After thirty-two years together, I thought I knew every single version of my husband, even the helpless mess he became whenever something hurt. But after a recent accident at work, Christopher stopped letting me help him altogether. The more protective he became of one simple injury, the more certain I was that something completely different had happened behind my back.
“Don’t touch the cast!”
Christopher’s voice came out so sharply that my hand stopped just inches from his right leg. He was sitting awkwardly on the bathroom floor beside the bathtub, with one crutch wedged under the sink and the other lying across the doorway. The top edge of his heavy fiberglass cast had cracked when he fell, and the soft cotton padding underneath had shifted out of place.
“You are sitting on the floor,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I am just trying to help you get up.”
“I can handle it myself,” he snapped back, avoiding my eyes.
“Don’t touch the cast,” he repeated, sounding entirely panicked.
“You just lost a fight with a bathtub,” I pointed out.
“Nora,” he said softly.
Something in the way he said my name made me pause right where I was. It was not irritation or anger in his tone, but raw, unfiltered fear. Christopher grabbed desperately for a towel, but he was not fast enough to cover himself. The loose padding had slipped far enough down for me to see a long pink scar running well above the line of the cast.
It was clearly healing, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fractured ankle he had supposedly gotten two weeks earlier. I stared down at the mark on his skin in absolute disbelief.
“Christopher, what on earth is that?” I asked.
PART 2
His hand closed tightly around the towel, covering the mark completely. Suddenly, the last two weeks of his strange behavior made total sense to me, or at least I thought they did.
When you have been married to someone for thirty-two years, you learn every tiny detail about their habits. I knew that Christopher snored much worse whenever he slept on his back. I knew he always claimed he was not hungry right before stealing half of my French fries. Most importantly, I knew my husband had absolutely no dignity whenever he was sick or injured. A simple head cold usually meant endless bowls of soup, special tea, extra blankets, and hourly updates about the state of his sinuses.
So when his long-time coworker, Waylon, brought him home one Tuesday afternoon with his right leg encased in plaster, I had fully expected six full weeks of total helplessness. Waylon had worked alongside Christopher in Columbus for over a decade. I had met him enough times to know he was much quieter than my husband and twice as patient.
That afternoon, patience was clearly necessary for everyone involved. Waylon had his arm wrapped tightly around Christopher’s waist when I opened the front door of our home in Columbus.
“What happened to him?” I asked, rushing over to support his other side.
“He slipped on a wet floor near the loading dock,” Waylon explained calmly.
Christopher lowered himself onto the sofa with a dramatic groan. “It is a fractured ankle, and the emergency room doctor said I need to stay off it for six weeks. This whole experience is going to be completely miserable.”
Six weeks of nursing him sounded exhausting, and I jokingly thought I would deserve a medal by Friday. I propped his swollen leg on three throw pillows and brought him a cold glass of water.
“Is there anything else you require, Your Majesty?” I asked with a small smile.
“A fresh cup of hot tea would be lovely, Nora,” he replied instantly.
I stared at him in disbelief. “You offered to help!” he added with a sheepish grin.
“I definitely did not mean it literally,” I laughed, but I went into the kitchen to make the tea anyway. That was just my Christopher, always looking for an extra bit of pampering.
When I returned to the living room, I noticed that the padding near the top of his cast looked strangely folded. I naturally reached out toward it to smooth it down. Christopher pulled his entire leg away from me in a violent jerk.
“I have got it,” he insisted, pulling his hands over the area.
I laughed at his reaction. “Since when do you handle your own medical stuff?”
“I just do not want you bumping into it by accident,” he said.
“Christopher, you once asked me to check your body temperature four times in one single evening,” I reminded him.
“That was a very severe fever,” he muttered, shifting his injured leg even farther away from where I stood.
The very next morning, I offered to wrap his heavy cast in plastic so he could take a shower safely.
“No, I will handle it myself,” he said firmly, grabbing the plastic wrap from my hand.
“Are you really planning to balance on one foot while wrapping your own leg?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“I can manage quite well, Nora. Please stop hovering over me,” he said.
He took the supplies upstairs, and a minute later, I heard the bathroom lock click shut. Christopher had never locked a inner door in our house during our entire marriage.
Three days later, I asked him when his follow-up medical appointment was scheduled.
“It is sometime next week,” he replied vaguely without looking up.
“What exact day is it?” I pressed. “I will write it down so I can come with you.”
“I have already taken care of it, Nora,” he said, staring fixately at the television screen.
“You have become strangely independent ever since you broke that ankle,” I noted softly.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked, his shoulders growing tense.
“It means you have spent thirty-two years asking me where we keep the aspirin every single time you get a headache,” I answered.
“That is a massive exaggeration,” he grumbled. “It is always in the exact same cabinet it has been in since we moved to this house.”
He almost smiled at my tease, but the expression disappeared from his face almost instantly.
Over the next week, the little details became far too obvious to ignore. He took his showers only when I was downstairs in the kitchen. He kept his injured leg tucked away on the far side of the bed. Whenever I walked into the room while he was adjusting his bandages, his hands immediately froze in place.
Then Waylon called our home phone late on a Thursday afternoon. Christopher had left his mobile phone on the kitchen counter while resting in the living room, so I answered it.
“Hello, Waylon,” I said into the receiver.
“Oh, hi, Nora,” Waylon sounded surprisingly nervous. “Is Christopher around?”
“Do you want me to hand him the phone?” I offered.
“No, that is fine,” Waylon replied quickly. “I was just calling to check how he is doing after everything that happened.”
My fingers tightened around the plastic handset. “After breaking his ankle, you mean?”
There was a long, noticeable pause on the line. “Yeah, of course,” Waylon said softly. “That is exactly what I meant.”
I looked through the doorway toward the sofa, where Christopher was pretending to read a magazine. “He is doing just fine,” I said slowly.
“Good to hear. Just tell him I called,” Waylon said before quickly hanging up.
When I walked back into the living room, Christopher glanced up from his page. “Was that Waylon on the phone?”
“Yes, it was,” I replied, watching his face carefully. “He wanted to know how you were doing after everything.”
Christopher’s eyes lifted toward mine. “What did he say?”
“Those were his exact words,” I said clearly.
Christopher merely shrugged his shoulders. “He was just talking about the accident at work, Nora.”
I walked away into the kitchen before he could see that I did not believe a single word coming out of his mouth.
That evening, I made a firm decision. I was not going to snoop through his personal phone or search his private drawers. After dinner was over, I was going to sit down and ask my husband one direct question: What on earth are you hiding from me?
However, I never actually got the chance to ask it. A sudden, heavy crash echoed from the upstairs floor, followed by a loud groan. I ran up the stairs and found him sprawled out beside the bathtub, which led right to the moment I spotted that mysterious mark.
“What happened to you?” I asked again, kneeling beside him on the cold tile floor.
“It is nothing,” Christopher insisted, trying to pull the damp towel over his leg.
“Nothing does not leave a giant scar like that on your leg,” I argued sternly.
“The whole situation is already handled,” he said, staring toward the open door.
“What is handled, Christopher?”
“I had a small spot removed,” he finally confessed in a low whisper.
