I. ONE DROP OF BLOOD
It was fourteen years of hell, all told, but she hardly knew it. For most of those years she existed in a daze so deep it was like death, and on more than one occasion she found herself almost certain that her life wasn’t really happening, that she would eventually awaken, yawning and stretching as prettily as the heroine in a Walt Disney animated cartoon. This idea came to her most often after he had beaten her so badly that she had to go to bed for awhile in order to recover. He did that three or four times a year. In 1985-the year of Wendy Yarrow, the year of the official reprimand, the year of the “miscarriage”-it had happened almost a dozen times. September of that year had seen her second and last trip to the hospital as a result of Norman’s ministrations… the last so far, anyway. She’d been coughing up blood. He held off taking her for three days, hoping it would stop, but when it started getting worse instead, he told her just what to say (he always told her just what to say) and then took her to St Mary’s. He took her there because the EMTs had taken her to City General following the “miscarriage.” It turned out she had a broken rib that was poking at her lung. She told the falling-downstairs story for the second time in three months and didn’t think even the intern who’d been there observing the examination and the treatment believed it this time, but no one asked any uncomfortable questions; they just fixed her up and sent her home. Norman knew he had been lucky, however, and after that he was more careful. Sometimes, when she was lying in bed at night, images would come swarming into her mind like strange comets. The most common was her husband’s fist, with blood grimed into the knuckles and smeared across the raised gold of his Police Academy ring. There had been mornings when she had seen the words on that ring-Service, Loyalty, Community-stamped into the flesh of her stomach or printed on one of her breasts. This often made her think of the blue PDA stamp you saw on roasts of pork or cuts of steak. She was always on the verge of dropping off, relaxed and loose-limbed, when these images came. Then she would see the fist floating toward her and jerk fully awake again and lie trembling beside him, hoping he wouldn’t turn over, only half-awake himself, and drive a blow into her belly or thigh for disturbing him. She passed into this hell when she was eighteen and awakened from her daze about a month after her thirty-second birthday, almost half a lifetime later. What woke her up was a single drop of blood, no larger than a dime.
She saw it while making the bed. It was on the top sheet, her side, close to where the pillow went when the bed was made. She could, in fact, slide the pillow slightly to the left and hide the spot, which had dried to an ugly maroon color. She saw how easy this would be and was tempted to do it, mostly because she could not just change the top sheet; she had no more clean white bed-linen, and if she put on one of the flower-patterned sheets to replace the plain white one with the spot of blood on it, she would have to put on the other patterned one, as well. If she didn’t, he was apt to complain. Look at this, she heard him saying. Goddam sheets don’t even match-you got a white one on the bottom, and one with flowers on it on top. Jesus, why do you have to be so lazy? Come over here-I want to talk to you up dose. She stood on her side of the bed in a bar of spring sunlight, the lazy slut who spent her days cleaning the little house (a single smeared fingerprint on the corner of the bathroom mirror could bring a blow) and obsessing over what to fix him for his dinner, she stood there looking down at the tiny spot of blood on the sheet, her face so slack and devoid of animation that an observer might well have decided she was mentally retarded. I thought my damned nose had stopped bleeding, she told herself. I was sure it had. He didn’t hit her in the face often; he knew better. Face-hitting was for the sort of drunken assholes he had arrested by the hundreds in his career as a uniformed policeman and then as a city detective. You hit someone-your wife, for instance-in the face too often, and after awhile the stories about falling down the stairs or running into the bathroom door in the middle of the night or stepping on a rake in the back yard stopped working. People knew. People talked. And eventually you got into trouble, even if the woman kept her mouth shut, because the days when folks knew how to mind their own business were apparently over. None of that took his temper into account, however. He had a bad one, very bad, and sometimes he slipped. That was what had happened last night, when she brought him a second glass of iced tea and spilled some on his hand. Pow, and her nose was gushing like a broken water-main before he even knew what he was doing. She saw the look of disgust on his face as the blood poured down over her mouth and chin, then the look of worried calculation-what if her nose was actually broken? That would mean another trip to the hospital. For a moment she’d thought one of the real beatings was coming, one of the ones that left her huddled in the corner, gasping and crying and trying to get back enough breath so she could vomit. In her apron. Always in her apron. You did not cry out in this house, or argue with the management, and you most certainly did not vomit on the floor-not if you wanted to keep your head screwed on tight, that was. Then his sharply honed sense of self-preservation had kicked in, and he had gotten her a washcloth filled with ice and led her into the living room, where she had lain on the sofa with the makeshift icepack pressed down between her watering eyes. That was where you had to put it, he told her, if you wanted to stop the bleeding in a hurry and reduce the residual swelling. It was the swelling he was worried about, of course. Tomorrow was her day to go to the 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 to have 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.