Chapter 42
I DIDN’T LIKE THE IDEA of keeping secrets from Paul, so I resolved to tell him about my run-in with Angela at the first opportunity.
But when he arrived back at the hotel that evening, he was in a foul mood.
He’d had some sort of issue calibrating a radiation monitoring device.
“I spent all day on the phone,” he said as he removed his shoes.
“Just trying to get someone to troubleshoot it with me.”
I’d recently swapped out our hot plate, so I offered to fry him up some eggs, and he asked if we had any ketchup, knowing full well we did not.
When I said as much, he told me I didn’t need to get on him, he was just asking.
I could feel a fight brewing and was determined to head it off at the pass, so I told him I thought we had Parmesan, and if he gave me a second, I’d grate some.
While I was rummaging around in the cooler, however, he let out a deranged Goddammit.
“What?” I asked, but I could already tell that he’d stubbed his toe, the way he was hopping around the room, holding his foot.
“Fucking bed,” he seethed. “Takes up half the fucking room.”
I made a sympathetic clucking noise, the kind of sound you make when you’re humoring someone. But then I noticed the blood leaking out from between his fingers and let out a little yelp. “You’re bleeding,” I said, which should have been obvious, but it wasn’t at all clear to me that he’d noticed.
I grabbed a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, then approached Paul, who stood on one foot in the middle of the room, staring—trancelike—at the trail of blood on the tile floor.
“Sit?” I suggested.
He moved to the bed, where he perched on the edge of the mattress. Still, he wouldn’t let go of the foot. I held out the roll of toilet paper. “I can help if you’ll let me look.”
Slowly, Paul removed his hand, exposing a bloody big toe. The damage was worse than I’d expected—he had split the nail in half, pulling a good chunk of it away from the nail bed in the process.
“Do you think it’s broken?” he asked.
I had no idea what to tell him. The toe didn’t look unreasonably lopsided, and if it were going to swell, it hadn’t yet. “Can you move it?”
“I really don’t want to,” he said, so I didn’t push. Like a lot of men, I would find Paul was a terrible baby when he was wounded, weary, or under the weather.
“Why don’t I clean it?” I suggested, and when he didn’t tell me not to, I tore a long piece of toilet paper off the roll and knelt beside him.
“You’re a real Mary Magdalene,” he said, after I had been at work on his toe for a few minutes.
“How so?”
“Didn’t she clean Jesus’s feet with her own hair?”
“I’m not sure you’ve got the right Mary.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was her. A sinful woman from Galilee.”
At that, I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know what offends me more, that you’re comparing me to a prostitute or yourself to Jesus Christ.”
This got a smile out of him, which was a relief.
Once I had him cleaned up, I wrapped a couple of layers of dry toilet paper around the toe and used a hairband to hold the whole thing in place. “I’ll buy Band-Aids first thing tomorrow,” I promised.
Paul pushed himself back onto the bed, and I folded a pillow in half and shoved it under his foot to elevate it. Then I returned to the hot plate and made a batch of very runny eggs. I brought them to bed, and we ate in silence.
When we were finished, I put our plates on my bedside table and lay down beside Paul.
“We need to get out of here,” he said, and for a second, I thought he meant La Maddalena. Then he gestured at the ceiling, the walls, the very bed on which we were lying. “This room. It’s killing me.”
“Literally,” I said, and he let out a small burst of air. Not quite a laugh, but something close.
“Hey,” he said finally. “How’d your seminar go?”
“Oh, you know,” I said.
He glanced over at me.
“It was fine.”