Rose Madder

“Gert…” Cynthia was crying and attempting to crawl to where Gert lay on her side, watching Norman disappear from view. Gert turned her attention to the girl and saw she’d taken a much worse beating than Gert had thought at first. A bruise like a thundercloud was puffing up over her right eye, and her nose would probably never be the same. Gert struggled to her knees and crawled toward Cynthia. They met and held each other that way, arms locked around necks to keep them from tumbling over. Speaking with enormous effort through her puffy lips, Cynthia said:

“I would have thrown him myself… like you taught us… only he took me by surprise.”

“That’s all right,” Gert said, and kissed her gently on the temple.

“How bad are you hurt?” “don’t know… not coughing up blood… step in the right direction.” She was trying to smile. It was clearly painful, but she was trying, anyway.

“Pissed on him.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Bitchin-good,” Cynthia whispered, and then began to cry again. Gert took her in her arms, and that was how the first group of women, closely followed by a pair of Pier Security guards, found them: on their knees between the back of the bathroom and the abandoned, overturned wheelchair, each with her head against the shoulder of the other, clinging together like shipwrecked sailors.

Rosie’s first blurred impression of the East Side Receiving Hospital Emergency Room was that everyone from Daughters and Sisters was there. As she crossed the room toward Gert (barely registering the men clustered around her), she saw at least three were missing: A

“Gert!” she cried, pushing through the men with barely a glance at them.

“Gert, where’s Cynthia? Is she-”

“Upstairs.” Gert tried to give Rosie a reassuring smile, but it wasn’t much of a success. Her eyes were swollen and red with tears.

“They admitted her and she’s probably going to be here awhile, but she’ll be okay, Rosie. He beat her up pretty bad, but she’ll be okay. Do you know you’re wearing a. motorcycle helmet? It’s sort of… cute.” Bill’s hands were on the buckle under her chin again, but Rosie was hardly even aware of the helmet’s being removed. She was looking at Gert… Consuelo… Robin. Looking for eyes that said she was infected, that she had brought a plague into their previously clean house. Looking for the hate.

“I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely.

“I’m so sorry for everything.”

“Why?” Robin asked, sounding honestly surprised.

“You didn’t beat Cynthia up.” Rosie looked at her uncertainly, then back to Gert. Gert’s eyes had shifted, and when Rosie followed them, she felt a surge of dread. For the first time she consciously registered the fact that there were cops here as well as women from D amp; S. Two in plainclothes, three in uniform. Cops. She reached out with a hand that felt numb and grasped Bill’s fingers.

“You have to talk to this woman,” Gert was telling one of the cops.

“Her husband was the one who did this. Rosie, this is Lieutenant Hale.” They were all turning to look at her now, to look at the cop’s wife who’d had the deadly impudence to steal her husband’s bank card and then try to flee from his life. Norman’s brothers, looking at her.

“Ma’am?” the plainclothes cop named Hale said, and for a moment he sounded so much like Harley Bissington she thought she might scream. “steady, Rosie,” Bill murmured.

“I’m here and I’m staying here.”

“Ma’am, what can you tell us about this?” At least he didn’t sound like Harley anymore. That had only been a trick of her mind. Rosie looked out the window toward a freeway entrance ramp. She looked east-the direction from which night would come rising out of the lake not so many hours from now. She bit her lip, then looked back at the cop. She placed her other hand over Bill’s and spoke in a husky voice she hardly recognized as her own.

“His name is Norman Daniels,” she told Lieutenant Hale. You sound like the woman in the painting, she thought. You sound like Rose Madder.

“He’s my husband, he’s a police detective, and he’s crazy.”

VIII. VIVA ZE BOOL

He had felt as if he were floating above his own head, somehow, but when Dirty Gertie pissed on him, all that changed. Now, instead of feeling like a helium-filled balloon, his head felt like a flat rock which some strong hand had sent skipping across the surface of a lake. He was no longer floating; now he seemed to be leaping. He still couldn’t believe what the fat black bitch had done to him. He knew it, yes, but knowing and believing were sometimes worlds apart, and this was one of those times. It was as if a dark transmutation had occurred, changing him into some new creature, a thing that went skittering helplessly along the surface of perception, allowing him only brief periods of thought and strange, disco