Rose Madder Read Online Free PDF Page 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 deep 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 by her theft of the ATM card, perhaps it had only been soothed by the tranquil peace of this April morning.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œNo more,” she whispered. She tucked her purse under one arm and took her first dozen steps into the fogbank which was now her future.
4
    T hose 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 purse 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? 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 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