guessed she had no more than a minute, possibly two, before everything let go. If that happened, she might as well kiss any chance of unnoticed escape goodbye. People might not remember a pale brownette walking up the sidewalk on a nice spring morning, but she didn’t see how they would be able to forget a pale brownette with a large dark stain spreading around the crotch of her jeans. She had to take care of this problem, and right away. There was a chocolate-colored bungalow two houses up her side of the street. The shades were pulled; three on newspapers lay on the porch. A fourth lay on the walk at the foot of the front steps. Rosie took a quick look around, saw no one observing her, then hurried across the lawn of the bungalow and down along its side. The back yard was empty. A rectangle of paper hung from the knob of the aluminum screen door. She went over, walking in cramped little steps, and read the printed message: Greetings from Ann Coses, your local Avon Lady! Didn’t find you at home this time, but will come again! Thanks! And give me a call at 555-1731 if you talk about any of Avon’s fine products! The date scribbled at the bottom was 4/17, two days ago. Rosie took another look around, saw that she was protected by hedges on one side and Russian olives on the other, unsnapped and unzipped her jeans, and squatted in the niche between the back stoop and the LP gas tanks. It was too late to worry about who, if anyone, might be watching from the upper stories of either neighboring house. And besides, the relief made such questions seem-for the time being, at least-trivial. You’re crazy, you know. Yes, of course she knew… but as the pressure on her bladder decreased and the stream of her urine flowed between the bricks of this back patio in a zigzag streamlet, she felt a crazy joy suddenly fill her heart. In that instant she knew what it must feel like to cross a river into a foreign country, and then set fire to the bridge behind you, and stand on the riverbank, watching and breathing deeply as your only chance of retreat went up in smoke.
She walked for nearly two hours, through one unfamiliar neighborhood after another, before coming to a strip mall on the west side of the city. There was a pay phone in front of Paint n Carpet World, and when she used it to call a taxi, she was amazed to discover she was no longer in the city at all, but in the suburb of Mapleton. She had big blisters on both heels, and she supposed it was no wonder-she must have walked over seven miles. The cab arrived fifteen minutes after her call, and by then she had visited the convenience store at the far end of the strip, where she got a pair of cheap sunglasses and a colorful red rayon kerchief. She remembered Norman saying once that if you wanted to divert attention from your face, the best way was to wear something bright, something which would direct the observer’s eye in a different direction. The cabbie was a fat man with unkempt hair, bloodshot eyes, bad breath. His baggy, faded tee-shirt showed a map of South Vietnam. WHEN I DIE I’ll GO TO HEAVEN
“CAUSE I SERVED MY TIME IN HELL, the words beneath the map read. IRON TRIANGLE, 1969. His beady red eyes scanned her quickly, passing from her lips to her breasts to her hips before appearing to lose interest.
“Where we going, dear?” he asked.
“Can you take me to the Greyhound depot?”
“You mean Portside?”
“Is that the bus terminal?”
“Yep.” He looked up and used the rear-view mirror to meet her eyes.
“That’s on the other side of the city, though. A twenty-buck fare, easy. Can you afford that?”
“Of course,” she said, then took a deep breath and added:
“Can you find a Merchant’s Bank ATM machine along the way, do you think?”
“All life’s problems should be so easy,” he said, and dropped the flag on his taximeter. $2.50, it read. BASE FARE. She dated the beginning of her new life from the moment the numbers in the taximeter window clicked from $2.50 to $2.75 and the words BASE FARE disappeared. She would not be Rose Daniels anymore, unless she had to be-not just because Daniels was his name, and therefore dangerous, but because she had cast him aside. She would be Rosie McClendon again, the girl who had disappeared into hell at the age of eighteen. There might be times when she would be forced to use her married name, she supposed, but even then she would continue to be Rosie McClendon in her heart and mind. 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.
The 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 WOMEN 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. Rosie offered the young man standing behind her a nervous, no-eye-contact smile, then hurried back to her cab.
Portside 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 amp; 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.
Another 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 handbag, 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
