Working Stiff(105)

“Of course you do.”

“I don’t. There’s a lot that I don’t say to anyone, that I’ve never said to anyone.”

“Everybody does that, holds parts of themselves back or shows facets of themselves to certain groups, compartmentalizing.” Sometimes, the twenty-dollar words came to her. “It’s normal.”

“This is different,” he said. “There are things that happened to me when I was a child that I never told anyone.”

He was a very private person, Arthur had said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I think I do.” He sighed and looked at the wall across the room. “Yes, I need to tell you.”

Pencil-thin lines of light rode across his face from the dawn’s glimmerings shining through the horizontal slats, but she couldn’t really see his face yet. “We’ve been friends for three years, and we’ve been okay with it this way.”

He took both her hands in his and inhaled a deep breath. “When I was six, I was in a car accident.”

“A car accident? Jesus, no wonder this accident freaked you out, even beyond the almost-dying part.”

“The car that I was riding in flipped over the safety barrier and rolled down the side of a mountain.

“Oh, Lord.” She gripped his hands more tightly in the dim light.

He said, “The seat belt didn’t fit me right. I was too small. I went through the windshield.”

She tightened her fingers around his. “Oh, God. Cash.”

“The glass scraped me up. I had cuts all over my body, crisscrossed, like I had gone through rollers of knives. Some were worse than others.” He let go of her hand, and through the darkness, she could see his arm lift as he ran his fingers down the tattoo that covered his left shoulder and ribs under his tee shirt. “This side went through the window first. The tattoo is to hide the worst of the scars. Here. Feel.”

He guided her fingers under the soft cotton of his shirt. His ribs were long lumps under his flesh, but the skin over them was rougher than the skin around the tattoo, thicker, like leather.

“The plastic surgeons sanded down the scars, so you can’t feel much.”

She ran her fingers over his skin, finding that odd texture under more of the tattoos. “Didn’t that hurt?”

“A bit.”

“Like sandblasting a few layers of your skin off?”

He shrugged. “That’s pretty close.”

“When you were six?”

“No. When I was eighteen and nineteen, during my undergraduate degree.”

“Wow, Cash. I’m so sorry. At least it didn’t mess up your face, huh?”

He held her other hand more tightly. “Actually, it did.”

“They must have done an amazing job with the sandblaster.”

“There weren’t a lot of cuts on my face.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good.”

“The bones inside were smashed. My cheekbones. My nose.”

Rox covered her mouth with her hand.

“For most of elementary and high school, I was disfigured, rather badly. They couldn’t do major reconstructive surgery until I had stopped growing.” He lifted her fingers to his cheekbones, his jaw. “This is all plastic and cement. It’s like I’m wearing a mask.”

She ran her fingers over the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw, trying to feel any seams or scars, but everything felt normal. “They did an amazing job. I can’t feel anything that doesn’t feel perfectly natural. Is this what you should have looked like?”

“It’s probably close. They used pictures of my father when he was that age and of my younger brother Willem, who was seventeen at the time, to make the casts. They also did some age-progressed photos of me that had been taken before the accident, but I look more like my father, I think.”

“I’ve never seen pictures of them. You don’t have any pictures of them around.”

“I’ve got some, somewhere. There’s more than a familial resemblance.”

His dry tone made her smile.

Early tendrils of sunlight leaked through the slats that covered the window.

In the dim light, something began to form on his cheek, something twisted.

Rox kept her hand cupped on his cheek on the other side of his face, the uninjured side. “Does the scar hurt now?”

“No.”

Her fingers drifted around to the other side of his face. On his other cheek, hard lumps and pits puckered his skin. A crease and ridge ran under his cheekbone. “This feels like it must have hurt.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. It was over with quickly.”

The sunlight strengthened, and a dark rose glow infiltrated the blinds.