He stands.Kicks me once in the ribs.Hard enough to make the point.
They get in their cars.The sedan pulls out first.The flatbed follows.No rush.Three men who did what they came to do and have dinner waiting at home.
I lie on the gravel for a while.Looking at the sky.Counting the things that hurt—eye, jaw, ribs, kidney, hands, pride.Pride hurts the most.It always does.
I pull myself up on the truck’s bumper.Lean against it.Spit blood onto the road.
I glance back toward Marin’s.Think better of turning back.She’s inside with him and doesn’t know I’m two hundred yards from her driveway spitting teeth onto a county road.
Not teeth.Feels like teeth.It’s just blood.
I get in the truck, check what’s left of my face in the rearview.The cut above my eye is deep—not stitches deep, but close.My jaw is swelling on the left side.My ribs ache when I breathe but they’re not broken.I’ve had broken.This isn’t broken.
I put the truck in drive.Pull onto the road.
I need water and paper towels and a gas station bathroom with a lock on the door and enough fluorescent light to see what I’m working with.
Route 9.The Shell station.I pull in.Pull up to a pump.Walk to the bathroom like a man who isn’t holding his ribs together with his left arm.
The mirror in the bathroom is cracked and yellowed and it shows me exactly what I expected.A man who got his ass kicked because he was thinking about a woman instead of watching the road.
I run the water.Cold.Press paper towels against the cut until the bleeding slows.Wash the blood off my hands.Off my neck.Out of my hair.
The door to the bathroom is thin.I hear a car pull in.A door open and close.
I keep cleaning.Slow.Methodical.The way I do everything—measure twice, fix once.Except tonight, I didn’t measure anything and I can see clearly what that costs.
48
Marin
We sit at the kitchen table.Patricia prays.I bow my head and close my eyes and think about the taser in the drawer three feet from Patricia’s elbow and the man in the basement who is currently gagged and chained to a column while Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm at full volume beneath our feet.“Lord, we ask you to place your healing hands on Charles?—”
From downstairs,“Yes!Yes!YES!”
Mrs.Mather’s eyebrows lift.“Do you have company?Down there?”
“Just Charles.It’s the light,” I say.“The tumor—it’s made him extremely photosensitive.Even with the curtains drawn, the bedroom was too much.I tried blackout curtains, aluminum foil on the windows—nothing worked.He kept having these episodes.”I lower my voice.“Screaming.Covering his eyes.It was awful.The doctor said the darkest, quietest room in the house.So we moved him to the basement.It’s cooler down there.Darker.He’s much more comfortable.”
Patricia nods slowly.The compassion on her face deepens into something approaching reverence.A woman who moved her dying husband to a basement because the light was killing him.What devotion.What sacrifice.
“You’re a saint,” Patricia says.
I am not a saint.But I smile like one.
From below, muffled but unmistakable: the sounds of a woman reaching climax in a deli.
“I left the movie on,” I say quickly.“Just in case he wakes up.He watches movies.The doctors said it helps with cognitive stimulation.”
“From the basement?”Mrs.Mather says.
“The acoustics are actually quite good down there.”
Patricia nods.Closes her eyes.Returns to prayer.
“We ask that you ease his suffering, Lord?—”
Muffled but clear:“I’ll have what she’s having.”
