THAT NIGHT ON THE STAIRS

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I’d hoped for a clean separation, not another soul stealing, gut wound of a break-up. Not like last time. This time I’d be strong. She’d been unfaithful and I just wanted out. But nothing’s ever that easy . . .

Her mother called me that night. Late. Terri had slit her wrists. I rushed over and found her wound up tight sitting on her basement stairs crying hysterically. Her mother had managed to clean up the wounds and wrapped them in white gauze. The bleeding had stopped by the time I got there but the parallel lines of the razor’s edge left me feeling faint; like I was the one losing blood.

It seemed like we sat on the stairs forever in the semi-darkness of the basement; the only light seeping through the half closed door above us. I could hear her mother going through her own private hell talking loudly to someone on the phone: “. . . she’s only doing it for attention . . . if she’d really wanted to do herself in she would have cut deeper. . .”

Cut deeper? Now I understood. Mom thought her daughter would even fuck up her own suicide. I wept. Did it matter if she “really” planned to kill herself? Wasn’t it enough that she hurt so badly that dying could be seen as a release?

At eighteen someone bled for loving me. But she wouldn’t die. Just months before this happened my uncle had died, followed by my grandmother, then my father. It seemed like the world was caving in on me. Now Terri’s blood was on my hands - literally. Her mother may have been right; maybe it was just a cry for help and a way of getting attention but I couldn’t afford to find out. We stayed together.

Within a week she was back in school acting as if nothing had happened. Every day after lunch I’d walk her back to her class and we’d linger on the stairs for a minute before saying our good-byes. Sometimes I’d actually forget about all we’d been through as she’d reach out to embrace me. But as she stretched out her arms the fresh white gauze dressings would reveal themselves from under her jacket sleeves and I’d remember the impossible position I’d found myself in.

Terri and I stayed together through her graduation. We kept in contact through her marriage and eventual divorce. She has a son now, John, who’s the center of her world and she recently graduated from college with a nursing degree. I spoke to her a few months ago. To this day she swears that she couldn’t have pulled it all together without me - that I believed in her even after she’d stopped believing in herself.

That all happened almost twenty years ago and I don’t think of it often. But it comes back to me sometimes when I’m lying in bed mourning the death of another relationship ended too soon. Struggling to find the right words to explain why things won’t work I wish I could tell the story of the night on the stairs but I don’t. I swallow it again. No hurt feelings, no scars revealed. Then I sit back and wonder who really bled that night.