Mud Vein

  I started unpacking the groceries. At first I felt nothing. Just boxes of pasta and bags of fruit being shelved … put away. Then I felt something. An itch. It nagged at me, tugging and pulling until I was so frustrated I threw a box of soup crackers across the room. They hit the wall and I stared at the spot where they’d landed, trying to find the sound of my emotion. Sound. I ran to the living room and hit play on Florence Welch. She’d been singing this song to me nonstop for days. Her real voice would be tired by now, but her recorded voice called out to me, unfailing. Strong.

  How had he known this song, these words, this tormented voice would speak to me?

  I hated him.

  I hated him.

  I hated him.

  I didn’t see Isaac until a few days before the surgery. I saw plenty of Dr. Elgin. I saw her three times a week upon my surgeon’s demand. It was like trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of therapy into six sessions. She commanded me to speak with her eyes and her tinkling bracelets: tell me more, tell me more. Each time I sank into her couch, I sank a little lower in esteem. This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that’s what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one. It seemed that the more Saphira Elgin absorbed of me, the less of me there was. Sometimes I tried to be funny, just so I could hear the dusty way she laughed. She laughed at the inappropriate, sometimes the crass. I liked her so much on some days, and on others I hated her.

  At the end of every session the dragon would purr the same thing: “Read Nick’s book. It will give you purrrrspective. Closurrrrre.” I would drive home determined, but then I would get to the title page and see For MV, and quickly close the cover.

  The dedication page was beginning to look worn and touched, rivets of fingerprints on the page.

  I waited until our last session to tell her about the rape. I didn’t know why except that other than the cancer, the rape was the last thing that happened to me. Maybe I had a chronological way of dealing with things; a writer’s route to solving problems. Her insouciance over the matter was what finally won me over. It was as if the entire time I saw her I was counting down the days until I would have to tell her about the rape, dreading the pity I’d see appear her eyes. But there was none. “Life happens,” she said. “Bad things happen because we live in a world with evil.” And then she’d asked me the strangest thing. “Do you blame God?” It had never occurred to me to blame God since I didn’t believe in him.

  “If I believed in God, I would blame him. I suppose it’s easier not to believe, then I have nothing to be angry at.”

  She smiled. A cat’s curl smile. And then it was over, and I’d left a free woman, my purgatory served. Isaac would operate on me now. I would be free of cancer, free to move forward without fear. Without some of the fear.

  That night I started having the dreams again, hands pushing and pulling at me. Sharp pain and humiliation. The feeling of helplessness and panic. I woke up screaming, but there was no Isaac. I got in the shower to wash away the dream, shivering under the scalding water. I couldn’t fall back to sleep with those images so fresh in my mind, so I sat in my office and pretended to write the book my agent was waiting for. The book I had no words for.

  At noon, five days before my surgery, I dressed to go to the hospital for my pre-op appointment. It was March and the sun had been fighting the clouds for a week. Today the sky was uninterrupted blue. I felt resentful of the sun. That thought made me think of the things Nick used to say about me. You’re all grey. Everything you love, the way you see the world. I walked out to my car, stepping around puddles of rainwater from the day before. They were colored like an oyster shell, iridescent from the oil collected from my car or Isaac’s. When I got to the driver’s side door, I saw a cardboard square underneath my wiper blade. I darted a look over my shoulder before plucking it out. He had been here. Last night? This morning? Why hadn’t he rung the bell?

  I climbed into the car a little bit excited and slipped the CD from the sleeve. This time he’d written the name of the song on the disk in red permanent marker. Kill Your Heroes, Awolnation. My hands were shaking as I hit play.

  I listened with my eyes closed, wondering if all people listened to music with words this way. When the last note played, I started my car and drove to the hospital fighting a smile. I’d expected something to strip me naked like the Florence Welch song had. The title and its tie to the great Oscar Wilde had been enough to make me smirk, but the words, which to anyone else fighting cancer would have felt insensitive, uplifted me. So gloriously morbid.

  I hit play and listened one more time, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel as I drove.

  I was sitting in the exam room in a hospital gown when Isaac walked in, followed by a nurse, Dr. Akela and the plastic surgeon I saw a few weeks earlier—I think his name was Dr. Monroe, or maybe it was Dr. Morton. Isaac was wearing black scrubs underneath his white lab coat. I had a moment to study him as he looked over my chart. Dr. Akela was smiling at me, standing almost too close to Isaac. Was that possession? Dr. Monroe/Morton looked bored. On television they called his kind Plastics.

  Finally, Isaac looked up.

  “Senna,” he said. Dr. Akela glanced up at him when he used my first name. I wondered if she was where he went missing to when he wasn’t with me. If I were a man, I’d go missing to Dr. Akela, too. She’d make a beautiful hiding place. Her sense was sight, I decided. Everything about her called loudly to the eyes: the way she moved, the way she looked, the way she spoke sentences with only her body.

  Isaac asked me to sit up. “We’re going to take a look.” He gently untied the back of my hospital gown and stepped away so I could lower it myself. I made myself feel nothing, staring straight ahead as the cold air touched my skin.

  “Lie back, Senna,” he said softly. I did. I focused on the ceiling as I felt his hands on me. He examined each breast, his fingers lingering around the lump on the right side. His touch was gentle, but professional. If anyone else had been touching me, I would have bolted upright and run straight out of the room. When he was done, he helped me sit up and retied my gown. I saw Dr. Akela watching him again.

  “Your labs look good,” he said. “Everything is set for the surgery next week. Dr. Montoll is here to talk to you about reconstruction.” Montoll! “And Dr. Akela would like to go over the radiation treatments with you.”

  “I won’t be needing to speak with Dr. Montoll,” I said.

  Isaac’s face jerked up from my chart. “You’ll want to discuss reconstruction of—”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Dr. Montoll the Plastic stepped in, suddenly not looking quite as bored. “Ms. Richards, if we get the expanders in now, your reconstruction—”

  “I’m not interested in reconstruction,” I said, dismissively. “I’ll have the mastectomy and then I’ll go home without expanders. That’s my decision.”

  Dr. Montoll opened his mouth to speak, but Isaac cut him off.

  “The patient has made her decision, doctor.” He was staring straight at me when he said it. I pulled my lips tight, in thanks.

  “If my services aren’t needed, you’ll excuse me,” Dr. Montoll said, before making his exit. I looked at my hands. Dr. Akela sat on the edge of my bed. We spoke for a few minutes about the radiation I’d have to go through after my surgery. Six weeks. I had to admire her bedside manner; she was warm and personal. On her way out she touched Isaac lightly on the back of his arm. Mine.

  Isaac waited until the door clicked shut before he took a step forward. I braced myself for an influx of questions, but instead he said, “You can get dressed now. Are you free for lunch?”

  I blinked up at him.

  “Isn’t that a conflict
of interest? Eating lunch with a patient?”

  He smiled. “Yes, we’d have to go somewhere other than the hospital cafeteria.”

  I was about to say no, when I heard the lyrics of the song he gave me this morning, playing in my head. Who gave someone a song that said, No need to worry because everybody will die when they had cancer?

  I liked it. It was the honesty.

  “All right,” I said.

  He glanced at his watch. “Meet you in the parking lot in ten?”

  I nodded.

  I got dressed and made my way downstairs. “I’m over this way,” he said, once I found him in the parking lot. He’d changed out of his scrubs and was wearing a white shirt and grey pinstriped pants. I followed him to his car, and he opened the door for me. It was too much. I freaked.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. I backed away from the car. “I’m sorry. I need to get home.”

  I didn’t look back as I walked toward my car.

  He probably thought I was losing my mind. There was a good chance I was.

  Isaac was waiting for me when I got home a few hours later, leaning against his car with his face turned upward. Soak it up, Isaac, I thought. Tomorrow my clouds will be back. For a brief second, I thought about not turning into my driveway and heading up to Canada instead. But I’d been driving around for hours and the needle to my gas tank was pointing to E. I wanted to go home. I walked past him to the front door. We were barely past the foyer when I said, “Why didn’t you ask me why I don’t want reconstruction?”

  “Because if you want to tell me, you will.”

  “We’re not friends, Isaac!”

  “No?”

  “I don’t have friends. Can’t you see that?”

  “I can see that,” he said. I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I was wearing a navy blue jacket over my shirt. I took it off and flung it on the couch. Then I piled my hair on top of my head and tied it into a knot.

  “So why are you here?”

  He looked at me then. “I want you to be okay.”

  Too much. I ran upstairs. I was crazy. I knew that. Normal people didn’t leave conversations right in the middle. Normal people didn’t let strangers sleep on their couch.

  Two years ago I purchased a stationary bike from an eighty-eight year old widower with pink hair named Delfie. She’d put an ad in the Penny Saver after she’d had hip replacement and couldn’t damn well use it, as she’d said. I’d picked it up the same day I made the call. After all the hassle and tassle of hauling the thing up the stairs, I’d yet to sit on it. I walked over to where it was collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom and climbed on. I had to adjust Delfie’s setting on the padded seat. I pedaled until my legs felt like jelly. I was panting when I climbed off, my bare feet sore from the plastic pedals. I walked on the sides of my feet to my night table. I flipped open the cover of Knotted with my pinkie.

  For MV

  I closed it, and went downstairs to see what Isaac was making for dinner.

  Fortune favors the brave. That’s what I repeated to myself as they prepped me for surgery. Except I didn’t say it in English, I said the Latin words: fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat. Mantras sounded better in Latin. Repeat any phrase in the educated fancy-pants language most of the ancient philosophers used, you sounded like a goddamn genius. Repeat the same phrase in English, you sounded like a loon. Who wrote that phrase? A philosopher. I should have remembered his name, but I couldn’t. Nerves, I told myself. I searched for something else to focus on, something that could comfort my decision. I knew that the Bible said something about cutting out your eye if it offended you. I was cutting out my breasts. I thought that this was both my brave move and my offended one. It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy. I tried to focus on something else so I wouldn’t have to think about how crazy I was. There was a nurse taking my blood.

  The nurses were very attentive even when they were sticking needles into my flesh. Oh, sorry honey, you have small veins. This will only sting for a second. They told me to close my eyes as if I were a child. This one didn’t have any problems with finding the right vein in my arm. I wondered if Isaac admonished them to take good care of me. It seemed like something he would do. The hospital room was white. Thank God for that. I could think in peace without the colors breaking through. Isaac came in to examine me. I was trying to be strong when he sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at me with soft eyes.

  “Why did you stop playing music?” My voice cracked on the last word. I needed something to distract myself. A truth from Isaac.

  He considered my question for a minute, then he said, “There are two things that I love.”

  I stopped breathing. I thought he was going to tell me about a woman. Someone he’d loved and that he’d given up music for. Instead he surprised me. “Music and medicine.”

  I settled down in the bed with my head against the pillows to listen to him.

  “Music makes me destructive—to myself and everyone around me. Medicine saves people. So I chose medicine.”

  So matter-of-fact. So simple. I wondered what it would be like to give up writing. To choose something else over what I craved.

  “Music saves people too,” I said. I don’t know this personally, but I was a writer and it was my job to know how other people thought. And I’d heard them say it.

  “Not me,” he said. “It makes me destructive.”

  “But you still listen to it.” I thought of his songs. The ones he’d left me, and the ones he played in his car.

  “Yes. But I don’t create it anymore. Or get lost in it.”

  I couldn’t keep it out of my eyes, the desire to know more. Isaac caught it.

  “How does a person get lost in music?”

  He grinned and looked at the lines running from my veins into the IV a few feet away.

  “What drugs do they have you on?” he teased.

  I stayed quiet, afraid that if I responded to his joke he wouldn’t tell me the answer.

  “You let it live in you. The beat, the lyrics, the harmonies … the lifestyle,” he added. “There is only room for one of you, eventually.”

  I was quiet for a bit. Processing.

  “Do you miss it?”

  He smiled. “I still have it. It’s just not my focus.”

  “What did you play?”

  He took my hand, turned it over until the inside of my wrist was facing up. Then with his pointer and middle finger began tapping a beat on my pulse. I let him for at least a minute. Then I said, “A drummer.”

  I had another question on the tip of my tongue, but I held it there when the nurse walked in. Isaac stood up and I knew our conversation was over. In my mind, I replayed the beat he’d played on my wrist as the nurse fit a cap over my hair. I wondered what song it belonged to. If it was one of the ones he’d left on my windshield.

  “I’m going to walk you through the procedure,” he said, lowering my gown. “Then Sandy is going to take you to surgery.” He morphed from Isaac the man to Isaac the doctor in just a few seconds. He told me where he was going to make the incisions, outlining them on my breasts with a black marker. He spoke about what he was going to be looking for. His voice was steady, professional. While he spoke tears streamed down my face and fell into my hair in a silent but torrid emotional cacophony. It was the first time I’d cried since my childhood. I hadn’t cried when my mother left, or when I was raped, or when I found out cancer was eating at my body. I hadn’t even cried when I made the decision to cut out the very essence of what made me a woman. I cried when Isaac played drums on my pulse and told me he had to give it up before they destroyed him. Go figure. Or maybe that statement had just broken it all open. My cry felt anticlimactic. Like something more profound should have kicked the last stone out of the dam before it burst open.

 
He saw my tears, but he didn’t acknowledge them. I was so, so grateful. They wheeled me into the OR and the anesthesiologist greeted me by name. I was asked to count backwards from ten. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was Isaac, staring intently into my eyes. I thought he was telling me to live.

  “Senna … Senna…”

  I heard his voice. My eyes felt weighted. When I opened them Isaac was standing over me. It was an alarming comfort to see him.

  “Hi,” he said softly. I blinked at him, trying to clear my vision.

  “Everything went well. I need you to rest. I’ll be back later to talk to you about the surgery.”

  “Is it gone?” My voice was just a scratch. He smelled like coffee when he leaned down. He spoke into my ear as if he were telling me a secret.

  “I got it all.”

  I could barely nod before I closed my eyes again. I drifted off wanting coffee and wishing my eyelids weren’t so heavy so I could see his face a little longer.

  When I woke up there was a nurse in my room checking my vitals. She was blonde and had pink fingernails. They were smooth and shiny like little candies. She smiled at me and told me she was going to page Dr. Asterholder. He came back a few minutes later and sat on the edge of my bed. I watched as he poured water into a glass from a pitcher and held the straw to my lips. I drank.

  “I took out three lymph nodes. We had them tested to see how far the cancer spread.” He paused. “You made the right call, Senna.”

  My chest felt tight. How did he get the results that soon? I wanted to reach up and touch the bandages, but it hurt too much. “You just need to rest for now. Can I get you anything?”

  I nodded. When I spoke my voice sounded charred. “There is a book on my nightstand, next to my bed. Can you get it for me next time you—”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said. “Your cell phone is there.” He pointed to the table next to my bed. I had no need for a cell phone, so I didn’t look. “I have to do rounds. Call me if you need anything.” I nodded, half wishing he’d leave a business card like the old days.