“Help you, ma’am?” the clerk asked, looking at her over a pair of half-glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.
“Angela Flyte,” she said. It was the name of her best chum in junior high, and the last friend she had ever really made. At Aubreyville High School, Rosie had gone steady with the boy who had married her a week after her graduation, and they had formed a country of two… one whose borders were usually closed to tourists.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am?” She realized she had named a person rather than a place, and how odd (this guy’s probably looking at my wrists and neck, trying to see if the straitjacket left any marks} it must have sounded. She blushed in confusion and embarrassment, and made an effort to clutch at her thoughts, to put them in some kind of order.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and a dismal premonition came to her: whatever else the future might hold, that simple, rueful little phrase was going to follow her like a tin can tied to a stray dog’s tail. There had been a closed door between her and most of the world for fourteen years, and right now she felt like a terrified mouse who has misplaced its hole in the kitchen skirting board. The clerk was still looking at her, and the eyes above the amusing half-glasses were now rather impatient.
“Can I help you or not, ma’am?”
“Yes, please. I want to buy a ticket on the eleven-oh-five bus. Are there still some seats on that one?”
“Oh, I guess about forty. One way or round trip?”
“One way,” she said, and felt another flush warm her cheeks as the enormity of what she was saying came home to her. She tried to smile and said it again, with a little more force:
“One way, please.”
“That’s fifty-nine dollars and seventy cents,” he said, and she felt her knees grow weak with relief. She had been expecting a much higher fare; had even been prepared for the possibility that he would ask for most of what she had.
“Thank you,” she said, and he must have heard the honest gratitude in her voice, because he looked up from the form he was drawing to him and smiled at her. The impatient, guarded look had left his eyes.
“A pleasure,” he said.
“Luggage, ma’am?”
“I… I don’t have any luggage,” she said, and was suddenly afraid of his gaze. She tried to think of an explanation-surely it must sound suspicious to him, an unaccompanied woman headed for a far-off city with no luggage except her handbag-but no explanation came. And, she saw, that was all right. He wasn’t suspicious, wasn’t even curious. He simply nodded and began to write up her ticket. She had a sudden and far from pleasant realization: she was no novelty at Portside. This man saw women like her all the time, women hiding behind dark glasses, women buying tickets to different timezones, women who looked as if they had forgotten who they were somewhere along the way, and what they thought they were doing, and why.
Rosie felt a profound sense of relief as the bus lumbered out of the Portside terminal (on time), turned left, re-crossed the Trunkatawny, and then got on I-78 heading west. As they passed the last of the three downtown exits, she saw the triangular glass-sided building that was the new police headquarters. It occurred to her that her husband might be behind one of those big windows right now, that he might even be looking out at this big, shiny bus beetling along the Interstate. She closed her eyes and counted to one hundred. When she opened them again, the building was gone. Gone forever, she hoped. She had taken a seat three-quarters of the way back in the bus, and the diesel engine hummed steadily not far behind her. She closed her eyes again and rested the side of her face on the window. She would not sleep, she was too keyed-up to sleep, but she could rest. She had an idea she was going to need all the rest she could get. She was still amazed at how suddenly this had happened-an event more like a heart attack or a stroke than a change of life. Change? That was putting it mildly. She hadn’t just changed it, she had uprooted it, like a woman tearing an African violet out of its pot. Change of life, indeed. No, she would never sleep. Sleep was out of the question. And so thinking, she slipped not into sleep, but into that umbilical cord which connects sleeping and waking. Here she moved slowly back and forth like a bubble, faintly aware of the diesel engine’s steady hum, the sound of the tires on the tarmac, of a kid four or five rows up asking his mother when they were going to get to Aunt Norma’s. But she was also aware that she had come untethered from herself, and that her mind had opened like a flower (a rose, of course), opened as it does only when one is in neither one place nor the other. I’m really Rosie… Carole King’s voice, singing Maurice Sendak’s words. They came floating up the corridor she was in from some distant chamber, echoing, accompanied by the glassy, ghostly notes of a piano… and I’m Rosie Real… I’m going to sleep after all, she thought. I think I really am. Imagine that! You better believe me… I’m a great big deal… She was no longer in the gray corridor but in some dark open space. Her nose, her entire head, was filled with smells of summer so sweet and so strong that they were almost overwhelming. Chief among them was the smell of honeysuckle, drifts of it. She could hear crickets, and when she looked up she saw the polished bone face of the moon, riding high overhead. Its white glow was everywhere, turning the mist rising from the tangled grasses around her bare legs to smoke. I’m really Rosie… and I’m Rosie Real… She raised her hands with the fingers splayed and the thumbs almost touching; she framed the moon like a picture and as the night wind stroked her bare arms she felt her heart first swell with happiness and then contract with fright. She sensed a dozing savagery in this place, as if there might be animals with big teeth loose in the perfumed undergrowth. Rose. Come over here, sweetheart. I want to talk to you up dose. She turned her head and saw his fist rushing out of the dark. Icy strokes of moonlight gleamed on the raised letters of his Police Academy ring. She saw the stressful grimace of his lips, pulled back in something like a smile-and jerked awake in her seat, gasping, her forehead damp with sweat. She must have been breathing hard for some time, because her window was humid with her condensed breath, almost completely fogged in. She swiped a clear patch on the glass with the side of her hand and looked out. The city was almost gone now; they were passing an exurban litter of gas stations and fast-food franchises, but behind them she could see stretches of open field. I’ve gotten away from him, she thought. No matter what happens to me now, I’ve gotten away from him. Even if I have to sleep in doorways, or under bridges, I’ve gotten away from him. He’ll never hit me again, because I’ve gotten away from him. But she discovered she did not entirely believe it. He would be furious with her, and he would try to find her. She was sure of it. But how can he? I’ve covered my trail; I didn’t even have to write down my old school chum’s name in order to get my ticket. I threw away the bank card, that’s the biggest thing. So how can he find me? She didn’t know, exactly… but finding people was what he did, and she would have to be very, very careful. I’m really Rosie… and I’m Rosie Real… Yes, she supposed both sides of that were the truth, but she had never felt less like a great big deal in her whole life. What she felt like was a tiny speck of flotsam in the middle of a trackless ocean. The terror which had filled her near the end of her brief dream was still with her, but so were traces of the exhilaration and happiness; a sense of being, if not powerful, at least free. She leaned against the high-backed bus seat and watched the last of the fast-food restaurants and muffler shops fall away. Now it was just the countryside-newly ploughed fields and belts of trees that were turning that fabulous cloudy green that belongs only to April. She watched them roll past with her hands clasped loosely in her lap and let the big silver bus take her on toward whatever lay ahead.