“Take it, take it! And don’t whine anymore! For the sake of every god that ever was, stop your stupid sheep’s whining!” Rosie reached out with a trembling hand and took the armlet. Although it had been against the blonde woman’s flesh, it felt cold. If she asks me to put it on, I don’t know what I’ll do, Rosie thought, but Rose Madder did not ask her to put it on. Instead she reached out with her mottled hand and pointed toward the olive tree. The easel was gone, and the picture-like the one in her room-had grown to an enormous size. It had changed, as well. It still showed the room on Trenton Street, but now there was no woman facing the door. The room was in darkness. Just a fluff of blonde hair and a single bare shoulder showed above the blanket on the bed. That’s me, Rosie thought in wonder. That’s me sleeping and having this dream.
“Go on,” Rose Madder said, and touched the back of her head. Rosie took a step toward the picture, mostly to get away from even the lightest touch of that cold and awful hand. As she did, she realized she could hear-very faintly-the sound of traffic. Crickets jumped around her feet and ankles in the high grass.
“Go on, little Rosie Real. Thank you for saving my baby.”
“Our baby,” Rosie said, and was instantly horrified. A person who corrected this woman had to be insane herself. But the woman in the reddish-purple chiton sounded amused rather than angry when she replied.
“Yes, yes, if you like-our baby. Go on, now. Remember what you have to remember, and forget what you need to forget. Protect yourself while you are outside the circle of my regard.” You bet, Rosie thought. And I won’t be coming around, looking for favors, you can count on it. That would be like hiring Idi Amin to cater a garden-party, or Adolf Hitler to-The thought broke off as she saw the woman in the painting shift in her bed and pull the blanket up over her exposed shoulder. Not a painting, not anymore. A window.
“Go on,” the woman in the red dress said softly.
“You done fine. Get gone before she change her mind “bout how she feel.” Rosie stepped toward the picture, and from behind her Rose Madder spoke again, her voice neither sweet nor husky now but loud and harsh and murderous:
“And remember: I repay!” Rosie’s eyes winced shut at this unexpected shout, and she lunged forward, suddenly sure that the woman in the chiton had forgotten the service Rosie had done her and had decided to kill her after all. She tripped over something (the bottom edge of the painting, perhaps?) and then there was a sense of falling. She had time to feel her stomach turn over like a circus tumbler, and then there was only darkness, rushing past her eyes and ears. In it she seemed to hear some ominous sound, distant but drawing closer. Perhaps it was the sound of trains in the deep tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, perhaps it was the rumble of thunder, or perhaps it was the bull Erinyes, running the blind depths of his maze with his head down and his short, sharp horns sorting the air. Then, for a little while, at least, Rosie knew nothing at all.
She floated silently and thoughtlessly, like an undreaming embryo in its placental sac, until seven o’clock in the morning. Then the Big Ben beside the bed tore her out of sleep with its ruthless howl. Rosie sat bolt-upright, flailing at the air with hands like claws and crying out something she didn’t understand, words from a dream that was already forgotten: “don’t make me look at you! Don’t make me look at you! Don’t make me! Don’t make me!” Then she saw the cream-colored walls, and the sofa that was really just a loveseat with delusions of grandeur, and the light flooding in through the window, and used these things to lock in the reality she needed. Whoever she might have been or wherever she might have gone in her dreams, she was now Rosie McClendon, a single woman who recorded audio-books for a living. She had stayed for a long time with a bad man, but had left him and met a good one. She lived in a room at 897 Trenton Street, second floor, end of the hall, good view of Bryant Park. Oh, and one other thing. She was a single woman who never intended to eat another foot-long hotdog in her life, especially one smothered in sauerkraut. They did not agree with her, it seemed. She couldn’t remember what she had dreamed (remember what you have to remember and forget what you need to forget) but she knew how it had started: with her walking into that damned painting like Alice going through the looking-glass. Rosie sat where she was for a moment, wrapping herself in her Rosie Real world as firmly as she could, then reached out for the relentless alarm-clock. Instead of gripping it, she knocked it onto the floor. It lay there, bawling its excited, senseless cry.
“Hire the handicapped, it’s fun to watch em,” she croaked. She leaned over and groped for the clock, fascinated all over again by the blonde hair she saw from the corner of her eye, locks so fabulously unlike those of that obedient little creepmouse Rose Daniels. She got hold of the clock, felt with her thumb for the stud that shut off the alarm, and then paused as something else registered. The breast pressing against her right forearm was naked. She silenced the alarm, then sat up with the clock still in her left hand. She pushed down the sheet and light blanket. Her bottom half was as bare as her top half.
“Where’s my nightie?” she asked the empty room. She thought she had never heard herself sounding so exceptionally stupid… but of course, she wasn’t used to going to bed with her nightgown on and waking up naked. Even fourteen years of marriage to Norman had not prepared her for anything quite that peculiar. She put the clock back on the nighttable, swung her legs out of bed-“Ow!” she cried, both startled and frightened by the pain and stiffness in her hips and thighs. Even her butt hurt.
“Ow, ow, OW!” She sat on the edge of the bed and gingerly flexed her right leg, then her left. They moved, but they hurt, especially the right one. It was as if she’d spent most of yesterday doing the granddaddy of all workouts, rowing machine, treadmill, StairMaster, although the only exercise she had taken was her walk with Bill, and that had been no more than a leisurely stroll. The sound was like the trains in Grand Central Station, she thought. What sound? For a moment she thought she almost had it-had something, anyway-and then it was gone again. She got slowly and cautiously to her feet, stood beside the bed for a moment, then walked toward the bathroom. Limped toward the bathroom. Her right leg felt as if she had actually strained it somehow, and her kidneys ached. What in God’s name-? She remembered reading somewhere that people sometimes “ran” in their sleep. Perhaps that was what she had been doing; perhaps the jumble of dreams she couldn’t quite remember had been so horrible that she’d actually made an effort to run away from them. She stopped in the bathroom doorway and looked back at her bed. The bottom sheet was rumpled, but not twisted or tangled or pulled loose, as she would have expected if she had been really active in her sleep. Rosie saw one thing she didn’t like much, however, something that flashed her back to the bad old days with terrible and unexpected suddenness: blood. They were the prints of thin lines rather than drops, however, and they were too far down to have come from a punched nose or a split lip… unless, of course, her sleeping movements had been so vigorous she’d actually turned around in her bed. Her next thought was that she’d had a visit from the cardinal (this was how her mother had insisted Rosie speak of her menstrual periods, if she had to speak of them at all), but it was entirely the wrong time of the month for that. Is it your time, girl? Is the moon full for you?
“What?” she asked the empty room.
“What about the moon?” Again, something wavered, almost held, and then floated away before she could grasp it. She looked down at herself, and one mystery was solved, at least. She had a scratch on her upper right thigh, quite a nasty one, from the look. That was undoubtedly where the blood on the sheet had come from. Did I scratch myself in my sleep? Is that what-This time the thought which came into her mind held a little longer, perhaps because it wasn’t a thought at all, but an image. She saw a naked woman-herself-edging carefully sideways along a path which was overgrown with thorn-bushes. As she turned on the shower and held one hand under the spray to test the temperature, she found herself wondering if you could bleed spontaneously in a dream, if the dream was vivid enough. Sort of like those people who bled from their hands and feet on Good Friday. Stigmata? Are you saying that on top of everything else, you’re suffering stigmata? I’m not saying anything because I don’t know anything, she answered herself, and how true that was. She supposed she could believe-just about barely-that a scratch might appear spontaneously on a sleeping person’s skin, matching a scratch that was occurring at that same moment in the person’s dream. It was a stretch, but not entirely out of the question. What was out of the question was the idea that a sleeping person could make the nightgown disappear right off her body simply by dreaming she was naked. (Take off that thing you’re wearing. (I can’t do that! I don’t have anything on underneath! (I won’t tell if you won’t…) Phantom voices. One she recognized as her own, but the other? It didn’t matter; surely it didn’t. She had taken her nightgown off in her sleep, that was all, or perhaps in a brief waking interlude which she now remembered no better than her weird dreams about running around in the dark or using white stepping-stones to cross streams of black water. She had taken it off, and when she got around to looking, she would no doubt find it wadded up under the bed.
“Right. Unless I ate it, or someth-” She pulled back the hand which had been testing the water and looked at it curiously. There were fading reddish-purple stains on the tips of her fingers, and a slightly brighter residue of the same stuff under her nails. She raised the hand slowly to her face, and a voice deep down in her mind-not the voice of Practical-Sensible this time, at least she didn’t think so-responded with unmistakable alarm. Dassn’t put the hand that touches the seeds into your mouth! Dassn’t, dassn’t!
“What seeds?” Rosie asked, frightened. She smelled her fingers and caught just a ghost of an aroma, a smell that reminded her of baking and sweet cooked sugar.”
What seeds? What happened last night? Is it-” She made herself stop there. She knew what she had been about to say, but didn’t want to hear the question actually articulated, hanging in the air like unfinished business: Is it still happening? She got into the shower, adjusted the water until it was as hot as she could take it, and then grabbed the soap. She washed her hands with particular care, scrubbed them until she could not see so much as a trace of that rose madder stain, even under her nails. Then she washed her hair, beginning to vocalize as she did so. Curt had suggested nursery rhymes in different keys and vocal registers, and that was what she did, keeping her voice low so not to disturb the people above or below her. When she got out five minutes later and dried off, her body was starting to feel a little more like real flesh and a little less like something constructed out of barbed wire and broken glass. Her voice had almost returned to normal, as well. She started to put on jeans and a tee-shirt, remembered that Rob Lefferts was taking her to lunch, and put on a new skirt instead. Then she sat down in front of the mirror to plait her hair. It was slow going, because her back, shoulders, and upper arms were also stiff. Hot water had improved the situation but not entirely cured it. Yes, it was a good-sized baby for its age, she thought, so absorbed in getting the plait just right that what she was thinking did not even really register. But as she was finishing, she looked into the mirror which reflected the room behind her and saw something which widened her eyes. The morning’s other, more minor discordancies slipped from her mind in an instant.
“Oh my God,” Rosie said in a strengthless little voice. She got up and walked across the room on legs which felt as nerveless as stilts. In most regards the picture was just the same. The blonde woman still stood on top of her hill with her plaited hair hanging down between her shoulderblades and her left arm raised, but now the hand shading her eyes made sense, because the thunderheads which had overhung the scene were gone. The sky above the woman in the short gown was the faded blue denim of a humid day in July. A few dark birds which hadn’t been there before circled in that sky, but Rosie hardly noticed them. The sky’s blue because the storm is over, she thought. It ended while I was… well… while I was somewhere else. All she could remember for sure about that somewhere else was that it had been dark and scary. That was enough; she didn’t want to remember any more, and she thought maybe she didn’t want to have her picture re-framed, after all. She knew she had changed her mind about showing it to Bill tomorrow, or even mentioning it. It would be bad if he saw the change from overcast and thunderheads to hazy sunshine, yes, but it would be even worse if he saw no change at all. That would mean she was losing her mind. I’m not sure I want the damned thing anymore at all, she thought. It’s scary. Do you want to hear something really hilarious? I think it might be haunted. She picked the unframed canvas up, holding the edges with her palms, denying her conscious mind access to the thought (careful Rosie don’t fall in) that caused her to handle it that way. There was a tiny closet to the right of the door leading out into the hall, with nothing in it yet but the lowtop sneakers she’d been wearing when she left Norman and a new sweater made out of some cheap synthetic stuff. She had to put the picture down in order to open the door (she could have tucked it under her arm long enough to free one hand, of course, but somehow didn’t like to do that), and when she picked it up again she paused, looking fixedly at it. The sun was out, definitely new, and there were big black birds circling in the sky above the temple, probably new, but wasn’t there something else, as well? Some other change? She thought so, and she thought she wasn’t seeing it because it wasn’t an addition but a deletion. Something was gone. Something-I don’t want to know, Rosie told herself brusquely. I don’t even want to think about it, so there. Yes, so there. But she was sorry to feel the way she did, because she’d begun by thinking of the picture as her personal good-luck charm, a kind of rabbit’s foot. And of one thing there was absolutely no doubt: it was thinking of Rose Madder, standing there so fearlessly on top of her hill, that had pulled her through on her first day in the recording studio, when she’d suffered the panic attack. So she didn’t want to be having these unpleasant feelings about the picture, and most assuredly didn’t want to be afraid of it… but she was. After all, the weather in oil-paintings usually didn’t clear up overnight, and the amount of stuff you could see in them usually didn’t grow and contract, as if some unseen projectionist were switching back and forth between lenses. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the picture in the long run, but she knew where it was going to spend today and the coming weekend: in the closet, keeping her old sneaks company. She put it in there, propped it against the wall (resisting an urge to turn it around so it would also face the wall), and then closed the door. With that done, she slipped into her only good blouse, took her bag, and left the room. As she walked down the long, dingy corridor leading to the stairs, two words whispered up from the very bottom of her mind: I repay. She stopped at the head of the stairs, shivering so violently she almost dropped her bag, and for a moment her right leg ached almost all the way up to her buttock, as if she had been struck with a savage cramp. Then it passed, and she went quickly down to the first floor. I won’t think about it, she told herself as she walked down the street to the bus stop. I don’t have to if I don’t want to, and I most definitely don’t want to. I’ll think about Bill instead. Bill, and his motorcycle.
