The jubilation and relief in that mental voice turned to wordless horror as she crossed quickly to the mantel above the gas fireplace he had installed two years before. What she was looking for probably wouldn’t be there, as a rule he only left it up there toward the end of the month (‘So I won’t be tempted,’ he would say), but it couldn’t hurt to check. And she knew his pin-number; it was just their telephone number, with the first and last digits reversed.
It WILL hurt! Practical-Sensible screamed. If you take some thing that belongs to him, it’ll hurt plenty, and you know it! PLENTY!
‘It won’t be there anyway,’ she murmured, but it was — the bright green Merchant’s Bank ATM card with his name embossed on it.
Don’t you take that! Don’t you dare!
But she found she did dare — all she had to do was call up the image of that drop of blood.
Besides, it was her card, too, her money, too; wasn’t that what the marriage vow meant?
Except it wasn’t about the money at all, not really. It was about silencing the voice of Ms Practical-Sensible; it was about making this sudden, unexpected lunge for freedom a necessity instead of a choice. Part of her knew that if she didn’t do that, the bottom of the block was as far as she would get before the whole uncertain sweep of the future appeared before her like a fogbank, and she turned around and came back home, hurrying to change the bed so she could still wash the downstairs floors before noon . . . and, hard as it was to believe, that was all she had been thinking about when she got up this morning: washing floors.
Ignoring the clamor of the voice in her head, she plucked the ATM card off the mantel, dropped it into her handbag, and quickly headed for the door again.
Don’t do it! the voice of Ms Practical-Sensible wailed. Oh Rosie, he won’t just hurt you for this, for this he’ll put you in the hospital, maybe even kill you — don’t you know that?
She supposed she did, but she kept walking just the same, her head down and her shoulders thrust forward, like a woman walking into a strong wind. He probably would do those things .
. . but he would have to catch her first.
This time when her hand closed on the knob there was no pause — she turned it and opened the door and stepped out. It was a beautiful sunshiny day in mid-April, the branches on the trees beginning to thicken with buds. Her shadow stretched across the stoop and the pale new grass like something cut from black construction paper with a sharp pair of scissors.
She stood there breathing deeply of the spring air, smelling earth which had been dampened (and perhaps quickened) by a shower that had passed in the night, while she had been lying asleep with one nostril suspended over that drying spot of blood.
The whole world is waking up, she thought. It isn’t just me.
A man in a jogging suit ran past on the sidewalk as she pulled the door closed behind her.
He lifted a hand to her, and she lifted hers in return. She listened for the voice inside to raise its clamor again, but that voice was silent. Perhaps it was stunned to silence by her theft of the ATM card, perhaps it had only been soothed by the tranquil peace of this April morning.
‘I’m going,’ she murmured. ‘I’m really, really going.’
But she stayed where she was a moment longer, like an animal which has been kept in a cage so long it cannot believe in freedom even when it is offered. She reached behind her and touched the knob of the door — the door that led into her cage.
‘No more,’ she whispered. She tucked her bag under one arm and took her first dozen steps into the fogbank which was now her future.
4
Those dozen steps took her to the place where the concrete walk merged with the sidewalk —
the place where the jogger had passed a minute or so before. She started to turn left, then paused. Norman had told her once that people who thought they were choosing directions at random — people lost in the woods, for example — were almost always simply going in the direction of their dominant hand. It probably wasn’t important, but she discovered she didn’t even want him to be right about which way she had turned on Westmoreland Street after leaving the house.
Not even that.
She turned right instead of left, in the direction of her stupid hand, and walked down the hill. She went past the Store 24, restraining an urge to raise her hand and cover the side of her face as she passed it. Already she felt like a fugitive, and a terrible thought had begun to gnaw at her mind like a rat gnawing cheese: what if he came home from work early and saw her? What if he saw her walking down the street in her jeans and lowtops, with her bag clamped under her arm and her hair uncombed? He would wonder what the hell she was doing out on the morning she was supposed to be washing the downstairs floors, wouldn’t he?
And he would want her to come over to him, wouldn’t he? Yes. He would want her to come over to where he was so he could talk to her up close.
That’s stupid. What reason would he have to come home now? He only left an hour ago. It doesn’t make sense.
No . . . but sometimes people did things that didn’t make sense. Her, for instance — look at what she was doing right now. And suppose he had a sudden intuition? How many times had he told her that cops developed a sixth sense after awhile, that they knew when something weird was going to happen? You get this little needle at the base of your spine, he’d said once.
I don’t know how else to describe it. I know most people would laugh, but ask a cop — he won’t laugh. That little needle has saved my life a couple of times, sweetheart.
Suppose he’d been feeling that needle for the last twenty minutes or so? Suppose it had gotten him into his car and headed home? This was just the way he would come, and she cursed herself for having turned right instead of left when leaving their walk. Then an even more unpleasant idea occurred to her, one which had a hideous plausibility . . . not to mention a kind of ironic balance. Suppose he had stopped at the ATM machine two blocks down the street from police headquarters, wanting ten or twenty bucks for lunch? Suppose he had decided, after ascertaining that the card wasn’t in his wallet, to come home and get it?
Get hold of yourself. That isn’t going to happen. Nothing like that is going to happen.
A car turned onto Westmoreland half a block down. It was red, and what a coincidence that was, because they had a red car . . . or he did; the car was no more hers than the ATM
card was, or the money it could access. Their red car was a new Sentra, and — coincidence upon coincidence! — wasn’t this car now coming toward her a red Sentra?
No, it’s a Honda!
Except it wasn’t a Honda, that was just what she wanted to believe. It was a Sentra, a brand-new red Sentra. His red Sentra. Her worst nightmare had come true at almost the very moment she had thought of it.
For a moment her kidneys were incredibly heavy, incredibly painful, incredibly full, and she was sure she was going to wet her pants. Had she really thought she could get away from him? She must have been insane.
Too late to worry about that now, Practical-Sensible told her. Its dithery hysteria was gone; now it was the only part of her mind which still seemed capable of thought, and it spoke in the cold, calculating tones of a creature that puts survival ahead of everything else. You just better think what it is you’re going to say to him when he pulls over and asks you what you’re doing out here. And you better make it good. You know how quick he is, and how much he sees.
‘The flowers,’ she muttered. ‘I came out to take a little walk and see whose flowers were
out, that’s all.’ She had stopped with her thighs pressed tightly together, trying to keep the dam from breaking. Would he believe it? She didn’t know, but it would have to do. She couldn’t think of anything else. ‘I was just going to walk down to the corner of St Mark’s Avenue and then come back to wash the — ‘