Rose Madder

"Give me two," he said.

"Let's live a little." The young man laughed as if this was the funniest line he'd ever heard, even funnier than Army Surplus Like You Never Find!, and then he bent down, got two nine-volt batteries from under the counter, and slapped them down beside Norman's Omega taser. "dull-feetcha!" the young man cried, and laughed some more. Norman figured this one out, too, after a moment, and laughed right along with Young Mister Harelip and later he thought that was the exact moment when he hit warp-speed and all the stars turned into lines. All ahead, Mr Sulu-this time we're going way past the Klingon Empire. He drove the stolen Tempo back into the city and in a part of town where the smiling models on the cigarette billboards started being black rather than white, he found a barber shop by the charming name of Cut Me Some Slack. He went in and found a young black man with a cool moustache sitting in an old-fashioned barber chair. There were Walkman earphones on his head and a copy of Jet in his lap.

"Whatchoo want?" the black barber asked. He spoke perhaps more brusquely than he would have to a black man, but not discourteously, either. You weren't discourteous to a man like this without a damned good reason, especially when you were alone in your shop. He was six-two at least, with broad shoulders and big, thick legs. Also, he smelled like a cop. Above the mirror were photographs of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, andjalen Rose. Jordan was wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball uniform. Above his picture was a slip of paper with THE ONCE amp; FUTURE BULL typed on it. Norman pointed. "do me like that," he said. The black barber looked at Norman carefully, first making sure he wasn't drunk or stoned, then trying to make sure he wasn't joking. The second was harder than the first.

"Whatchoo saying, brother? Are you saying you want a cleanhead?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying." Norman ran a hand through his hair, which was a thick black just starting to show flecks of gray at the temples. It was neither exceptionally short nor exceptionally long. He had worn it at this same length for almost twenty years. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to imagine what he was going to look like, as bald as Michael Jordan, only white. He couldn't do it. With luck, Rose and her new friends wouldn't be able to, either.

"You sure?" Suddenly Norman felt almost sick with the desire to knock this man down and drop both knees onto his chest and lean over and bite his entire upper lip, cool moustache and all, right off his face. He supposed he knew why, too. He looked like that memorable little cocksucker, Ramon Sanders. The one who had tried to cash in on the ATM card his lying bitch of a wife had stolen. Oh, barber, Norman thought. Oh barber, you're so close to being nothing but taillights. Ask one more question, say one more wrong word in my face, and that's all you'll be. And I can't say anything to you; I couldn't warn you even if I wanted to, because right now my own voice is all the firing-pin I'd need. So here we are, and here we go. The barber gave him another long, careful look. Norman stood where he was and let him do it. Now he felt composed. What happened would be what happened. It was all in this jiggedy-jig's hands.

"All right, I guess you are," the barber said at last. His voice was mild and disarming. Norman relaxed his right hand, which had been shoved deep into his pocket and gripping the handle of the laser. The barber put his magazine on the counter beside his bottles of tonic and cologne (there was a little brass sign there that said SAMUEL LOWE), then got up and shook out a plastic apron.

"You wanna be like Mike, let's do it." Twenty minutes later, Norman was staring at himself thoughtfully in the minor. Samuel Lowe stood beside his chair, watching him look. Lowe seemed apprehensive, but he also seemed interested. He looked like a man seeing something familiar from an entirely new perspective. Two new customers had come in. They were also looking at Norman look at himself, and they wore identical expressions of appraisal.

"The man be handsome," one of the newcomers said. He spoke in a tone of faint surprise, and mostly to himself. Norman couldn't get entirely straight in his mind the fact that the man in the minor was still him. He winked and the minor-man winked, he smiled and the minor-man smiled, he turned and the mirror-man turned, but it didn't help. Before he'd had the brow of a cop; now he had the brow of a mathematics professor, a brow that went into the stratosphere. He couldn't get over the smooth, somehow sensuous curves of his bald skull. And its whiteness. He hadn't thought he had anything like a tan, but compared to his pallid skull, the rest of his skin was as brown as a lifeguard's. His head looked strangely fragile, and too weirdly perfect to belong to the likes of him. To belong to any human being, especially a male. It looked like a piece of Delft china.

"You ain't got a bad head "tall, man," Lowe said. He spoke tentatively, but Norman had no sense he was trying to flatter him, and that was good, because Norman was in no mood to have someone blow smoke up his ass.

"Look good. Look younger. Don't he, Dale?"

"Ain't bad," the other newcomer agreed.

"Nossir, not half."

"How much did you say?" Norman asked Samuel Lowe. He tried to turn away from the minor and was distressed and a little frightened to find that his eyes tried to follow the top of his head, to see how it looked in the back. That sense of disassociation was stronger within him than ever. He wasn't the man in the minor, the man with the scholar's bald head rising above heavy black eyebrows; how could he be? This was some stranger, that was all, some fantastic Lex Luthor up to no good in Metropolis, and the things he did from here on out didn't matter. From here on out, nothing mattered. Except catching Rose, of course. And talking to her. Up close. Lowe was giving him that cautious look again, breaking it off to dart glances at the other two patrons, and Norman suddenly realized he was checking to see if they'd help him, if the big white man-the big bald white man-suddenly went berserk.

"I'm sorry," he said, trying to make his voice soft and conciliatory.

"You were talking, weren't you? What did you say?"

"I said thirty sounds about right to me. How's it sound to you?" Norman took a folded-over packet of bills out of his left front pocket, slid two twenties out from under the tarnished old moneyclip, and held them out.

"Thirty sounds too low," he said.

"Take forty, along with my apologies. You did a great job. I've just had a bitch of a week, that's all." You don't know the half of it, buddy, he thought. Samuel Lowe relaxed visibly and took the money.

"No prob, bro," he said.

"And I wasn't kiddin-you ain't got a bad-lookin head at all. You ain't Michael, but ain't nobody Michael."

"Cept Michael," the newcomer named Dale said. The three black men laughed heartily and nodded at one another. Although he could have killed all three of them without turning a hair, Norman nodded and laughed along with them. The newcomers in the barber shop had changed things. It was time to be careful again. Still laughing, he went out. A trio of teenagers, also black, were leaning against a fence near the Tempo, but they hadn't bothered doing anything to the car, possibly because it was too much of a dog to bother with. They eyed Norman's pallid white head with interest, then glanced at each other and rolled their eyes. They were fourteen or so, boys without much trouble in them. The one in the middle started to say

"You lookin at me?" like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Norman seemed to sense this and stared at him-just at him, it seemed, ignoring the other two completely. The one in the middle decided that maybe his De Niro imitation needed a little more work and quit it. Norman got into his freshly washed stolen car and drove away. Six blocks in toward the center of the city, he went into a used-clothing store called Play It Again, Sam. There were several browsers in the store, and they all looked at him, but that was okay. Norman didn't mind being looked at, especially if it was his freshly shaven skull they were paying attention to. If they were looking at the top of his head, they wouldn't have the slightest f**king idea what his face looked like five minutes after he left. He found a motorcycle jacket that gleamed with studs and zippers and small silver chains and creaked in every fold when he took it off its hanger. The clerk opened his mouth to ask two hundred and forty dollars for the jacket, looked at the haunted eyes peering out from beneath the awesome white desert of that freshly shaven skull, and told Norman the jacket was one-eighty, plus tax. He would have gone lower had Norman dickered, but Norman didn't. He was tired now, his head was throbbing, and he wanted to go back to the hotel and go to sleep. He wanted to sleep right through until tomorrow. He needed all the rest he could get, because tomorrow was going to be a busy day. He made two more stops on the way back. The first was at a store which sold ostomy supplies. Here Norman bought a motorless second-hand wheelchair which would fit, folded up, into the trunk of the Tempo. Then he went to the Women's Cultural Center and Museum. Here he paid six dollars to get in but looked at no exhibits and did not so much as peer into the auditorium, where a panel discussion on natural childbirth was being held. He made a quick trip to the gift shop, then left. Back at the Whitestone, he went upstairs without asking anyone about Blondie with the cute little ass. He would not have trusted himself to ask for a glass of club soda in his current condition. His newly shaven head was pounding like a steel-forge, his eyes were beating in their sockets, his teeth hurt and his jaws throbbed. Worst of all, his mind now seemed to be bobbing along above him like a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; it felt as if it were tethered to the rest of him by a single fragile thread and might break away at any moment. He had to lie down. To sleep. Maybe then his mind would go back inside his head, where it belonged. As for Blondie, his best course would be to treat her as an ace in the hole, something to be used only if absolutely necessary. Break Glass in Case of Emergency. Norman went back to bed at four o'clock on Friday afternoon. The throbbing behind his temples was no longer anything resembling a hangover; it was now one of the headaches he called his "specials." He got them frequently when he was working hard, and since Rose had left and his big drug-case had heated up, two a week weren't unusual. As he lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, his eyes ran and his nose leaked and he could see funny bright zigzag patterns pulsing around the edges of things. The pain had reached the point where it felt like there was some horrible fetus in the middle of his head, trying to be born; the point where there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait for it to be over, and the way you did that was by getting through the moments one at a time, going from one to the next the way a person might use stepping-stones to cross a stream. That tugged some hazy memory far back in his mind, but it couldn't get past the relentless throbbing, and Norman let it go. He rubbed his hand back and forth across the top of his head. The smoothness up there felt like nothing that could be a part of him; it was like touching the hood of a freshly waxed car.

"Who am I?" he asked the empty room.

"Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Who am I?" Before he could stab at an answer to any of these questions he fell asleep. The pain followed him for quite a distance into its dreamless depths, like a bad idea that won't let go, but finally Norman left it behind. His head sagged to one side on his pillow, and a wetness which was not precisely tears ran out of his left eye and left nostril and trickled down his cheek. He began to snore thickly. When he woke up twelve hours later, at four o'clock on Saturday morning, his headache was gone. He felt fresh and energized, as he almost always did after one of his specials. He sat up, put his feet on the floor, and looked out the window at darkness. The pigeons were out there on the ledge, cooing to each other even in their sleep. He knew, completely and surely and without any doubt, that this day was going to see the end of it. Probably the end of him, as well, but that was a minor matter. Just knowing there would be no more headaches, not ever, made that seem like a fair trade. Across the room, his new motorcycle jacket hung over a chair like a black and headless ghost. Wake up early, Rose, he thought almost tenderly. Wake up early, honeybunch, and get a good look at the sunrise, why don't you? You ought to get the best look you can, because it's the last one you're ever going to see.

2

Rosie woke at a few minutes past four on Saturday morning and fumbled for the lamp by the bed, terrified, sure that Norman was in the room with her, sure she could smell his cologne, all my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all. She almost knocked the lamp onto the floor in her panicky efforts to make a light, but when it was finally on (with the base hanging halfway over oblivion) her fear subsided quickly. It was just her room, small and neat and sane, and the only thing she could smell was the faint, bedwarm fragrance of her own skin. No one was here but her... and Rose Madder, of course. But Rose Madder was safely put away in the closet, where she undoubtedly still stood with one hand raised to shade her eyes, looking down at the ruins of the temple. I was dreaming about him, she thought as she sat up. I was having another nightmare about Norman, that's why I woke up so scared. She pushed the lamp back on the table. It clinked against the armlet. Rose picked it up and looked at it. Strange, how hard it was to remember (what you have to remember) how she'd come by this trinket. Had she bought it in Bill's shop, because it looked like the one the woman in her picture was wearing? She didn't know, and that was troubling. How could you forget (what you need to forget) a thing like that? Rosie lifted the circlet, which felt as heavy as gold but was probably just gilded potmetal, and looked across the room through it, like a woman looking through a telescope. As she did, a fragment of her dream came back, and she realized it hadn't been about Norman at all. It had been about Bill. They had been on his motorcycle, but instead of taking her to a picnic place by the lake, he had driven her down a path that wound deeper and deeper into a sinister forest of dead trees. After awhile they came into a clearing, and in the clearing was a single live tree, laden with fruit the color of Rose Madder's chiton. Oh, what a great first course! Bill had cried cheerily, hopping off his motorcycle and hurrying toward the tree. I've heard about these-eat one and you can see out of the back of your head, eat two and you live forever! That was where the dream had crossed the line from the merely unsettling into real nightmare country. She knew somehow that the fruit of that tree wasn't magic but horribly poisonous and she ran to him, wanting to stop him before he could bite into one of the tempting fruits. But Bill wouldn't be convinced. He merely put an arm around her, gave her a little hug, and said, Don't be silly, Rosie-I know pomegranates, and these aren't them. That was when she'd awakened, shivering madly in the dark and thinking not about Bill but about Norman... as if Norman were lying in bed someplace near and thinking about her. This idea made Rosie cross her arms over her br**sts and hug herself. It was all too possible that he was doing just that. She put the armlet back down on the table, hurried into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. Her troubling dream of Bill and the poisoned fruit, her questions about where or how she might have come by the armlet, and her confused feelings about the picture she'd bought, then unframed, then hidden away in the closet like a secret... all these things faded behind a larger and more immediate concern: her date. It was today, and every time she thought of that she felt something like a hot wire in her chest. She was both afraid and happy, but more than anything else she was curious. Her date. Their date. If he even comes, a voice inside whispered ominously. It could have all been a joke, you know. Or you might have scared him off. Rosie started to step into the water, and realized just in the nick of time that she was still wearing her panties.

"He'll come," she murmured as she bent and slipped them off.

"He'll come, all right. I know he will." As she ducked under the spray and reached for the shampoo, a voice far back in her mind-a very different voice, this time-whispered, Beasts will fight.

"What?" Rosie froze with the plastic bottle in one hand. She was frightened and didn't quite know why.

"What did you say?" Nothing. She couldn't even remember exactly what it was that she'd thought, only that it was something else about that damned picture, which had gotten into her head like the chorus of a song you can't forget. As she began to lather her hair, Rosie decided abruptly to get rid of it. The thought of doing that made her feel better, like the thought of quitting some bad habit-smoking, drinking at lunch-and by the time she stepped out of the shower, she was humming.

3

Bill didn't torture her with doubt by being late. Rosie had pulled one of the kitchen chairs over by the window so she could watch for him (at quarter past seven she had done this, three full hours after she'd stepped out of the shower), and at twenty-five past eight a motorcycle with a cooler strapped to the carrier-rack pulled into one of the spaces in front of the building. The driver's head was covered by a big blue helmet and the angle was wrong for her to see his face, but she knew it was him. Already the line of his shoulders was unmistakable to her. He gunned the engine once, then killed it and used a booted heel to drop the Harley's kickstand. He swung one leg off, and for a moment the line of his thigh was clearly visible against his faded jeans. Rosie felt a tremor of timid but unmistakable lust go through her and thought: That's what I'll be thinking about tonight while I'm waiting to go to sleep; that's what I'm going to see. And if I'm very, very lucky, it's what I'll dream about. She thought of waiting for him up here, of letting him come to her the way a girl who is comfortable in the home of her parents might wait for the boy who is going to take her to the Homecoming Dance, waiting even after he has come, watching in her strapless party dress from behind the curtain of her bedroom window, smiling a small secret smile as he gets out of his father's newly washed and waxed car and comes to the door, self-consciously adjusting his bowtie or tugging on his cummerbund. She thought of it, then opened the closet door, reached in, and snatched out her sweater. She hurried down the hall, slipping into it as she went. It crossed her mind as she came to the head of the stairs and saw him already halfway up, his head raised to look at her, that she had reached the perfect age: too old to be coy for the sake of coyness, but still too young not to believe that some hopes-the ones that really matter-may turn out against all odds to be justified.

"Hi," she said, looking down from her place.

"You're on time." "sure," he said, looking up from his. He seemed faintly surprised.

"I'm always on time. It's the way I was raised. I think it might have been bred in my genes, too." He held one gloved hand up to her, like a cavalier in a movie. He smiled.

"Are you ready?" This was a question she didn't yet know how to answer, so she just met him where he was and took his hand and let him lead "her down and out into the sunlight washing over the first Saturday of June. He stood her on the curb beside the leaning bike, looked her critically up and down, then shook his head.

"Nope, nope, the sweater doesn't make it," he said.

"Luckily, my Boy Scout training has never deserted me." There were saddlebags on either side of the Harley's carrier-rack. He unbuckled one of them and pulled out a leather jacket similar to his own: zipper pockets high and low on either side, but otherwise black and plain. No studs, epaulets, lightning bolts, or geegaws. It was smaller than the one Bill wore. She looked at it hanging flat in his hands like a pelt, troubled by the obvious question. He saw the look, understood it at once, and shook his head.

"It's my dad's jacket. He taught me to ride on an old Indian hammerhead he took in trade for a dining-room table and a bedroom set. The year he turned twenty-one, he rode that bike all over America, he says. It was the kind you had to kick-start, and if you forgot to put the gearshift in neutral, it was apt to go tearing right out from under you."

"What happened? Did he crash it?" She smiled a little. "did you crash it?"

"Neither one. It died of old age. Since then they've all been Harleys in the Steiner family. This is a Heritage softail, thirteen-forty-five cc." He touched the nacelle gently. "dad hasn't ridden for five years or so now." "did he get tired of it?" Bill shook his head.

"No, he got glaucoma." She slipped into the jacket. She guessed that Bill's father must be at least three inches shorter and maybe forty pounds lighter than his son, but the jacket still hung comically on her, almost to her knees. It was warm, though, and she zipped it up to her chin with a kind of sensuous pleasure.

"You look good," he said.

"Kind of funny, like a kid playing dress-up, but good. Really." She thought she could now say what she hadn't been able to when she and Bill had been sitting on the bench and eating hotdogs, and it suddenly seemed very important that she should say it.

"Bill?" He looked at her with that little smile, but his eyes were serious.

"Yeah?" "don't hurt me." He considered this, the little smile staying on, his eyes still grave, and then he shook his head.

"No. I won't." "do you promise?"

"Yeah. I promise. Come on, climb aboard. Have you ever ridden an iron pony before?" She shook her head.

"Well, those little pegs are for your feet." He bent over the back of the bike, rummaged, and came up with a helmet. She observed its red-purple color with absolutely no surprise.

"Have a brain-bucket." She slipped it on over her head, bent forward, looked solemnly at herself in one of the Harley's side-mirrors, then burst out laughing.

"I look like a football player!"

"Prettiest one on the team, too." He took her by the shoulders and turned her around.

"It buckles under your chin. Here, let me." For a moment his face was kissing distance from hers, and she felt light-headed knowing that if he wanted to kiss her, right here on the sunny sidewalk with people going about their leisurely Saturday-morning errands, she would let him. Then he stepped back.

"That strap too tight?" She shook her head. "sure?" She nodded. "say something, then."

"Iss sap's ot ooo ite," she said, and burst out laughing at his expression. Then he was laughing with her.

"Are you ready?" he asked her again. He was still smiling, but his eyes had returned to their former look of serious consideration, as if he knew that they had embarked on some grave enterprise, where any word or movement might have far-reaching consequences. She made a fist, rapped the top of her helmet, and grinned nervously.

"I guess I am. Who gets on first, you or me?"

"Me." He swung his leg over the saddle of the Harley.

"Now you." She swung her leg over carefully, and put her hands on his shoulders. Her heart was beating very fast.

"No," he said.

"Around my waist, okay? I have to keep my arms and hands free to run the controls." She slipped her hands in between his arms and sides and clasped them in front of his flat stomach. All at once she felt as if she were dreaming again. Had all of this come out of one small drop of blood on a sheet? An impulse decision to walk out of her front door and just keep going? Was that even possible? Dear God, please let this not be a dream, she thought.

"Feet up on the pegs, check?" She put them there, and was fearfully enchanted when Bill rocked the bike upright and booted back the kickstand. Now, with only his feet holding them steady, it felt to her like the moment when a small boat's last mooring is slipped and it floats beside the dock, nodding more freely on the waves than previously. She leaned a little closer to his back, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. The smell of sunwarmed leather was pretty much as she had imagined it would be, and that was good. It was all good. Scary and good.

"I hope you like this," Bill said.

"I really do." He pushed a button on the right handlebar and the Harley went off like a gun beneath them. Rosie jumped and slipped closer to him, her grip tightening and becoming a little less self-conscious.

"Everything okay?" he called. She nodded, realized he couldn't see that, and shouted back that yes, everything was fine. A moment later the curb to their left was rolling backward. He snatched a quick glance over her shoulder for traffic, then swung across Trenton Street to the right side. It wasn't like a turn in a car; the motorcycle banked, like a small airplane lining itself up with the runway. Bill twisted the throttle and the Harley scooted forward, blowing a rattle of wind into her helmet and making her laugh.

"I thought you'd like it!" Bill called back over his shoulder as they stopped at the traffic light on the corner. When he put his foot down it was as if they were tethered to solid land once more, but by the thinnest of lines. When the light turned green the engine roared under her again, with more authority this time, and they swung onto Deering Avenue, running beside Bryant Park, rolling through the shadows of old oaks that were" printed on the pavement like inkblots. She looked up over his right shoulder and saw the sun leading them through the trees, flashing in her eyes like a heliograph, and when he leaned the bike onto Calumet Avenue, she leaned with him. I thought you'd like it, he'd said as they started off, but she only liked it while they were crossing the north side of the city, hopscotching through increasingly suburban neighborhoods where the hip-to-hip frame houses made her think of All in the Family and there seemed to be a Wee Nip on every corner. By the time they were on the Skyway out of the city she was not just liking it but loving it, and when he left the Skyway for Route 27, two-lane blacktop which traced the edge of the lake all the way up into the next state, she felt she would have been happy to go on forever. If he'd asked her what she thought about going all the way to Canada, maybe catch a Blue Jays game in Toronto, she would simply have laid her helmeted head against the leather between his shoulderblades so he could feel her nod. Highway 27 was the best. Later in the summer it would be heavy with traffic even at this hour of the morning, but today it was almost empty, a black ribbon with a yellow stitch running down the middle. On their right, the lake winked a fabulous blue through the running trees; on their left they passed dairy farms, tourist cabins, and souvenir shops just opening for the summer. She felt no need to talk, was not sure she could have talked, even if called upon to do so. He gradually twisted the Harley's throttle until the red speedometer needle stood straight up from its pin like a clock hand indicating noon, and the wind rattled harder in her helmet. To Rosie, it was like the dreams of flying she'd had as a young girl, dreams in which she had gone racing with fearless exuberance over fields and rock walls and rooftops and chimneys with her hair rippling like a flag" behind her. She had awakened from those dreams shaking, sweat-drenched, both terrified and delighted, and she felt that way now. When she looked to her left, she saw her shadow flowing along beside her as it had in those dreams, but now there was another shadow with it, and that made it better. If she had ever in her whole life felt as happy as she did at that moment, she didn't know when it had been. The whole world seemed perfect around her, and she perfect within it. There were delicate fluctuations of temperature, cold as they flew through wide swales of shadow or descended into dips, warm when they passed into the sun again. At sixty miles an hour the smells came in capsules, so concentrated it was as if they were being fired out of ramjets: cows, manure, hay, earth, cut grass, fresh tar as they blipped by a driveway repaying project, oily blue exhaust as they came up behind a laboring farm truck. A mongrel dog lay in the back of the truck with its muzzle on its paws, looking at them without interest. When Bill swung out to pass on a straight stretch, the farmer behind the wheel raised a hand to Rosie. She could see the crow's feet around his eyes, the reddened, chapped skin on the side of his nose, the glint of his wedding ring in the sunshine. Carefully, like a tightrope walker doing a stunt without a net, she slid one hand out from under Bill's arm and waved back. The farmer smiled at her, then slipped behind them. Ten or fifteen miles out of the city, Bill pointed ahead at a gleaming metal shape in the sky. A moment later she could hear the steady beat of the helicopter's rotors, and a moment after that she could see two men seated in the Perspex bubble. As the chopper flashed over them in a clattery rush, she could see the passenger leaning over to shout something in the pilot's ear. I can see everything, she thought, and then wondered why that should seem so amazing. She really wasn't seeing anything she couldn't see from a car, after all. Except I am, she thought. I am because I'm not looking at it through a window and that makes it stop being just scenery. It's the world, not scenery, and I'm in it. I'm flying across the world, just like in the dreams I used to have, but now I'm not doing it alone. The motor throbbed steadily between her legs. It wasn't a sexy feeling, exactly, but it made her very aware of what was down there and what it was for. When she wasn't looking at the passing countryside, she found herself looking with fascination at the small dark hairs on the nape of Bill's neck, and wondering how it would feel to touch them with her fingers, to smooth them down like feathers. An hour after leaving the Skyway they were in deep country. Bill walked the Harley deliberately down through the gears to second, and when they came to a sign reading SHORJELAND PICNIC AREA CAMPING BY PERMIT ONLY, he dropped to first and turned onto a gravel lane.

"Hang on," he said. She could hear him clearly now that the wind was no longer blowing a hurricane through her helmet.

"Bumps." There were bumps, but the Harley rode them easily, turning them into mere swells. Five minutes later they pulled into a small dirt parking area. Beyond it were picnic tables and stone barbecue pits spotted on a wide, shady expanse of green grass which dropped gradually down to a rocky shingle which could not quite be termed a beach. Small waves came in, running up the shingle in polite, orderly procession. Beyond them, the lake opened out all the way to the horizon, where any line marking the point where the sky and the water met was lost in a blue haze. Shoreland was entirely deserted except for them, and when Bill switched the Harley off, the silence took her breath away. Over the water, gulls turned and turned, crying toward the shore in their high-pitched, frantic voices. Somewhere far to the west there was the sound of a motor, so dim it was impossible to tell if it was a truck or a tractor. That was all. He scraped a flat rock toward the side of the bike with the toe of his boot, then dropped the kickstand so the foot would rest on the rock. He got off and turned toward her, smiling. When he saw her face, the smile turned to an expression of concern.

"Rosie? Are you all right?" She looked at him, surprised.

"Yes, why?"

"You've got the funniest look-" I'll bet, she thought. I'll just bet.

"I'm fine," she said.

"I feel a little bit like all of this is a dream, that's all. I keep wondering how I got here." She laughed nervously.

"But you're not going to faint, or anything?" Rosie laughed more naturally this time.

"No, I'm fine, really."

"And you liked it?"

"Loved it." She was fumbling at the place where the strap wove through the helmet's locking rings, but without much success...

"Those're hard the first time. Let me help you." He leaned close to slip the strap free, kissing distance again, only this time he didn't draw away. He used the palms of his hands to lift the helmet off her head and then kissed her mouth, letting the helmet dangle by its straps from the first two fingers of his left hand while he put his right against the small of her back, and for Rosie the kiss made everything all right, the feel of his mouth and the pressure of his palm was like coming home. She felt herself starting to cry a little, but that was all right. These tears didn't hurt. He pulled back from her a little, his hand still on the small of her back, the helmet still bumping softly against her knee in little pendulum strokes, and looked into her face.

"All right?" Yes, she tried to say, but her voice had deserted her. She nodded instead.

"Great," he said, and then, gravely, like a man doing a job, he kissed her cool wet cheeks high up and in toward her nose-first under her right eye and then under her left. His kisses were as soft as fluttering eyelashes. She had never felt anything like them, and she suddenly put her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely, with her face against the shoulder of his jacket and her eyes, still trickling tears, shut tight. He held her, the hand which had been pressed against her back now stroking the plait of her hair. After awhile she pulled back from him and rubbed her arm across her eyes and tried to smile.

"I don't always cry," she said.