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 that 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,