Craig was halfway up the stairs to his apartment when he heard a door open and someone clomping unevenly toward the stairwell. “Oh, hello,” he said, when he recognized her, and then covered his face in his down jacket, which he’d taken off, when he recognized the look of horror on her face.
“Holy shit,” Deb said, rushing to him, holding the back of his head in one hand and his coat in the other, pressing his face into the jacket even harder, to the point that he was a little afraid that the tiny, goosey feathers might smother him. “What the fuck did they do to you?”
She hurried him as quickly as a girl on crutches could hurry someone into her apartment, pulled the door closed behind him, shoved him toward her bedroom, where, it appeared, she hadn’t done anything—changed the sheets, made the bed—since rousing him from sleep there the day before.
“It looks worse than it is,” Craig told her, but he knew the words were muffled by his jacket, and that there was blood all over the top of his head, so who knew what she thought he was saying to her?
“Oh, my God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’ll be right back. I’ll get some towels.”
Craig felt bad about it—he would ruin her towels with his bloody nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood running down his neck—but he let himself fall backward, hard, onto her bed, and the room swirled around him like a warm bath. Never in his life had a bed felt this comfortable. It would be fine, he thought, if she came back with the towels, but it would also be fine if someone just came in here and turned off the lights and let him lie like this forever.
“Here!” she screamed, tossing the towels toward him. And then, again, “Oh, my God!”
“It’s just a bloody nose, maybe broken,” Craig said—although he also knew that with his current nasal intonation, she probably had no idea what he’d said. “No big deal. I’ve had one before. Just gotta put a bandage on it if it’s broken. Maybe I’ll have black eyes.”
He took the jacket off his face, grabbed a towel, and could tell by the way she inhaled that he must already have black eyes.
“What happened?” she asked, and the way she said it was so serious that he felt, somehow, the need to suppress his own laughter. He pressed the towel harder against his face. He could almost hear the snow falling outside. Those flakes, big as little hands, had slapped him upside the head the entire walk home from Greek Row. The whole way there’d been the gasping of girls when they saw the little trail of blood he was leaving in the snow, and the “Whoa, dude” of the guys, and the whole time he’d felt this same urge to laugh right along with the urge to hit someone, to pummel someone, to punch someone in the face, the feeling he imagined boxers had—a profound love and joy and urge to do violence all wrapped up in one profound physical desire.
But he didn’t do it. He’d just kept walking. Laughing, and maybe weeping (was that tears or blood, and what was the difference now?) as he kept walking, thinking of her taking one look at him, running. She wasn’t dead. He’d seen her with his own eyes:
The fucking lying, cheating bitch hadn’t died.
She was the one who’d been calling. The postcards were hers. The beautiful girl he’d loved and killed had come back to life.
Deb left and reemerged above him with what looked like a washcloth full of rocks, or ice, and sat beside him on the bed, moving the towel gently away from his face and lowering her little frozen surprise toward his nose, making noises of empathy and disgust as she did it and demanding that he tell her something he had no idea how to begin to tell her, or anyone, because there were no words with which to express such a thing.