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people in its aisles and alcoves. A man with a wrinkled, pulsing bag of flesh hanging from the side of his neck trudged past her with his head down, dragging a duffelbag after him by its string. The bag hissed like a snake as it slid along the dirty tile floor. A Mickey Mouse doll stuck out of the duffel’s top, smiling blandly at her. The godlike announcer was telling the assembled travelers that the Trailways express to Omaha would be departing Gate 17 in twenty minutes.
    I can’t do this, she thought suddenly. I can’t live in this world. It isn’t just not knowing where the teabags andScrubbies are; the door he beat me behind was also the door that kept all this confusion and madness out. And I can never go back through it again.
    For a moment a startlingly vivid image from her childhood Sunday-school class filled her mind—Adam and Eve wearing fig-leaves and identical expressions of shame and misery, walking barefoot down a stony path toward a bitter, sterile future. Behind them was the Garden of Eden, lush and filled with flowers. A winged angel stood before its closed gate, the sword in its hand glowing with terrible light.
    â€œDon’t you dare think of it that way!” she cried suddenly, and the man sitting in the doorway recoiled so strongly that he almost dropped his sign. “Don’t you dare! ”
    â€œJesus, I’m sorry! ” the man with the sign said, and rolled his eyes. “Go on, if that’s the way you feel!”
    â€œNo, I . . . it wasn’t you . . . I was thinking about my—”
    The absurdity of what she was doing—trying to explain herself to a beggar sitting in the doorway of the bus terminal—came home to her then. She was still holding two dollars in her hand, her change from the cabbie. She flung them into the cigar-box beside the young man with the sign and fled into the Portside terminal.
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    A nother young man—this one with a tiny Errol Flynn moustache and a handsome, unreliable face—had set up a game she recognized from TV shows as three-card monte on top of his suitcase near the back of the terminal.
    â€œFind the ace of spades?” he invited. “Find the ace of spades, lady?”
    In her mind she saw a fist floating toward her. Saw a ring on the third finger, a ring with the words Service, Loyalty, and Community engraved on it.
    â€œNo thank you,” she said. “I never had a problem with that.”
    His expression as she passed suggested he thought she had a few bats flying around loose in her belfry, but that was all right. He was not her problem. Neither was the man at the entrance who might or might not have AIDS, or the man with the bag of flesh hanging from his neck and the MickeyMouse doll poking out of his duffel. Her problem was Rose Daniels—check that, Rosie McClendon —and that was her only problem.
    She started down the center aisle, then stopped as she saw a trash barrel. A curt imperative— DON’T LITTER! —was stencilled across its round green belly. She opened her purse, took out the ATM card, gazed down at it for a moment, then pushed it through the flap on top of the barrel. She hated to let it go, but at the same time she was relieved to see the last of it. If she kept it, using it again might become a temptation she couldn’t resist . . . and Norman wasn’t stupid. Brutal, yes. Stupid, no. If she gave him a way to trace her, he would. She would do well to keep that in mind.
    She took in a deep breath, held it for a second or two, then let it out and headed for the ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors clustered at the center of the building. She didn’t look back. If she had, she would have seen the young man with the Errol Flynn moustache already rummaging in the barrel, looking for whatever it was the ditzy lady in the sunglasses and bright red kerchief had eighty-sixed. To the young man it had looked like a credit card. Probably