Rose Madder

“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 bo

“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.