Rosie Heindel

THE WOUND

I got eight hours of sleep every night, back then. When I came home, ghosts didn’t follow me. I rarely got a headache. Loneliness didn’t touch me.

I remember that night Paul and I went to the U2 concert, my ultimate favorite band. He waited in line five hours and spent three hundred dollars on the tickets. On our anniversary he made me go on a scavenger hunt through the house to find them. He hid little love notes leading to the sugar canister, where he buried the tickets. I made such a mess getting them out.

We sat, stood— no jumped, hollered, rocked, sang, six rows back from the stage. About halfway through the performance Paul lost his excitement and just stood there stiff as a board. I looked at his pale face and asked him what the matter was. He feigned a smile. ‘Oh, nothing.’ I searched him for a clue. A red stream poured down his shin from a catastrophic jump into the seat in front of us. Pushing through the crowd, I nearly knocked a woman out. She would have punched me had she not noticed the blood oozing from Paul’s leg. After about twenty minutes of searching we finally found a security guard. He offered to get an ambulance, but Paul refused. The guard escorted us to our car.

Thankfully, it only took us ten minutes to drive to the hospital. I thought he would die from hemorrhaging. They got him in with surprising speed. When they cleaned the wound, he only winced once. The rest of the time he cracked jokes with the doctors. He held my hand to comfort me the entire time. We didn’t get home until four in the morning.

The next day we slept in until two, but we made love and laughed and reminisced in bed until dinnertime. After rummaging through empty cupboards, we ordered Chinese takeout. We snickered at Paul’s fortune, which read, ‘troublesome days are at hand, but happier ones are to come.’

Paul didn’t go back to get the wound checked on. He smiled and ruffled my hair when he noticed me eying it one day. ‘It’s barely a scratch,’ he said. He removed the stitches himself. When the wound swelled and turned a greenish tone, I begged him to go to the doctor. Purple, black, grey and green seeped around his lower leg. He found that he could no longer walk the way he used to. One day he passed out and his co-workers took him in to the hospital. By then the doctors couldn’t do anything about the leg.

He refused to see me when I came to visit. No one knows when he left. When the nurse made her night rounds she came upon an empty bed. I still wait for him to come home.