trunkatawny Bridge, and smiled as Maurice Sendak's words and Carole King's voice floated through her mind like a pair of ghosts.
And I'm Rosie Real.

Was she, though? Was she real?

This is where I start finding out,
she thought.
Right here and right now.

T
he cabbie stopped in Iroquois Square and pointed to a line of cash machines standing in a plaza which came equipped with a fountain and a brushed-chrome sculpture that didn't look like anything in particular. The machine on the far left was bright green.

“That do ya?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks. I'll just be a minute.”

But she was a little longer than that. First she couldn't seem to punch in the pin-number correctly, in spite of the machine's large keypads, and when she finally succeeded in that part of the operation, she couldn't decide how much to take. She pressed seven-five-decimal-zero-zero, hesitated over the
TRANSACT
button, then pulled her hand back. He would beat her up for running away if he caught her—no question about that. If he beat her badly enough to land her in the hospital, though
(or to kill you,
a small voice murmured,
he might actually kill you, Rosie, and you
'
re a fool if you forget that),
it would be because she had dared to steal his ATM card . . . and to use it. Did she want to risk that sort of retribution for a mere seventy-five dollars? Was that enough?

“No,” she murmured, and reached out again. This time she tapped three-five-zero-decimal-zero-zero . . . and then hesitated again. She didn't know exactly how much of what he called “the ready” there was in the cash-and-checking account this machine tapped into, but three hundred and fifty dollars had to be a pretty sizeable chunk of it. He was going to be so
angry . . .

She moved her hand toward the
CANCEL/RETRY
button, and then asked herself again what difference
that
made. He was going to be angry in any case. There was no going back now.

“Are you going to be much longer, ma'am?” a voice asked from behind her. “Because I'm over my coffee-break right now.”

“Oh, sorry!” she said, jumping a little. “No, I was just . . . woolgathering.” She hit the
TRANSACT
button. The words
ONE MOMENT PLEASE
appeared on the auto-teller's VDT. The wait wasn't long, but it was long enough for her to entertain a vivid fantasy of the machine's suddenly emitting a high, warbling siren and a mechanized voice bellowing “
THIS WOMAN IS A THIEF! STOP HER! THIS WOMAN IS A THIEF!”

Instead of calling her a thief, the screen flashed a thank-you, wished her a pleasant day, and produced seventeen twenties and a single ten. Rose offered the young man standing behind her a nervous, no-eye-contact smile, then hurried back to her cab.

P
ortside was a low, wide building with plain sandstone-colored walls. Buses of all kinds—not just Greyhounds but Trailways, American Pathfinders, Eastern Highways, and Continental Expresses—ringed the terminal with their snouts pushed deep into the loading docks. To Rosie they looked like fat chrome piglets nursing at an exceedingly ugly mother.

She stood outside the main entrance, looking in. The terminal wasn't as crowded as she had half-hoped (safety in numbers) and half-feared (after fourteen years of seeing almost no one but her husband and the colleagues he sometimes brought home for a meal, she had developed more than a touch of agoraphobia), probably because it was the middle of the week and shouting distance from the nearest holiday. Still she guessed there must be a couple of hundred people in there, walking aimlessly around, sitting on the old-fashioned, high-backed wooden benches, playing the video games, drinking coffee in the snackbar, or queuing for tickets. Small children hung onto their mothers' hands, tilted their heads back, and bawled like lost calves at the faded logging mural on the ceiling. A loudspeaker that echoed like the voice of God in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic announced destinations: Erie, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Miami, Florida (the disembodied, echoing voice pronounced it
Miamuh);
Denver, Colorado.

“Lady,” a tired voice said. “Hey, lady, little help here. Little help, what do you say?”

She turned her head and saw a young man with a pale face and a flood of dirty black hair sitting with his back against one side of the terminal entrance. He was holding a cardboard sign in his lap.
HOMELESS & HAVE AIDS
, it read.
PLEASE “AID” ME.

“You got some spare change, don't you? Help me out? You'll be ridin in your speedboat on Saranac Lake long after I'm dead and gone. Whaja say?”

She felt suddenly strange and faint, on the edge of some mental and emotional overload. The terminal appeared to grow before her eyes until it was as large as a cathedral, and there was something horrifying about the tidal movements of the people in its aisles and alcoves. A man with a wrinkled, pulsing bag of flesh hanging from the side of his neck trudged past her with his head down, dragging a duffelbag after him by its string. The bag hissed like a snake as it slid along the dirty tile floor. A Mickey Mouse doll stuck out of the duffel's top, smiling blandly at her. The godlike announcer was telling the assembled travelers that the Trailways express to Omaha would be departing Gate 17 in twenty minutes.

I can't do this,
she thought suddenly.
I can't live in this world. It isn't just not knowing where the teabags and
Scrubbies are; the door he beat me behind was also the door that kept all this confusion and madness out. And I can never go back through it again.

For a moment a startlingly vivid image from her childhood Sunday-school class filled her mind—Adam and Eve wearing fig-leaves and identical expressions of shame and misery, walking barefoot down a stony path toward a bitter, sterile future. Behind them was the Garden of Eden, lush and filled with flowers. A winged angel stood before its closed gate, the sword in its hand glowing with terrible light.

“Don't you
dare
think of it that way!” she cried suddenly, and the man sitting in the doorway recoiled so strongly that he almost dropped his sign. “Don't you
dare!
”

“Jesus, I'm
sorry!
” the man with the sign said, and rolled his eyes. “Go on, if that's the way you feel!”

“No, I . . . it wasn't you . . . I was thinking about my—”

The absurdity of what she was doing—trying to explain herself to a beggar sitting in the doorway of the bus terminal—came home to her then. She was still holding two dollars in her hand, her change from the cabbie. She flung them into the cigar-box beside the young man with the sign and fled into the Portside terminal.

A
nother young man—this one with a tiny Errol Flynn moustache and a handsome, unreliable face—had set up a game she recognized from TV shows as three-card monte on top of his suitcase near the back of the terminal.

“Find the ace of spades?” he invited. “Find the ace of spades, lady?”

In her mind she saw a fist floating toward her. Saw a ring on the third finger, a ring with the words
Service, Loyalty,
and
Community
engraved on it.

“No thank you,” she said. “I never had a problem with that.”

His expression as she passed suggested he thought she had a few bats flying around loose in her belfry, but that was all right. He was not her problem. Neither was the man at the entrance who might or might not have AIDS, or the man with the bag of flesh hanging from his neck and the Mickey
Mouse doll poking out of his duffel. Her problem was Rose Daniels—check that, Rosie
McClendon
—and that was her
only
problem.

She started down the center aisle, then stopped as she saw a trash barrel. A curt imperative—
DON'T LITTER!
—was stencilled across its round green belly. She opened her purse, took out the ATM card, gazed down at it for a moment, then pushed it through the flap on top of the barrel. She hated to let it go, but at the same time she was relieved to see the last of it. If she kept it, using it again might become a temptation she couldn't resist . . . and Norman wasn't stupid. Brutal, yes. Stupid, no. If she gave him a way to trace her, he would. She would do well to keep that in mind.

She took in a deep breath, held it for a second or two, then let it out and headed for the
ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES
monitors clustered at the center of the building. She didn't look back. If she had, she would have seen the young man with the Errol Flynn moustache already rummaging in the barrel, looking for whatever it was the ditzy lady in the sunglasses and bright red kerchief had eighty-sixed. To the young man it had looked like a credit card. Probably not, but you never knew stuff like that for sure unless you checked. And sometimes a person got lucky. Sometimes? Hell,
often.
They didn't call it the Land of Opportunity for nothing.

T
he next large city to the west was only two hundred and fifty miles away, and that felt too close. She decided on an even bigger one, five hundred and fifty miles farther on. It was a lakeshore city, like this one, but in the next timezone. There was a Continental Express headed there in half an hour. She went to the bank of ticket windows and got into line. Her heart was thumping hard in her chest and her mouth was dry. Just before the person in front of her finished his transaction and moved away from the window, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and stifled a burp that burned coming up and tasted of her morning coffee.

You don't dare use either version of your name here,
she cautioned herself.
If they want a name, you have to give another one.

“Help you, ma'am?” the clerk asked, looking at her over a pair of half-glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.

“Angela Flyte,” she said. It was the name of her best chum in junior high, and the last friend she had ever really made. At Aubreyville High School, Rosie had gone steady with the boy who had married her a week after her graduation, and they had formed a country of two . . . one whose borders were usually closed to tourists.

“Beg your pardon, ma'am?”

She realized she had named a person rather than a place, and how odd

(this guy's probably looking at my wrists and neck, trying to see if the straitjacket left any marks)

it must have sounded. She blushed in confusion and embarrassment, and made an effort to clutch at her thoughts, to put them in some kind of order.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and a dismal premonition came to her: whatever else the future might hold, that simple, rueful little phrase was going to follow her like a tin can tied to a stray dog's tail. There had been a closed door between her and most of the world for fourteen years, and right now she felt like a terrified mouse who has misplaced its hole in the kitchen baseboard.

The clerk was still looking at her, and the eyes above the amusing half-glasses were now rather impatient. “Can I help you or not, ma'am?”

“Yes, please. I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?”

“Oh, I guess about forty. One way or round trip?”

“One way,” she said, and felt another flush warm her cheeks as the enormity of what she was saying came home to her. She tried to smile and said it again, with a little more force: “One way, please.”

“That's fifty-nine dollars and seventy cents,” he said, and she felt her knees grow weak with relief. She had been expecting a much higher fare; had even been prepared for the possibility that he would ask for most of what she had.

“Thank you,” she said, and he must have heard the honest gratitude in her voice, because he looked up from the form he was drawing to him and smiled at her. The impatient, guarded look had left his eyes.

“A pleasure,” he said. “Luggage, ma'am?”

“I . . . I don't have any luggage,” she said, and was suddenly afraid of his gaze. She tried to think of an explanation—surely it must sound suspicious to him, an unaccompanied woman headed for a far-off city with no luggage except her purse—but no explanation came. And, she saw, that was all right. He wasn't suspicious, wasn't even curious. He simply nodded and began to write up her ticket. She had a sudden and far from pleasant realization: she was no novelty at Portside. This man saw women like her all the time, women hiding behind dark glasses, women buying tickets to different timezones, women who looked as if they had forgotten who they were somewhere along the way, and what they thought they were doing, and why.

R
osie felt a profound sense of relief as the bus lumbered out of the Portside terminal (on time), turned left, re-crossed the Trunkatawny, and then got on I-78 heading west. As they passed the last of the three downtown exits, she saw the triangular glass-sided building that was the new police headquarters. It occurred to her that her husband might be behind one of those big windows right now, that he might even be looking out at this big, shiny bus beetling along the Interstate. She closed her eyes and counted to one hundred. When she opened them again, the building was gone. Gone forever, she hoped.

She had taken a seat three quarters of the way back in the bus, and the diesel engine hummed steadily not far behind her. She closed her eyes again and rested the side of her face on the window. She would not sleep, she was too keyed-up to sleep, but she could rest. She had an idea she was going to need all the rest she could get. She was still amazed at how suddenly this had happened—an event more like a heart attack or a stroke than a change of life. Change? That was putting it mildly. She hadn't just changed it, she had uprooted it, like a woman tearing an African violet out of its pot. Change of life, indeed. No, she would never sleep. Sleep was out of the question.