her. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says as he kneels to fully pick her up, “so quit being a goose.”
“I’m bleeding,” she whispers, remembering he had told the person he’d been talking to on the phone that he wouldn’t move her, of course he wouldn’t.
“Yeah, I know,” he replies, but without interest. He is looking around the room, trying to decide where the accident happened—she knows what he’s thinking as surely as if she were inside his head. “That’s okay, it’ll stop. They’ll stop it.”
Will they be able to stop the miscarriage? she cries inside her own head, never thinking that if she can do it he can too, or noticing the careful way he’s looking at her. And once again she won’t let herself overhear the rest of what she is thinking. I hate you. Hate you.
He carries her across the room to the stairs. He kneels, then settles her at the foot of them.
“Comfy?” he asks solicitously.
She closes her eyes. She can’t look at him anymore, not right now. She feels she’ll go mad if she does.
“Good,” he says, as if she had replied, and when she opens her eyes she sees the look he gets sometimes—that absence. As if his mind has flown off, leaving his body behind.
If I had a knife I could stab him, she thinks ... but again, it isn’t an idea she will even allow herself to overhear, much less consider. It is only a deep echo, perhaps a reverberation of her husband’s madness, as soft as a rustle of batwings in a cave.
Animation floods back into his face all at once and he gets up, his knees popping. He looks down at his shirt to make sure there’s no blood on it. It’s okay. He looks over into the corner where she collapsed. There is blood there, a few little beads and splashes of it. More blood is coming out of her, faster and harder now; she can feel it soaking her with unhealthy, somehow avid warmth. It is rushing, as if it has wanted all along to flush the stranger out of its tiny apartment. It is almost as if—oh, horrible thought—her very blood has taken up for her husband’s side of it ... whatever mad side this is.
He goes into the kitchen again and is out there for about five minutes. She can hear him moving around as the actual miscarriage happens and the pain crests and then lets go in a liquid squittering which is felt as much as heard. Suddenly it’s as if she is sitting in a sitz bath full of warm, thick liquid. A kind of blood gravy.
His elongate shadow bobs on the archway as the refrigerator opens and closes and then a cabinet (the minute squeak tells her it’s the one under the sink) also opens and closes. Water runs in the sink and then he begins to hum something—she thinks it might be “When a Man Loves a Woman”—as her baby runs out of her.
When he comes back through the archway he has a sandwich in one hand—he has not gotten any supper yet, of course, and must be hungry—and a damp rag from the basket under the sink in the other. He squats in the corner to which she staggered after he tore the book from her hands and then administered three hard punches to her belly—bam, bam, bam, so long stranger—and begins to wipe up the spatters and drips of blood with the rag; most of the blood and the other mess will be over here at the foot of the stairs, right where he wants it.
He eats his sandwich as he cleans. The stuff between the slices of bread smells to her like the leftover barbecued pork she was going to put together with some noodles for Saturday night—something easy they could eat as they sat in front of the TV, watching the early news.
He looks at the rag, which is stained a faint pink, then into the comer, then at the rag again. He nods, tears a big bite out of his sandwich, and stands up. When he comes back from the kitchen this time, she can hear the faint howl of an approaching siren. Probably the ambulance he called.
He crosses the room, kneels beside her, and takes her hands. He frowns at how cold they are, and begins to chafe them gently as he talks to her.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just... stuff’s been happening ... that