the reality she needed. Whoever she might have been or wherever she might have gone in her dreams, she was now Rosie McClendon, a single woman who recorded audio books for a living. She had stayed for a long time with a bad man, but had left him and met a good one. She lived in a room at 897 Trenton Street, second floor, end of the hall, good view of Bryant Park. Oh, and one other thing. She was a single woman who never intended to eat another foot-long hotdog in her life, especially one smothered in sauerkraut. They did not agree with her, it seemed. She couldn’t remember what she had dreamed
(remember what you have to remember and forget what you need to forget)
but she knew how it had started: with her walking into that damned painting like Alice going through the looking-glass.
Rosie sat where she was for a moment, wrapping herself in her Rosie Real world as firmly as she could, then reached out for the relentless alarm-clock. Instead of gripping it, she knocked it onto the floor. It lay there, bawling its excited, senseless cry.
“Hire the handicapped, it’s fun to watch em,” she croaked.
She leaned over and groped for the clock, fascinated all over again by the blonde hair she saw from the corner of her eye, locks so fabulously unlike those of that obedient little creepmouse Rose Daniels. She got hold of the clock, felt with her thumb for the stud that shut off the alarm, and then paused as something else registered. The breast pressing against her right forearm was naked.
She silenced the alarm, then sat up with the clock still in her left hand. She pushed down the sheet and light blanket. Her bottom half was as bare as her top half.
“Where’s my nightie?” she asked the empty room. She thought she had never heard herself sounding so exceptionally stupid ... but of course, she wasn’t used to going to bed with her nightgown on and waking up naked. Even fourteen years of marriage to Norman had not prepared her for anything quite that peculiar. She put the clock back on the nighttable, swung her legs out of bed—
“Ow!” she cried, both startled and frightened by the pain and stiffness in her hips and thighs. Even her butt hurt. “Ow, ow, ow!”
She sat on the edge of the bed and gingerly flexed her right leg, then her left. They moved, but they hurt, especially the right one. It was as if she’d spent most of yesterday doing the granddaddy of all workouts, rowing machine, treadmill, StairMaster, although the only exercise she had taken was her walk with Bill, and that had been no more than a leisurely stroll.
The sound was like the trains in Grand Central Station, she thought.
What sound?
For a moment she thought she almost had it—had something, anyway—and then it was gone again. She got slowly and cautiously to her feet, stood beside the bed for a moment, then walked toward the bathroom. Limped toward the bathroom. Her right leg felt as if she had actually strained it somehow, and her kidneys ached. What in God’s name—?
She remembered reading somewhere that people sometimes “ran” in their sleep. Perhaps that was what she had been doing; perhaps the jumble of dreams she couldn’t quite remember had been so horrible that she’d actually made an effort to run away from them. She stopped in the bathroom doorway and looked back at her bed. The ground-sheet was rumpled, but not twisted or tangled or pulled loose, as she would have expected if she had been really active in her sleep.
Rosie saw one thing she didn’t like much, however, something that flashed her back to the bad old days with terrible and unexpected suddenness: blood. They were the prints of thin lines rather than drops, however, and they were too far down to have come from a punched nose or a split lip ... unless, of course, her sleeping movements had been so vigorous she’d actually turned around in her bed. Her next thought was that she’d had a visit from the cardinal (this was how her mother had insisted Rosie speak of her menstrual periods, if she had to speak of them at all), but it was entirely the wrong time of the month for that.
Is it your time, girl? Is the moon full for you?
“What?” she asked the empty room. “What about the moon?”
Again, something wavered, almost held, and then floated away before