Rose Madder by Stephen King

Anna sighed.

‘There’s going to be a remembrance circle for him Saturday afternoon — we all sit around in folding chairs, like drunks at an AA meeting, and take turns talking about him. At least I think that’s what we do.’

‘It sounds nice.’

‘Do you think so?’ Anna asked. Rosie could imagine her arching her eyebrows in that unconsciously arrogant way of hers, and looking more like Maude than ever. xx7 think it sounds rather silly, but perhaps you’re right. Anyway, I’ll leave the picnic long enough to do that, but I’ll come back with only a few regrets. The battered women of this city have lost a friend, there’s no doubt about that much.’

‘If it was Norman who did it — ‘

‘I knew that was coming,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve been working with women who’ve been bent, folded, stapled, and mutilated for a lot of years, and I know the masochistic grandiosity they develop. It’s as much a part of the battered-woman syndrome as the disassociation and the depression. Do you remember when the space shuttle Challenger exploded?’

‘Yes . . .’ Rosie was mystified, but she remembered, all right.

‘Later that day, I had a woman come to me in tears. There were red marks all over her cheeks and arms; she’d been slapping and pinching herself. She said it was her fault those men and that nice woman teacher had died. When I asked why, she explained she’d written not one but two letters supporting the manned space program, one to the Chicago Tribune and one to the U.S. Representative from her district.

‘After awhile, battered women start accepting the blame, that’s all. And not just for some things, either — for everything.’

Rosie thought of Bill, walking her back to the Corn Building with his arm around her waist. Don’t say fault, he’d told her. You didn’t make Norman.

‘I didn’t understand that part of the syndrome for a long time,’ Anna said, ‘but now I think I do. Someone has to be to blame, or all the pain and depression and isolation make no sense.

You’d go crazy. Better to be guilty than crazy. But it’s time for you to get past that choice, Rosie.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Anna said calmly, and from there they had passed on to other subjects.

2

Twenty minutes after saying goodbye to Anna, Rosie lay in bed with her eyes open and her fingers laced together under her pillow, looking up into the darkness as faces floated through her mind like untethered balloons. Rob Lefferts, looking like Mr Pennybags on the yellow Community Chest cards; she saw him offering her the one that said Get Out of Jail Free.

Rhoda Simons with a pencil stuck in her hair, telling Rosie it was nylon stockings, not nylon strokings. Gert Kinshaw, a human version of the planet Jupiter, wearing sweatpants and a man’s V-necked undershirt, both size XXXL. Cynthia Someone (Rosie still couldn’t quite remember her last name), the cheerful punk-rocker with the tu-tone hair, saying she had once sat for hours in front of a picture where the river had actually seemed to be moving.

And Bill, of course. She saw his hazel eyes with the green undertints, saw the way his dark hair grew back from his temples, saw even the tiny circle of scar on his right earlobe, which he’d once had pierced (perhaps back in college, as the result of a drunken dare) and then allowed to grow back over. She felt the touch of his hand on her waist, warm palm, strong fingers; felt the occasional brush of her hip against his, and wondered if he had been excited, touching her. She was now willing to admit that the touch had certainly excited her. He was so different from Norman that it was like meeting a visitor from another star-system.

She closed her eyes. Drifted deeper.

Another face came floating out of the darkness. Norman’s face. Norman was smiling, but his gray eyes were as cold as chips of ice. I’m trolling for you, sweetie, Norman said. Lying in my own bed, not all that Jar away, and trolling for you. Pretty soon I’ll be talking to you.

Right up close, I’ll be talking to you. It should be a fairly short conversation. And when it’s over —

He raised his hand. There was a pencil in it, a Mongol No. 2. It had been sharpened to a razor point.

This time I won’t bother with your arms or shoulders. This time I’m going straight for your eyes. Or maybe your tongue. How do you think that would be, sweetie? Having a pencil driven straight through your quacking, lying t —

Her eyes flew open and Norman’s face disappeared. She closed them again and summoned Bill’s face. For a moment she was sure it wouldn’ t come, that Norman’s face would return instead, but it didn’t.

We’re going out on Saturday, she thought. We’re going to spend the day together. If he wants to kiss me, I’ll let him. If he wants to hold me and touch me, I’ll let him. It’s nuts, how much I want to be with him.

She began to drift again, and now she supposed she must be dreaming about the picnic she and Bill were going on the day after tomorrow. Someone else was picnicking nearby, someone with a baby. She could hear it crying, very faintly. Then, louder, came a rumble of thunder.

Like in my picture, she thought. I’ll tell him about my picture while we eat. I forgot to tell him today, because there were so many other things to talk about, but . . .

The thunder rolled again, closer and sharper. This time the sound filled her with dismay.

Rain would spoil their picnic, rain would wash out the Daughters and Sisters picnic at Ettinger’s Pier, rain might even cause the concert to be cancelled.

Don’t worry, Rosie, the thunder’s only in the picture, and this is all a dream.

But if it was a dream, how come she could still feel the pillow lying on her wrists and forearms? How come she could still feel her fingers laced together and the light blanket lying on top of her? How come she could still hear city traffic outside her window?

Crickets sang and hummed: reep-reep-reep-reep-reep.

The baby cried.

The insides of her eyelids suddenly flashed purple, as if with lightning, and the thunder rolled again, closer than ever.

Rosie gasped and sat up straight in bed, her heart thumping hard in her chest. There was no lightning. No thunder. She thought she could still hear crickets, yes, but that might just have been her ears playing tricks on her. She looked across the room toward the window and made out the shadowy rectangle leaning against the wall below it. The picture of Rose Madder.

Tomorrow she would slip it into a grocery sack and take it to work with her. Rhoda or Curt would probably know a place nearby where she could get it re-framed.

Still, faintly, she could hear crickets.

From the park, she thought, lying back down.

Even with the window closed? Practical-Sensible asked. She sounded dubious, but not really anxious. Are you sure, Rosie?

Sure she was. It was almost summer, after all, lots more crickets for your buck, shoppers, and what difference did it make, anyhow? All right, maybe there was something odd about the picture. More likely the oddities were in her own mind, where the final kinks were still being worked out, but say it really was the picture. So what? She sensed no actual badness about it.

But can you say it doesn’t feel dangerous, Rosie? Now there was a touch of anxiety in Practical-Sensible’s voice. Never mind evil, or badness, or whatever you want to call it. Can you say it doesn’t feel dangerous?

No, she couldn’t say that, but on the other hand, there was danger everywhere. Just look at what had happened to Anna Stevenson’s ex-husband.

Except she didn’t want to look at what had happened to Peter Slowik; she didn’t want to go back down what was sometimes called Guilty Street in Therapy Circle. She wanted to think about Saturday, and what it might feel like to be kissed by Bill Steiner. Would he put his hands on her shoulders, or around her waist? What, exactly, would his mouth feel like on hers? Would he . . .

Rosie’s head slipped over to the side. Thunder rumbled. The crickets hummed, louder than ever, and now one of them began to hop across the floor toward the bed, but Rosie didn’t notice. This time the string tethering her mind to her body had broken, and she floated away into darkness.

3

A flash of light woke her, not purple this time but a brilliant white. It was followed by thunder — not a rumble but a roar.

Rosie sat up in bed, gasping, clutching the top blanket to her neck. There was another flash, and in it she saw her table, the kitchen counter, the little sofa that was really not much more than a loveseat, the door to the tiny bathroom standing open, the daisy-printed shower curtain run back on its rings. The light was so bright and her eyes so unprepared that she continued to see these things even after the room had fallen dark again, only with the colors reversed. She realized she could still hear the baby crying, but the crickets had stopped. And a wind was blowing. That she could feel as well as hear. It lifted her hair from her temples, and she heard the rattle-slither-flump of pages. She had left the Xeroxed sides of the next

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