has the picnic area to herself at this time of the day and year. She takes her shoes off, puts them under a picnic table, and walks north through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, as she did with Bill when he brought her out here the first time. She thinks she may have trouble finding the overgrown path leading up the bank, but she does not. As she goes up it, digging into the gritty sand with her bare toes, she wonders how many unremembered dreams have taken her out here since the rages started. There is no way of telling, of course, nor does it really matter.
At the top of the path is the ragged clearing, and in the clearing is the fallen tree—the one she has finally remembered. She has never forgotten the things which happened to her in the world of the picture, and she sees now, with no iota of surprise, that this tree and the one which had fallen across the path leading to Dorcas’s “pomegranate tree” are identical.
She can see the foxes’ earth beneath the dusty bouquet of roots at the far left end of the tree, but it is empty, and looks old. She walks to it anyway, then kneels—she is not sure her trembling legs would have supported her much farther, anyway. She opens her old purse and pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground. Among crumpled laundry lists and receipts years out of date, below a shopping list with the words
PORK CHOPS
at the top, underlined, capitalized, and exclamation-pointed (pork chops were always Norman’s favorite), is the blue packet with the spatter of red-purple drops running across it.
Trembling, beginning to cry—partly because the scraps of her old, hurt life make her so sad and partly because she is so afraid that the new one is in danger—she scoops a hole in the earth at the base of the fallen tree. When it is about eight inches deep, she puts the packet down beside it and opens it. The seed is still there, surrounded by the gold circle of her first husband’s ring.
She puts the seed in the hole (and the seed has kept its magic; her fingers go numb the instant they touch it) and then places the ring around it again.
“Please,” she says, not knowing if she prays, or for whom the prayer is intended if she does. In any case, she is answered, after a fashion. There is a short, sharp bark. There’s no pity in it, no compassion, no gentleness. It is impatient. Don’t fuck with me, it says.
Rosie looks up and sees the vixen on the far side of the clearing, standing motionless and looking at her. Her brush is up. It flames like a torch against the dull gray sky overhead.
“Please,” she says again in a low, troubled voice. “Please don’t let me be what I’m afraid of. Please .... just please help me keep my temper and remember the tree.”
There is nothing she can interpret as an answer, not even another of those impatient barks. The vixen only stands there. Its tongue is out now, and it is panting. To Rosie it appears to be grinning.
She looks down once more at the ring circling the seed, then she covers it over with the fragrant, mulchy dirt.
One for my mistress, she thinks, and one for my dame, and one for the little girl who lives down the lane. One for Rosie.
She backs to the edge of the clearing, to the head of the path which will take her back down to the lakeshore. When she is there, the vixen trots quickly to the fallen tree, sniffs the spot where Rosie buried the ring and the seed, and then lies down there. Still she pants, and still she grins (Rosie is now sure she is grinning), still she looks at Rosie with her black eyes. The kits are gone, those eyes say, and the dog that got them on me is gone, as well. But I, Rosie ... I bide. And, if needs must, I repay.
Rosie looks for madness or sanity in those eyes ... and sees both.
Then the vixen lowers her pretty snout to her pretty bush, closes her eyes, and appears to go to sleep.
“Please,” Rosie whispers, one final time, and then she leaves. And as she drives the Skyway, on her way back to what she hopes is her life, she throws the last piece