Rose Madder

by Stephen King

  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 comer, 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 gumey 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 awhil
e 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.

  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 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 comer 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 startle, 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 want
ed 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 close.

  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.