Memory of the Scar

Cal laid on his side next to Aubrey on top of the furrowed sheets. He stared at her, gently smiling, as everything in the room remained silent while his eyes met hers to carry on the conversation.

A gentle, “What?” came out of Aubrey with a laugh at a decibel level that competed with pins on floors. 

“Nothing,” Cal responds with a smile. And in that moment, he genuinely means it, his own brain unaware of what’s to come.

After six years, he knew he could have these two-word conversations forever.  To him, they carried more meaning than the essays that got him through graduate school. Yet after that length of time, bodies lying parallel as they advanced toward forever, the exchange still felt exactly like the ones at this hour of the night (morning?) that the two shared in the quiet corners of college parties.

The ball had dropped two hours prior, and the vapors of liquor Cal smelled on the sheets in front of him were reminders of the great night that passed like a blur yet didn’t need to be pieced together.  Their friends Vic and Leah inhabited the adjacent guest room of Cal and Aubrey’s recently purchased home, partaking in similar spirits and competitive consumption that best left their sedan resting in the driveway overnight.

Unsure if it was the coziness or the celebrating, though definitely the girl in front of him, Cal felt at the center of a Venn diagram of happiness and contentedness. He wished he could just hop on a plane to Las Vegas and take Aubrey to a chapel ran by The King himself, as he just didn’t want another day to go by not married to her.  Though he knew he couldn’t because that would ruin his plans.

Cal wanted to wait until they were surrounded by family and friends to ask her to marry him. Hell, he hadn’t even asked her father for permission yet, a custom that would annul most Midwestern marriages before they started.  Once that happened, he would organize a party, a private movie theatre screening of their favorite films, or a walk along the beach that would end with family and friends surprising them. The end result of everything Cal envisioned consisted of celebratory shouting, applause, those things that make obnoxious noise at children’s birthday parties, happy Aubrey tears, and plenty of perfectly lit photos for the Instagram-hungry masses. Yet the more he thought about it, the less it seemed like something Aubrey would want.

Cal bought the ring 10 months prior because, well, he knew he wanted to marry her — and he got a really good deal.  He wasn’t afraid to admit the latter was a reason for the purchase, with his frugality on Threat Level Orange after getting carpal tunnel signing the Tolstoy work that resulted in their first mortgage.  Cal wished he could give her the largest and most sustainably sourced blood diamond that was typically reserved for wives of professional athletes, but modest and from the heart would have to suffice.

He had no idea what to do with the ring once he picked it up, so it resided in the center console of his car.  Albeit probably not the best spot from a security perspective, he was able to keep it a secret from Aubrey and that was paramount. Well, that and it not getting stolen.

“What are you thinking about?” Aubrey asked, bringing Cal back to reality. He didn’t want to tell her, but the comfort of the overlap from the Venn diagram compelled him to break every rule he kept for nearly a year.

“You know I can’t wait to marry you, right?” He said, reaching out to cup the side of her cheek.

The buzzy grin leapt off of her face.  “God, I can’t wait either.”

“What if I told you I have a ring, and have had one for a long while?” Cal inquired.

Aubrey paused, incredulous to the point of silence.  Her eyes squinted, going from full screen to wide screen while running through the litany of questions in her brain.  Her sharpness seemed to be at a very solid 90 percent of its usual intelligent, witty fortitude.

“Bull­shit you have a ring,” the dormant 10 percent responded with a smirk.

“I do, I’m serious,” Cal said with straight-faced sincerity. “It’s a few hundred feet away.”

Aubrey’s face slowly turned from confident grinning to stone. Like the passing minutes before, her eyes said exactly how she felt, they just weren’t on the same page as her mouth.

“Nope. I don’t believe you,” she said, challenging him with reluctance in her voice.

Just like that, all of Cal’s plans went out the window.  He knew she believed him, and thus, the surprise was ruined and the moment gone forever if he didn’t act fast. Before she could ask any questions or continue to reaffirm her incorrect assumption, he held up his index finger to communicate he would be right back, and quietly sprinted out of the bedroom.

As he tiptoed down the stairs like a cartoon villain so not to wake their guests, his adrenaline created a spring in his step all the way down the stairs of the split-level and out to the garage. He opened the driver’s side door, flipped open the console, and picked up the case of the ring while wiping away the patina of dust that had formed since he last checked its safety. Opening the case, he saw the ring that would be resting on Aubrey’s finger and smiled, giving him another jolt of energy to quickly get back upstairs.

Moving through an agility course in his imagination, Cal tried his best to put his wide, bouldering frame on the tips of his toes in a rapidly graceful manner. Soon after getting up to that speed, his grace failed rapidly as he caught the edge of the carpeted step, causing him to fall face-first into the steps ahead of it while simultaneously sliding down to the floor. Very much not a tree falling in the woods kind of situation, Cal felt the entire neighborhood now knew it was now part of an event registering on the Richter scale.

So much for quiet, Cal thought, assuming that Vic and Leah would wake up right away.  When they didn’t, it was back to moving north with poise.

He swayed the door open to find Aubrey sitting at attention on the bed.  Her eyes darted down and when they came back up, so too did her hands over her mouth.

“Oh my god, Cal!”  She aggressively whispered, removing one hand and pointing at his leg.  “You’re bleeding! Why are you bleeding?!”

Cal looked down to find a creek of red sliding down his calf.  A casualty of his fall, he assumed, though he didn’t pay it more than a moment’s notice, shrugging it off while bending his leg at a 90-degree angle toward the floor.

“Aubrey,” he said looking up at her, as he almost always had.  “I have no doubt you’ve been waiting for this, and I’m dumb because I’ve waited too long too.  Six years is a long time when I knew this was coming after a few days.  I don’t want to wake up starting a new year without making sure I’m one step closer to forever with you. Will you m—”

“Yes! Absolutely yes!” she exclaimed with a loud whisper through tears. “Now get up and stop bleeding on the floor!”

Cal stood up to embrace and kiss his soon-to-be wife in one fluid motion.  Separating from her grip, he gingerly went to the bathroom to wipe his multicolored leg clean.  Grabbing a bandage from the medicine cabinet, he looked down smiling at the burned and gnarled flesh.  Scars inherently made for the best stories, and he knew right then that this would be his favorite to tell.