let the liquid on my fingers be clear. Please, God. Please let it be clear.
But when she brings her hand out from under her dress the tips of her fingers are red with blood. As she looks at them, a monstrous cramp rips through her like a hacksaw blade. She has to slam her teeth together to stifle a scream. She knows better than to scream in this house.
“Never mind all that bullshit, just get here! Fast!” He slams the phone back into its cradle.
His shadow swells and bobs on the wall and then he’s standing in the archway, looking at her out of his flushed and handsome face. The eyes in that face are as expressionless as shards of glass twinkling beside a country road.
“Now look at this,” he says, holding out both hands briefly and then letting them drop back to his sides with a soft clap. “Look at this mess.”
She holds her own hand out to him, showing him the bloody tips of her fingers—it is as close to accusation as she can get.
“I know,” he says, speaking as if his knowing explained everything, put the whole business in a coherent, rational context. He turns and stares fixedly at the dismembered paperback. He picks up the piece on the couch, then bends to get the one under the coffee-table. As he straightens up again, she can see the cover, which shows a woman in a white peasant blouse standing on the prow of a ship. Her hair is blowing back dramatically in the wind, exposing her creamy shoulders. The title, Misery’s Journey, has been rendered in bright red foil.
“This is the trouble,” he says, and wags the remains of the book at her like a man shaking a rolled-up newspaper at a puppy that has piddled on the floor. “How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?”
The answer, actually, is never. She knows she might be sitting here in the comer having a miscarriage if he had come home and found her watching the news on TV or sewing a button on one of his shirts or just napping on the couch. It has been a bad time for him, a woman named Wendy Yarrow has been making trouble for him, and what Norman does with trouble is share the wealth. How many times have I told you how I feel about that crap? he would have shouted, no matter what crap it was. And then, just before he started in with his fists: I want to talk to you, honey. Right up close.
“Don’t you understand?” she whispers. “I’m losing the baby!”
Incredibly, he smiles. “You can have another one,” he says. He might be comforting a child who has dropped her ice-cream cone. Then he takes the torn-up paperback out to the kitchen, where he will no doubt drop it in the trash.
You bastard, she thinks, without knowing she thinks it. The cramps are coming again, not just one this time but many, swarming into her like terrific insects, and she pushes her head back deep into the corner and moans. You bastard, how I hate you.
He comes back through the arch and walks toward her. She pedals with her feet, trying to shove herself into the wall, staring at him with frantic eyes. For a moment she’s positive he means to kill her this time, not just hurt her, or rob her of the baby she has wanted for so long, but to really kill her. There is something inhuman about the way he looks as he comes toward her with his head lowered and his hands hanging at his sides and the long muscles in his thighs flexing. Before the kids called people like her husband fuzz they had another word for them, and that’s the word that comes to her now as he crosses the room with his head down and his hands swinging at the ends of his arms like meat pendulums, because that’s what he looks like—a bull.
Moaning, shaking her head, pedaling with her feet. One loafer coming off and lying on its side. She can feel fresh pain, cramps sinking into her belly like anchors equipped with old rusty teeth, and she can feel more blood flowing, but she can’t stop pedaling. What she sees in him when he’s like this is nothing at all; a kind of terrible absence.
He stands over her, shaking his head wearily. Then he squats and slides his arms beneath