Rose Madder by Stephen King
She had said the word; it came out of her mouth like a bolt of electricity. The wheels of Bill's Harley had left the road--for just a moment she had seen the front one, still spinning but now six inches above the pavement--and she had seen their shadow not beside them but somehow beneath them. Bill had twisted the hand-throttle and suddenly they were bolting up toward the bright blue sky, emerging from the lane the road made in the trees like a submarine coming to the surface of the ocean, and she had awakened in her bed with the covers balled up all around her, shivering and yet gasping in the hold of some deep heat which seemed hidden in the center of her, unseen but powerful, like the sun in eclipse.
She doubted very much if they would fly like that no matter how many magic words she tried, but she thought she would keep the flowers awhile longer, anyway. Perhaps even press a couple of them between the pages of this very book.
She had bought the book in Elaine's Dreams, the place where she had gotten her hair done. The title was Simple but Elegant: Ten Hairstyles You Can Do at Home. "These are good," Elaine had told her. "Of course you should always get your hair done by a professional, that's my view, but if you can't afford it every week, timewise or moneywise, and the thought of actually dialing the 800 number and ordering the Topsy Tail makes you feel like shooting yourself, this is a decent compromise. Just for Jesus' sake promise me that if some guy invites you to a country club dance in Westwood, you'll come see me first."
Rosie sat down and turned to Style #3, the Classic Plait ... which, the opening paragraph informed her, was also known as the Classic French Braid. She went through the black-and-white photographs which showed a woman first separating and then plaiting her hair, and when she reached the end, she began to work her way backward, undoing the plait. Unmaking it in the evening turned out to be a lot simpler than making it in the morning; it had taken her forty-five minutes and one good round of cursing to get it looking more or less the way it had when she'd left Elaine's Dreams the night before. It had been worth it, however; Pam's unabashed shriek of amazement in the Hot Pot was worth all of that and more.
As she finished her work, her mind turned to Bill Steiner (it had never been very far away from him), and she wondered if he would like her hair plaited. If he would like her hair blonde. Or if he would, in fact, notice either of these changes at all. She wondered if she would be unhappy if he didn't notice, then sighed and wrinkled her nose. Of course she would be. On the other hand, what if he not only noticed but reacted as Pam had (minus the squeal, of course)? He might even sweep her into his arms, as they said in the romance novels ...
She was reaching for her purse, wanting the comb inside, and beginning to slide into a harmless little fantasy of Saturday morning--of Bill tying the end of the plait with a piece of velvet ribbon, in fact (why he would happen to have a piece of velvet ribbon on his person could go completely unexplained; that was the nice thing about kitchen table daydreams)--when her thoughts were interrupted by a small sound from the far side of the room.
Reep. Reep-reep.
A cricket. The sound wasn't coming through the open window from Bryant Park, either. It was a lot closer than that.
Reep-reep. Reep-reep.
She swept her eyes along the baseboard and saw something jump. She got up, opened the cupboard to the left of the sink, and took down a glass mixing bowl. She walked across the room, pausing to pluck the Wal-Mart circular from the seat of the chair in the living-room area. Then she knelt by the insect, which had made its way almost into the unadorned south comer where she supposed she would put her TV, if she actually got around to buying one before moving out of here. After today, moving to a bigger place-and soon--seemed like more than just a daydream.
It was a cricket. How it had gotten up here to the second floor was a bit of a mystery, but it was definitely a cricket. Then the answer occurred to her, and it included the reason why she'd heard it when she was falling asleep. The cricket must have come up with Bill, probably in the cuff of his pants. A little extra present to go along with the flowers.
You didn't hear just one cricket the other night, Practical-Sensible spoke up suddenly. That particular voice hadn't gotten much use lately. It sounded rusty and a little hoarse. You heard a whole fieldful of crickets. Or a whole parkful.
Bullshit, she replied comfortably as she lowered the bowl over the insect and then slid the advertising circular under the lip, poking the bug with the corner of it until he hopped, letting her slide the paper entirely over the inverted mouth of the bowl. My mind just turned one cricket into a chorus, that's all. I was going to sleep, remember. I was probably half in a dream already.
She picked the bowl up and turned it over, holding the circular over the top so the cricket couldn't escape before she was ready for it to. It jumped energetically up and down meanwhile, its armored back ticking off a picture of the new John Grisham novel, which could be purchased at Wal-Mart for only sixteen dollars, plus tax. Humming "When You Wish Upon a Star," Rosie took the cricket over to the open window, removed the circular, and held the bowl out into space. Insects could fall from much greater heights than this and walk away unhurt (hop away, her mind amended) when they landed. She was sure she had read that somewhere, or perhaps seen it on some TV nature program.
"Go on, Jiminy," she said. "Be a good boy and hop. See the park over there? Tall grass, plenty of dew to drink, lots of girl crick--"
She broke off. The bug hadn't come upstairs in Bill's cuffs, because he'd been wearing jeans on Monday night, when he'd taken her out to dinner. She questioned her memory on that, wanting to be sure, and the same information came back quickly, and with no shade of doubt. Oxford shirt and Levi's with no cuffs. She remembered being comforted by his clothes; they were insurance that he wasn't going to try taking her to some fancy place where she would be stared at.
Bluejeans, no cuffs.
So where had Jiminy come from?
What did it matter? If the cricket hadn't come upstairs in one of Bill's pantscuffs, it had probably come up in someone else's, that was all, hopping out on the second-floor landing when it got a little restless-hey, t'anks for the ride, bud. Then it had simply slipped under her door, and what of that? She could think of less pleasant uninvited guests.
As if to express agreement with this, the cricket suddenly sprang out of the bowl and took the plunge.
"Have a nice day," Rosie said. "Stop by anytime. Really."
As she brought the bowl back inside, a minor gust of wind blew the Wal-Mart circular out from beneath her thumb and sent it seesawing lazily to the floor. She bent over to pick it up, then froze with her outstretched fingers still an inch away from it. Two more crickets, both dead, lay against the baseboard, one on its side and the other on its back with its little legs sticking up.
One cricket she could understand and accept, but three? In a second-floor room? How, exactly, did you explain that?
Now Rosie saw something else, something lying in the crack between two boards close to the dead crickets. She knelt, fished it out of the crack, and held it up to her eyes.
It was a clover flower. A tiny pink clover flower.
She looked down at the crack from which she had plucked it; she looked again at the pair of dead crickets; then she let her eyes climb slowly up the cream-colored wall ... to her picture, hanging there by the window. To Rose Madder (it was as good a name as any) standing on her hill, with the newly discovered pony cropping grass behind her.
Conscious of her heartbeat--a big slow muffled drum in her ears--Rosie leaned forward toward the picture, toward the pony's snout, watching the image dissolve into layered shades of old paint, beginning to see the brush-strokes. Below the muzzle were the forest-green and olive-green hues of the grass, which appeared to have been done in quick, layered downstrokes of the artist's brush. Dotted among them were small pink blobs. Clover.
Rosie looked at the tiny pink flower in the palm of her hand, then held it out to the painting. The color matched exactly. Suddenly, and with n
It didn't happen, of course. The pink flower struck the glass covering the painting (unusual for an oil to be covered with glass, Robbie had said on the day she met him), bounced off, and fluttered to the floor like a tiny shred of balled-up tissue-paper. Maybe the painting was magic, but the glass covering it clearly wasn't.
Then how did the crickets get out? You do think that's what happened, don't you? That the crickets and the clover flower somehow got out of the painting?
God help her, that was what she thought. She had an idea that when she was out of this room and with other people, the notion would seem ridiculous or fade away completely, but for now that was what she thought: the crickets had hopped out of the grass under the feet of the blonde woman in the rose madder chiton. They had somehow hopped from the world of Rose Madder and into that of Rosie McClendon.
How? Did they just sort of ooze through the glass?
No, of course not. That was stupid, but--
She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and lifted the painting off its hook. She took it into the kitchen area, set it on the counter, and then turned it around. The charcoaled words on the paper backing were more blurred than ever; she wouldn't have known for sure that they said ROSE MADDER if she hadn't seen them earlier.
Hesitantly, feeling afraid now (or perhaps she'd been afraid all along and was just now beginning to realize it), she touched the backing. It crackled when she poked it. Crackled too much. And when she poked at it lower down, where the brown paper disappeared into the frame, she felt something ... some things ...
She swallowed, and the back of her throat was so dry it hurt. She opened one of the counter drawers with a hand that didn't feel like her own, picked up a paring knife, and brought its blade slowly toward the brown paper backing.
Don't do it! Practical-Sensible shrieked. Don't do it. Rosie, you don't know what might come out of there!
She held the tip of the knife poised against the brown paper for a moment, then laid it aside for the time being. She lifted the picture and looked at the bottom of the frame, noting with some distant part of her mind that her hands were shaking very badly now. What she saw running through the wood--a crack at least a quarter-inch across at its widest point--didn't really surprise her. She set the picture back down on the counter, holding it up with her right hand and using her left--her smart hand--to bring the tip of the paring knife against the paper backing again.
Don't, Rosie. Practical-Sensible wasn't shrieking this time; she was moaning. Please don't do this, please leave well enough alone. Except that was ridiculous advice, when you thought about it; if she had followed it the first time Ms. P-S had given it, she would still be living with Norman. Or dying with him.
She used the knife to slit the backing, down low where she felt those bulges. Half a dozen crickets tumbled out onto the counter, four of them dead, one twitching feebly, the sixth frisky enough to hop off down the counter before tumbling into the sink. Along with the crickets came a few more pink clover-puffs, a few grass-cuttings ... and part of a brown dead leaf. Rosie picked this last up and looked at it curiously. It was an oak-leaf. She was almost sure of it.
Working carefully (and ignoring the voice of Practical-Sensible), Rosie used the paring knife to cut all the way around the paper backing. When she removed it, more rustic treasures fell out: ants (most dead but three or four still able to crawl), the plump corpse of a honeybee, several daisy-petals of the sort you were supposed to pluck from the central flower while chanting he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not ... and a few filmy white hairs. She held these up to the light, gripping the turned-around painting tighter with her right hand as a shudder went up her back like big feet climbing a set of stairs. If she took these hairs to a veterinarian and asked him to look at them under a microscope, Rosie knew what he'd tell her: they were horse-hairs. Or, more accurately, they were hairs from a small, shaggy pony. A pony that was currently cropping grass in another world.
I'm losing my mind, she thought calmly, and that wasn't the voice of Practical-Sensible; that was her own voice, the one which spoke for the central, integrated core of her thoughts and her self. It wasn't hysterical or goosey; it spoke rationally, calmly, and with a touch of wonder. It was, she suspected, the same tone in which her mind would acknowledge the inevitability of death, in the days or weeks when its approach could no longer be denied.
Except she didn't really believe she was losing her mind, not the way she would be forced to believe in the finality of, say, cancer, once it had progressed to a certain stage. She had opened the back of her picture and a bunch of grass, hair, and insects--some still alive--had fallen out. Was that so impossible to believe? She had read a story in the newspaper a few years back about a woman who had discovered a small fortune in perfectly good stock certificates hidden in the backing of an old family portrait; compared to that, a few bugs seemed mundane.
But still alive, Rosie? And what about the clover, still fresh, and the grass, still green? The leaf was dead, but you know what you're thinking about that--
She was thinking that it had blown through dead. It was summer in the picture, but you found dead leaves in the grass even in June.
So I repeat: I'm losing my mind.
Except the stuff was here, scattered all over her kitchen counter, a litter of bugs and grass.
Stuff.
Not dreams or hallucinations but real stuff.
And there was something else, the one thing she did not really want to approach head-on. This picture had talked to her. No, not out loud, but from the first moment she'd seen it, it had spoken to her, just the same. It had her name on the back--a version of it, anyway--and yesterday she had spent much more than she could afford to make her hair look like the hair of the woman in the picture.
Moving with sudden decisiveness, she inserted the flat of the paring knife's blade under the top part of the frame and levered upward. She would have stopped immediately if she'd sensed strong resistance--this was the only paring knife she had, and she didn't want to snap the blade off--but the nails holding the frame together gave easily. She pulled off the top, now using her free hand to keep the glass front from falling to the counter and shattering, and laid it aside. Another dead cricket clicked to the counter. A moment later she held the bare canvas in her hands. It was about thirty inches long and eighteen inches high, with the frame and the matting removed. Gently, Rose ran her fingers across the long-dried oil paints, feeling layers of minutely different heights, feeling even the fine-combed tracks left by the artist's brush. It was an interesting, slightly eerie sensation, but there was nothing supernatural about it; her finger did not slip through the surface and into that other world.
The phone, which she had bought and plugged into the wall-jack yesterday, rang for the first time. The volume was turned up all the way, and its sudden, shrill warble made Rosie jump and voice her own cry. Her hand tensed, and her outstretched finger almost poked through the painted canvas.
She laid the picture down on the kitchen table and hurried to the phone, hoping it was Bill. If it was, she thought she might invite him over--invite him to take a good look at her painting. And show him the assorted detritus that had fallen out of it. The stuff.
"Hello?"
"Hello, Rosie?" Not Bill. A woman. "It's Anna Stevenson."
"Oh, Anna! Hello! How are you?"
From the sink came a persistent reep-reep.
"I'm not doing too well," Anna said. "Not too well at all. Something very unpleasant has happened, and I need to tell you about it. It may not have anything to do with you-I hope with all my heart it doesn't-but it might."
Rosie s
Rosie listened with growing horror as Anna told her. When she had finished, she asked if Rosie wanted to come over to Daughters and Sisters, perhaps spend the night.
"I don't know," Rosie said numbly. "I'll have to think. I ... Anna, I have to call someone else now. I'll get back to you."
She hung up before Anna could reply, dialed 411, asked for a number, got it, dialed it.
"Liberty City," an older man's voice said.
"Yes, may I speak to Mr. Steiner?"
"This is Mr. Steiner," the slightly hoarse voice replied, sounding amused. Rosie was confused for a moment, then remembered that he was in business with his dad.
"Bill," she said. Her throat was dry and painful again. "Bill, I mean ... is he there?"
"Hold on, miss." A rustle and a clunk as the phone was laid down, and, distant: "Billy! It's a lady forya!"
Rosie closed her eyes. Very distantly, she heard the cricket in the sink: Reep-reep.
A long, unbearable pause. A tear slipped out from beneath the lashes of her left eye and started down her cheek. It was followed by one from her right, and a snatch of some old country song drifted through her mind: "Well, the race is on and here comes Pride up the backstretch ... Heartache is goin' to the inside ..." She wiped them away. So many tears she had wiped away in this life of hers. If the Hindus were right about reincarnation, she hated to think what she must have been in her last one.
The telephone was picked up. "Hello?" A voice she now heard in her dreams.
"Hello, Bill." It wasn't her normal speaking voice, not even a whisper, not really. It was more like the husk of a whisper.
"I can't hear you," Bill said. "Can you speak up, ma'am?"
She didn't want to speak up; she wanted to hang up. She couldn't, though. Because if Anna was right, Bill could be in trouble, too--very bad trouble. If, that was, he was perceived by a certain someone as being a little too close to her. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Bill? It's Rosie."