THE SCAR
The scar is imperceptible to the untrained eye. The crescent-shaped outline sits at the base of my left index finger. Most scars come with a horrible story…an injury sustained and the long recovery process. My scar is a small reminder of when I fell in love, a process with no recovery.
It was a bracingly cold January night in Indiana. Rob and I had been dating for only a month, but we had known each other for about five months. I offered to drive him up to Ft. Wayne for a CBA basketball game. He was volunteering his time doing the radio analysis, hoping it would turn into a play-by-play job in the future.
I arrived at his apartment to pick him up in my no-frills, new black Geo Prism. I was excited to have Rob all to myself for the two-hour drive. He was an entertaining storyteller. Just when I thought I’d heard everything, he topped himself. As I grabbed my keys from my purse, I scratched the base of my index finger with my fingernail. I didn’t really feel the scratch, but I noticed the blood oozing from my finger. I was embarrassed to have hurt myself so violently — giving away my excitement for his company. I also didn’t have a band-aid. So, I casually applied direct pressure as I drove and pretended that nothing was wrong. The blood finally clotted just as we realized Rob went to middle school with my roommate from freshman year at Purdue.
From there, we discovered we had a few more mutual friends. Just more small world evidence that bonded me to Rob — another sign from God that he was the one, he was a keeper. Rob then launched into his experience on the high school cross country team and that a teammate they called “LA Hot” got his nickname because he stole stuff and LA stood for Lard Ass. He told me about how Grandma Brown ruined Christmas dinner and they all had to go to a Chinese restaurant in Logansport, just like in the movie A Christmas Story. He told me about the American Trans Air trip he and his Dad went on to New York City to watch the Pacers play the Knicks. I told him that my Dad was famous for saying that he would not watch the Pacers if they were playing in our backyard — even though I grew up in the same neighborhood as former Pacers coach Bobby “Slick” Leonard. The Leonard boys were notorious for trying to hit trick or treaters with water balloons from the balcony of their house.
Rob and I had created mixtapes for each other — it was a way of telling him about me without having to say anything. So, as we cruised down the highway with “Sara Smile” by Hall and Oates playing in the background, I decided to tell Rob about my brother, Matt, who had died five years before. I was able to say Matt’s name out loud without crying for the first time.
It was also the first time I tried to explain Matt to someone who had never met him. Words didn’t seem to do him justice — that is why I had never bothered to try. It was hard to find the right words and even harder to find someone worthy to hear them. It had been five years since he died, and Rob was the first person that I trusted enough to want to tell.
Rob needed to know that Matt and I watched the Cubs on WGN after school — that Matt was a card-carrying member of the Die-Hard Cubs Fan Club. Rob got to hear about the time Matt and I went to a Cubs game in early May of 1989 and it snowed, so I spent most of my time under a heat vent in the restroom. I told him how Matt and I would spend our summer days playing mini-tennis on the driveway and how I would make Matt be Ivan Lendl and I got to be John McEnroe. I told Rob that Matt did every math story problem for me because he was smart and was too kind to tell me to do it myself.
As I told Rob more about Matt, the scar Matt’s death left on my heart started to heal just like the one at the base of my left index finger — the bleeding had stopped, but the scar was still visible if you were looking for it.
