Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TWENTY

            Rosalyn and Deidra had left their room at the Moorland Motel at about 8am that morning. The best part of the Moorland, thought Rosalyn, who before now never would have guessed she would be staying in the ancient motel, was that the clerks really didn't give a damn who you were, as long you could fork out enough cash.

Fortunately, Deidra had enough money for both of them, and they were given the key to a room that was really more like a small trailer. A kitchen with a one-burner stove sat across from a tired, green sofa. The wallpaper inside exhumed the smell of cigarette smoke, dust, and breathing this air into her lungs, Rosalyn had spent an honest five minutes scanning the mattress for bed bugs, blood stains.

But she was hungry now, and craving breakfast, as she walked on the sidewalk across town. Deidra was silent beside her; her hair wrapped up and covered with a hood, her sunglasses on. Her skin lined and tanned without the makeup she'd worn the day before. Now the only product she wore was a dark, almost-purple lipstick she'd said she used once a year on Halloween, but was always looking for an excuse to wear it again.

When Rosalyn entered the super market, she'd felt the air conditioning splay cool air across her skin, her nose picking up on the scent of fried chicken. "Remember," she said, picking up a small, black basket from the entranceway. "In and out."

Deidra nodded beneath her hood. She pried her sunglasses down, poked her eyes up over them, scanning the produce section. Then she pushed her glasses back on, and moved in-step with Rosalyn.

A grocery worker was filling an island with pre-made plastic-wrapped sandwiches and burritos. He nodded at Rosalyn as they moved by him.

"Let's just get enough stuff for today," Rosalyn said. "We don't want to have to leave a bunch of stuff behind if we need to getaway again."

Deidra was silent beside her. She picked three oranges out of a pile, one after another, and tossed them, underhand, into Rosalyn's basket.

"What's up? Rosalyn said. But she thought she knew without asking. Phil. No way Deidra was going to getaway from this Norriswood without him. But how did she plan on making it back to the hospital to see him? And how long was it going to be before he was even cleared to leave?

Rosalyn moved to the left, towards where the greens and veggies lived beneath the mist spurting from the refrigerator's hoses. "I'm surprised the nurse didn't say he had a concussion," Rosalyn said, picking up a full piece of broccoli.

Beside her, she felt Deidra move, and then saw she had taken her sunglasses off. The skin beneath her eyes was dark, purple-tinged, like the way ice looks on a pond when it hasn't fully frozen, when it'll sigh, crack, collapse, if you dare skate on it. "Rosalyn," she said. "I've known that man since we were both tots in the same kindergarten class. I was married to him for almost ten years, and I've never seen him like that. I didn't realize it –" Rosalyn had noticed a woman with a small child perched atop her shopping cart meander toward them, and began to walk on, into the bakery.

"I didn't realize – it didn't hit me what kind of state he was in until I woke up this morning. That whole time we were in the hospital, it all just felt like a dream."

Rosalyn stopped walking, and picked up a loaf of multi-grain bread from the shelf, dropped it into her basket. "I know," Rosalyn said. Then something moved through her thoughts.

"Deidra, you don't think the nurses might have drugged him with something, do you?"

Deidra's eyes fished along the back wall where cardboard boxes of pastries lined the shelves. "Now that you mention it, he was definitely given something. I thought the man was dead, Rosalyn."

Rosalyn stopped then, and had to catch the basket of groceries as it dropped from her hand. In front of them, at a small, square-shaped table marked off with a 50% off sign, a woman moved her grey-haired head toward her, a woman who looked identical to Deidra.

Rosalyn flipped around, and darted between two aisles that housed containers of loose seeds and nuts on either side. Deidra slipped in behind her.

"Did she see you?" Rosalyn asked. She poked her head out of the aisle of seeds, and then Rosalyn did drop her basket, and it clattered against the hard floor. Deidra's clone lay flat against the floor, a head of cauliflower rolled like tumbleweed across the supermarket floor.

Rosalyn turned back inside, and grabbed the basket with her right hand, and Deidra with her left. "We need to go," she said. "Right now."

Rosalyn speed-walked toward the front entrance, while beside her, Deidra flipped her sunglasses back on. The front doors slid open as Rosalyn approached, and then an alarm rang and rang around them.

Rosalyn kept moving, and stepped through the front foyer where shopping carts were crumpled into one another in rows.

She was on the sidewalk, moving away from the store when she looked down: she still clutched the basket of groceries in her hand.

"Shit," she said, but Deidra was already pushing behind her, leading her away into the September morning, the alarm inside the store sounding out and around the half-empty parking lot.