She was reaching for her bag, 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 skirting board 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
corner 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 bow l 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.
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.