Rose Madder Read Online Free Page B

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? It 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.
    â€œNo,” 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!
    â€œIt 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 purse, 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