She could, in fact, slide the pillow slightly to the left and hide the spot, which had dried to an ugly maroon color. It was on the top sheet, her side, close to where the pillow went when the bed was made. What woke her up was a single drop of blood, no larger than a dime. 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. 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 was always on the verge of dropping off, relaxed and loose-limbed, when these images came. This often made her think of the blue FDA stamp you saw on roasts of pork or cuts of steak. 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. 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. Sometimes, when she was lying in bed at night, images would come swarming into her mind like strange comets. Norman knew he had been lucky, however, and after that he was more careful.

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. 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.

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. September of that year had seen her second and last trip to the hospital as a result of Norman’s ministrations. 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. 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. 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. It was fourteen years of hell, all told, but she hardly knew it.

Rose madder king