“I’m going. Help me get cleaned up and get me to my car, would you?”

“You’re stranger than pie, Ted Conkaffey. If you want to go get yourself murdered, fine, but you’re not going anywhere with half your face falling off.” Amanda took me by the shoulders and pushed me back onto the toilet. “I’ll fix it. Have you got any fishing line?”

“Forget about it. I’m not letting you anywhere near my face, with or without fishing line.”

“What, you think I’m gonna mess it up? You’re not a pretty man, Ted Conkaffey.”

“Yes I am.”

“You don’t need to be a doctor to stitch a guy’s face,” she said, lifting my chin, examining the wound. “I’ll do it. It’ll be great. It’ll be very erotic. Like when Val Kilmer cuts his face in The Saint and Elisabeth Shue stitches it for him. Urgh, Val Kilmer. Val Killlmerrr. I’m sorry. I need a moment.” She sighed and hung her head back, her eyes closed, remembering. Gave a warm, wide smile.

It turns out that a lot of women have stitched men’s faces in movies. Amanda told me all about them, straddling my lap in the bathtub, where the light was best, her breath on my face as she fed the fishing line through my skin with a sewing needle and ignoring my whining. Aside from Elisabeth Shue and Val Kilmer’s soulful interaction in The Saint, Rooney Mara stitched up Daniel Craig’s brow in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead put some stitches in John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

It wasn’t all that odd to have Amanda sitting on me, crotch to crotch, jabbering excitedly about erotic moments in movies, neither of us feeling anything remotely sexual. There was nothing erotic about us. In fact, Amanda seemed to have little concept of regular emotions. She was exactly as bright and cheerful about me not being dead as I imagined she’d have been about finding my corpse. She used weird expressions like “stranger than pie” as if everyone should know what they meant. Her social-emotional barometer had certainly been bashed around by her murder conviction, by her decade in prison. But I wasn’t exactly sure it had been firing on all pistons before that.

She helped me out to the car and I got on the road, my hands locked on the wheel, everything pulsing with pain in protest to the movement. I should really have been in the hospital. But then, I hadn’t been where I was meant to be or doing what I was meant to do in a very long time.