“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. Blue jeans, 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 skirting board, 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 muzzle, 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. Rose 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 no forethought at all, she raised her hand to the level of her lips and puffed the tiny flower toward the picture. She half-expected (no, it was more than that, actually; for a moment she was utterly positive) the tiny pink ball would float through the surface of the painting and enter that world which had been created by some unknown artist sixty, eighty, perhaps even a hundred years ago. 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 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 finger 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.