Mud Vein

  It was Christmas before I found her again. Actual Christmas—the day of tinsel and turkey and colorful paper wrapped around goodies we don’t want or need. I have a mother and a father and twin sisters with rhyming names. I was on my way to their house for Christmas dinner when I saw her jogging along the barren sidewalk. She was headed for the lake, her fluorescent sneakers blurring beneath her. She was a flash of speed. Her legs were chorded with muscle. I’d bet she could outrun a deer if she tried. I sped up and pulled into the empty lot of an Indian restaurant about half a mile ahead of her. I could smell the curries seeping from the building: green and red and yellow. I hopped out of my car and crossed the street, planning to cut her off before she reached the lake. She would have to go through me to get to the trail. I looked bolder than I felt. She could tell me to go to hell.

  By the time she saw me it was too late to pretend she hadn’t. Her pace slowed until she was bent at the knees in front of me. I watched the way her back rose and fell. She was breathing hard.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said. “Sorry for interrupting your run.”

  She glared at me from her bent position, confirming my guess that she didn’t want to see me.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you the last time you were at my house,” I said. “If you’d given me the chance to apologize I wo—”

  “You didn’t upset me,” she said. And then, “I finished my book.”

  Finished her book? I gaped. “In the three weeks I haven’t seen you? I thought you’d barely started.”

  “Yes, and now I’ve finished it.”

  I opened and closed my mouth. It took me a year to complete a manuscript, and that didn’t include the time I spent on research.

  “So when you just left like that…?”

  “I knew what I had to write,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Why didn’t you say something? Call me?” I felt like a clingy high school girl.

  “You’re an artist. I thought you’d understand.”

  I was wrestling with my pride to tell her that I didn’t. I’d never in my life run out on dinner to finish a story. I’d never felt even a chord of passion strong enough to drive me to do that. I didn’t tell her because I was afraid of what she would think. Me—New York Times Bestseller of over a dozen sappy novels.

  “What did you write about?” I asked.

  “My mud vein.”

  I got a chill.

  “You wrote about your darkness? Why would you do that?”

  There was nothing pretentious about her. No show, no thriving to impress me. She didn’t even try to guard the ugly truth, which made every one of her words feel like a cold dousing of water to the face.

  “Because it was the truth,” she said, so matter of fact. And I fell in love with her. She didn’t have to try to be anything. And everything that she was was something that I was not.

  “I missed you,” I said. “Can I read it?”

  She shrugged. “If you want to.”

  I watched a trickle of sweat wind down her neck and disappear between her breasts. Her hair was damp, her face flushed, but I wanted to grab her and kiss her.

  “Come with me to my parents’. I want to have Christmas dinner with you.”

  I thought she was going to say no and I’d have to spend the next ten minutes convincing her. She didn’t. She nodded. I was too afraid to say anything as she walked with me to my car, in case she changed her mind. Without any objections, she climbed into the front seat and folded her hands in her lap. It was all very formal.

  As soon as we were on the road, I reached for the radio. I wanted to put on Christmas music. At least prepare her for the Christmas crack she was about to experience at the Nissley house. She grabbed my hand.

  “Can you leave it off?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Not a fan of music?”

  She blinked at me, then looked out the window.

  “Everyone is a fan of music, Nick,” she said.

  “But not you…?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it. I’m begging for a detail about you, Brenna. Just give me one.”

  “Okay,” she said. “My mother loved music. She played it in our house from morning ‘til night.”

  “And that made you dislike it?”

  We pulled into my parent’s driveway and she used the distraction to avoid answering my question.

  “Pretty,” she said as we slowed to a stop.

  My parents lived in a modest home. They’d spent the last ten years making upgrades. If she thought the outside was pretty I couldn’t wait to see what she thought of my mother’s pink granite kitchen counters, or the fountain depicting a peeing boy they installed in the middle of the foyer. When I lived at home we’d had linoleum and plumbing that only worked a tenth of the time. She made no comment about the giant reindeer lawn ornaments, or the wreath almost the size of the front door. She hopped out without any reservation and followed me to the house of my very happy childhood. I looked at her before I opened the door, dressed in running clothes, her hair messy and stuck to her face. What type of woman jumped in the car with you on Christmas Day to meet your family, without putting on a cardigan and a dress? This one. She made every woman I’d ever been with feel insignificant and fake. This was going to be fun.

  “Is this you, Senna?”

  He was looking at me intensely. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew what I was thinking: Damn Nick and his book.

  I could barely … I didn’t know how to … My thoughts were trembling out of my hands.

  “You’re shaking,” Isaac said. He set the book on the nightstand and poured me a glass of water. The cup was one of those heavy plastic things, the color of too many colors of Play-Doh mixed together. It grossed me out, but I took it and sipped. The cup felt too heavy. Some of the water spilled down the front of my hospital gown, plastering it to my skin. I handed the cup back to Isaac, who set it aside without taking his eyes off my face. He put each one of his hands over mine to steady them. It absorbed a little of my shaking.

  “He wrote this for you,” Isaac said. His eyes were dark, like he had too many thoughts and they were filling him up. I didn’t want to answer.

  There was no mistaking the similarities in name—Senna/Brenna. There was also no mistaking the actual story itself. The fine line that squiggled between fiction and truth. It made me sick that Nick told the story. Our story? His version of our story. Some things should be buried and left to rot.

  I pointed to the book. “Take it,” I said. “Throw it away.”

  His eyebrows drew together. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want the past.”

  He stared at me for a long minute, then picked up the book, tucked it under his arm and walked for the door.

  “Wait!”

  I held out my hand for the book and he walked it back to me. Opening the cover I flipped to the dedication, touching it softly, running my fingers over the words … then I ripped it out. Hard. I handed the book back to Isaac, with the jagged page clutched in my fist. Stone faced, he left, the soles of his shoes sucking on the hospital floor. Thwuup ... Thwuup … Thwuup. I listened until they disappeared.

  I folded the page over and over until it was the size of my thumbnail, square upon square upon square. Then I ate it.

  I was discharged a week later. The nurses told me that normally a double mastectomy patient went home after three days, but Isaac pulled strings to keep me there longer. I didn’t say anything about it as he handed me my prescriptions in a paper bag, folded over twice and stapled. I shoved the bag into my overnight bag, trying to ignore the rattling sound of the pills. Trying to ignore how heavy the bag was in general. I supposed that it was easier for him to keep an eye on me here rather than at my house.

  He moved surgeries around and took the afternoon off to take me home. It annoyed me, and yet I didn’t know what I’d do without him. What did you say to a man who inserted himself as
your caretaker without your permission? Stay away from me, what you’re doing is wrong? Your kindness freaks me out? What the hell do you want from me? I didn’t like being someone’s project, but he had his wits and car, and I was laced with painkillers.

  I wondered what he did with Nick’s book. Did he toss it in the trash? Put it in his office? Maybe when I got home it would be sitting on my night table like it had never left.

  A nurse wheeled me through the hospital to the main doors where Isaac had parked his car. He walked slightly ahead of me. I watched his hands, the fat of his palm beneath his thumb. I was looking for traces of the book on his fingers. Stupid. If I wanted Nick’s words, I should have read them. Isaac’s hands were more than Nick’s book. They’d just reached into my body and cut out my cancer. But I couldn’t stop seeing the book in his hands, the way his fingers lifted the corner of the page before he turned it.

  He put on wordless music when we got in his car. That bothered me for some reason. Perhaps I expected him to have something new for me. I tapped my finger on the window as we drove. It was cold out. It would be like this for another few months before the weather would crack, and the sun would start to warm Washington. I liked the feel of the cold glass on my fingertips, like tiny shocks of winter. Isaac carried my bag inside. When I got to my room my eyes found my nightstand. There was a clear rectangle cut in the dust. I felt a pang of something. Grief? I was feeling a lot of grief; I had just lost my breasts. It had nothing to do with Nick, I told myself.

  “I’m making lunch,” Isaac said, standing just outside my room. “Do you want me to bring it up here?”

  “I want to shower. I’ll come down after.”

  He saw me staring at the bathroom door and cleared his throat. “Let me take a look before you do that.” I nodded and sat down on the edge of my bed, unbuttoning my shirt. When I was finished, I leaned back, my fingers gripping the comforter. You’d think I’d be used to this by now—the constant gawking and touching of my chest. Now that there was nothing there I should feel less ashamed. I was just a little boy as far as what was underneath my shirt. He unwound the bandages from my torso. I felt the air hit my skin and my eyes closed automatically. I opened them, defying my shame, to watch his face.

  Blank

  When he touched the skin around my sutures I wanted to pull back. “The swelling is down,” he said. “You can shower since the drain is out, but use the antibacterial soap I put in your bag. Don’t use a sponge on the stitches. They can snag.”

  I nodded. All things I knew, but when a man was looking at your mangled breasts he needed something to say. Doctor or not.

  I pulled my shirt closed and held it together in a fist.

  “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

  I couldn’t look at him. My breasts weren’t the only thing torn and ripped. Isaac was a stranger and he had seen more of my wounds than anyone else. Not because I chose him like I did Nick. He was just always there. That’s what scared me. It was one thing inviting someone into your life, choosing to put your head on the train tracks and wait for imminent death, but this—this I had no control over. What he knew, and what he’d seen about me brought so much shame I could barely look him in the eyes. I tiptoed to the bathroom, glancing once more at the nightstand before shutting the door.

  Someone could take your body, use it, beat it, treat it like it’s a piece of trash, but what hurts far worse than the actual physical attack is the darkness it injects into you. Rape works its way into your DNA. You aren’t you anymore, you’re the girl who was raped. And you can’t get it out. You can’t stop feeling like it’s going to happen again, or that you’re worthless, or that anyone could ever want you because you’re tainted and used. Someone else thought you were nothing, so you assume that everyone else will as well. Rape was a sinister destroyer of trust and worth and hope. I could fight cancer. I could cut chunks out of my body and inject poison into my veins to fight cancer. But I had no idea how to fight what that man took from me. And what he gave me—fear.

  I didn’t look at my body when I undressed and stepped into the shower. It wouldn’t be me in that mirror. Over the last few months my eyes had emptied out, become hollow. When I happened upon my reflection somewhere, it hurt. I stood with my back to the water, like Isaac told me, and my eyes rolled back in my head. This was my first shower since the surgery. The nurses had given me a sponge bath, and one had even washed my hair in the little bathroom. She’d pushed a chair right up against the rim of the sink and had me bend my head back while she massaged little bottles of shampoo and conditioner into my hair. I let the water run over me for at least ten minutes before I had the nerve to reach up and soap the empty place below my collar bone. I felt…nothing.

  When I was finished, patted dry and dressed in pajama pants, I called Isaac upstairs. Some of my steri-strips had come loose. I stood quietly as he worked to fit new ones on, my wet hair dripping down my back, my eyes closed. He smelled like rosemary and oregano. I wondered what he was making downstairs. When he was done, I slipped on a shirt and turned my back to him while I buttoned up the front of it. When I turned back around Isaac was holding the hairbrush I’d tossed on the bed. I’d been unsure of how to lift my arms high enough to work out the tangles. Pouring shampoo on my head had been one thing, brushing felt like an impossible feat. He gestured to the stool in front of my vanity.

  “You’re so strange,” I said, once I was seated. I was working hard to keep my eyes on his reflection and not look at my face.

  He glanced down at me, his strokes gentle and even. His fingernails were square and broad; there was nothing messy or ugly about his hands.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re brushing my hair. You don’t even know me, and you’re in my house brushing my hair, cooking me dinner. You were a drummer and now you’re a surgeon. You hardly ever blink,” I finished.

  His eyes looked so sad by the time I finished that I regretted saying it. He ran the brush through my hair one last time before setting it on the vanity.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded. I stood and let him lead me out of my room.

  I glanced once more at my nightstand before I followed him to the food.

  People lie. They use you and they lie, all the while feeding you bullshit about being loyal and never leaving you. No one can make that promise, because life is all about seasons, and seasons change. I hate change. You can’t rely on it, you can only rely on the fact that it will happen. But before it does, and before you learn, you feel good about their stupid, bullshit promises. You choose to believe them, because you need to. You go through a warm summer where everything is beautiful and there are no clouds—just warmth, warmth, warmth. You believe in a person’s permanence because humans have a tendency to stick to you when life is good. I call them honey summers. I’ve had enough honey summers in life to know that people leave you when winter comes. When life frosts you over and you’re shivering and layering on as much protection as you can just to survive. You don’t even notice it at first. The cold makes you too numb to see clearly. Then all of a sudden you look up and the snow is starting to melt, and you realize you spent the winter alone. That makes me mad as hell. Mad enough to leave people before they left me. That’s what I did with Nick. That’s what I tried to do with Isaac. Except he wouldn’t leave. He stayed all winter.

  The seasons split at the seams: spring, summer, fall and winter. I’ve always pictured them as giant sacks filled with air and color and smell. When it’s time for one season to be over, the next seasons splits open and pours over the world, drowning its tired and waning predecessor with its strength.

  Winter was over. Spring split and burst forth, spilling warm air and bright pink trees all over Washington. The sky was blue, and Isaac was trimming back the bushes in front of my house. A branch caught my arm the week before as I was walking to my front door and made me bleed. Isaac thought I cut myself. I could see the way he examined it. When he deem
ed my wound to be too curvy to come from a knife’s blade, he went searching for shears in my garage. Normally I hired a landscaping company to do the yard work, but here was my doctor, hacking away at my little spruce trees.

  I watched him through the window, flinching every time his arms flexed and the shears took a new branch in their mouth. If he accidentally hacked off a finger I’d be responsible. There were leaves and branches littered around his tennis shoes. I was never really hot enough in Washington to be dripping with sweat, but Isaac was damp and exhausted. You couldn’t tell Isaac not to do something. He didn’t listen. But, winter was over and I was tired of being his project. He was like a fixture here. On my couch, in my kitchen, trimming my hedges. The air was warm and the change had come. Nick used to tell me I was a daughter of winter—that the grey streak in my hair proved it. He said when the seasons changed, I changed. For the first time I think he was right.

  “When are you going home?” I asked when he came inside. He was washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

  “In a few minutes.”

  “No, I mean for good. When are you going home and staying home?”

  He dried his hands, took his time doing it.

  “Are you ready for me to?”

  That made me so angry. He always answered my questions with a question. Infuriating. I wasn’t a child. I could take care of myself.

  “I never asked you to be here in the first place.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You didn’t.”

  “Well, it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Is it?”

  He walked straight at me. I braced myself, but at the very last second he veered to the left and breezed right past where I was standing. I closed my eyes as the air that he stirred wrapped around me. I had the strangest thought. The strangest. You’re never going to smell him again.