Mud Vein

  “What does it mean?” I ask Isaac.

  He shakes his head. “A fan? I don’t know. It’s someone playing games.”

  “How did we never notice that before?”

  I want to press my fingers into the sides of his face and force him to look at me. I want him to tell me that he hates me, because for some reason he is here as a result of me. But he doesn’t. Nothing he does is encumbered by blame or anger. I wish I could be like that.

  “We weren’t looking,” he says. “What else are we not seeing because we aren’t looking?”

  “I have to read what’s in there.” I stand up, but Isaac pulls me back.

  “It’s Chapter Nine.”

  Chapter Nine?

  I reach for it in my mind. Then I let it go. Chapter Nine hurts. I wish I hadn’t written it. I tried to get the publishers to take it out of the manuscript before the book went to print. But they felt it was necessary to the story.

  The day the book hit shelves, I sat in my white room, holding back my vomit, knowing that everyone was reading Chapter Nine and living my pain. I don’t want to read it, so I stay sitting.

  “Chapter Nine is—”

  I cut him off.

  “I know what it is,” I snap. “But why is it there?”

  “Because someone is obsessed with you, Senna.”

  “No one knew that was real! Who did you tell?”

  I am screaming; so angry I want to throw something large. But the zookeeper didn’t give us anything large to throw. Everything is bolted, sewn into the walls and floors like this is a dollhouse.

  “Stop it!” He grabs me, tries to slow me down.

  His voice is getting loud. I release mine, too. If he’s going to yell I’m going to yell louder.

  “Then why are you here?” I punch his chest with both of my fists.

  He sits down abruptly. It throws me off. I was all geared up to fight.

  “You’ve said those words to me so many times I’ve lost count. But this time it’s not my choice. I want to be with my wife. Planning for our baby. Not locked up like a prisoner with you. I don’t want to be with you.”

  His words hurt so bad. My pride keeps my knees stiff, otherwise I would have buckled from the pain. I watch him walk up the stairs, my heart pounding to the beat of his anger. I guess I was wrong about him. I was wrong about so many things with regard to him.

  I am wrapped in my cocoon again when Isaac comes up with dinner. He brings two plates and sets them on the floor by the fire before unwrapping me.

  “Food,” he says. I lay on my back staring up at the ceiling for a minute, before throwing my legs off the side of the bed and slowly walking to his picnic.

  He’s already eating, staring at the flames while he chews. I sit on my knees as far away from him as I can—on the corner of the rug—and pick up my plate. The plate is square. There are squares around its edge. It’s the first time I’m noticing. I’ve been eating off these dishes for weeks, but I’m just now observing things like color and pattern and shape. They are familiar to me. I touch one of the squares with my pinkie.

  “Isaac, these plates…”

  “I know,” he says. “You’re in a fog, Senna. I wish you’d wake up and help me get out of here.”

  I set my plate on the floor. He’s right.

  “The fence. How far does it run around the house?”

  “About a mile in every direction. With the cliff on one side of us.”

  “Why did he give us that much room?”

  “Food,” Isaac says. “Wood?”

  “So he means for us to take care of ourselves when the food runs out?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the fence will keep the animals out, and there are only so many trees to cut down.”

  Isaac shrugs. “Maybe he intended for us to make it ‘til summer. We’d see some animals then.”

  “There is a summer here?” I say it sarcastically, but Isaac nods.

  “There is a short summer in Alaska, yes. But depending on where we are, there might not be one. If we are in the mountains it will be winter year round.”

  I don’t long for the sun. I never have. But I don’t like being told it has to be winter all year either. It makes me want to claw at the walls.

  I fidget with the hem of my sweater.

  “How much food do we have left?”

  “Couple months’ worth if we ration it.”

  “I wish this song would stop playing.” I pick up my plate and start eating. These are Isaac’s plates. Or were his plates. I only ate at his house once. He probably has the type of china now that married people have. I think about his wife. Small and pretty, eating off her china alone because her husband is missing. She doesn’t feel like eating, but she’s doing it anyway because of the baby. The baby they tried and tried for. I blink the image of her away. She helped save my life. I wonder if they’ve tied our disappearances together? Daphne knew some of what happened with Isaac and me. They had been seeing each other when he met me. He put everything on hold with her during those months he was keeping me alive.

  “Senna,” he says.

  I don’t lift my head. I’m trying not to crack. There is rice on my plate. I count the grains.

  “It took me a long time…” he pauses. “To stop feeling you everywhere.”

  “Isaac, you don’t have to. Really. I get it. You want to be with your family.”

  “We’re not good at this,” he says. “The talking.” He sets his plate down. I hear the clatter of silverware. “But I want you to know one thing about me. Want being the key word, Senna. I know you don’t need words from me.”

  I brace myself against the rice; it’s all that stands between me and my feelings. Rice.

  “You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”

  I set my plate down and wipe my palms on my pant legs. I have yet to look at him, but I hear the angst in his voice. I have nothing to say. I don’t know what to say. That proves his point, and I don’t want him to be right.

  “I hear you still.”

  I stand up. I upset my plate; it topples.

  “Isaac, stop.”

  But he doesn’t. “It’s never that I don’t want to be with you. It’s that you don’t want to be with me.”

  I bolt for the ladder. I don’t even bother using the rungs. I jump … land on my haunches. I feel feral.

  “The life you choose to live is the essence of who you arrre.”

  I am an animal, bent on surviving. I let nothing in. I let nothing out.

  Depression

  I stink. Not the way you smell on a hot day when the sun toasts your skin and you smell like bologna. I wish I smelled like that. It would mean there was sun. I smell musty, like an old doll that has been locked up in a closet for years. I smell like unwashed body and depression. Yes. I slowly consider my stink and the awful way my grey streak hangs lank in my face. I don’t bother to push it off my eyes. I stay curled under the blanket like a fetus. I don’t even know how long I’ve been like this—days? Weeks? Or maybe it just feels like weeks. I’m composed of weeks, and days of weeks, and hours of weeks and days and minutes and seconds and…

  I’m not even in the attic bed. It’s warmer in the attic, but a few nights ago I took too many shots of whiskey and stumbled into the carousel room, only half conscious and holding in my sick. I was too dizzy to light a fire, so I lay trembling under the feather blanket, trying not to look at the horses. Waking up there was like having a night of drinking and then finding yourself in your bed with your best friend’s boyfriend.

  At first I was too shocked to move, so I just lay there paralyzed by shame and nausea. Not sure who exactly
I felt like I was betraying by being in there, but felt it nevertheless. Isaac never came to find me, but considering that we were passing the bottle back and forth all night, he was probably just as sick as I was. That’s what we do lately; we congregate in the living room after dinner to sip from a bottle that fits neatly in our hands. After dinner drinks. Except dinners are getting sparse: a handful of rice, a small pile of canned carrots. There is always more liquor in our bellies than food these days. I groan at the thought of food. I need to pee and maybe be sick. I run the tip of my finger back and forth, back and forth over the cotton sheets. Back and forth, back and forth until I fall asleep. Landscape is playing. It’s always playing. The zookeeper is cruel.

  Back and forth, back and forth. There is wallpaper to the left of the bed, of tiny carousel horses floating untethered through a creamy backdrop. Except they aren’t angry like the horses attached to the bed. There are no flared nostrils and you cannot see the whites of their eyes. They have furling ribbons tied to their forelocks and cranberry colored jewels decorating their saddles. To the right of the bed is a baby blue wall and centered in the middle of it, a brick fireplace. Sometimes I look at the blue wall, other times I like to count the little carousel horses on the wallpaper. And then there are times I squeeze my eyes shut so tight and pretend I’m at home in my own bed. My sheets are different, and the weight of the blanket, but if I lie very still…

  That’s when things get a little crazy. I’m not even sure I want to be in my own bed. It was figuratively just as cold as this one. There is nowhere I want to be. I should embrace the cold and the snow and the prison. I should be like Corrie Ten Boom and try to find purpose in suffering. I get catatonic at that point. My thoughts, having run in circles for most of the day, shut down. I just stare until Isaac eventually carries in a plate of food and sets it on the table next to the bed. I don’t touch anything. Not for days, until he pleads with me to eat. To move. To talk to him. I stare at one of the two walls and see how long I can go without feeling. I pee in the bed. The first time it’s an accident; my bladder, stretched like a water balloon, reaches its limit. There’s another time. In my sleep I roll away from it, find a new spot. I wake up closer to the fireplace, my clothes barely damp. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finally in the place where nothing bothers me.

  Spalsh

  I squirm under hot water, writhing in shock. I come up gasping, trying to claw my way out of the tub. He dropped me in like a human bath bead. Water sloshes over the side of the tub and soaks into his pant legs and socks. I fight for a few more seconds, his hands holding me in the water. I don’t have the energy to fight. I let myself sink. The bath is so full that I can submerge myself completely. I sink, sink, sink into the ocean.

  But there is no rest, because he grabs me under my arms and pulls me up to a sitting position. I gasp and grab the sides of the tub. I’m naked except for a sports bra and panties. He pours shampoo on my head; I bat at his hands like a child until his fingers find my scalp. Then I let him. My body, rigid a second ago, slouches as he rubs the fight out of my head. He washes me, using his hands and a sponge that looks like it came straight from a coral reef. Surgeon’s hands rub across my muscles and my skin until I’m so relaxed I can barely move. I close my eyes when he rinses my hair. Both of his hands are holding my head up, cradling it so I don’t sink beneath the water’s surface. When they suddenly stop moving I open my eyes. Isaac is staring at me from above. His eyebrows are almost touching, so deep is his consternation. I reach up without thinking and cradle his cheek with my hand. I would be worried that he could see through my thin, white sports bra, but there is nothing to see. I’m practically a boy. I take my hand away and then I start to chortle. It sounds like a burst of madness. Why do I even wear a sports bra? It’s so stupid. I should just walk around topless. I laugh harder, swallowing a mouthful of water as my body rolls to the side. I am choking—choking and laughing. Isaac pulls me up. Then all at once the sound and the choking are gone. I am Senna again. I stare at the wall behind the tap, feeling tired. Isaac grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

  “Please,” he says. “Just try to live.”

  My eyes are so tired. He picks me up out of the bath. I close my eyes as he kneels on the floor to dry me, then wraps me up in a towel that smells of him. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me to the ladder. I squeeze his neck a little, just so he knows I’ll try.

  I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No. It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come?

  Days, then a week, then two. Isaac gives me the silent treatment. And when there are only two people in the universe, silence is very, very loud. I lurk in his places: the kitchen, the carousel room where he sits against the wall and stares at the horses. I don’t sleep in the attic room anymore; I curl up downstairs on the sofa and wait. Wait for him to wake up, wait for him to look at me, wait for emotions to implode.

  One night I am sitting at the table … waiting … while he stands at the stove stirring something in a huge cast iron pot. We are running out of food. The freezer has seven plastic bags of indeterminate meat and about four pounds of frozen vegetables. All lima beans, which Isaac hates. The pantry is no less barren looking. We have one sack of potatoes and a two-pound bag of rice. There are some cans of ravioli, but I keep telling myself we will be out of here before I have to eat those. When he hands me my plate a few minutes later I try to catch his eyes, but they run from me. I push my plate away. The rim of my plate bumps against his. He looks up.

  “Why are you treating me like this? You can barely look at me.”

  I don’t expect him to answer. Maybe.

  “Do you remember how we met?” he asks. I get a chill.

  “How could I not?”

  He runs his tongue across his teeth before leaning away from his food. He’s certainly looking at me this time.

  “Do you want the story?”

  “I want to know why you can’t look at me,” I say.

  He rubs the tips of his fingers together as if to rub away grease. But there is no grease. We are eating dry rice with a little potato and ground beef mashed into it.

  “I had a flight booked, Senna. On Christmas Day. I was supposed to leave that morning and go home to see my family. I was on my way to the airport when I turned my car around and went home. I don’t fucking know why I did it. I just felt like I needed to stay. I went for a jog to clear my head and there you were, running out of the trees.”

  I stare at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  “Believed what? That you went for a jog instead of hopping on a plane?”

  He leans forward. “No. Don’t make me feel stupid for thinking that there is purpose. We aren’t animals. Life isn’t random. I was supposed to be there.”

  “And I was supposed to get raped? So that we could meet? Because that’s what you’re saying. If life isn’t random then it was in someone’s plan for that bastard to do what he did to me!” I am out of breath, my chest heaving. Isaac licks his lips.

  “Maybe it was in someone’s plan for me to be there for you…”

  “To keep me alive,” I finish.

  “No. I didn’t say—”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what you’re saying. My savior, sent to
keep the pathetic, sniveling, Senna from killing herself.”

  “Senna!” he slams his fist on the table, and I jump.

  “When we found each other we were both pretty dead and defeated. Something grew despite that.” He shakes his head. “You breathed life back into me. It was instinct for me to be there with you. I didn’t want to save you, I just didn’t know how to leave you.”

  There is a long pause.

  Not even Nick did that. Because Nick didn’t love me unconditionally. He loved me so long as I was his muse. So long as I gave him something to believe in.

  “Isaac…” his name falls flat. There is something I want to say but I don’t know what it is. There is no real point in saying anything at all. Isaac is married and our situation leaves little room for anything but survival.

  “I need to go get some wood,” I announce.

  He smiles sadly, shakes his head.

  I cook dinner that night. Red meat; I don’t know what kind it is until I smell it in the skillet and know it’s some type of game. Who took the time to hunt these animals for us? Bag them? Freeze them?

  Isaac doesn’t come down from his room. I put his plate of food in the oven to keep it warm and climb onto the kitchen table. It’s big enough for two people to lie side by side. I curl up in the middle, my face turned toward the window. I can see the window above the sink, and in it the reflection of the doorway. The kitchen is his go-to place. I’ll wait for him here. It feels good to be somewhere I’m not supposed to be. The zookeeper wouldn’t care that I’m lying on his table, but in general, tables aren’t for lying on. So, I feel mildly rebellious. And that helps. No it doesn’t. Who am I kidding? I unroll myself from the ball I’m curled into and jump down from the table. Walking to the silverware drawer, I pull it back forcefully until the silver clatters. I eye its contents, examining the selection: long, short, curved, serrated. I reach for the knife Isaac uses to peel potatoes. I run the tip across my palm, back and forth, back and forth. If I press a little harder I can draw blood. I watch my skin dent underneath the tip as I wait for the puncture, the inevitable sharp pain, the red, red release.