"I'm glad you came," she said.
10
They walked slowly east along Lake Drive, facing into a strong, warm wind. When he put his arm around her, she gave him a small smile. They were three miles west of the lake at this point, but Rosie felt she could walk all the way there if he would just keep his arm around her like that. All the way to the lake, and maybe all the way across it as well, stepping calmly from one wave-top to the next.
"What are you smiling at?" he asked her.
"Oh, nothing," she said. "Just feel like smiling, I guess."
"You're really glad I came?"
"Yes. I didn't sleep much last night. I kept thinking I'd made a mistake. I guess I did make a mistake, but ... Bill?"
"I'm here."
"I did it because I feel more for you than I thought I'd ever feel for any man again in my whole life, and it's all happened so fast ... I must be crazy to be telling you this."
He squeezed her briefly closer. "You're not crazy."
"I called you and told you to stay away because something's happening--may be happening--and I didn't want you to be hurt. Not for anything. And I still don't."
"It's Norman, isn't it? As in Bates. He's come looking for you after all."
"My heart says he has," Rosie said, speaking very carefully, "and my nerves say he has, but I'm not sure I trust my heart--it's been scared for so long--and my nerves ... my nerves are just shot."
She glanced at her watch, then at the hotdog stand on the comer just ahead. There were benches on a small grassy strip nearby, and secretaries eating their lunches.
"Would you buy a lady a foot-long with sauerkraut?" she asked. Suddenly a case of afternoon burps seemed like the least important thing in the world. "I haven't had one of those since I was a kid."
"I think it could be arranged."
"We can sit on one of those benches and I'll tell you about Norman, as in Bates. Then you can decide if you want to be around me or not. If you decide you don't want to be, I'll understand--"
"Rosie, I won't--"
"Don't say that. Not until I've told you about him. And you'd better eat before I start, or you're apt to lose your appetite."
11
Five minutes later he came over to the bench where she was sitting. He was carefully balancing a tray on which there were two foot-long dogs and two paper cups of lemonade. She took a dog and a cup, set her drink on the bench beside her, then looked at him gravely. "You probably ought to stop buying me meals. I'm starting to feel like the waif on the UNICEF posters."
"I like buying you meals," he said. "You're too thin, Rosie."
That's not what Norman says, she thought, but it was hardly the right remark, under the circumstances. She wasn't sure what was, and found herself thinking of the half-witty repartee the characters spouted on TV shows like Melrose Place. She could certainly use a little of that bright chatter now. Silly me, I forgot to bring my screenwriter with me, she thought. Instead of talking, she looked down at her krautdog and began poking the bun, her forehead creased and her mouth intent, as if this were some arcane pre-ingestion ritual which had been handed down in her family, mother to daughter, over the generations.
"So tell me about Norman, Rosie."
"All right. Just let me think how to start."
She took a bite of her dog, relishing the sting of the sauerkraut against her tongue, then sipped her lemonade. It occurred to her that Bill mightn't want to know her anymore when she had finished, that he would feel nothing but horror and disgust for a woman who could live with a creature like Norman for all those years, but it was too late to start worrying about things like that. She opened her mouth and began to speak. Her voice sounded steady enough, and that had a calming effect on her.
She began by telling him about a fifteen-year-old girl who'd felt extraordinarily pretty with a pink ribbon tied in her hair, and how this girl had gone to a varsity basketball game one night only because her Future Homemakers meeting had been cancelled at the last minute and she had two hours to kill before her father came and picked her up. Or maybe, she said, she'd just wanted people to see how pretty she looked, wearing that ribbon, and the school library was empty. A boy in a letter-jacket had sat down beside her in the bleachers, a big boy with broad shoulders, a senior who would have been out there, running up and down the court with the rest of them, if he hadn't been kicked off the team in December for fighting. She went on, listening to her mouth spill out things she had been positive she would take untold with her to her grave. Not about the tennis racket, that one she would take untold to her grave, but about how Norman had bitten her on their honeymoon and how she had tried to persuade herself it was a lovebite, and about the Norman-assisted miscarriage, and about the crucial differences between face-hitting and back-hitting. "So I have to pee a lot," she said, smiling nervously down at her own hands, "but that's getting better." She told him about the times, early in their marriage, when he had burned her toes or the tips of her fingers with his cigarette lighter; hilariously enough, that particular torment had ceased when Norman quit smoking. She told him about the night Norman had come home from work, sat silently in front of the TV during the news, holding his dinner on his lap but not eating it; how he had put his plate aside when Dan Rather had finished and how he had begun poking her with the tip of a pencil that had been lying on the table at one end of the couch. He poked hard enough to hurt and leave little black dots like moles on her skin, but not quite hard enough to draw blood. She told Bill there were other times when Norman had hurt her worse, but that he had never scared her more. Mostly it was his silence. When she talked to him, tried to find out what was wrong, he wouldn't reply. He only kept walking after her as she retreated (she hadn't wanted to run; that would very likely have been like dropping a sulphur match into a barrel of gunpowder), not answering her questions and ignoring her outstretched, splay-fingered hands. He kept poking her arms and her shoulders and her upper chest--she had been wearing one of those shell tops with a mildly scooped neck--with the pencil and making a little plosive noise under his breath every time the pencil's blunt point dug into her skin: Poo! Poo! Poo! At last she had been huddled in the corner with her knees up against her breasts and her hands laced over the back of her head and he had been kneeling in front of her, his face serious, almost studious, and he kept poking her with the pencil and making that noise. She told Bill that by then she was sure he was going to kill her, that she was going to be the only woman in the history of the world to be stabbed to death with a Mongol No. 2 pencil ... and what she remembered telling herself over and over again was that she mustn't scream because the neighbors would hear and she didn't want to be found this way. Not still alive, at least. It was too shameful. Then, just as she was nearing the point where she knew she was going to begin screaming in spite of herself, Norman had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. He was in there a long time and she had thought about running then--just running out the door and into the anywhere--but it had been night, and he had been in the house. If he had come out and found her gone, she said, he would have chased her and caught her and killed her, she knew it. "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 th
at 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 honestly. "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 of 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.
"I'm not going anywhere near the police," Rosie said, speaking rapidly. "Anna said I don't have to and nobody can make me. The police are his friends. His brothers. They stick up for each other, they--"
"Take it easy," he said, sounding a little alarmed. "It's okay, just take it easy."
"I can't take it easy! I mean, you don't know. That's really why I called you and said I couldn't see you, because you don't know how it is ... how he is ... and how it works between him and all the rest of them. If I went to the police here, they'd check with the police there. And if one of them ... someone who works with him, who's been on stakeouts with him at three in the morning, who's trusted his life to him ..." It was Harley she was thinking of, Harley who couldn't stop loo
king at her breasts and always had to check on where the hem of her skirt finished up when she sat down.
"Rosie, you don't have to--"
"Yes I do!" she said with a fierceness that was entirely unlike her. "If a cop like that knew how to get in touch with Norman, he would. He'd say I'd been talking about him. If I gave them my address--and they make you do that when you file a complaint--he'd give him that, too."
"I'm sure that no cop would--"
"Have you ever had them in your house, playing poker or watching Debbie Does Dallas?"
"Well ... no. No, but ..."
"I have. I've heard what they talk about, and I know how they look at the rest of the world. They see it that way, as the rest of the world. Even the best of them do. There's them ... and there's the Kmart shoppers. That's all."
He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn't sure what, then closed it again. The idea that Norman might find out the address of her room on Trenton Street as the result of some cop's jungle telegraph had a sort of persuasiveness to it, but this was not the main reason he kept quiet. The look on her face--the look of a woman who has made a hateful and unwilling regression back to an unhappier time--suggested that he could say nothing which would convince her, anyway. She was scared of the cops, that was all, and he was old enough to know that not all bogies can be slain by mere logic.
"Besides, Anna said I didn't have to. Anna said if it was Norman, they'd be seeing him first, not me."