Entering Normal

chapter 1 hrose Ned is snoring, a thick thunder that rolls up from his chest. His arm is flung over Rose's ribs, and she takes a breath against the heft of it, the pressure that recently seems to have increased. Back in the middle of summer, she mentioned getting twin beds, but his response was sharp. Typical Ned. "Whadda you crazy?" She explained how his arm made it hard for her to breathe, how she felt pinned down by it. "We've slept in the same bed for thirty-five years, Rosie," he said, his gaze level. "Exactly when did my arm get so heavy?" Not willing to go where that subject might lead, she dropped it flat. He snores again, a long, rippling snort with a catch in the middle, like he is swallowing his breath. It's a wonder more women don't kill their husbands. Half asleep, she imagines herself picking up the pillow, holding it over his open mouth. What on earth is the matter with her, thinking something crazy like that? Ned is a good man. Where she would be without him she hates to think. She gives him a slight nudge, just enough to make him stop snoring, but not enough to wake him. The last thing in the world she needs right now is for him to wake and ask her what's wrong. What's wrong? This is a question she doesn't want him to ask, not when all that is wrong swirls through the room, hangs above her face like smoke. The digital clock on the nightstand glows 1:40, red numerals that remind her of eyes, the alert eyes of some nocturnal animal. The time changes to 1:41. She wishes they still had their old dial-face clock, the one that didn't need resetting every time there was a power failure. Very carefully she lifts Ned's arm from its hold across her ribs and scratches her stomach, hard. It's still there. It's bigger. Maybe. The itchy spot first appeared toward the end of September, the same week Opal Gates and her boy moved into the house next door. At first Rose figured it was an insect bite of some kind, or dry skin, what with the furnace coming on in the evening now. Yesterday she finally took a reluctant look at itshe doesn't much like looking at her stomachand even without her reading glasses she was able to see the small, raised welt right over the mole on her stomach. Red circled out from the brown center. Definitely a bite she decided, pushing away darker possibilities conjured up by the Cancer Society leaflets she's read in Doc Blessing's waiting room, their bold letters enumerating the Seven Deadly Signs. She doesn't think it is anything significant. If something important was going on in your body, you'd know it. No, she's sure it's just an insect bite. They are into October now, late for mosquitoes, but it's been a particularly mild fall, the first frost not coming until the last of September. She lies in the dark, reminded suddenly of the mosquito bites she used to get summers at Crystal Lake when she was a girl, great welts that rose on her arms and legs and ankles until she looked like she had a tropical disease. "Don't scratch," her mother would say as she swabbed them with calamine lotion. "It makes it worse." Rose scratched the bites until they bled. Then, the summer she was sixteen, she fell in love with her best friend's cousin, and just like that she stopped scratching mosquito bites. Instead she dug her thumbnail directly across the swollen spot and then again in the opposite direction, forming the shape of a cross, her magic remedy, better than calamine. Lord, she hasn't thought about those things in years. Rachel's cousin. The thin, dark boy from out of town who made alLeClaire, Anne D. is the author of 'Entering Normal' with ISBN 9780345445728 and ISBN 0345445724.