Rose Madder Read Online Free

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 tohave 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.
    â€œIf 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
    S he 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 toherself, 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 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