Rose Madder (69 page)

It was Norman's Police Academy ring.

She slipped it over her thumb, turning it this way and that, letting the light from the frosted glass of the bathroom window shine off the words
Service, Loyalty, Community.
She shivered again, and for a moment or two she fully expected Norman to coalesce around this baleful talisman.

Half a minute later, with Dorcas's bottle safely stowed in the medicine cabinet, she hurried back to the rumpled bed, this time not smelling the fragrance of man and woman that still lingered there. It was the nighttable she was thinking about and looking at. It had a drawer. She would put the ring in there for now. Later she would think what to do with it; for now all she wanted was to get it out of sight. It wouldn't be safe to leave it out, that was for sure. Lieutenant Hale was likely to drop in later, armed with a few new questions and a lot of old ones, and it wouldn't do for him to see Norman's Police Academy ring. It wouldn't do at all.

She opened the drawer, reached forward to drop the ring in . . . and then her hand froze.

There was something else in the drawer already. A scrap of blue cloth, carefully folded over to make a packet. Rose madder stains were scattered across it; they looked to her like drops of half-dried blood.

“Oh my God,” Rosie whispered. “The
seeds!”

She took out the packet that was once part of a cheap cotton nightgown, sat on the bed (her knees suddenly felt too
weak to hold her), and laid the packet on her lap. In her mind she heard Dorcas telling her not to taste the fruit, or to even put the hand which touched the seeds into her mouth. A pomegranate tree, she had called it, but Rosie didn't think that was what it was.

She unfolded the sides of the little packet and looked down at the seeds. Her heart was running like a racehorse in her chest.

Dassn't keep them,
she thought.
Dassn't, dassn't.

Leaving her late husband's ring beside the lamp, at least for the time being, Rosie got up and went into the bathroom again, the open cloth held on her palm. She didn't know how long Bill had been gone, she had lost track of time, but it had been quite awhile.

Please,
she thought,
let the bagel line at the deli be long.

She put up the ring of the toilet seat, knelt down, and plucked the first seed off the cloth. It had occurred to her that this world might have robbed the seeds of their magic, but the tips of her fingers went numb immediately, and she knew that was not the case. It wasn't as if her fingers had been cold-numbed; it was more as if the seeds had communicated some strange amnesia to her very flesh. Nevertheless, she held the seed for a moment, looking at it fixedly.

“One for the vixen,” she said, and threw it into the bowl. At once the water bloomed a sinister rose madder red. It looked like the residue of a sliced wrist or a cut throat. The smell that drifted up to her wasn't blood, however; it was the bitter, slightly metallic aroma of the stream behind the Temple of the Bull. It was so strong it made her eyes water.

She plucked the second seed off the cloth and held it in front of her eyes.

“One for Dorcas,” she said, and threw it into the bowl. The color deepened—it was now not the color of blood but of clots—and the smell was so strong that tears went rolling down her cheeks. Her eyes were as red as the eyes of a woman elbow-deep in chopped onions.

She plucked the last seed off the cloth and held it in front of her eyes.

“And one for me,” she said. “One for Rosie.”

But when she tried to throw this one into the bowl, her fingers wouldn't let go of it. She tried again, with the same result. Instead, the voice of the madwoman filled her mind,
and it spoke with a persuasive sanity:
Remember the tree. Remember the tree, little Rosie. Remember—

“The tree,” Rosie murmured. “Remember the tree, yes, got that, but
what
tree? And what should I do? What in God's name should I do?”

I don't know,
Practical-Sensible answered,
but whatever you do, you better do it fast. Bill could come back any minute. Any second.

She flushed the john, watching as the reddish-purple liquid was replaced by clear water. Then she went back to the bed, sat on it, and stared at the last seed lying on the stained cotton cloth. From the seed she looked to Norman's ring. Then she looked back at the seed.

Why can't I throw this damned thing away?
she asked herself.
Never mind the goddamn tree, just tell me why in God's name I can't throw this last seed from it away, and be done with it.

No answer came. What did was the excited pop and burble of an approaching motorcycle, drifting in through the open window. She already recognized the sound of Bill's Harley. Quickly, asking no more questions of herself, Rosie put the ring in the soft blue swatch of cloth along with the seed. Then she refolded it, hurried across to the bureau, and took her purse off the top. It was scuffed and dowdy, this purse, but it meant a lot to her—it was the one she had brought out of Egypt with her that spring. She opened it and put the little blue packet inside, stuffing it all the way to the bottom, where it would lie even more securely hidden than the ceramic bottle in the medicine cabinet. With that done, she went over to the open window and began breathing in great lungfuls of fresh air.

When Bill came in with a fat Sunday paper and an outrageous number of bagels stuffed into a paper bag, Rosie turned to him with a brilliant smile. “What kept you?” she asked, and thought to herself:
What a fox you are, little Rosie. What a f—

The smile on his face, the answer to hers, suddenly faltered. “Rosie? Are you all right?”

Her smile brightened again. “Fine. I guess a goose just walked over my grave.”

Except it hadn't been a goose.

M
ay I give you one piece of advice before I send you back?
Rose Madder had asked, and late that afternoon, after Lieutenant Hale had brought them the shocking news about Anna Stevenson (who hadn't been discovered until that morning, due to her oft-expressed dislike of unauthorized visitors in her office) and then departed, Rosie took that advice. It was Sunday, but Hair 2000 at the Skyview Mall was open. The hairdresser to whom she was assigned understood what Rosie wanted, but protested briefly.

“It looks so pretty this way!” she said.

“Yes, I guess it does,” Rosie replied, “but I hate it anyway.”

So the beautician did her thing, and the surprised protests she expected from Bill when she saw him that evening did not come.

“Your hair's shorter, but otherwise you look the way you did when you first came into the shop,” he said. “I think I like that.”

She hugged him. “Good.”

“Want Chinese for supper?”

“Only if you promise to stay over again.”

“All promises should be so easy to keep,” he said, smiling.

M
onday's headline:
ROGUE COP SPOTTED IN WISCONSIN

Tuesday's headline:
POLICE MUM ON KILLER COP DANIELS

Wednesday's headline:
ANNA STEVENSON CREMATED;
2,000
IN SILENT MEMORIAL MARCH

Thursday's headline:
DANIELS MAY BE DEAD BY OWN HAND, INSIDERS SPECULATE

On Friday, Norman moved to page two.

By the following Friday, he was gone.

S
hortly after July 4th, Robbie Lefferts put Rosie to work reading a novel about as far from the works of “Richard Racine” as it was possible to get:
A Thousand Acres,
by Jane Smiley. It was the story of an Iowa farm family, except that wasn't what it
really
was; Rosie had been costume designer in the high-school drama society for three years, and although she had never trod a single step in front of the footlights, she still recognized Shakespeare's mad king when she encountered him. Smiley had put Lear in biballs, but crazy is still crazy.

She had also turned him into a creature that reminded Rosie fearfully of Norman. On the day she finished the book (“Your best job so far,” Rhoda told her, “and one of the best readings I've ever heard”), Rosie went back to her room and took the old frameless oil painting out of the closet where it had been ever since the night of Norman's . . . well, disappearance. It was the first time she had looked at it since that night.

What she saw didn't surprise her that much. It was daylight in the picture again. The hillside was the same, overgrown and rather ragged, and the temple down below was the same (or
about
the same; Rosie had a sense that the temple's queerly skewed perspective had somehow changed, become normal), and the women were still gone. Rosie had an idea that Dorcas had taken the madwoman to see her baby one last time . . . and then Rose Madder would be going on alone, to whatever place creatures like her went when the hour of their deaths had at last rolled around.

She took the picture down the hall to the incinerator chute, holding it carefully by the sides as she had held it before—holding it as if she feared her hand would slide right through into that other world, if she should be careless. In truth, she did fear something like that.

At the incinerator shaft she paused again, looking fixedly one last time at the picture which had called to her from its dusty pawnshop shelf, called with a tongueless, imperative voice that could have belonged to Rose Madder herself.
And probably did,
Rosie thought. She lifted one hand toward the
door of the incinerator chute, then paused, her eye caught by something she'd missed before: two shapes in the tall grass a little way down the hill. She ran a finger lightly over the painted surface of those shapes, frowning, trying to think what they might be. After a few moments it came to her. The little blob of clover-pink was her sweater. The black blob beside it was the jacket Bill had loaned her for the motorcycle ride out Route 27 that day. She didn't care about the sweater, it was just a cheap Orlon thing, but she was sorry about the jacket. It wasn't new, but there had been good years left in it, just the same. Besides, she liked to return the things people loaned her.

She had even used Norman's bank card just that once.

She looked at the painting, then sighed. No sense keeping it; she would be leaving the little room Anna had found for her soon, and she had no intention of dragging any more of the past with her than necessary. She supposed she was stuck with the part of it that was lodged in her head like bullet-fragments, but—

Remember the tree, Rosie,
a voice said, and this time it sounded like Anna's voice—Anna who had helped her when she had needed help, when she'd had no one else to turn to, Anna for whom she hadn't been able to mourn as she'd wanted to . . . although she had cried rivers for sweet Pam, with her pretty blue eyes always trained for “someone interesting.” Yet now she felt a sting of sorrow that made her lips quiver and her nose prickle.

“Anna, I'm sorry,” she said.

Never mind.
That voice, dry and slightly arrogant.
You didn't make me, you didn't make Norman, and you don't have to accept responsibility for either of us. You're Rosie McClendon, not Typhoid Mary, and you'd do well to remember that when storms of melodrama threaten to engulf you. But you have to remember—

“No, I don't,” she said, and slammed the painting together on itself, like someone closing a book with authority. The old wood upon which the canvas had been stretched snapped. The canvas itself did not so much tear as explode into strips which hung like rags. The paint on these rags was dim and meaningless. “No, I don't. Not
anything,
if I don't want to, and I
don't.”

Those who forget the past—

“Fuck
the past!” Rosie cried.

I repay,
a voice answered. It whispered; it cajoled. It warned.

“I don't hear you,” Rosie said. She pulled the flap of the incinerator open, felt warmth, smelled soot. “I don't hear you, I'm not listening, it's over.”

She shoved the torn and folded picture through the door, mailing it like a letter intended for someone in hell, then stood on tiptoe to watch it fall toward the flames far below.

I
n October, Bill takes her out to the Shoreland picnic area again. This time they go in his car; it's a pretty fall day, but too chilly for the motorcycle. Once they're there, with a picnic spread before them and the wood around them flaming with fall color, he asks her what she has known for some time that he means to ask her.

“Yes,” she says. “As soon as the decree comes through.”

He hugs her, kisses her, and as she tightens her arms around his neck and closes her eyes, she hears the voice of Rose Madder deep in her head:
All accounts now balance . . . and if you remember the tree, it will never matter, anyway.

What
tree, though?

Tree of Life?

Tree of Death?

Tree of Knowledge?

Tree of Good and Evil?

Rosie shudders and hugs her husband-to-be even tighter, and when he cups her left breast in his hand, he marvels at the feel of her heart pounding away so rapidly beneath it.

What
tree?

T
hey're married in a civil ceremony which takes place midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, ten days after Rosie's decree of nonresponsive divorce from Norman Daniels becomes final. On her first night as Rosie Steiner, she wakes to her husband's screams.