Rose Madder by Stephen King

She broke off, watching with wide, unbelieving eyes as the car — a Honda after all, not new, and really closer to orange than red — rolled slowly past her. The woman behind the wheel gave her a curious glance, and the woman on the sidewalk thought, If it had been him, no story would have done, no matter how plausible — he would have seen the truth all over your face, underlined and lit in neon. Now are you ready to go back? To see sense and go back?

She couldn’t. Her overwhelming need to urinate had passed, but her bladder still felt heavy and overloaded, her kidneys were still throbbing, her legs were shaky, and her heart was pounding so violently in her chest that it frightened her. She would never be able to walk back up the hill, even though the grade was very mild.

Yes, you can. You know you can. You’ve done harder things than that in your marriage and survived them.

Okay — maybe she could climb back up the hill, but now another idea occurred to her.

Sometimes he called. Five or six times a month, usually, but sometimes more often than that.

Just hi, how are you, do you want me to bring home a carton of Half-n-Half or a pint of ice cream, okay, bye. Only she felt nothing solicitous in these calls, no sense of caring. He was checking up on her, that was all, and if she didn’t answer the telephone, it just rang. They had no answering machine. She had asked him once if getting one might not be a good idea. He had given her a not entirely unfriendly poke and told her to wise up. You’re the answering machine, he’d said.

What if he called and she wasn’t there to answer?

He’ll think I went marketing early, that’s all.

But he wouldn’t. That was the thing. The floors this morning; the market this afternoon.

That was the way it had always been, and that was the way he expected it to always be.

Spontaneity was not encouraged at 908 Westmorland. If he called . . .

She began walking again, knowing she had to get off Westmorland Street at the next corner, even though she wasn’t entirely sure where Tremont went in either direction. That wasn’t important at this point, anyway; what mattered was that she was on her husband’s direct route if he came back from the city by way of I-295, as he usually did, and she felt as if she had been pinned to the bull’s-eye of an archery target.

She turned left on Tremont and went walking past more quiet little suburban houses separated from each other by low hedges or lines of decorative trees — Russian olives seemed particularly in vogue down here. A man who looked like Woody Allen with his hornrimmed glasses and freckles and his shapeless blue hat crushed down on top of his head looked up from watering his flowers and gave her a little wave. Everyone wanted to be neighborly today, it seemed. She supposed it was the weather, but she could have done without it. It was all too easy to imagine him coming along behind her later on, patiently working her backtrail, asking questions, using his little memory-stimulation tricks, and flashing her picture at every stop.

Wave back at him. You don’t want him to register you as an unfriendly, unfriendlies have a way of sticking in the memory, so wave back and just slide along your way.

She waved back and slid along her way. The need to pee had returned, but she would just have to live with it. There was no relief in sight — nothing ahead but more houses, more hedges, more pale green lawns, more Russian olives.

She heard a car behind her and knew it was him. She turned around, eyes wide and dark, and saw a rusty Chevrolet creeping up the center of the street at little more than walking

speed. The old man behind the wheel wore a straw hat and a look of terrified determination.

She faced forward again before he could register her own look of fright, stumbled, then started walking resolutely with her head lowered. The pulsing ache in her kidneys had returned and her bladder was pounding, too. She guessed she had no more than a minute, possibly two, before everything let go. If that happened, she might as well kiss any chance of unnoticed escape goodbye. People might not remember a pale brownette walking up the sidewalk on a nice spring morning, but she didn’t see how they would be able to forget a pale brownette with a large dark stain spreading around the crotch of her jeans. She had to take care of this problem, and right away.

There was a chocolate-colored bungalow two houses up her side of the street. The shades were pulled; three

on

newspapers lay on the porch. A fourth lay on the walk at the foot of the front steps. Rosie took a quick look around, saw no one observing her, then hurried across the lawn of the bungalow and down along its side. The back yard was empty. A rectangle of paper hung from the knob of the aluminum screen door. She went over, walking in cramped little steps, and read the printed message: Greetings from

, your local Avon Lady! Didn’t find

you at home this time, but will come again! Thanks! And give me a call at if you

talk about any of Avon’s fine products! The date scribbled at the bottom was 4/17, two days ago.

Rosie took another look around, saw that she was protected by hedges on one side and Russian olives on the other, unsnapped and unzipped her jeans, and squatted in the niche between the back stoop and the LP gas tanks. It was too late to worry about who, if anyone, might be watching from the upper stories of either neighboring house. And besides, the relief made such questions seem — for the time being, at least — trivial.

You’re crazy, you know.

Yes, of course she knew . . . but as the pressure on her bladder decreased and the stream of her urine flowed between the bricks of this back patio in a zigzag streamlet, she felt a crazy joy suddenly fill her heart. In that instant she knew what it must feel like to cross a river into a foreign country, and then set fire to the bridge behind you, and stand on the riverbank, watching and breathing deeply as your only chance of retreat went up in smoke.

5

She walked for nearly two hours, through one unfamiliar neighborhood after another, before coming to a strip mall on the west side of the city. There was a pay phone in front of Paint n Carpet World, and when she used it to call a taxi, she was amazed to discover she was no longer in the city at all, but in the suburb of Mapleton. She had big blisters on both heels, and she supposed it was no wonder — she must have walked over seven miles.

The cab arrived fifteen minutes after her call, and by then she had visited the convenience store at the far end of the strip, where she got a pair of cheap sunglasses and a colorful red rayon kerchief. She remembered Norman saying once that if you wanted to divert attention from your face, the best way was to wear something bright, something which would direct the observer’s eye in a different direction.

The cabbie was a fat man with unkempt hair, bloodshot eyes, bad breath. His baggy, faded tee-shirt showed a map of South Vietnam. WHEN I DIE I’LL GO TO HEAVEN ‘CAUSE I SERVED MY

TIME IN HELL, the words beneath the map read. IRON TRIANGLE, 1969. His beady red eyes scanned her quickly, passing from her lips to her breasts to her hips before appearing to lose interest.

‘Where we going, dear?’ he asked.

‘Can you take me to the Greyhound depot?’

‘You mean Portside?’

‘Is that the bus terminal?’

‘Yep.’ He looked up and used the rear-view mirror to meet her eyes. ‘That’s on the other side of the city, though. A twenty-buck fare, easy. Can you afford that?’

‘Of course,’ she said, then took a deep breath and added: ‘Can you find a Merchant’s Bank ATM machine along the way, do you think?’

‘All life’s problems should be so easy,’ he said, and dropped the flag on his taximeter.

$2.50, it read. BASE FARE.

She dated the beginning of her new life from the moment the numbers in the taximeter window clicked from $2.50 to $2.75 and the words BASE FARE disappeared. She would not be Rose Daniels anymore, unless she had to be — not just because Daniels was his name, and therefore dangerous, but because she had cast him aside. She would be Rosie McClendon again, the girl who had disappeared into hell at the age of eighteen. There might be times when she would be forced to use her married name, she supposed, but even then she would continue to be Rosie McClendon in her heart and mind.

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