The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  And the long clean cuts on my sides, those were the hopeless trails of the first week of that sophomore year, when I was running out of both hope and places to relieve the pressure where no one could see.

  All of those happened before I met Wes. Those and the ones I didn’t look at now—the faded but still harsh scars on my thighs. And the one on the inner left that I’d promised the night I made it that I would never look at again. They were as old as the pain itself. Only the ones on the tops of my shoulders belonged to Wes.

  Yeah, blame poor Wes, whose crime is wanting to get you in bed. What is wrong with that red-blooded American boy, anyway?

  I didn’t blame Wes. I actually didn’t blame anybody except myself. Really, what did I have in my life that was so bad it raced under my skin until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I had to give it a place to come out? I didn’t know. At moments like this, when my flesh cried out for relief, I didn’t have to know. I just needed to make it stop.

  I lifted the pleated bed skirt and pulled out the wooden box. Inside, the instruments were lined up on a folded snowy-white pillowcase, still sterile and gleaming from Easter night.

  Let the surgery begin. Nurse, scalpel, please.

  But it wasn’t like that, not really. It was nothing so clinical. This was release, and the longer I lingered over the silver straight razor and the pewter letter opener and the pen with its so-very-fine tip, the more my skin pleaded for help. I selected the calligraphy pen, a graduation gift from Wes that I’d never used for anything but this. I was on my way to the bathroom with it, silently assuring myself that soon it would be all right, when my phone jangled out blues piano.

  Wes’s ring. Pen still in hand, I ran for the kitchen counter where I’d left my cell and answered with a breathless hello.

  “Babe?” he said.

  His voice rattled as if something in him had been jarred loose. I pressed my hand to my throat. “Wes, what’s wrong?”

  “I can’t—I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “Do you want to come over? It’s okay—you can come over.”

  “No, not now. I just want to say—I love you, Kirsten. You know that, right?”

  “Yea-ah. Baby, what is it?”

  “Just say you know it.”

  “I know it.”

  My free palm left a sweaty imprint on the granite countertop.

  “Okay. Okay, just don’t ever stop loving me, you got that?” he said.

  “Why would I?”

  “Because of the way I acted tonight. I’m sorry, babe, believe me.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to say whether I did or not. My throat was closing anyway. “Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to clear my head, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And then I want to come over—maybe have a nice dinner together. I’ll help you . . .”

  I couldn’t even remind him that he didn’t so much as know how to operate the microwave. I just kept saying, “Okay.”

  “And then I want to talk to you. Seriously. I’m ready to talk about the future.”

  That called for more than an okay. “What happened since you left here?”

  “It just hit me how much I love you. We have to talk. Tomorrow. I’ll be there at six.”

  “Six,” I said.

  “Say you love me.”

  “I love you.”

  “Thank you, God,” he said.

  I didn’t realize until he hung up that I still had the calligraphy pen in my hand. I opened my palm and let it roll to the counter, where it landed next to the pottery cookie jar that Wes could never stay out of.

  Wait, let me get this straight: you’re about to implode with your little neurosis and then Mr. Wonderful calls and you’re magically healed. In what universe does that happen?

  In the universe where you held out for what was right and the man you thought was wonderful really turned out to be wonderful. In the universe that had suddenly stopped spinning so fast I couldn’t hold on.

  I returned the pen to the box and slid the whole collection back under the bed. Tomorrow I’d get rid of all of it.

  Before I went to bed, knowing I wasn’t going to sleep much anyway, I wanted to tell Isabel. My best friend. All right, let’s face it, my only friend, the one girl I trusted not to dis me on Facebook. We’d been close since junior year when Wes and I met her at Faith House after she transferred in from a community college, and we’d become more so since we were both accepted into the M. Architecture program. She was the only person in the world who knew the agony I’d been in over Wes. She called it Wes Angst.

  I texted her: Xpect good news soon!

  Her reply would be instantaneous. She lived with her thumbs on her phone. I had actually seen her move them in a dead sleep like she was texting her dreams.

  When I didn’t get an answer after two minutes, I texted her again: R u trapped under something heavy?

  I snickered to myself. The only time Isabel didn’t text me back within a nanosecond was when she was with a guy. At twenty-three she was convinced she was going to be, as she described it, “a spinster with seven cats and hemorrhoids” if she didn’t snag one soon. I was never sure how the hemorrhoids fit in, but her social life was like a buffet of potential candidates for the husband position. Curly-haired and tiny and pert—my exact opposite in looks—she was adorable enough to have been married multiple times, except that she was beyond picky about the groom.

  Obviously she was busy interviewing somebody right now, but I had to tell her. I opened my laptop and got on e-mail. As I typed I could hear her saying, Why are you telling me what I’ve been telling you about him all along? Can we please be done with the Wes Angst and get back to my problems?

  Izzy,

  I know you’re going to find fifteen ways to say I told you so, and I am totally okay with that! I’m not going to go into all the details—much as you’re dying to hear them, they are SO none of your business—but tonight Wes said he wants to talk seriously about the future. HE wants to. It’s a little bit surreal still. I mean, I’ve waited for so long—rehearsed every possible scenario in my head. And in yours, actually. Now that it’s finally happening, it’s like it must be happening to somebody else. Am I completely neurotic? I am, aren’t I? I should be in a Woody Allen movie. I think I AM Woody Allen. Okay, I stopped making sense about five sentences ago. That’s what happens when you aren’t here to talk me out of the crazy tree. So CALL ME as soon as you decide whoever you’re with isn’t going to make the cut. I’ll be up late.

  Love you, sister,

  Kirsten

  I stared at my name for a few seconds before I hit Send. The Kirsten who wrote that e-mail and had lattes with her best friend at Wild Joe’s and commiserated with her over the misogynistic travesties that took place at the School of Architecture wasn’t the same Kirsten who a half hour before had been about to add another scar to the gallery on her skin. Nor was she the same Kirsten who was constantly poked by an imaginary voice with a taunting tongue. Those Kirstens were real, but the Kirsten I was with Isabel was just as real, like every piece in the pie is real. That Kirsten was the easiest one to be. I hit Send and let that Kirsten declare her good news to her best friend.

  When I woke up the next morning, there was still no text from Izzy, which could mean things I didn’t even want to think about. Sometimes her “interviews” went into the third round.

  Besides, I had things to do. Actually laughing out loud at the idea of Wes helping with dinner, I composed a shopping list while I had my coffee and was out of the house on a mission by nine a.m.

  My neighborhood was in an old part of Bozeman, cloistered from the rest of the bright naked college town by trees and Victorian two-stories. Most of my fellow students lived closer to campus, out in the Montana openness, but when my father went house-hunting with me just before my undergrad years were over, he insisted on something more “Kirsten.” Like he knew who that was somehow. His view of me had co
zied me into my quaint two-bedroom bungalow with my nearby landlady’s gardens fluffing their way from her big house to mine and the Colorado spruces shielding me from whatever encroachments my father thought were afoot. Seeing how the one-on-one time we’d spent in my life could be described in a one-paragraph summary, he’d been uncannily right about where I should live. I liked the feeling of being cocooned.

  But as I drove my Beemer—okay, it was an old used one my dad got a good deal on—into the sunny openness, it was okay. The mountain ranges on every side were enough protection today.

  I avoided the Nineteenth Street corridor with its endless chain of big box stores and headed straight for the Gallatin County Farmer’s Market. This was the first weekend it was open so there wouldn’t be a wide selection of produce, but the meat sellers would be there and I wanted some fresh Black Angus steaks to cook to perfection. When I got out of the car, before I wove my way through the already thick crowd of so-ready-for-summer Montanans, I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up at the giant white-stoned M. Wes was at least an hour into his climb right now, and I imagined his head getting clearer with every step. I didn’t question how he was going to do that with Caleb et al jacking their jaws all over the place. I just trusted the voice I’d heard on the phone last night.

  Between the farmer’s market and the self-consciously trendy shops on Main Street, it didn’t take me long to drop two bills. I never really spent much out of the account my dad kept for me. I probably inherited my frugality from my pinch-fisted Missouri . . . well, my mother. Today I had no guilt pangs as I tucked the bags full of tender new lettuce and finely marbled rib eyes and crusty artisan bread into my car with more bags that held the new outfit and the scented candles and the hand-blown glasses Wes and I would be toasting with. My father loved Wes from the Christmas we’d spent with him in Big Sky. He’d be fine with this shopping spree.

  I made one more stop on my way back to the house. Two little kids, a towheaded boy and his even more towheaded sister, were just settling into their lopsided lemonade stand as I drove past them just around the corner. The boy, about a head taller than his more demure business partner, held up a beer-sized plastic cup of their product and sloshed it in my direction, shouting like the best of ballpark hawkers, “Lemonade! Get your ice-cold lemonade!”

  The scene was so Little Wes and Little Kirsten I had to pull over onto the gravel shoulder and walk back with my wallet in my hand. We were going to have kids. Towheaded kids like us. Both skinny and lanky and blue-eyed because we were. I had to have a taste of the future.

  Because it was impossible for me to get through a day without being Nudniked, she started in on me as I was setting the table four hours before Wes was scheduled to arrive.

  Kids, huh? You do know you’re going to have to sleep with the man to get said kids, right?

  Well, no kidding. Wes might think I was naïve, but it hadn’t been any easier for me to resist falling into bed together than it had been for him. We’d gone far enough for me to know what passion was.

  Lovely. Surely it will be so passionate that he will never notice what you’ve done to your body for the last, what is it now, seven years?

  I sank into the chair I’d just draped and tied with muslin. There was no denying that at least part of my refusal to sleep with Wes was my fear of what he would say about the scars. I’d always been careful to cut where the general public couldn’t see them. When I’d run out of room and started on my shoulders, the simple solution was to always wear at least short sleeves, which most of the time wasn’t a problem in Montana weather. But there was going to be no hiding them from Wes. I’d have to find a way to explain.

  Ya think? Of course, you could always put him off a little longer and opt for plastic surgery. Oh, wait, Daddy probably isn’t going to pay for that, is he? After all, Daddy doesn’t know!

  I launched myself into the kitchen and got out the scissors and did a full-out attack on the stems of the roses I’d bought. Get these babies down to vase length. Make them perfect for the table. Or maybe the bedroom.

  No, I wasn’t going to put Wes off a little longer. Maybe I wasn’t even going to put him off tonight. With the future finally unrolled before us like a white aisle runner, what did it matter if we crept between clean sheets—I had a set I’d never used in the back of the linen closet—and spent tonight in each other’s arms?

  With the lights out, no doubt.

  After I told Wes everything. I rehearsed as I chopped walnuts.

  Baby, I know at first it’s going to look to you like I had a close encounter with a pack of porcupines . . .

  No, too flippant.

  Baby, a long time ago I was going through a really bad time and I—

  Uh, no. Not even the truth.

  I know it was beyond absurd, but you know me—

  Definitely too cavalier.

  What about: Sometimes the stress and the old stuff I still wrestle with teems under my skin and I have to let it out. But I won’t need to do it ever again. I promise you that.

  I closed my eyes and saw Wes’s blue eyes glisten with understanding tears.

  Don’t forget the violins.

  No, what I was going to forget was Miss Nudnik. Other voices were going to outsing hers now.

  I successfully shut her out as I marinated the steaks and tossed a salad Rachael Ray would salivate over and took a luscious bubble bath. When I’d slithered into the silk tunic that clung and yet teasingly didn’t cling, I unbuttoned the top two buttons. Then the next two. Chortling, yes, chortling at myself, I clipped my bangs so that a straight blond panel dipped over one blue eye. Oh yeah, baby.

  With summer approaching Montana, dusk didn’t happen until after seven. When very little sunlight was making its silvery way through the spruce trees, Wes still wasn’t there. Pushing back visions of grizzlies, landslides, and marauding bands of banditos at the M, I texted him with a gentle Where are u?

  Though not as thumb-ready as Isabel, Wes always answered within five minutes. After six I texted him again. After ten I called but his phone went straight to voice mail. Then I started to pace, and every time a magpie squawked or the wind hissed through the spruces I ran to the window to look for the Mini Cooper.

  When I hadn’t heard from him by eight, I texted Isabel and then called her. No response there either, even after I sent URGENT!!! My throat was so tight I could feel its pull all the way up to my jaw. Fingers shaking, I texted Caleb. He was definitely more Wes’s friend than mine—maybe they all were, come to think of it—but surely he’d answer, right? If he didn’t I would know Wes had fallen off the side of the mountain and he and Tess and Isabel were trying to figure out a way to tell me. There could be no other explanation.

  When my phone signaled a text I almost jumped out of my now on-fire skin. It was from Caleb: I haven’t seen Wes all day. He didn’t do the hike.

  I couldn’t put that anywhere. I’m not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t heard a car pull into my driveway. Why I looked out the window first instead of opening the door, I don’t know. Maybe it was because the engine didn’t sound like Wes’s. The Mini Cooper didn’t purr. In fact, nobody’s engine did except the one in Isabel’s Miata.

  I pulled aside the curtain on the window in the door and peered into what was now almost complete darkness except for the porch light that created only a pool of yellow on the steps. It was enough for me to make out Wes’s long body, leaning into the driver’s side window of the black sports car. I still didn’t open the door, which was perhaps the only good decision I made that night, because as I stared between the muslin panels into the yellowed darkness, I saw Wes push his head through the open car window and give the driver a long, tender kiss. The driver. My best friend, Isabel.

  Before Wes could extricate himself from the window, I snapped the curtains closed and flew around the room with my silky tunic flailing out behind me. With one trembling hand I snatched up the flowers from the table, with the other I doused the candles wi
thout bothering to wet my fingers. I dumped it all into the kitchen trash can and was on my way back to pick up the tablecloth—china, crystal, and all—when the front door opened. I abandoned that idea and, with my back to Wes, buttoned my tunic all the way to my chin.

  “I am so sorry I’m late,” he said.

  I whirled to face him, and he knew. I knew he knew by the panic that flickered through his eyes. A panic that had nothing on what was racing up my throat.

  “Kirsten, it isn’t what it looks like,” he said.

  I gave my head a wild shake and smacked away the hair that was no longer seductive. “Why do they always say that?” some other Kirsten’s voice said.

  “Who, babe?”

  “Men who get caught with their girlfriend’s best friend. Why do they always say it’s not what it looks like when it is exactly what it looks like?”

  “It isn’t. I swear to you it isn’t.”

  Wes came toward me and I put up my hands to ward him off. He grabbed them anyway and towed me to the couch and held me there until I stopped struggling. He had a hold on me unlike any he’d ever tried.

  “Let me explain,” he said.

  Only because he spoke in the same voice he’d used on the phone the night before did I nod. I couldn’t speak, and for once neither could the Nudnik. All my mind could do was spin.

  “I didn’t go on the hike today.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “No. Listen, please.” He was just short of shaking me. “I intended to, but when I left here last night, Isabel called me freaking out. She needed my help today and I had to go with her.”

  “This isn’t making any sense. Why didn’t you tell me that last night when you called me?”

  “I couldn’t. She made me promise.”

  “I don’t understand. If she was in that much trouble, why didn’t she call me?”

  I watched him swallow. “She didn’t want you to know.”

  “Know what?”