“Rosie?” Anna asked softly.
“Are you here?”
“Yes,” she said, speaking in a little breathless rush.
“I’m here, and yes, I’m still afraid of him.” That’s not exactly surprising, you know. On some level I suppose you’ll always be afraid of him. But you’ll be ail right as long as you remember that you’re going to have longer and longer periods when you’re not afraid of anything… and when you don’t even think of him. But that isn’t exactly what I asked, either. I asked if you’re still afraid that he’ll come after you.” Yes, she was still afraid. No, not as afraid. She had heard a lot of his business-related telephone conversations over the last fourteen years, and she’d heard him and his colleagues discuss a lot of cases, sometimes in the rec room downstairs, sometimes out on the patio. They barely noticed her when she brought them warm-ups for their coffee or fresh bottles of beer. It was almost always Norman who led these discussions, his voice quick and impatient as he leaned over the table with a beer bottle half-buried in one big fist, hurrying the others along, overriding their doubts, refusing to entertain their speculations. On rare occasions he had even discussed cases with her. He wasn’t interested in her ideas, of course, but she was a handy wall against which to bounce his own. He was quick, a man who wanted results yesterday, and he had a tendency to lose interest in cases once they were three weeks old. He called them what Gert had called her self-defense moves: leftovers. Was she a leftover to him now? How much she wanted to believe that. How hard she had tried. And yet, she couldn’t… quite… do it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“A part of me thinks that if he was going to show up, he would have already. But there’s another part that thinks he’s probably still looking. And he’s not a truck-driver or a plumber; he’s a cop. He knows how to look for people.” Anna nodded.
“Yes, I know. That makes him especially dangerous, and that means you’ll have to be especially careful. It’s also important for you to remember you’re not alone. The days when you were are over for you, Rosie. Will you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And if he does show up, what will you do?” “slam the door in his face and lock it.”
“And then?”
“Call 911.”
“With no hesitation?”
“None at all,” she said, and that was the truth, but she would be afraid. Why? Because Norman was a cop and they would be cops, the people she called. Because she knew Norman had a way of getting his way-he was an alpha-dog. Because of what Norman had told her, again and again and again: that all cops were brothers.
“And after you called 911? What would you do then?”
“I’d call you.” Anna nodded.
“You’re going to be fine. Absolutely fine.”
“I know.” She spoke with confidence, but part of her still wondered… would always wonder, she supposed, unless he showed up and took the matter out of the realm of speculation. If that happened, would all of this life she had lived over the last month and a half-D amp; S, the Whitestone Hotel, Anna, her new friends-fade like a dream on waking the moment she opened her door to an evening knock and found Norman standing there? Was that possible? Rosie’s eyes shifted to her picture, leaning against the wall beside the door to the office, and knew it was not. The picture was facing inward so only the backing showed, but she found she could see it anyway; already the image of the woman on the hill with the thundery sky above and the half-buried temple below was crystal clear in her mind, not the least dreamlike. She didn’t think anything could turn her picture into a dream. And with luck, these questions of mine will never have to be answered, she thought, and smiled a little.
“What about the rent, Anna? How much?”
“Three hundred and twenty dollars a month. Will you be all right for at least two months?”
“Yes.” Anna knew that, of course; if Rosie hadn’t had enough runway to assure her of a safe take-off, they would not have been having this discussion.
“That seems very reasonable. As far as the room-rent goes, I’ll be fine to start with.”
“To start with,” Anna repeated. She steepled her fingers under her chin and directed a keen look across the cluttered desk at Rosie.
“Which brings me to the subject of your new job. It sounds absolutely wonderful, and yet at the same time it sounds…”
“Iffy? Impermanent?” These were words which had occurred to her on her walk home… along with the fact that, despite Robbie Lefferts’s enthusiasm, she didn’t really know if she could do this job yet, and wouldn’t-not for sure-until next Monday morning. Anna nodded.
“They aren’t the words I would have chosen myself-I don’t know what words would be, exactly-but they’ll do. The point is, if you leave the Whitestone, I can’t absolutely guarantee I could get you back in, especially on short notice. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority.”
“Of course. I understand that.”
“I’d do what I could, naturally, but-”
“If the job Mr Lefferts offered me doesn’t pan out, I’ll look for work waitressing,” Rosie said quietly.
“My back is much better now, and I think I could do it. Thanks to Dawn, I can probably get a late-shift job in a Seven-Eleven or a Piggly-Wiggly, if it comes to that.” Dawn was Dawn Verecker, who gave rudimentary clerking lessons on a cash register that was kept in one of the back rooms. Rosie had been an attentive student. Anna was still looking at Rosie keenly.
“But you don’t think it will come to that, do you?”
“No.” She directed another glance down at her picture.
“I think it will work out. In the meantime, I owe you so much…”
“You know what to do about that, don’t you?”
“Pass it on.” Anna nodded.
“That’s right. If you should see a version of yourself walking down the street someday-a woman who looks lost and afraid of her own shadow-just pass it on.”
“Can I ask you something, Anna?”
“Anything at all.”
“You said your parents founded Daughters and Sisters. Why? And why do you carry it on? Or pass it on, if you like that better?” Anna opened one of her desk drawers, rummaged, and brought out a thick paperback book. She tossed it across the desk to Rosie, who picked it up, stared at it, and experienced a moment of recall so vivid it was like one of the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes suffered. In that instant she did not just remember the wetness on the insides of her thighs, a sensation like small, sinister kisses, but seemed to re-experience it. She could see Norman’s shadow as he stood in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She could see his shadow-fingers pulling restlessly at a shadow-cord. She could hear him telling the person on the other end that of course it was an emergency, his wife was pregnant. And then she saw him come back into the room and start picking up the pieces of the paperback he had torn out of her hands before beginning to hit her. The same redhead was on the cover of the book Anna had tossed her. This time she was dressed in a ballgown and caught up in the arms of a handsome gypsy who had flashing eyes and-apparently-a pair of rolled-up socks in the front of his breeches. This is the trouble, Norman had said. How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?
“Rose?” It was Anna, sounding concerned. She also sounded very far away, like the voices you sometimes heard in dreams.
“Rose, are you all right?” She looked up from the book (Misery’s Lover, the title proclaimed in that same red foil, and, below it, Paul Sheldon’s Most Torrid Novel!) and forced a smile.
“Yes, I’m fine. This looks hot.”
“Bodice-rippers are one of my secret vices,” Anna said.
“Better than chocolate because they don’t make you fat and the men in them are better than real men because they don’t call you at four in the morning, drunk and whining for a second chance. But they’re trash, and do you know why?”
Rosie shook her head.
“Because the whole round world is explained in them. There are reasons for everything. They may be as farfetched as the stories in the supermarket tabloids and they may run counter to everything a halfway intelligent person understands about how people behave in real life, but they’re there, by God. In a book like Misery’s Lover, Anna Stevenson would undoubtedly run Daughters and Sisters because she had been an abused woman herself… or because her mother had been. But I was never abused, and so far as I know, my mother never was, either. I was often ignored by my husband-we’ve been divorced for twenty years, in case Pam or Gert hasn’t told you-but never abused. In life, Rosie, people sometimes do things, both bad and good, just-because. Do you believe that?” Rosie nodded her head slowly. She was thinking of all the times Norman had hit her, hurt her, made her cry… and then one night, for no reason at all, he might bring her half a dozen roses and take her out to dinner. If she asked why, what the occasion was, he usually just shrugged and said he “felt like treating her.” Just-because, in other words. Mommy, why do I have to go to bed at eight even in the summertime, when the sky is still light outside? Just-because. Daddy, why did grandpa have to die? Just-because. Norman undoubtedly thought these occasional treats and whirlwind dates made up for a lot, that they must offset what he probably thought of as his “bad temper.” He would never know (and never understand even if she told him) that they terrified her even more than his anger and his bouts of rage. Those, at least, she knew how to deal with.