Rosalind (12 page)

Rosalind jerked and then grabbed the picture. She didn't want a new one. She pointed to the scribbled letters below the woman and said, "This is my name. It says Rosalind."

Susan looked at the picture closer and smiled.
"I guess it does. You probably want to get some sleep."

Rosalind agreed. The possibility of another incident like the night before would always occupy her thoughts. However, she was with people again, and while there was an innate sense of safety in numbers, she didn't feel very safe. Susan seemed nice, but there was a distance to her; something in the tone of her voice that indicated this arrangement wasn't her idea.

It was a fresh start, but how many fresh starts was she going to need? She hoped that this was the last one, but with all that had happened in the last month, she didn't dare dream it.

***

After
Susan left, she collapsed on the bed and curled up in a fetal position. She fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

             
Susan came in a few moments later and tried to take the catalog page out of her hand but her grip on it was too tight. She looked down at Rosalind and pondered the situation. She had often dreamed of watching her own child sleep and thought about how that would make her feel. It was a motherly thing to do. But the girl who now lay on the bed John had hauled out of the guest room wasn't her daughter. She was something else, and Susan didn't know what that something else was.

John looked up at the clock. The drivers were coming back in for the day, and he thanked his lucky stars he didn't have to make the routes anymore. He was the boss now, and routes were grunt work. The clock said 4:16. He tapped his finger on the desk, wishing it would move faster, but it clicked and clicked with constant measure. He could close early, but Susan would suspect him. He was on edge. He needed to see her; his red. Just seeing her filled him with that hunger, that lust that put out fires in his soul. He burned for her every minute of the day. He didn't know how much longer he could wait until their next meeting. Oh sure, he'd see her around the house, flaunting her chest and that innocence that drove him insane, but when would they—

"John, your wife is on the phone," Joe Bishop said, sticking his head into John's office. He hadn't heard the phone? He picked up the receiver.

"Hi honey, is everything okay? Is our girl getting settled in?" he said.

"Yes, she's fine. Could you possibly bring home some soda? I can barely get this girl to say a word, but at lunch she made it known that she likes soda."

"Anything she wants," John replied, which Susan thought was strange. "What kind?"

"I don't know, the cheapest I guess. It's soda water with flavoring, what does it matter?"

"Alright, I'll be done here shortly so I'll stop at the IGA on the way home," he replied.

"Okay, thanks honey." He hung up the phone. Susan was a genius. Any way he could endear himself to Rosalind, he would do it.
If it took a little longer than usual to charm his way in, then he always had his regulars to fall back on. He thought about that for a moment and realized that he hadn't even thought of them since meeting Rosalind. Right then he knew—he knew he was in love with her.

The drivers turned in their keys and he placed them on the hooks in his office. He locked his office door and then the main door to the building. He hopped in his car, and sped to the IGA.

***

The soda aisle had quite a few selections and he wasn't familiar with any of them. He didn't drink soda. There were small packs and then there was the family pack that contained twenty-four of them. He grabbed the RC twenty-four pack and headed to the register. He paid the cashier and walked them outside to his car. He was glad to be out of there. If the only grocery store in town weren't owned by Sheldon Buckle, he would have been a happier man, but it was what it was. At least the fool wasn't there to taunt him. Sheldon Buckle had never actually taunted John Byrd at any point, but John considered his presence the world as an eternal bother. He despised the man. John started the car and drove home.

***

John
lugged the crate of RC Cola up the stairs of the porch and set them down just before reaching the door. He was winded. Years away from the hard farm work that his father had forced on him left his arms and legs slightly atrophied which was nothing compared to his lack of will to perform manual labor. He saw it as a weakness of sorts.
If a man couldn't survive in this world on his wits alone, he wasn't worth the weight of his bones
, he would always say. He heaved the crate and balanced it between his right arm and his body, then swung the door open and went inside.

The plan was to sneak the cola into the kitchen and put it by the fridge before anyone could see him. This
'hands off' approach was his best defense against any recognition that might spark in that dull brain of Rosalind's, but he was dismayed when he heard the noise from the kitchen. He took a deep breath and walked through the dining room and passed through the French doors that separated it from the kitchen. He was pleasantly surprised to see that it was only Susan, chopping some carrots on the cutting board.

He walked by her, kissed her on the head and then set the crate down. "I'll be in my study," he said.

"You're peaches," she replied, never taking her attention away from her carrots.

He crept
past the stairway and went to his study where he closed the doors quietly. Inside, he sat down at his desk and pulled out some paperwork from the drawer. He didn't notice what he grabbed and it didn't matter. The sounds and motions were all that mattered and to anyone outside of the den, he only wanted to assume the illusion of being busy. But he sat in his chair and looked at his desk. He grabbed his crotch and thought about Rosalind.

Upstairs, Rosalind sat on her new bed and stared at the walls. The room was bright and for all intents and purposes, it was a pleasant room to sit and think, but after spending one night at the Byrd house, she was beginning to miss the comfort of Nancy's couch. She was beginning to miss Nancy even more.
She's with momma now,
she thought. Although she suspected that someone like Nancy and her momma wouldn't run in the same social circles, she pretended that they were looking down on her together, and that maybe Heaven was a place where differences didn't matter.

An hour
after Rosalind heard the door to the house open and close, Susan called upstairs that dinner was almost ready. Rosalind set the picture of the woman next to the lamp and turned it off.

***

Without being told, Rosalind entered the kitchen and started grabbing plates from the cupboard. With an old wisdom, she knew exactly where they were and she set them in perfect order on the kitchen table.

Susan brought a plate of carrots
and a bowl of mashed potatoes to the table. "Can you knock on Mr. Byrd's door and tell him dinner's ready?" Rosalind got up and went to the sliding, double-doors of the den. She looked at the floor and the lights were on. She pressed her ear to the door but she didn't hear anything. Just as she was about to knock, the doors sung open in unison and she jumped.

"Sorry, my dear! I can hear my wife from a mile away. Would you be so kind as to tell her that I'll be working on the quarterly taxes this evening? If she could make me a plate, I'd consider myself a lucky man." Rosalind bowed her head and nodded. "Oh, I got you a surprise.
Mrs. Byrd will give it to you. Thanks, sweetheart." He quickly closed the doors. A cloud of the pipe-smoke managed to escape the room and it filled her nose. She didn't like it. It smelled like cigarettes, only fruitier.

When Susan brought the roast out and placed it on the table, she asked Rosalind where Mr. Byrd was.

"He wants a plate for later. He's doing qua—quarter taxes," Rosalind said.

"Ugh,"
Susan grunted. "The man works night and day. But you know, he started out small and built himself a little empire." She disappeared back into the kitchen and reappeared with a glass bottle of dark liquid. Susan took a can-opener and popped the lid. She set it down by Rosalind's plate. Rosalind had never seen such a bottle, but she did see bubbles and she got excited. Susan sat down and grabbed the corn bowl.

"Sometimes," she continued, "I think he's in there plotting to take over the world. But he works hard, and I couldn't ask for a better man."

Rosalind took the bottle in hand and then sipped it. The bubbles raced into the back of her throat and the sweet caramel flavor clung to her palette and tongue. It had a different taste than the Coca-Cola, but the result was still the same. She was in heaven.

"Is it good? I didn't know which brand you liked?" Susan said.

"Yes ma'am," replied Rosalind.

"
Please don't call me
ma'am
. You can call me Susan, but I think for now
Mister Byrd
would be best for the General in there," she said, rolling her eyes.

When they were finished eating, Susan got up and fixed her husband a plate, covering it with tin foil. She placed it in the top tray of the oven, where John always knew to look.
Rosalind brought the dishes to the sink and started filling it with hot, soapy water. Susan put the rest of the food into some plastic containers that Rosalind had only just, for the first time, seen last week in the cupboards at Nancy's house.

Poor Nancy,
she thought.

She liked Susa
n, but there was an edge to her; something that needed to be kept at arm's length.

Nancy's house
had been the nicest house she had ever seen until she came to live with the Byrds. Rosalind looked around the living room at all of the shelves and the knickknacks. There were pewter horses and glass dolphins; printed dishes on wooden stands; pictures of John and Susan's wedding, a dinner party, and one of John accepting an award from a man with no hair and thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Rosalind's walls had pictures like these back home, but nothing so glamorous. Her family photos were burned in her mind, and all she remembered about them was that they looked like people waiting to die. There were only three of them; one of her parents standing in a yard, holding each other, a baby picture of Rosalind, and a baby picture of Jared. The picture of her parents she never understood, but her mother had explained to her on one occasion that it was their wedding. Rosalind had seen a wedding on television once and didn't see the resemblance, but what did she know about them?

Poor Jared
, she thought.

She thought again about her mother and father's wedding picture, and how it had seemed so ominous. The sky was overcast and neither of them smiled. She didn't know much about marriage, but she figured that if two people
bothered to do such a thing, they would at least be happy, if not in reality then at least in the picture. But neither of them wore a smile. And their faces, she recalled, were as old as they were before she saw them melt in the blaze.

She got up from the couch and went to her room and sat on the bed. The picture of the woman had slumped over a bit against the lamp, so she fixed it. The woman smiled at her and from that moment she decided that if she ever got married, she would smile at the camera.

A month had passed without incident at the Byrd house, and Rosalind was quickly becoming acclimated to a normal existence. She had always thought that life in the woods was normal, but she realized that it had all been wrong. But before she could get too comfortable, old pains returned.

The first time she got
sick to her stomach was a week before Christmas, but she neglected to tell Susan about it. The vomiting that had landed her in the hospital had returned and her first thought was that she might again be pregnant. But she hadn't bled between her legs. This presented her with neither confirmation nor comfort—no bleeding was good, unless you were expecting it. She knew that she would have to tell Susan, but didn't know how she would react. Mrs. Peterson had reacted so compassionately when she confronted Rosalind about it, but the circumstances were different then. Since knowing that what her father had been doing was wrong, she was able to project backwards and remove the guilt that had come with being pregnant, but her father was dead and he could not be the one who had done it. She thought about the intruder who had broken into Nancy's house, but dismissed him and thought about Nancy instead.

I miss
her
, she thought.

But how would she tell Susan? And again, how would Susan react? She hadn't told anyone about the break-in at Nancy's, and didn't quite know how to approach the subject. But her condition was real. She needed to tell someone.

Sheriff Hanes had been making regular visits to the Byrd farm, but with Christmas coming, he told Rosalind that he would see her after the holidays were over. And while her family's death in the fire two months ago was big news for a small town, it had fallen off the town's radar and the need to place Rosalind into a foster home became less important to Sheriff Hanes, thanks to the Byrds.