And if she were too frightened to jump, Amanda would have to fumble her way through the dark to the corral for bales of alfalfa on which to stand.
She could hear her own unnatural breathing—gasp, hold, exhale. She longed for one of her increasingly rare cigarettes, but there wasn’t time even if any had been at hand. She threw back the bed coverlet, stripped off the top blanket, folded it, crossed to one of the flanking windows. And discovered that the screens were still in place.
“Oh, God!” she said fiercely aloud, and that was a mistake; it made an instant hole in her precarious self-possession.
The top wing nut holding the screen turned easily. The bottom one would not. At the other window the screen seemed destined to stay in place until the end of time, without tools. Amanda ran to the bureau, searched its top in vain for manicure scissors or tweezers or any other implement, and wrenched open the middle drawer. Perhaps among the jewelry in the leather case?
Fingers shaking because the hands on the bedside clock seemed to be picking up speed, she snatched out a pair of Zuni bracelets with tapering silver ends. The coral one was too thick to fit into the bottom nut’s narrow slot; the turquoise worked.
Amanda removed the screen, cranked the window open, pulled the tufted hassock into place, and stood Rosie on it. She said intensely, “We have to go home, Rosie, and the door doesn’t work so we have to use this window. I’ll go out first, and then you sit here—like this —and let go when I tell you and I’ll catch you. I won’t drop you, I promise.” She searched the small face with its remains of tears, not liking to use this particular prod, knowing that she had to. “Will you do that? We don’t like those men.”
Rosie nodded transfixedly. Amanda edged the hassock a little to one side, dropped the blanket out, and found that her coat was hindering. She unbuttoned it and flung it after the blanket, got one leg out and then the other, after some difficult pivoting, and dropped into the dark, only guessing where the ground was.
Her right ankle received a bolt of fire, and she had to steady herself against the house, head down, before she could bend awkwardly for her coat and put it on. She thought at first that the pain had dizzied her, but the night was actually in motion. The snow predicted for midnight had arrived ahead of schedule.
Although the window sill wasn’t more than six inches above her upreached arms, she was sharply worried about this unavoidable separation from the small creature inside the house. She called, “Rosie?” with a quickening of alarm, and the child appeared almost at once, one arm adorned with the Zuni bracelets. She was gazing down with solemn interest, her fear apparently forgotten in bemusement at these strange goings-on.
“Hold on tight, and sit down where I showed you,” instructed Amanda.
Slowly, doubtfully, Rosie obeyed. Amanda positioned herself, already braced for the shock to her throbbing ankle. “Now let go, Rosie.” She took an encouraging grip on the corduroyed legs. “Let yourself fall out.” To her disbelief, Rosie wagged her head. Even with the light behind her it was possible to see her confiding smile, her conviction that this was their private joke, that no adult would really expect her to do the kind of thing she had always been expressly forbidden.
Was the man who had snatched her from Amanda heading for the driveway right now? It would be far too dangerous to give a sudden yank at the dangling and bird-like legs. Amanda said in her steeliest voice, “Let go, Rosie. I’m not going to tell you again.”
Either because this was the Lopezes’ ultimate threat, or because she was taken off balance by the stern unfriendliness of someone she trusted, Rosie came plummeting in such a wildly neck-clasping fall that Amanda staggered briefly. Her ankle roared with pain. She gathered up the blanket, wrapped it envelopingly around her charge, and went past the end of the house at a limping run.
No night with snow on the ground was completely black, even to eyes dazzled by fierce concentration on a lighted window. Here was the driveway, clearly delineated, and there was her car, parked behind Mrs. Balsam’s. The very fact of escape so near seemed to tempt a sudden rocketing of headlights with someone dangerous behind them, and Amanda, terrified of dropping the keys, had trouble locating the lock.
But the door was finally open and Rosie in her cocoon of blanket deposited on the passenger seat. With the door closed and the button pushed down, a kind of trembling reaction, almost a lassitude, set in; for a few moments Amanda simply sat. Then, foot placed high on the accelerator, hoping to take most of the strain with her heel, she started the car, switched on her lights, set the wipers moving on the furred windshield. The snow fell straight and thick, a soundless white downpour.
Back in a fast arc; in fact, speed all the way home: The sooner she saw a policeman the better. She was not going to accomplish either. The car, pleasantly responsive since its major tune-up a month ago, bumped sluggishly in reverse like something waked out of a profound sleep in a junkyard.
For the second time in less than twenty minutes, Amanda came close to tears. She had never gotten around to buying a flashlight for the glove compartment because she seldom drove at night, but there were matches there. She got out of the car and circled it. All the tires had been slashed; they were not only flat but puddled.
Set out for that distant glimmer of light on foot, in the snow, carrying Rosie in the slipping blanket,
