those Where’s Waldo pictures, full of things you didn’t see at first, and ...
... and that was bullshit. The picture was very simple, actually.
“Well,” Rosie whispered, “it was.”
She found herself thinking of Cynthia’s story about the picture in the parsonage where she had grown up ... De Soto Looks West. How she’d sat in front of it for hours, watching it like television, watching the river move.
“Pretending to watch it move,” Rosie said, and ran up the window, hoping to catch a breeze and fill the room with it. The thin voices of little kids in the park playground and bigger kids playing baseball drifted in. “Pretending, that’s all. That’s what kids do. I did it myself.”
She put a stick in the window to prop it open—it would stay where it was for a little bit, then come down with a crash if you didn’t—and turned to look at the picture again. A sudden dismaying thought, an idea so strong it was almost a certainty, had come to her. The folds and creases in the rose madder gown were not the same. They had changed position. They had changed position because the woman wearing the toga, or chiton, or whatever it was, had changed position.
“You’re crazy if you think that,” Rosie whispered. Her heart was thumping. “I mean totally bonkers. You know that, don’t you?”
She did. Nevertheless, she leaned close to the picture, peering into it. She stayed in that position, with her eyes less than two inches from the painted woman on top of the hill, for almost thirty seconds, holding her breath so as not to fog the glass which overlaid the image. At last she pulled back and let the air out of her lungs in a sigh that was mostly relief. The creases and folds in the chiton hadn’t changed a bit. She was sure of it. (Well, almost sure.) It was just her imagination, playing tricks on her after her long day—a day which had been both wonderful and terribly stressful.
“Yeah, but I got through it,” she told the woman in the chiton. Talking out loud to the woman in the painting already seemed perfectly okay to her. A little eccentric, maybe, but so what? Who did it hurt? Who even knew? And the fact that the blonde’s back was turned somehow made it easier to believe she was really listening.
Rosie went to the window, propped the heels of her hands on the sill, and looked out. Across the street, laughing children ran the bases and pumped on the swings. Directly below her, a car was pulling in at the curb. There had been a time when the sight of a car pulling in like that would have terrified her, filled her with visions of Norman’s fist and Norman’s ring riding on it, riding toward her, the words Service, Loyalty, and Community getting bigger and bigger until they seemed to fill the whole world... but that time had passed. Thank God.
“Actually, I think I did a little more than just get through it,” she told the picture. “I think I did a really good job. Robbie thought so, I know, but the one I really had to convince was Rhoda. I think she was prepared not to like me when I came in, because I was Robbie’s find, you know?” She turned toward the picture once more, turned as a woman will turn to a friend, wanting to judge from her face how some idea or statement strikes her, but of course the woman in the picture just went on looking down the hill toward the ruined temple, giving Rosie nothing but her back to judge from.
“You know how bitchy us gals can be,” Rosie said, and laughed. “Except I really think I won her over. We only got through fifty pages, but I was a lot better toward the end, and besides, all those old paperbacks are short. I’ll bet I can finish by Wednesday afternoon, and do you know the best thing? I’m making almost a hundred and twenty dollars a day—not a week, a day—and there are three more Christina Bell novels. If Robbie and Rhoda give me those, I—”
She broke off, staring at the picture with wide eyes, not hearing the thin cries from the playground anymore, not even hearing the footsteps which were now climbing the stairs from the first floor. She was looking at the shape on the far right side of the picture again—curve of brow, curve of