Was She Worth It?

You’ve been stabbed.

You’d think my mind would be in a bit more of a panic, considering the four inches of sharpened metal stuffed into my belly, but here comes the clearest thought I’ve ever had, spelled out before me like a neon sign.

You’ve been stabbed.

There’s no pain, nothing worse than a runner’s cramp, and all that’s immediately noticeable is how warm that part of my body has become. My shirt soaks up with blood—I’m sure there is a lot of it—and feels warm and numbing, like honey or candle-wax. It goes from warm to hot rather quickly.

Only then do I look down.

The homeless man’s hand is still attached to the handle of the blade, and his hand is glowing bright red in the light of the parking lot lamp-post. I follow the ragged sweatshirt sleeve to the man’s chest, to his thin neck, his sharp jaw-line, his unruly beard and his wild, vibrant green eyes. He lets out a growl and retracts his arm, the blade, a splash of blood, and I lurch forward as though pulled by a rubber-band. The homeless man catches me in his arms and the knife clatters on the cement, noisier than I’d expect over the rapid beating of my heartbeat. I smell dirt and beer and dust on the vagrant’s clothing. My face slides across his shoulder and I taste his filth on my lips as he grabs my arms and flings me to the ground.

Then he runs from the scene, already looking through my wallet and tossing away the grocery store club cards, the photos of my children, the gift cards, library cards, old receipts and business cards. He keeps the money and the credit cards and the wallet, which my wife gave me for my birthday last month, and it’s that wallet that I want back the most.

I wonder if he went to college, like I did. If he ever held a job. If he ever had a family or if he was ever loved by his parents. I wonder if he saw my parking pass that gets me a spot in the sub-level lot under George Westsmith’s Finance and Savings, where I work, which he’d have known if he didn’t toss aside my business card. I wonder how much anything I’ve accomplished matters. The paperwork I’ve filed. Stop lights I’ve obeyed. Taxes, holidays and trends that I’ve followed. I see birth and death in the same flash. Growing up, growing older. I have so many memories and none of them seem to be coming up clearly, like I’ve submerged my head in cloudy laundry detergent.

No one comes to help me.

It’s 2:00am on the wrong side of town.

When I realize how alone I am, with the homeless man turning the corner around a boarded-up apartment building, I start to feel the pain. It starts in my heart. The regret explodes like a grenade. This is what you get. This is what you deserve. The regret sneaks into my mind, where logic intercedes and says It was just bad luck. After all, I’d come out to see Shannon eight other times before this night and I’d been fine. This would be the first time I’d come back home to my wife with a stab wound.

If you make it back home at all, my heart panics.

Just get yourself together. You can make it to the car, says my brain.

I manage to get to my feet. Now the warm numbing has ended and a small burning sensation begins to build in my gut, around the ripped flesh, and I put a hand over the wound to press gently upward toward my ribs. Blood pours through my fingers in the night. I can’t look, I look, I wish I hadn’t looked, and then I’m puking on the empty parking spaces of desolate dive-bar. I stumble away from the stench, gritting my teeth, wishing I’d tossed back a few fewer shots with Shannon, tasting vodka and cranberry slime on the back of my teeth. Gagging, choking, I move toward the street and try to remember where I parked, but I can’t use my brain, which is busy sounding the Pain Alarm and waking up the rest of my body, alerting my nerves. Now it hurts. Now it hurts a lot.

I wonder if the blade went all the way through me.

I wonder if anything critical was ruptured.

I wonder if I’m going to die.

Find the car. Find the car or find someone to help you.

You shouldn’t have come here.

Get help.

You deserve this. You deserve this.

Keep walking.

Have fun explaining to your wife what you were doing out here.

My heart, panicking, sensing doom, starts flooding my head with all this guilt and regret and I can’t handle it. I start crying, pressing a hand against my belly as though I were holding my intestines in place, and I think about Kaitlin and little Jeffery and little Portia. A family. A happy little family. Asleep, probably, unless Portia was having another nightmare, and as content as a bunch of clams. I loved them so much. I did. I do. I don’t know. I’m bleeding to death in a bad neighborhood and I just need to find my car. I need my heart to just shut up for a while and let me survive.

You don’t deserve to survive.

Ignore it. You’ll be fine.

Hope Shannon was worth it, buddy.

Shannon is a bartender with the kind of deep dark eyes that suck you in and get you drunk and compel you to make poor choices, addictive choices, repeatedly, Wednesday nights when she works late. Shannon is a fallen angel with naughty habits and soft skin. She is worth every beer you buy her, but she is not—I repeat, she is not—worth getting stabbed by a homeless man. I see her face and I see the face of my attacker and they are the same.

I look back and see the trail of blood splatters I’ve left on the sidewalk, glowing all sorts of colors in the buzzing CLOSED signs of the darkened businesses I stumble before. Not a single car drives by. Nary a soul on the street at this hour. Usually a blessing when I’m trying to sneak back home after a night with Shannon.

About two minutes pass before I realize that I don’t know where I parked.

I was in such a hurry when I got here.

An addict needing a fix.

When you get into something like Shannon, you forget the value of doing whatever it was you were doing before she came along. You forget you can still fix your marriage. You forget your kids need help with homework. You forget you have deadlines at the office and meetings to attend and e-mails to send. You forget you’re not going to get away with this and most of all you forget to pay attention to where you park your car.

A tree seems a good place to rest and try to regain my mind, but it’s too busy thinking about tetanus shots and kidney transplants and death and death and death, death, death, and my funeral and my kids without a father and if they’ll find out and what they’ll think and so there’s no way I’ll find my car, no way, no how.

I lean against this tree, pressing the side of my head into the crumbly bark, and give up on the idea of pressing a hand against the wound—the blood is too slippery, half the time I’m just holding a palm over the belly-button. Belly… Sometimes we call Portia “Portia-Belly.” She has the sweetest little laugh, just six years old, always coming home with a new flower stuck behind her ear, plucked from one of the neighbor’s yards.

I’ve been crying the whole time.

Now, if anyone were around, they’d hear me sobbing.

You gave up on them and the world will give up on you.

You can’t be parked too far from here.

Even your car wants you to die.

This thought makes me laugh, despite it all, and I crumble to the dirt at the foot of the tree and slump forward over my legs, and the wound spurts and I hear air blow out from my abdomen like the fart of a balloon. I’m laughing and crying now and if someone were around they would think I was very drunk and they might pity me, from a distance, and if they got closer they would still not see the blood because this is a bad neighborhood and there are few lights left un-vandalized in these parts. I sit in the dark, weak and lost, and I think about my children, and I think about Kaitlin.

She’ll never forgive you for this.

Don’t sit down, you fool! You’re dying!

Kaitlin and I married ten years ago, too young, too quick, and things were great in the beginning when we still thought our flaws were cute idiosyncrasies, when I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world and she saw something in me that reminded her absently of her father. That’s how these things start. The kids were a surprise. A nice touch, for a while. I loved her. I loved them. We were a good family. I don’t think things really started to get bad until last year, on one afternoon specifically when both the kids were at preschool, when Kaitlin and I were home alone together and hardly knew how to act with each other, like strangers with a mutual friend who left the room. You get shaken out of a routine and it feels like you’ve been asleep the whole time. I was different. Kaitlin was different.

We were older and it suddenly felt like we hadn’t looked each other in the eyes since before Jeffrey was born. Jeffrey, the bravest little kid I’ve ever seen, who fell out of the same tree twice because he kept trying to climb to the highest branch. My little monkey. Kaitlin put her career on hold. I buckled down with an office position—for the benefits—and at first it seemed like the right thing to do, the manly thing to do, what I was meant to do and what my father did before me. Routine.

Then came Portia.

Longer hours.

Less sleep.

Fast forward six years and then there’s Shannon.

And eight weeks later, a knife in the gut.

You look at your life in this basic way when you’re about to die. Everything whittles down to a few lines in a story. A couple quick facts. He was this, he did this, and then he was dead. Slumped against a tree, another cheating husband meeting his fate. The police would be called in the morning, his body taken to the morgue, identified by Kaitlin, buried, mourned over and forgotten.

You expect life lessons and a moral of the story.

You expect something bigger.

And in the morning people will see a trail of blood on the sidewalk, and they’ll be curious as to what went wrong, who was hurt, what happened to them, who they were and what they were trying to do, wandering down the sidewalk, swerving aimlessly over the cement, ending here at this tree and dying in the cold of night.

And I wonder, as it comes like a black tsunami, what my children will think.

And I wonder, as I suppose we all do in the end, if this isn’t just a dream.

Something jarring to wake from in a cold sweat.

But there’s your heart, beating slowly, and it says No.