Five

I woke up the next morning, no trace of a hangover, but freezing cold, burrowing deeper under the covers and closer to Miro’s form.

Upon closer scientific examination I realized he was awake. And breathing. And looking at me like I was a lunatic.

“I, um, don’t always do that on the first date,” I offered hopefully. He grinned at me.

“Sure you don’t.” It took me a second to realize he was joking, his dry sense of humor took some getting used to. Well, a lot of getting used to, especially for me, who grew up in a family where the most subtle form of humor was telling someone their fly was unzipped.

“It’s cold in here,” I blurted, trying to recover from my first attempt at words. Maybe I just shouldn’t talk at all in the mornings. Miro started, apparently realizing the cold for the first time, although he was half out of the bed and it was February, evidently inside as well as out.

“I guess I left a window open,” he said quickly, nearly leaping out of the bed. A few moments later I heard a window screaming shut.

“What for?” I asked, once he had returned. The puff of cold air he had let into the bed slowly dissolved into warm body heat. I hoped he would say something, hoping against hope that he would turn around and tell me yes, he did burn himself, on a regular basis, just in case you’d like to know.

“I forgot,” he said evenly. The easiest answer. He forgot. I forgot. Sometimes, it’s just easier to forget.

When he returned, I noticed he was wearing a long-sleeved black undershirt that he hadn’t been wearing the previous night.

Okay, Marian. He’s just cold. It’s February, after all. And he has lots of matches because he lights lots of candles.

Then I remembered watching him and the match, one and the same in some unholy, frightening ritual of which I had no part and no control and could never have any part or any control.

“You cold?” I asked, trying to be kind of suave and nonchalant.

“Not really,” he replied absently, and the sudden look in his eyes said “now you’ve done it, now you’ve screwed it allllll up, man.” I knew that look then. I know it now. Too many times I’ve looked it myself.

“So why the long shirt?” I pried. I knew it was wrong. It was nothing if not wrong. But it was like picking at a scab, where you can’t stop even after the blood begins to flow and it starts to hurt again.

“Fine.” He grimaced and his face clouded with ice. The way he looked could have sliced my heart open.

He grasped the ends of his shirt and yanked them up, and I had whole seconds to admire his stomach and chest before he bared his arms.

I recoiled. Up and down the entire inner length of his arms were red scars and newer burns, mostly angry red welts and a few burns that had been so bad as to leave hardened white marks. It was worse than I had thought, worse than I could have imagined.

I didn’t want to think about how long he had been doing it. I fought the tears that sprang to my eyes and lowered my head.

Miro saw. He must have seen my eyes pricking with wet and squeezing closed of their own accord, because the next thing I knew was that he was holding me against him, hard.

“Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” The odd, simplistic tone of his words made me feel very young and strangely, very vulnerable. I didn’t want to cry. I was Responsible Marian, and he didn’t cry.

But I looked up back at him, at the eyes that seemed so full of hurt, and I couldn’t stop myself, and all my heroic impulses flew out the window. I didn’t want to save him from himself anymore. I just wanted him to stop and be bigger than me and be normal. At that moment, I realized I wasn’t Responsible Marian to him anymore. I could never be Responsible Marian to him again. I was me. Just me.

I would be all I had to be, but I couldn’t look at his arms again.

Still, it was like a train wreck, I didn’t want to stare and couldn’t look away. It seemed as though my brain was unconnected to my eyes, screaming and screaming to get away and being unable. I wanted to claw my eyes out.

“Wha—whe—why?” I stammered. I took me a few tries to get the word out, complete.

“Because it feels good.” I was in absolute shock, disillusioned and disheartened. How could anyone voluntarily do that to themselves? It didn’t make sense! And didn’t it hurt? I couldn’t take all of that in.

“How long?” I choked out. I didn’t really want to hear an answer, not at all, but I had to say something in order to fill the silence, and a comment about the weather seemed a little too simple.

“If you’re quiet I’ll tell you a story,” he said slowly, voice caressing. I shut my mouth and nodded, slumping further into the comforter, closing my eyes.

“Once upon a time there was a boy,” he began, and the comforting sound of his voice in Slovakian, warm and soothing, transported me way back. “He was just twenty-one when a major-league hockey team decided he was That Good. They wanted to sign him.

“And I did. I signed and left as soon as I could, full of excitement and hope and a little bit of fear. Edmonton training camp, first day, I found someone who I thought would help me. His name was Mariusz Czerkawski and I thought he was the greatest man on earth. He introduced himself. He was the very first person I met in Canada. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven to find a friend so soon.

“I was grateful. So grateful. He turned into my friend and he took me everywhere. He took me racing for the first time.” His eyes looked somewhere far away for a moment in remembrance. “It was incredible, going so fast, leaning into him, and then he kissed me.

“Suddenly things were moving too fast, faster than any racecar could move. But I listened to everything he told me, everything he said about how wonderful I was and how perfect we were for each other. Bit by bit, he dragged me in and under and I believed him. I truly believe I was in love with him. He was mine.

“Four months later he slept with me and it all fell apart. He left before I woke up and didn’t leave a note, didn’t call, didn’t do anything. I thought something had happened to him until the next day at practice. He was normal. I wasn’t.

“After practice I went home, did housework, made dinner for myself, and the phone rang. I knocked over a pot on the stove onto my hand in my race for the phone, thinking it was him, and it wasn’t. But it burned my hand, and suddenly all the emotion raced out of me and I was empty, and I thought ‘this is how it must be’. I’d cluttered myself up, but maybe, if I could stay clean, he would come back to me and this time I wouldn’t do anything wrong.

“After a week, Mariusz came to my apartment. He told me he had slept with an opponent, and he felt awful, and he didn’t want to hurt me because I was so perfect. And I welcomed him. I took him back. How could I do anything else? He was mine.

“A week of bliss and he left for a week of torture. I couldn’t understand why he did it, but I knew it had something to do with me. I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t stay clear enough. But if I kept touching myself with a flame, everything would rush out of me like a deflated balloon and I would know that I was safe again.

“Week after torturous week after blissful week after torturous week until the season was through and I had welts all over my arms. I considered going home. I couldn’t make it in the Big Leagues. But I looked at my arms and knew that someone, somewhere loved me and thought I could do it if I kept myself deflated, devoid of any and all emotion, and the only way I could do that was touching myself with the match over and over and over again, that’s how good it felt, that’s how good it feels.

“At last I was traded, and I was free of him, and I thought I didn’t want it. He was mine, my very own Mariusz, and I loved him. I thought I loved him. I loved and hated him in turns.

“It was almost the next month that I first saw Ziggy, and I knew that if I could become clean enough and stay that way and devote myself to him, he would love me back, and he wouldn’t be like Mariusz. And you know the rest of the story from there.

I was crying and couldn’t stop. Overwhelmed, I longed to go back to sleep, but this was the stuff of nightmares. I doubted that I would ever sleep again. But most of all, I wanted to shut my eyes and my ears and dive back into last night, because last night I didn’t know the hurt.

But no, I’m not that smart. I had to open my mouth, my big Hossa mouth, the one my dad said could be a fire chief someday since it was almost always open screaming at Marcel.

“Why don’t you just stop?”

He looked taken aback.

“You’re just a kid, Marian. You don’t understand. I didn’t even see a flame during the Olympics, and you saw how I was. I can’t stop. It’s a part of me. The fire is just part of me, the same way my leg is or my arm is. And I wouldn’t dream of cutting off my leg, or my arm.”

When he said that, I felt as though a part of the flame was in me too, because something was small and shriveled and dead inside.

He calmly and rationally explained all of this to me, and I nodded and pretended to take it all in. Inside, however, I thought that in a few seconds my head was going to explode and I would have some real explaining to do.

If I was smart, I would have kept my mouth shut. But naturally, I’m not that bright. All the spinning in my head had to come out somewhere, and it happened to be my mouth.

“Doesn’t it hurt? I mean, it would burn, right? Like fire. Burns like fire,” my mouth rambled before I clapped a hand on it to contain it. It was almost scary. “Don’t you ever think ‘hey, maybe I shouldn’t fucking do this?’”

He looked pained.

“You don’t get it, do you,” he said disdainfully. “It doesn’t hurt. Does cutting your hair hurt? I think not. And besides, it’s nowhere near like what I feel inside.”

I shook at his words, at the rage I felt and the revulsion and so many things rocketing through my head at a zillion miles per hour.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said detachedly. If I didn’t get out soon, I would start flailing about, eyes rolling, tongue lolling, blood flowing from my various orifices like I had the Ebola virus. And it takes a bit of scrubbing to get blood out of carpet and bedsheets and things, so I’d better take my extreme bleeding outside.

“You can’t go for a walk. You’re naked and it’s fifteen degrees outside. You’ll freeze your wonderfulness off,” he pointed out.

Damn. He was right.

I stalked into my own room, slapped on some clothes, and went downstairs to his fire-engine-red foyer and took a long coat and hat out of the closet. Stop giving me that look. It’s not like I was stealing them or anything. Despite the fact that I needed a shower, my chin was starting to look like the playoffs had started early, and my hair resembles a blond bird’s nest, I decided to go out. Hell, I had a hat on.

I walked. I think I went through the five-stages-of-trauma or grief or whatever in record time. Denial lasted about three and a half seconds, considering that I had seen him burning himself with my very own eyes. Anger was likewise short.

“Stupid fucking Mariusz Czerkawski. Who the fuck does he think he is? Why the fuck does he have this right? Is he fucking better than the rest of us? Fuck him. He deserves to fucking die for what he did. I mean, fuck. Really.”

Bargaining. “Hey, maybe if I can love him—”

And that was it. Every other single thought flew out of my head. Love? Love? Me love him? Was I smoking something? I mean, seriously, let’s review the guy’s history. Comes to Canada, gets brutally torn apart by cruel Polish guy, begins burning himself, and then immediately fixates on a guy two thousand miles way, meets said guy at the Olympics and his world comes crashing down.

Sounds like exactly the kind of guy I’d been subconsciously looking to get involved with! Great choice, Marian!

But I began to think about it, more and more and more, and I realized that maybe the previous night had been lust and alcohol, but I could try. It could work. It wasn’t just friendship that had propelled me to put up with a crazy man in my room for several Olympics days, then jet to said crazy guy’s house directly afterwards. That wasn’t just the kind of thing that a friend did, right?

I had no idea. Whatsoever. I may as well have been playing darts during a blackout for all I could see.

Sadly, I was freezing my ass off and lost by that point. Northville Street. I didn’t know any fucking Northville Street. Stupid Williamsville New York and their stupid fucking street system. I pulled off my borrowed hat before remembering that no, Miro was not six years old, and he probably didn’t have his address written on the tag in his hat.

He didn’t. I staggered around in the cold for a while, suddenly acutely aware of my strangely inept dress sense. I began to wonder about how soon someone could get frostbite, and how soon someone could fall in love, and just how damn long it would take to get back to the goddamn house. At last I rounded a vaguely familiar corner.

“Sunflower Court! Sunflower Court!” I hollered, excited with my good fortune. I ripped off the hat and ran down the street, whipping the hat around wildly. I banged on the door a few times, and then, in an action vaguely reminiscent of The Blob taking over some unsuspecting civilian, the door opened a crack and sucked me in.

Actually, it wasn’t the door. It was Miro’s arm, which was promptly all over me again. Hell, I thought. I could get used to all this sudden screwing.