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ROSE MADDER

Hodder & Stoughton

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the from the following copyrighted

works:

Sendak

(Renewed 1992) EMI Music Publishing o/b/o Al Gallico Music Corp. Reprinted by permission of Warner

Bros. Publications Inc.

Excerpt from Out of the Sea, Early is reprinted with permission of Macmillan Books for Young Readers, an

imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division, from The Complete Poems to Solve by May

rights administered by Sony Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights

reserved. Used by permission.

"Ramblin" Rose" words and music by Noel Sherman and Joe Sherman Copyright (c)

1962 renewed 1990 by Erasmus Music, Inc. Administered by the Songwriter's Guild of America,

International copyright secured.

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton

a division of Hodder Headline PLC

The right of Stephen King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a

similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

King, Stephen

Rose Madder

I. Title

813.54 [F]

ISBN 0 340 64013 8

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

Hodder and Stoughton

A division of Hodder headline PLC

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

This book is for Joan Marks

I'm really Rosie,

And I'm Rosie Real,

You better believe me,

I'm a great big deal . . .

Maurice Sendak

A bloody

egg yolk. A burnt hole

spreading in a sheet. An en-

raged rose threatening to bloom.

May Swenson

PROLOGUE

Sinister Kisses

She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few minutes ago

and now seems to have none. From what sounds like a great distance she can hear a thin whoop-whoop

sound, and she knows this is air going down her throat and then sliding back out again in a series of feverish

little gasps, but that doesn't change the feeling that she's drowning here in the corner of her living room,

looking at the shredded remains of the paperback novel she was reading when her husband came home.

Not that she cares much. The pain is too great for her to worry about such minor matters as respiration, or

how there seems to be no air in the air she is breathing. The pain has swallowed her as the whale reputedly

swallowed Jonah, that holy draft-dodger. It throbs like a poison sun glowing deep down in the middle of her,

in a place where until tonight there was only the quiet sense of a new thing growing.

There has never been any pain like this pain, not that she can remember - not even when she was

thirteen and swerved her bike to avoid a pothole and wiped out, bouncing her head off the asphalt and

opening up a cut that turned out to be exactly eleven stitches long. What she remembered about that was a

silvery jolt of pain followed by starry dark surprise which had actually been a brief faint . . . but that pain had

not been this agony. This terrible agony. Her hand on her belly registers flesh that is no longer like flesh at

all; it is as if she has been unzipped and her living baby replaced with a hot rock.

Oh God please, she thinks. Please let the baby be okay.

But now, as her breath finally begins to ease a little, she realizes that the baby is not okay, that he has

made sure of that much, anyway. When you're four months pregnant the baby is still more a part of you than

of itself, and when you're sitting in a corner with your hair stuck in strings to your sweaty cheeks and it feels

as if you've swallowed a hot stone-

Something is putting sinister, slippery little kisses against the insides of her thighs.

'No,' she whispers, 'no. Oh my dear sweet God, no. Good God, sweet God, dear God, no.'

Let it be sweat, she thinks. Let it be sweat . . . or maybe I peed myself. Yes, that's probably it. It hurt so

bad after he hit me the third time that I peed myself and didn't even know it. That's it.

Except it isn't sweat and it isn't pee. It's blood. She's sitting here in the corner of the living room, looking at

a dismembered paperback lying half on the sofa and half under the coffee-table, and her womb is getting

ready to vomit up the baby it has so far carried with no complaint or problem whatsoever.

'No,' she moans, 'no, God, please say no.'

She can see her husband's shadow, as twisted and elongated as a cornfield effigy or the shadow of a

hanged man, dancing and bobbing on the wall of the archway leading from the living room into the kitchen.

She can see shadow-phone pressed to shadow-ear, and the long corkscrew shadow-cord. She can even

see his shadow-fingers pulling the kinks out of the cord, holding for a moment and then releasing it back into

its former curls again, like a bad habit you just can't get rid of.

Her first thought is that he's calling the police. Ridiculous, of course - he is the police.

'Yes, it's an emergency,' he's saying. 'You're goddam tooting it is, beautiful, she's pregnant.' He listens,

slipping the cord through his fingers, and when he speaks again his tone is testy. Just that faint irritation in

his voice is enough to renew her terror and fill her mouth with a steely taste. Who would cross him,

contradict him? Oh, who would be so foolish as to do that? Only someone who didn't know him, of course -

someone who didn't know him the way she knew him. 'Of course I won't move her, do you think I'm an idiot?'

Her fingers creep under her dress and up her thigh to the soaked, hot cotton of her panties. Please, she

thinks. How many times has that word gone through her mind since he tore the book out of her hands? She

doesn't know, but here it is again. Please let the liquid on my fingers be clear. Please, God. Please let it be

clear.

But when she brings her hand out from under her dress the tips of her fingers are red with blood. As she

looks at them, a monstrous cramp rips through her like a hacksaw blade. She has to slam her teeth together

to stifle a scream. She knows better than to scream in this house.

'Never mind all that bullshit, just get here! Fast!' He slams the phone back into its cradle.

His shadow swells and bobs on the wall and then he's standing in the archway, looking at her out of his

flushed and handsome face. The eyes in that face are as expressionless as shards of glass twinkling beside

a country road.

'Now look at this,' he says, holding out both hands briefly and then letting them drop back to his sides with

a soft clap. 'Look at this mess.'

She holds her own hand out to him, showing him the bloody tips of her fingers - it is as close to

accusation as she can get.

'I know,' he says, speaking as if his knowing explained everything, put the whole business in a coherent,

rational context. He turns and stares fixedly at the dismembered paperback. He picks up the piece on the

couch, then bends to get the one under the coffee-table. As he straightens up again, she can see the cover,

which shows a woman in a white peasant blouse standing on the prow of a ship. Her hair is blowing back

dramatically in the wind, exposing her creamy shoulders. The title, Misery's Journey, has been rendered in

bright red foil.

'This is the trouble,' he says, and wags the remains of the book at her like a man shaking a rolled-up

newspaper at a puppy that has piddled on the floor. 'How many times have I told you how I feel about crap

like this?'

The answer, actually, is never. She knows she might be sitting here in the corner having a miscarriage if

he had come home and found her watching the news on TV or sewing a button on one of his shirts or just

napping on the couch. It has been a bad time for him, a woman named Wendy Yarrow has been making

trouble for him, and what Norman does with trouble is share the wealth. How many times have I told you

how I feel about that crap? he would have shouted, no matter what crap it was. And then, just before he

started in with his fists: I want to talk to you, honey. Right up close.

'Don't you understand?' she whispers. 'I'm losing the baby!'

Incredibly, he smiles. 'You can have another one,' he says. He might be comforting a child who has

dropped her ice cream cone. Then he takes the torn-up paperback out to the kitchen, where he will no doubt

drop it in the trash.

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 that 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 . . . stuffs 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

One Drop of Blood

1

It 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 PDA 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.

2

She 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 dose.

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.

He didn't hit her in the face often; he knew better. Face-hitting was for the sort of drunken assholes he

had arrested by the hundreds in his career as a uniformed policeman and then as a city detective. You hit

someone - your wife, for instance - in the face too often, and after awhile the stories about falling down the

stairs or running into the bathroom door in the middle of the night or stepping on a rake in the back yard

stopped working. People knew. People talked. And eventually you got into trouble, even if the woman kept

her mouth shut, because the days when folks knew how to mind their own business were apparently over.

None of that took his temper into account, however. He had a bad one, very bad, and sometimes he

slipped. That was what had happened last night, when she brought him a second glass of iced tea and

spilled some on his hand. Pow, and her nose was gushing like a broken water-main before he even knew

what he was doing. She saw the look of disgust on his face as the blood poured down over her mouth and

chin, then the look of worried calculation - what if her nose was actually broken? That would mean another

trip to the hospital. For a moment she'd thought one of the real beatings was coming, one of the ones that

left her huddled in the corner, gasping and crying and trying to get back enough breath so she could vomit.

In her apron. Always in her apron. You did not cry out in this house, or argue with the management, and you

most certainly did not vomit on the floor - not if you wanted to keep your head screwed on tight, that was.

Then his sharply honed sense of self-preservation had kicked in, and he had gotten her a washcloth filled

with ice and led her into the living room, where she had lain on the sofa with the makeshift icepack pressed

down between her watering eyes. That was where you had to put it, he told her, if you wanted to stop the

bleeding in a hurry and reduce the residual swelling. It was the swelling he was worried about, of course.

Tomorrow was her day to go to the market, and you couldn't hide a swollen nose with a pair of Oakleys the

way you could hide a black eye.

He had gone back to finish his supper - broiled snapper and roasted new potatoes.

There hadn't been much swelling, as a quick glance in the mirror this morning had shown her (he had

already given her a close looking-over and then a dismissive nod before drinking a cup of coffee and leaving

for work), and the bleeding had stopped after only fifteen minutes or so with the icepack . . . or so she'd

thought. But sometime in the night, while she had been sleeping, one traitor drop of blood had crept out of

her nose and left this spot, which meant she was going to have to strip the bed and remake it, in spite of her

aching back. Her back always ached these days; even moderate bending and light lifting made it hurt. Her

back was one of his favorite targets. Unlike what he called 'face-hitting,' it was safe to hit someone in the

back . . . if the someone in question knew how to keep her mouth shut, that was. Norman had been working

on her kidneys for fourteen years, and the traces of blood she saw more and more frequently in her urine no

longer surprised or worried her. It was just another unpleasant part of being married, that was all, and there

were probably millions of women who had it worse. Thousands right in this town. So she had always seen it,

anyway, until now.

She looked at the spot of blood, feeling unaccustomed resentment throbbing in her head, feeling

something else, a pins-and-needles tingle, not knowing this was the way you felt when you finally woke up.

There was a small bentwood rocker on her side of the bed which she had always thought of, for no

reason she could have explained, as Pooh's Chair. She backed toward it now, never taking her eyes off the

small drop of blood glaring off the white sheet, and sat down. She sat in Pooh's Chair for almost five

minutes, then jumped when a voice spoke in the room, not realizing at first that it was her own voice.

'If this goes on, he'll kill me,' she said, and after she got over her momentary surprise, she supposed it

was the drop of blood - the little bit of herself that was already dead, that had crept out of her nose and died

on the sheet - she was speaking to.

The answer that came back was inside her own head, and it was infinitely more terrible than the

possibility she had spoken aloud:

Except he might not. Have you thought of that? He might not.

3

She hadn't thought of it. The idea that someday he would hit her too hard, or in the wrong place, had often

crossed her mind (although she had never said it out loud, even to herself, until today), but never the

possibility that she might live . . .

The buzzing in her muscles and joints increased. Usually she only sat in Pooh's Chair with her hands

folded in her lap, looking across the bed and through the bathroom door at her own reflection in the mirror,

but this morning she began to rock, moving the chair back and forth in short, jerky arcs. She had to rock.

The buzzing, tingling sensation in her muscles demanded that she rock. And the last thing she wanted to do

was to look at her own reflection, and never mind that her nose hadn't swollen much.

Come over here, sweetheart, I want to talk to you up dose.

Fourteen years of that. A hundred and sixty-eight months of it, beginning with his yanking her by the hair

and biting her shoulder for slamming a door on their wedding night. One miscarriage. One scratched lung.

The horrible thing he'd done with the tennis racket. The old marks, on parts of her body her clothes covered.

Bite-marks, for the most part. Norman loved to bite. At first she had tried to tell herself they were lovebites. It

was strange to think she had ever been that young, but she supposed she must have been.

Come over here - I want to talk to you up close.

Suddenly she was able to identify the buzzing, which had now spread to her entire body. It was anger she

was feeling, rage, and realization brought wonder.

Get out of here, that deep part of her said suddenly. Get out of here right now, this very minute. Don't

even take the time to run a comb through your hair. Just go.

'That's ridiculous,' she said, rocking back and forth faster than ever. The spot of blood on the sheet sizzled

in her eye. From here, it looked like the dot under an exclamation point. 'That's ridiculous, where would I

go?'

Anywhere he isn't, the voice returned. But you have to do it right now. Before . . .

Before what?

That one was easy. Before she fell asleep again.

A part of her mind - a habituated, cowed part - suddenly realized that she was seriously entertaining this

thought and put up a terrified clamor. Leave her home of fourteen years? The house where she could put

her hand on anything she wanted? The husband who, if a little short-tempered and quick to use his fists, had

always been a good provider? The idea was ridiculous. She must forget it, and immediately.

And she might have done so, almost certainly would have done so, if not for that drop on the sheet. That

single dark red drop.

Then don't look at it! the part of herself which fancied itself practical and sensible shouted nervously. For

Christ's sake don't look at it, it's going to get you into trouble!

Except she found she could no longer look away. Her eyes remained fixed upon the spot, and she rocked

faster than ever. Her feet, clad in white lowtop sneakers, patted the floor in a quickening rhythm (the buzzing

was now mostly in her head, rattling her brains, heating her up), and what she thought was Fourteen years.

Fourteen years of having him talk to me up dose. The miscarriage. The tennis racket. Three teeth, one of

which I swallowed. The broken rib. The punches. The pinches. And the bites, of course. Plenty of those.

Plenty of -

Stop it! It's useless, thinking like this, because you're not going anywhere, he'd only come after you and

bring you back, he'd find you, he's a policeman and finding people is one of the things he does, one of the

things he's good at-

'Fourteen years,' she murmured, and now it wasn't the last fourteen she was thinking about but the next.

Because that other voice, the deep voice, was right. He might not kill her. He might not. And what would she

be like after fourteen more years of having him talk to her up close? Would she be able to bend over? Would

she have an hour - fifteen minutes, even - a day when her kidneys didn't feel like hot stones buried in her

back? Would he perhaps hit her hard enough to deaden some vital connection, so she could no longer raise

one of her arms or legs, or perhaps leave one side of her face hanging slack and expressionless, like poor

Mrs Diamond, who clerked in the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill?

She got up suddenly and with such force that the back of Pooh's Chair hit the wall. She stood there for a

moment, breathing hard, wide eyes still fixed on the maroon spot, and then she headed for the door leading

into the living room.

Where are you going? Ms Practical-Sensible screamed inside her head - the part of her which seemed

perfectly willing to be maimed or killed for the continued privilege of knowing where the teabags were in the

cupboard and where the Scrubbies were kept under the sink. Just where do you think you're-

She clapped a lid on the voice, something she'd had no idea she could do until this moment. She took her

purse off the table by the sofa and walked across the living room toward the front door. The room suddenly

seemed very big, and the walk very long.

I have to take this a step at a time. If I think even one step ahead, I'm going to lose my nerve.

She didn't think that would be a problem, actually. For one thing, what she was doing had taken on a

hallucinatory quality - surely she could not simply be walking out of her house and her marriage on the spur

of the moment, could she? I,t had to be a dream, didn't it? And there was something else, too: not thinking

ahead had pretty much become a habit with her, one that had started on their wedding night, when he'd

bitten her like a dog for slamming a door.

Well, you can't go like this, even if you just make it to the bottom of the block before running out of steam,

Practical-Sensible advised. At the very least change out of those jeans that show how wide your can's

getting. And run a comb through your hair.

She paused, and was for a moment close to giving the whole thing up before she even got to the front

door. Then she recognized the advice for what it was - a desperate ploy to keep her in the house. And a

shrewd one. It didn't take long to swap a pair of jeans for a skirt or to mousse your hair and then use a comb

on it, but for a woman in her position, it would almost certainly have been long enough.

For what? To go back to sleep again, of course. She'd be having serious doubts by the time she'd pulled

the zipper up on the side of her skirt, and by the time she'd finished with her comb, she'd have decided she

had simply suffered a brief fit of insanity, a transitory fugue state that was probably related to her cycle.

Then she would go back into the bedroom and change the sheets.

'No,' she murmured. 'I won't do that. I won't.'

But with one hand on the doorknob, she paused again.

She shows sense! Practical-Sensible cried, her voice a mixture of relief, jubilation, and - was it possible? -

faint disappointment. Hallelujah, the girl shows sense! Better late than never!

The jubilation and relief in that mental voice turned to wordless horror as she crossed quickly to the

mantel above the gas fireplace he had installed two years before. What she was looking for probably

wouldn't be there, as a rule he only left it up there toward the end of the month ('So I won't be tempted,' he

would say), but it couldn't hurt to check. And she knew his pin-number; it was just their telephone number,

with the first and last digits reversed.

It WILL hurt! Practical-Sensible screamed. If you take something that belongs to him, it'll hurt plenty, and

you know it! PLENTY!

'It won't be there anyway,' she murmured, but it was - the bright green Merchant's Bank ATM card with his

name embossed on it.

Don't you take that! Don't you dare!

But she found she did dare - all she had to do was call up the image of that drop of blood. Besides, it was

her card, too, her money, too; wasn't that what the marriage vow meant?

Except it wasn't about the money at all, not really. It was about silencing the voice of Ms Practical-

Sensible; it was about making this sudden, unexpected lunge for freedom a necessity instead of a choice.

Part of her knew that if she didn't do that, the bottom of the block was as far as she would get before the

whole uncertain sweep of the future appeared before her like a fogbank, and she turned around and came

back home, hurrying to change the bed so she could still wash the downstairs floors before noon . . . and,

hard as it was to believe, that was all she had been thinking about when she got up this morning: washing

floors.

Ignoring the clamor of the voice in her head, she plucked the ATM card off the mantel, dropped it into her

handbag, and quickly headed for the door again.

Don't do it! the voice of Ms Practical-Sensible wailed. Oh Rosie, he won't just hurt you for this, for this he'll

put you in the hospital, maybe even kill you - don't you know that?

She supposed she did, but she kept walking just the same, her head down and her shoulders thrust

forward, like a woman walking into a strong wind. He probably would do those things . . . but he would have

to catch her first.

This time when her hand closed on the knob there was no pause - she turned it and opened the door and

stepped out. It was a beautiful sunshiny day in mid-April, the branches on the trees beginning to thicken with

buds. Her shadow stretched across the stoop and the pale new grass like something cut from black

construction paper with a sharp pair of scissors. She stood there breathing deeply of the spring air, smelling

earth which had been dampened (and perhaps quickened) by a shower that had passed in the night, while

she had been lying asleep with one nostril suspended over that drying spot of blood.

The whole world is waking up, she thought. It isn't just me.

A man in a jogging suit ran past on the sidewalk as she pulled the door closed behind her. He lifted a

hand to her, and she lifted hers in return. She listened for the voice inside to raise its clamor again, but that

voice was silent. Perhaps it was stunned to silence by her theft of the ATM card, perhaps it had only been

soothed by the tranquil peace of this April morning.

'I'm going,' she murmured. 'I'm really, really going.'

But she stayed where she was a moment longer, like an animal which has been kept in a cage so long it

cannot believe in freedom even when it is offered. She reached behind her and touched the knob of the door

- the door that led into her cage.

'No more,' she whispered. She tucked her bag under one arm and took her first dozen steps into the

fogbank which was now her future.

4

Those dozen steps took her to the place where the concrete walk merged with the sidewalk - the place

where the jogger had passed a minute or so before. She started to turn left, then paused. Norman had told

her once that people who thought they were choosing directions at random - people lost in the woods, for

example - were almost always simply going in the direction of their dominant hand. It probably wasn't

important, but she discovered she didn't even want him to be right about which way she had turned on

Westmoreland Street after leaving the house.

Not even that.

She turned right instead of left, in the direction of her stupid hand, and walked down the hill. She went

past the Store 24, restraining an urge to raise her hand and cover the side of her face as she passed it.

Already she felt like a fugitive, and a terrible thought had begun to gnaw at her mind like a rat gnawing

cheese: what if he came home from work early and saw her? What if he saw her walking down the street in

her jeans and lowtops, with her bag clamped under her arm and her hair uncombed? He would wonder what

the hell she was doing out on the morning she was supposed to be washing the downstairs floors, wouldn't

he? And he would want her to come over to him, wouldn't he? Yes. He would want her to come over to

where he was so he could talk to her up close.

That's stupid. What reason would he have to come home now? He only left an hour ago. It doesn't make

sense.

No . . . but sometimes people did things that didn't make sense. Her, for instance - look at what she was

doing right now. And suppose he had a sudden intuition? How many times had he told her that cops

developed a sixth sense after awhile, that they knew when something weird was going to happen? You get

this little needle at the base of your spine, he'd said once. I don't know how else to describe it. I know most

people would laugh, but ask a cop - he won't laugh. That little needle has saved my life a couple of times,

sweetheart.

Suppose he'd been feeling that needle for the last twenty minutes or so? Suppose it had gotten him into

his car and headed home? This was just the way he would come, and she cursed herself for having turned

right instead of left when leaving their walk. Then an even more unpleasant idea occurred to her, one which

had a hideous plausibility . . . not to mention a kind of ironic balance. Suppose he had stopped at the ATM

machine two blocks down the street from police headquarters, wanting ten or twenty bucks for lunch?

Suppose he had decided, after ascertaining that the card wasn't in his wallet, to come home and get it?

Get hold of yourself. That isn't going to happen. Nothing like that is going to happen.

A car turned onto Westmoreland half a block down. It was red, and what a coincidence that was, because

they had a red car . . . or he did; the car was no more hers than the ATM card was, or the money it could

access. Their red car was a new Sentra, and - coincidence upon coincidence! - wasn't this car now coming

toward her a red Sentra?

No, it's a Honda!

Except it wasn't a Honda, that was just what she wanted to believe. It was a Sentra, a brand-new red

Sentra. His red Sentra. Her worst nightmare had come true at almost the very moment she had thought of it.

For a moment her kidneys were incredibly heavy, incredibly painful, incredibly full, and she was sure she

was going to wet her pants. Had she really thought she could get away from him? She must have been

insane.

Rose_Madder

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