Entering Normal by Anne Leclaire

Author:Anne Leclaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307415127
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

ROSE

THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND IT. ANDERSON JEFFREY will keep calling until she caves in and talks to him. Rose fears one of these times he’s going to call when Ned is home. Then she would be . . . Well, as Opal would say, she’d be fucked. She is shocked how easily the word slips into her mind.

How did she manage to get herself into such a fix? She dials, half hoping he won’t answer, but he picks up on the very first ring, as if he’s been standing there waiting for her call.

“Thanks for calling, Rose,” he says when he hears her voice.

“You’re welcome,” she says, polite as can be.

“I have to see you.”

She has no response for this.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

There is nothing on earth Anderson Jeffrey can say that she wants to hear.

“It’s about the piece you wrote in class.”

The piece she wishes she had never written, the hot spilling of rage and loss and guilt. Who knew writing could get a person in such trouble? And how had she come to pour it all out anyway? The relief of it, she supposes. All these years when there was no one to talk to about Todd. No one to remember with. No one to help keep him alive.

“It’s important,” Anderson Jeffrey says.

He suggests they meet somewhere in Normal—more convenient for her—but she wants no part of that. They settle on a café near the college. At least she’s not likely to run into someone she knows there.

Fuck, she thinks after they hang up. She tries the word out loud. Once the shock of hearing it fly out from her lips passes, she is surprised at how satisfying it feels on her tongue. Fuck. Lord, Ned would die if he heard her. If her mother were alive she’d use up half a bar of soap washing out her mouth.

ROSE TAKES THE PIONEER BUS SYSTEM TO THE COLLEGE. AS she pays the fare, she misses the slot and the token falls to the floor, rolls the length of the bus. The driver sighs, impatient. She fishes out another token, finds a seat, stares out at the winter landscape.

What does he want with her?

Whatever it is, it was set in motion by the words she spilled out on paper the second day in class. The “hot writing.” All the things she wrote about Todd and his death. In that class, something was set in motion, and she can’t go back now and change it. If she could, the first thing she would change is the last time she saw Anderson Jeffrey.

If it had stopped with the kiss, that would be shameful enough. Her face flushes with the recollection. The rest of the memory is at a distance, surreal, like a dream. It has that weird underwater feel to it. Sometimes she can actually make herself believe it was a dream, that it couldn’t have really happened. Maybe she’s turning crazy. Like Bernie Feldman who was normal as blueberry pie until the day she started accusing half the men in Normal of raping her.

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