Rose Madder (2 page)

You bastard,
she thinks, without knowing she thinks it. The cramps are coming again, not just one this time but many, swarming into her like terrific insects, and she pushes her head back deep into the corner and moans.
You bastard, how I hate you.

He comes back through the arch and walks toward her. She pedals with her feet, trying to shove herself into the wall, staring at him with frantic eyes. For a moment she's positive he means to kill her this time, not just hurt her, or rob her of the baby she has wanted for so long, but to really kill her. There is something inhuman about the way he looks as he comes toward her with his head lowered and his hands hanging at his sides and the long muscles in his thighs flexing. Before the kids called people like her husband fuzz they had another word for them, and that's the word that comes to her now as he crosses the room with his head down and his hands swinging at the ends of his arms like meat pendulums, because that's what he looks like—a bull.

Moaning, shaking her head, pedaling with her feet. One loafer coming off and lying on its side. She can feel fresh pain, cramps sinking into her belly like anchors equipped with old rusty teeth, and she can feel more blood flowing, but she can't stop pedaling. What she sees in him when he's like this is nothing at all; a kind of terrible absence.

He stands over her, shaking his head wearily. Then he squats and slides his arms beneath her. “I'm not going to hurt you,” he says as he kneels to fully pick her up, “so quit being a goose.”

“I'm bleeding,” she whispers, remembering he had told the person he'd been talking to on the phone that he wouldn't move her, of course he wouldn't.

“Yeah, I know,” he replies, but without interest. He is looking around the room, trying to decide where the accident happened—she knows what he's thinking as surely as if she were inside his head. “That's okay, it'll stop. They'll stop it.”

Will they be able to stop the miscarriage?
she cries inside her own head, never thinking that if she can do it he can too, or noticing the careful way he's looking at her. And once again she won't let herself overhear the rest of what she is thinking.
I hate you. Hate you.

He carries her across the room to the stairs. He kneels, then settles her at the foot of them.

“Comfy?” he asks solicitously.

She closes her eyes. She can't look at him anymore, not right now. She feels she'll go mad if she does.

“Good,” he says, as if she had replied, and when she opens her eyes she sees the look he gets sometimes—that absence. As if his mind has flown off, leaving his body behind.

If I had a knife I could stab him,
she thinks . . . but again, it isn't an idea she will even allow herself to overhear, much less consider. It is only a deep echo, perhaps a reverberation of her husband's madness, as soft as a rustle of batwings in a cave.

Animation floods back into his face all at once and he gets up, his knees popping. He looks down at his shirt to make sure there's no blood on it. It's okay. He looks over into the corner where she collapsed. There
is
blood there, a few little beads and splashes of it. More blood is coming out of her, faster and harder now; she can feel it soaking her with unhealthy, somehow avid warmth. It is
rushing,
as if it has wanted all along to flush the stranger out of its tiny apartment. It is almost as if—oh, horrible thought—her very blood has taken up for her husband's side of it . . . whatever mad side this is.

He goes into the kitchen again and is out there for about five minutes. She can hear him moving around as the actual miscarriage happens and the pain crests and then lets go in a liquid squittering which is felt as much as heard. Suddenly it's as if she is sitting in a sitz bath full of warm, thick liquid. A kind of blood gravy.

His elongate shadow bobs on the archway as the refrigerator opens and closes and then a cabinet (the minute squeak tells her it's the one under the sink) also opens and closes. Water runs in the sink and then he begins to hum something—she thinks it might be “When a Man Loves a Woman”—as her baby runs out of her.

When he comes back through the archway he has a sandwich in one hand—he has not gotten any supper yet, of course, and must be hungry—and a damp rag from the basket under the sink in the other. He squats in the corner to which she staggered after he tore the book from her hands and then administered three hard punches to her belly—
bam, bam, bam,
so long stranger—and begins to wipe up the spatters and drips of blood with the rag; most of the blood and the other mess will be over here at the foot of the stairs, right where he wants it.

He eats his sandwich as he cleans. The stuff between the slices of bread smells to her like the leftover barbecued pork she was going to put together with some noodles for Saturday night—something easy they could eat as they sat in front of the TV, watching the early news.

He looks at the rag, which is stained a faint pink, then into the corner, then at the rag again. He nods, tears a big bite out of his sandwich, and stands up. When he comes back from the kitchen this time, she can hear the faint howl of an approaching siren. Probably the ambulance he called.

He crosses the room, kneels beside her, and takes her hands. He frowns at how cold they are, and begins to chafe them gently as he talks to her.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “It's just . . . stuff's been happening . . . that bitch from the motel . . .” He stops, looks away for a moment, then looks back at her. He is wearing a strange, rueful smile.
Look who I'm trying to explain to,
that smile seems to say.
That's how bad it's gotten—sheesh.

“Baby,” she whispers. “Baby.”

He squeezes her hands, squeezes them hard enough to hurt.

“Never mind the baby, just listen to me. They'll be here in a minute or two.” Yes—the ambulance is very close now, whooping through the night like an unspeakable hound. “You were coming downstairs and you missed your footing. You fell. Do you understand?”

She looks at him, saying nothing. The pain in her middle is abating a little now, and when he squeezes her hands together this time—harder than ever—she really feels it, and gasps.

“Do you understand?”

She looks into his sunken absent eyes and nods. Around her rises a flat saltwater-and-copper smell. No blood gravy now—now it is as if she were sitting in a spilled chemistry set.

“Good,” he says. “Do you know what will happen if you say anything else?”

She nods.

“Say it. It'll be better for you if you do. Safer.”

“You'd kill me,” she whispers.

He nods, looking pleased. Looking like a teacher who has coaxed a difficult answer from a slow student.

“That's right. And I'd make it last. Before I was done, what happened tonight would look like a cut finger.”

Outside, scarlet lights pulse into the driveway.

He chews the last bite of his sandwich and starts to get up. He will go to the door to let them in, the concerned husband whose pregnant wife has suffered an unfortunate accident. Before he can turn away she grasps at the cuff of his shirt. He looks down at her.

“Why?” she whispers. “Why the baby, Norman?”

For a moment she sees an expression on his face she can hardly credit—it looks like fear. But why would he be afraid of her? Or the baby?

“It was an accident,” he says. “That's all, just an accident. I didn't have anything to do with it. And that's the way it better come out when you talk to them. So help you God.”

So help me God,
she thinks.

Doors slam outside; feet run toward the house and there is the toothy metallic clash and rattle of the gurney on which she will be transported to her place beneath the siren. He turns back to her once again, his head lowered in that bullish posture, his eyes opaque.

“You'll have another baby, and this won't happen. The next one'll be fine. A girl. Or maybe a nice little boy. The flavor doesn't matter, does it? If it's a boy, we'll get him a little baseball player's suit. If it's a girl . . .” He gestures vaguely. “ . . . a bonnet, or something. You wait and see. It'll happen.” He smiles then, and the sight of it makes her feel like screaming. It is like watching a corpse grin in its coffin. “If you mind me, everything will be fine. Take it to the bank, sweetheart.”

Then he opens the door to let the ambulance EMTs in, telling them to hurry, telling them there's blood. She closes her eyes as they come toward her, not wanting to give them any opportunity to look into her, and she makes their voices come from far away.

Don't worry, Rose, don't you fret, it's a minor matter, just a baby, you can have another one.

A needle stings her arm, and then she is being lifted. She keeps her eyes closed, thinking
Well all right, yes. I suppose I
can
have another baby.
I can have it and take it beyond his reach. Beyond his murderous reach.

But time passes and gradually the idea of leaving him—never fully articulated to begin with—slips away as the knowledge of a rational waking world slips away in sleep; gradually there is no world for her but the world of the dream in which she lives, a dream like the ones she had as a girl, where she ran and ran as if in a trackless wood or a shadowy maze, with the hoofbeats of some great animal behind her, a fearful insane creature which drew ever closer and would have her eventually, no matter how many times she twisted or turned or darted or doubled back.

The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep. Rose McClendon Daniels slept within her husband's madness for nine more years.

I
t was fourteen years of hell, all told, but she hardly knew it. For most of those years she existed in a daze so deep it was like death, and on more than one occasion she found herself almost certain that her life wasn't really happening, that she would eventually awaken, yawning and stretching as prettily as the heroine in a Walt Disney animated cartoon. This idea came to her most often after he had beaten her so badly that she had to go to bed for awhile in order to recover. He did that three or four times a year. In 1985—the year of Wendy Yarrow, the year of the official reprimand, the year of the “miscarriage”—it had happened almost a dozen times. September of that year had seen her second and last trip to the hospital as a result of Norman's ministrations . . . the last so far, anyway. She'd been coughing up blood. He held off taking her for three days, hoping it would stop, but when it started getting worse instead, he told her just what to say (he
always
told her just what to say) and then took her to St. Mary's. He took her there because the EMTs had taken her to City General following the “miscarriage.” It turned out she had a broken rib that was poking at her lung. She told the falling downstairs story for the second time in three months and didn't think even the intern who'd been there observing the examination and the treatment believed it this time, but no one asked any uncomfortable questions; they just fixed her up and sent her home. Norman knew he had been lucky, however, and after that he was more careful.

Sometimes, when she was lying in bed at night, images would come swarming into her mind like strange comets. The most common was her husband's fist, with blood grimed into the knuckles and smeared across the raised gold of his Police Academy ring. There had been mornings when she had seen the words on that ring—
Service, Loyalty, Community
—stamped into the flesh of her stomach or printed on one of her breasts. This often made her think of the blue FDA stamp you saw on roasts of pork or cuts of steak.

She was always on the verge of dropping off, relaxed and
loose-limbed, when these images came. Then she would see the fist floating toward her and jerk fully awake again and lie trembling beside him, hoping he wouldn't turn over, only half-awake himself, and drive a blow into her belly or thigh for disturbing him.

She passed into this hell when she was eighteen and awakened from her daze about a month after her thirty-second birthday, almost half a lifetime later. What woke her up was a single drop of blood, no larger than a dime.

S
he saw it while making the bed. It was on the top sheet, her side, close to where the pillow went when the bed was made. She could, in fact, slide the pillow slightly to the left and hide the spot, which had dried to an ugly maroon color. She saw how easy this would be and was tempted to do it, mostly because she could not just change the top sheet; she had no more clean white bed-linen, and if she put on one of the flower-patterned sheets to replace the plain white one with the spot of blood on it, she would have to put on the other patterned one, as well. If she didn't he was apt to complain.

Look at this,
she heard him saying.
Goddam sheets don't even match—you got a white one on the bottom, and one with flowers on it on top. Jesus, why do you have to be so lazy? Come over here—I want to talk to you up close.

She stood on her side of the bed in a bar of spring sunlight, the lazy slut who spent her days cleaning the little house (a single smeared fingerprint on the corner of the bathroom mirror could bring a blow) and obsessing over what to fix him for his dinner, she stood there looking down at the tiny spot of blood on the sheet, her face so slack and devoid of animation that an observer might well have decided she was mentally retarded.
I thought my damned nose had stopped bleeding,
she told herself.
I was sure it had.