They passed a bank clock — the same one Norman had passed not so long before — and Rosie bent her head to read the time. 4:09 p.m. The day had stretched out like warm taffy.
She looked back over her shoulder, terrified that Bill might be gone, sure in some secret part of her mind and heart that he would be. He wasn’t, though. He shot her a grin, lifted one hand, and waved at her briefly. She raised her own hand in return.
‘Seems like a nice guy,’ Gert said.
‘Yes,’ Rosie agreed, but she didn’t want to talk about Bill, not with the two cops in the front seat undoubtedly listening to every word they said. ‘You should have stayed at the hospital.
Let them take a look at you, make sure he didn’t hurt you with that taser thing.’
‘Shit, it was good for me,’ Gert said, grinning. She was wearing a huge blue-and-white-striped hospital bathrobe over her split jumper. ‘First time I’ve felt absolutely and completely awake since I lost my virginity at Baptist Youth Camp, back in 1974.’
Rosie tried for a matching grin and could manage only a wan smile. ‘I guess that’s it for Swing into Summer, huh?’ she said.
Gert looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
Rosie looked down at her hands and was not quite surprised to see they were rolled into fists. ‘Norman’s what I mean. The skunk at the picnic. One big fucking skunk.’ She heard that word, that fucking, come out of her mouth and could hardly believe she’d said it, especially in the back of a police car with a couple of detectives in the front seat. She was even more surprised when her fisted left hand shot out sideways and struck the door panel, just above the window crank.
Gustafson jumped a little behind the wheel. Hale looked back, face expressionless, then faced forward again. He might have murmured something to his partner. Rosie didn’t know for sure, didn’t care.
Gert took her hand, which was throbbing, and tried to soothe the fist away, working on it like a masseuse working on a cramped muscle. ‘It’s all right, Rosie.’ She spoke quietly, her voice rumbling like a big truck in neutral.
‘No, it’s not!’ Rosie cried. ‘No, it’s not, don’t you say it is!’ Tears were pricking her eyes now, but she didn’t care about that, either. For the first time in her adult life she was weeping with rage rather than with shame or fear. ‘Why won’t he go away? Why won’t he leave me alone? He hurts Cynthia, he spoils the picnic . . . fucking Norman!’ She tried to strike the door again, but Gert held her fist prisoner. ‘Fucking skunk Norman!’
Gert was nodding. ‘Yeah. Fuckin’ skunk Norman.’
‘He’s like a . . . a birthmark! The more you rub and try to get rid of it, the darker it gets!
Fucking Norman! Fucking, stinking, crazy Norman! I hate him! J hate him!’
She fell silent, panting for breath. Her face was throbbing, her cheeks wet with tears . . .
and yet she didn’t feel exactly bad.
Bill! Where’s Bill?
She turned, certain he would be gone this time, but he was there. He waved. She waved back, then faced forward again, feeling a little calmer.
‘You be mad, Rosie. You’ve got a goddam right to be mad. But — ‘
‘Oh, I’m mad, all right.’
‘ — but he didn’t spoil the day, you know.’
Rosie blinked. ‘What? But how could they just go on? After . . .’
‘How could you just go on, after all the times he beat you?’
Rosie only shook her head, not comprehending.
‘Some of it’s endurance,’ Gert said. ‘Some, I guess, is plain old stubbornness. But what it is mostly, Rosie, is showing the world your game-face. Showing that we can’t be intimidated.
You think this is the first time something like this has happened? Huh-uh. Norman’s the worst, but he’s not the first. And what you do when a skunk shows up at the picnic and sprays around is you wait for the breeze to blow the worst of it away and then you go on. That’s what they’re doing at Ettinger’s Pier now, and not just because we signed a play-or-pay contract with the Indigo Girls, either. We go on because we have to convince ourselves that we can’t be beaten out of our lives . . . our right to our lives. Oh, some of them will have left
— Lana Kline and her patients are history, I imagine — but the rest will rally round.
Consuelo and Robin were heading back to Ettinger’s as soon as we left the hospital.’
‘Good for you guys,’ Lieutenant Hale said from the front seat.
‘How could you let him get away?’ Rosie asked him accusingly. ‘Jesus, do you even know how he did it?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, we didn’t let him get away,’ Hale said mildly. ‘It was Pier Security’s baby; by the time the first metro cops got there, your husband was long gone.’
‘We think he stole some kid’s mask,’ Gustafson said. ‘One of those whole-head jobs. Put it on, then just boogied. He was lucky, I’ll tell you that much.’
‘He’s always been lucky,’ Rose said bitterly. They were turning into the police station parking lot now, Bill still behind them. To Gert she said, ‘You can let go of my hand now.’
Gert did and Rosie immediately hit the door again. The hurt was worse this time, but some newly aware part of her relished that hurt.
‘Why won’t he let me alone?’ she asked again, speaking to no one. And yet she was answered by a sweetly husky voice which spoke from deep in her mind.
You shall be divorced of him, that voice said. You shall be divorced of him, Rosie Real.
She looked down at her arms and saw that they had broken out all over in gooseflesh.
3
His mind lifted off again, up up and away, as that foxy bitch Marilyn McCoo had once sung, and when he came back he was easing the Tempo into another parking space. He didn’t know where he was for sure, but he thought it was probably the underground parking garage half a block down from the Whitestone, where he’d stowed the Tempo before. He caught sight of the gas gauge as he leaned over to disconnect the ignition wires and saw something interesting: the needle was all the way over to F. He’d stopped for gas at some point during his last blank spot. Why had he done that?
Because gas wasn’t really what I wanted, he answered himself.
He leaned forward again, meaning to look at himself in the rear-view minor, then remembered it was on the floor. He picked it up and looked at himself closely. His face was bruised, swelling in several places; it was pretty goddam obvious that he’d been in a fight, but the blood was all gone. He had scrubbed it away in some gas-station restroom while a self-serve pump filled the Tempo’s tank on slow automatic feed. So he was fit to be seen on the street — as long as he didn’t press his luck — and that was good.
As he disconnected the ignition wires he wondered briefly what time it was. No way to tell; he wasn’t wearing a watch, the shitbox Tempo didn’t have a clock, and he was underground.
Did it matter? Did it —
‘Nope,’ a familiar voice said softly. ‘Doesn’t matter. The time is out of joint.’
He looked down and saw the bullmask staring up at him from its place in the passenger-side footwell: empty eyes, disquieting wrinkled smile, absurd flower-decked horns. All at once he wanted it. It was stupid, he hated the garlands on the horns and hated the stupid happy-to-be-castrated smile even more . . . but it was good luck, maybe. It didn’t really talk, of course, all of that was just in his mind, but without the mask he certainly never would have gotten away from Ettinger’s Pier. That was for damned sure.
Okay, okay, he thought, viva ze bool, and he leaned over to get the mask.
Then, with seemingly no pause at all, he was leaning forward and clamping his arms around Blondie’s waist, squeezing her tight-tight-tight so she couldn’t get enough breath to scream. She had just come out of a door marked HOUSEKEEPING, pushing her cart in front of her, and he thought he’d probably been waiting out here for her quite awhile, but that didn’t matter now because they were going right back into HOUSEKEEPING, just Pam and her new friend Norman, viva ze bool.
She was kicking at him and some of the blows landed on his shins, but she was wearing sneakers and he hardly felt the hits. He let go of her waist with one hand, pulled the door closed behind him, and shot the bolt across. A quick look around, just to make sure the place was empty except for the two of them. Late Saturday afternoon, middle of the weekend, it should have been . . . and was. The room long and narrow, with a short row of lockers standing at the far end. There was a wonderful smell — a fragrance of clean, ironed linen that made Norman think of laundry day at their house when he was a kid.