Bill’s pantscuffs, it had probably come up in someone else‘s, that was all, hopping out on the second-floor landing when it got a little restless-hey, t’anks for the ride, bud. Then it had simply slipped under her door, and what of that? She could think of less pleasant uninvited guests.
As if to express agreement with this, the cricket suddenly sprang out of the bowl and took the plunge.
“Have a nice day,” Rosie said. “Stop by anytime. Really.”
As she brought the bowl back inside, a minor gust of wind blew the Wal-Mart circular out from beneath her thumb and sent it seesawing lazily to the floor. She bent over to pick it up, then froze with her outstretched fingers still an inch away from it. Two more crickets, both dead, lay against the baseboard, one on its side and the other on its back with its little legs sticking up.
One cricket she could understand and accept, but three? In a second-floor room? How, exactly, did you explain that?
Now Rosie saw something else, something lying in the crack between two boards close to the dead crickets. She knelt, fished it out of the crack, and held it up to her eyes.
It was a clover flower. A tiny pink clover flower.
She looked down at the crack from which she had plucked it; she looked again at the pair of dead crickets; then she let her eyes climb slowly up the cream-colored wall ... to her picture, hanging there by the window. To Rose Madder (it was as good a name as any) standing on her hill, with the newly discovered pony cropping grass behind her.
Conscious of her heartbeat—a big slow muffled drum in her ears—Rosie leaned forward toward the picture, toward the pony’s snout, watching the image dissolve into layered shades of old paint, beginning to see the brush-strokes. Below the muzzle were the forest-green and olive-green hues of the grass, which appeared to have been done in quick, layered downstrokes of the artist’s brush. Dotted among them were small pink blobs. Clover.
Rosie looked at the tiny pink flower in the palm of her hand, then held it out to the painting. The color matched exactly. Suddenly, and with no forethought at all, she raised her hand to the level of her lips and puffed the tiny flower toward the picture. She half-expected (no, it was more than that, actually; for a moment she was utterly positive) the tiny pink ball would float through the surface of the painting and enter that world which had been created by some unknown artist sixty, eighty, perhaps even a hundred years ago.
It didn’t happen, of course. The pink flower struck the glass covering the painting (unusual for an oil to be covered with glass, Robbie had said on the day she met him), bounced off, and fluttered to the floor like a tiny shred of balled-up tissue-paper. Maybe the painting was magic, but the glass covering it clearly wasn’t.
Then how did the crickets get out? You do think that’s what happened, don’t you? That the crickets and the clover flower somehow got out of the painting?
God help her, that was what she thought. She had an idea that when she was out of this room and with other people, the notion would seem ridiculous or fade away completely, but for now that was what she thought: the crickets had hopped out of the grass under the feet of the blonde woman in the rose madder chiton. They had somehow hopped from the world of Rose Madder and into that of Rosie McClendon.
How? Did they just sort of ooze through the glass?
No, of course not. That was stupid, but—
She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and lifted the painting off its hook. She took it into the kitchen area, set it on the counter, and then turned it around. The charcoaled words on the paper backing were more blurred than ever; she wouldn’t have known for sure that they said ROSE MADDER if she hadn’t seen them earlier.
Hesitantly, feeling afraid now (or perhaps she’d been afraid all along and was just now beginning to realize it), she touched the backing. It crackled when she poked it. Crackled too much. And when she poked at it lower down, where the brown paper disappeared into the frame, she felt something ... some things ...
She swallowed, and the back of her throat was so dry it hurt. She opened one of the counter drawers with a hand that didn’t