“He would have snapped my neck like the wishbone in a chicken,” she told Bill without looking up. She had promised herself that she would leave, though; she would do it the very next time he hurt her. But after that night he hadn’t laid a hand on her for a long time. Five months, maybe. And when he did go after her again, at first it hadn’t been so bad and she had told herself that if she could stand up to being poked over and over again with a pencil, she could put up with a few punches. She had gone on thinking that until 1985, when things had suddenly escalated. She told him how scary Norman had been that year, because of the trouble with Wendy Yarrow.
“That was the year you had your miscarriage, wasn’t it?” Bill asked.
“Yes,” she told her hands.
“He broke one of my ribs, too. Or maybe it was a couple. I don’t really remember anymore, isn’t that awful?” He didn’t reply, so she hurried on, telling him that the worst parts (other than the miscarriage, of course) were the long, scary silences when he would simply look at her, breathing so loudly through his nose that he sounded like an animal getting ready to charge. Things had gotten a little better, she said, after her miscarriage. She told him about how she had started to slip a few cogs at the end, how time sometimes got away from her when she was in her rocker and how sometimes, when she was setting the table for supper and listening for the sound of Norman’s car pulling into the driveway, she’d realize she’d taken eight or even nine showers in the course of the day. Usually with the bathroom lights off.
“I liked to shower in the dark,” she said, still not daring to look up from her hands.
“It was like a wet closet.” She finished by telling him about Anna’s call, which Anna had made in a hurry for one important reason. She had learned a detail which hadn’t been in the newspaper story, a detail the police were holding back to help them weed out any false confessions or bad tips they might receive. Peter Slowik had been bitten over three dozen times, and at least one part of his anatomy was missing. The police believed that the killer had taken it with him… one way or another. Anna knew from Therapy Circle that Rosie McClendon, whose first significant contact in this city had been with her ex-husband, had been married to a biter. There might be no connection, Anna had been quick to add. But… on the other hand…
“A biter,” Bill said quietly. It sounded almost as if he were talking to himself.
“Is that what they call men like him? Is that the term?”
“I guess it is,” Rosie said. And then, maybe because she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her (would think she had been “fibulating,” in Normanspeak), she slid her shoulder briefly out of the pink Tape Engine tee-shirt she was wearing and showed him the old white ring of scar there, like the remnant of a shark-bite. That had been the first one, her honeymoon present. Then she turned up her left forearm, showing him another one. This time it wasn’t a bite it made her think of; for some reason it made her think of smooth white faces almost hidden in lush green undergrowth.
“This one bled quite a bit, then got infected,” she told him. She spoke in the tone of someone relaying routine information-that Gramma had called earlier, perhaps, or that the mailman had left a package.
“I didn’t go to the doctor, though. Norman brought home a big bottle of antibiotic tablets. I took them and got better. He knows all sorts of people he can get things from. He calls people like that “daddy’s little helpers.” That’s sort of funny when you think of it, isn’t it?” She was still talking mostly to her hands, which were clasped in her lap, but she finally dared a quick look up at him, to gauge his reaction to the things she had been saying. What she saw stunned her.
“What?” he asked hoarsely.
“What, Rosie?”
“You’re crying,” she said, and now her own voice wavered. Bill looked surprised.
“No, I’m not. At least, I don’t think I am.” She reached out with one finger, drew a gentle semicircle below his eye with it, and then held the tip up for him to see. He examined it closely, biting his lower lip.
“You didn’t eat much, either.” Half of his dog was still on his plate, with mustardy sauerkraut spilling out of the bun. Bill pitched the paper plate into the trash barrel beside the bench, then looked back at her, absently wiping at the wetness on his cheeks. Rosie felt a bleak certainty steal over her. Now he would ask why she had stayed with Norman and while she wouldn’t get up off the park bench and leave (any more than she had ever left the house on Westmoreland Street until April), it would put the first barrier between them, because it was a question she couldn’t answer. She didn’t know why she had stayed with him, any more than she knew why, in the end, it had taken just a single drop of blood to transform her entire life. She only knew that the shower had been the best place in the house, dark and wet and full of steam, and that sometimes half an hour in Pooh’s Chair felt like five minutes, and that why wasn’t a question that had any meaning when you were living in hell. Hell was motiveless. The women in Therapy Circle had understood that; no one had asked her why she stayed. They knew. From their own experiences, they knew. She had an idea that some of them might even know about the tennis racket… or things even worse than the tennis racket. But when Bill finally asked a question, it was so different from the one she had expected that for a moment she could only flounder.
“What are the chances he might have killed the woman who was making all the trouble for him back in
“85? That Wendy Yarrow?” She was shocked, but it wasn’t the kind of shock one feels when asked an unthinkable question; she was shocked in the manner of one who sees a known face in some fabulously unlikely locale. The question he had spoken aloud was one which had circled, unarticulated and thus not quite formed, at the back of her mind for years.
“Rosie? I asked you what you thought the chances were-”
“I think they might have been… well, pretty good, actually.”
“It was convenient for him when she died like that, wasn’t it? Saved him from watching the whole thing get hung out in civil court.”
“Yes.”
“If she had been bitten, do you think the newspapers would have printed it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.” She looked at her watch and got quickly to her feet.
“Oh, boy, I have to go, and right now. Rhoda wanted to start in again at twelve-fifteen and it’s ten past already.” They started back side by side. She found herself wishing he would put his arm around her again, and just as part of her mind was telling her not to be greedy and another part (Practical-Sensible) was telling her not to ask for trouble, he did just that. I think I’m falling in love with him. It was the lack of amazement in that thought which prompted the next one: No, Rosie, I think that’s actually yesterday’s headline. I think it’s already happened.
“What did Anna say about the police?” he asked her. “does she want you to go someplace and make a report?” She stiffened within the circle of his arm, her throat drying out as adrenaline tipped into her system. All it took was that single word. The p-word. Cops are brothers. Norman had told her this over and over. Law enforcement is a family and cops are brothers. Rosie didn’t know how true it was, how far they would go to stick up for each other-or cover up for each other-but she knew that the cops Norman brought home from time to time seemed eerily like Norman himself, and she knew he had never said a word against any of them, even his first partner on detectives, a crafty, grafty old pig named Gordon Satterwaite, whom Norman had loathed. And of course there was Harley Bissington, whose hobby-at least when in attendance at Casa Daniels-had been undressing Rosie with his eyes. Harley had gotten some kind of skin-cancer and taken early retirement three years ago, but he had been Norman’s partner back in 1985, when the Richie Bender/Wendy Yarrow thing had gone down. And if it had gone down the way Rosie suspected it had, then Harley had stuck up for Norman. Stuck up for him big-time. And not just because he’d been in on it himself, either. He’d done it because law enforcement was a family and cops were brothers. Cops saw the world in a different way from the nine-to-fivers ('the Kmart shoppers,” in Normanspeak); cops saw it with its skin off and its nerves sizzling. It made all of them different, it made some of them a lot different-and then there was Norman.