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.
‘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 sat down, frightened now in a way she hadn’t been even when she had felt the shapes of dead insects hiding behind the backing of her picture. ‘What, Anna? What’s wrong?’
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,’ he 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.’
‘Rosie!’ he cried, sounding delighted. ‘Hey, how are you?’
His unaffected, undisguised delight only made it worse; all of a sudden it felt as if someone were twisting a knife in her guts. ‘I can’t go out with you on Saturday,’ she said, speaking
rapidly. The tears were coming faster now, oozing from beneath her eyelids like some nasty hot grease. ‘I can’t go out with you at all. I was crazy to think I could.’
‘Of course you can! Jesus, Rosie! What are you talking about?’
The panic in his voice — not the anger she had half-expected, but real panic — was bad, but somehow the bewilderment was worse. She couldn’t stand it.