‘I hope someone can,’ Rosie said, wiping at her cheeks with her free hand. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m in the city all by myself, I don’t know anyone, and I need a place to stay. If you’re all full I understand, but could I at least come in and sit for awhile and maybe have a glass of water?’
There was more silence. Rosie was reaching for the button again when the tinny voice asked who had sent her.
‘The man in the Travelers Aid booth at the bus station. David Slowik.’ She thought that over, then shook her head. ‘No, that’s wrong. Peter. His name was Peter, not David.’
‘Did he give you a business card?’ the tinny voice asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Please find it.’
She opened her purse and rummaged for what felt like hours. Just as fresh tears began to prick at her eyes and double her vision, she happened on the card. It had been hiding beneath a wad of Kleenex.
‘I have it,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to put it through the letter-slot?’
‘No,’ the voice said. ‘There’s a camera right over your head.’
She looked up, startled. There was indeed a camera mounted over the door and looking down at her with its round black eye.
‘Hold it up to the camera, please. Not the front but the back.’
As she did so, she remembered the way Slowik had signed the business card, making his signature as large as he possibly could. Now she understood why.
‘Okay,’ the voice said. ‘I’m going to buzz you inside.’
‘Thanks,’ Rosie said. She used the Kleenex to wipe at her cheeks but it did no good; she was crying harder than ever, and she couldn’t seem to stop.
7
That evening, as Norman Daniels lay on the sofa in his living room, looking up at the ceiling and already thinking of how he might begin the job of finding the bitch (a break, he thought, I need a break to start with, just a little one would probably be enough), his wife was being taken to meet Anna Stevenson. By then Rosie felt a strange but welcome calm — the sort of calm one might feel in a recognized dream. She half-believed she was dreaming.
She had been given a late breakfast (or perhaps it had been an early lunch) and then taken to one of the downstairs bedrooms, where she had slept like a stone for six hours. Then, before being shown into Anna’s study, she had been fed again — roast chicken, mashed potatoes, peas. She had eaten guiltily but hugely, unable to shake the idea that it was non-caloric dreamfood she was stuffing herself with. She finished with a goblet of Jell-O in which bits of canned fruit floated like bugs in amber. She was aware that the other women at the table were looking at her, but their curiosity seemed friendly. They talked, but Rosie could not follow their conversations. Somebody mentioned the Indigo Girls, and she at least knew who they were — she had seen them once on Austin City Limits while waiting for Norman to come home from work.
While they ate their Jell-O desserts, one of the women put on a Little Richard record and two other women danced the jitterbug, popping their hips and twirling. There was laughter and applause. Rosie looked at the dancers with a numb absence of interest, wondering if they were welfare lesbians. Later, when the table was cleared, Rosie tried to help but they wouldn’t let her.
‘Come on,’ one of the women said. Rosie thought her name was Consuelo. She had a wide, disfiguring scar under her left eye and down her left cheek. ‘Anna wants to meet you.’
‘Who’s Anna?’
‘Anna Stevenson,’ Consuelo said as she led Rosie down a short hall which opened off the kitchen. ‘Boss-lady.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘You’ll see.’ Consuelo opened the door of a room which had probably once been the pantry, but made no move to go in.
The room was dominated by the most fabulously cluttered desk Rosie had ever seen. The woman who sat behind it was a bit stout but undeniably handsome. With her short but carefully dressed white hair, she reminded Rosie of Beatrice Arthur, who had played Maude on the old TV sitcom. The severe white blouse/black jumper combination accentuated the resemblance even further, and Rosie approached the desk timidly. She was more than half convinced that, now that she had been fed and allowed a few hours’ sleep, she would be turned out onto the street again. She told herself not to argue or plead if that happened; it was their place, after all, and she was already two meals to the good. She wouldn’t have to stake out a piece of bus station floor, either, at least not yet — she still had money enough for several nights in a cheap hotel or motel. Things could be worse. A lot worse.
She knew that was true, but the woman’s crisp demeanor and direct blue eyes — eyes that must have seen hundreds of Rosies come and go over the years — still intimidated her.
‘Sit down,’ Anna invited, and when Rosie was seated in the room’s only other chair (she had to remove a stack of papers from the seat and put them on the floor beside her — the nearest shelf was full), Anna introduced herself and then asked Rosie for her name.
‘I guess it’s actually Rose Daniels,’ she said, ‘but I’ve gone back to McClendon — my maiden name. I suppose that isn’t legal, but I don’t want to use my husband’s name anymore.
He beat me, and so I left him.’ She realized that sounded as if she’d left him the first time he’d done it and her hand went to her nose, which was still a little tender up where the bridge ended. ‘We were married a long time before I got up the courage, though.’
‘How long a time are we talking about?’
‘Fourteen years.’ Rosie discovered she could no longer meet Anna Stevenson’s direct blue gaze. She dropped her eyes to her hands, which were knotted so tightly together in her lap that the knuckles were white.
Now she’ll ask why it took me so long to wake up, she thought. She won’t ask if maybe some sick part of me liked getting beaten up, but she’ll think it.
Instead of asking why about anything, the woman asked how long Rosie had been gone.
It was a question she found she had to consider carefully, and not just because she was now on Central Standard Time. The hours on the bus combined with the unaccustomed stretch of sleep in the middle of the day had disoriented her time-sense. ‘About thirty-six hours,’ she said after a bit of mental calculation. ‘Give or take.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Rosie kept expecting forms which Anna would either hand to Rosie or start filling in herself, but the woman only went on looking at her over the strenuous topography of her desk. It was unnerving. ‘Now tell me about it. Tell me everything.’
Rosie drew a deep breath and told Anna about the drop of blood on the sheet. She didn’t want to give Anna the idea that she was so lazy — or so crazy — that she had left her husband of fourteen years because she didn’t want to change the bed-linen, but she was terribly afraid that was how it must sound. She wasn’t able to explain the complex feelings that spot had aroused in her, and she wasn’t able to admit to the anger she had felt — anger which had seemed simultaneously new and like an old friend — but she did tell Anna that she had rocked so hard she had been afraid she might break Pooh’s Chair.
‘That’s what I call my rocker,’ she said, blushing so hard that her cheeks felt as if they might be on the verge of smoking. ‘I know it’s stupid— ‘
Anna Stevenson waved it off. ‘What did you do after you made your mind up to go? Tell me that.’
Rosie told her about the ATM card, and how she had been sure that Norman would have a hunch about what she was doing and either call or come home. She couldn’t bring herself to tell this severely handsome woman that she had been so scared she’d gone into someone’s back yard to pee, but she told about using the ATM card, and how much she’d drawn out, and how she’d come to this city because it seemed far enough away and the bus would be leaving soon. The words came out of her in bursts surrounded by periods of silence in which she tried to think of what to say next and contemplated with amazement and near-disbelief what she had done. She finished by telling Anna about how she’d gotten lost that morning, and showing her Peter Slowik’s card. Anna handed it back after a single quick glance.