Mud Vein

  And that was the last of Isaac Asterholder and me.

  I try to remember sometimes what his last words to me had been. If he said something as we walked up that hill, or on the car ride home. But all I remember was his presence and his silence. And the slight echo of, and yet I love you.

  And yet he loved me.

  And yet I couldn’t love him back.

  When I wake Isaac isn’t there. I weigh my panic against the pain. I can only focus on one at a time. I choose my pain because it won’t loosen its grip on my brain. I am familiar with heart pain—intense, excruciating heart pain, but I’ve never experienced a physical pain quite this exquisite. Heart pain and physical pain are only comparable in that neither relinquish their hold on you once they get rolling. The heart releases a dull ache when it is broken; the pain in my leg so acute and sharp it’s hard to breathe.

  I wrestle with the pain for a minute … two, before I discard it. I broke my body and there is no way to fix it. I don’t care. I need to find Isaac. And that’s when I think it: Oh God. What if the zookeeper came while I was passed out and did something to him? I roll slightly onto my side until I have some leverage, and try to drag myself up using my good leg. That’s when I see my leg. The lower half of my pants has been cut away. The place where the bone was sticking out has been wrapped in thin gauze. I feel liquid running down to my foot as I move. I hold my hand over my mouth and breathe through my nose. Who was here? Who did this? The fire is burning. The fire I built would have given up the ghost by now. Someone had built it back up, fed it new logs.

  I wobble where I’m standing. I need light. I need to—

  “Sit down.”

  I start, jarred by the voice. I twist my neck around as far as it can go.

  “Isaac,” I cry out. I start to teeter, but he darts over and catches me. Darts is a strong word, I think. For a minute it looks like he is going to fall with me. I lift my hand up, touch his face. He looks terrible. But he’s alive and walking. He lowers me gently to the ground.

  “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head. “Alive’s not enough for you?”

  “You shouldn’t be,” I hiss. “I thought you were going to die.” He doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead he walks over to a pile of something I can’t see in the dark.

  “Look who’s talking,” he says, softly.

  “Isaac,” I say again. “The table…” All of a sudden I’m feeling hot … weak. The adrenaline, which carried me up the well, up the stairs, up the ladder, has run out.

  He walks over to me, his arms full. “I know,” he says, dryly. “I saw.”

  He’s looking at my leg as he sets things down next to me. He’s lining them up, double-checking everything. But every few seconds he looks at my leg again like he doesn’t know how to fix it.

  “Is that how this happened?”

  “I jumped down the table,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. The asthma—”

  The corners of his mouth pull tight. “You had an asthma attack? While this happened?” I nod. I can only see his face with the dim light of the fire, but it looks as if it’s paled.

  “Your tibia is fractured. Your leg must have bent at just the right angle when you fell to cause the break.”

  “When I jumped,” I said.

  “When you fell.”

  He’s working with his hands, opening packages. I hear little rips, the clatter of metal. I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear little bursts of air, I think it’s Isaac, but then I realize that I’m panting.

  He looks straight at me. “You must have gotten my body temperature back up. You did everything right.”

  “What?” I’m dizzy. I want to hurl again.

  “You saved me life,” he says. He glances up at me at the same time I crack open an eye.

  “I need to move you.”

  “No!” I grab his arm. “No, please. Just let me stay here.” I’m panting. The thought of moving makes me sick. “There is nowhere to move me, Isaac. Just do it here.”

  Do what here? Was he really planning to operate on the floor of the attic room?

  “There’s not enough light,” I say. The pain is intensifying. I’m hoping he’ll forget this whole thing and let me die. He reaches round his back and brings out the flashlight from downstairs. When I was a little girl, my mother would have chided me for reading under that light, now Isaac is planning on operating with it.

  “What are you going to do?” I do a quick survey of what he’s brought with him. There are six rolls of what look like bandages, alcohol, a bucket of water, a needle and thread, a bottle of tequila. There are some other things but he’s placed them on a baking sheet and covered them with what looks like a bandage.

  “Fix your leg.”

  “Where’s the morphine?” I joke. Isaac props my upper body under pillows he gets from the bed so that I’m in a half sitting position. Then he unscrews the lid from the tequila and holds it to my mouth.

  “Get drunk,” he says without looking at me. I chug it.

  “Where did you find all of this?” I take a couple of deep breaths letting what I’ve already swallowed settle, and then I lift the bottle back to my mouth. I want to hear how he found my discovery. He speaks while the cactusy taste of tequila burns its way to my stomach in small gulps.

  “Where do you think?”

  I bite my lip. My mind is numb from the alcohol. I wipe away what’s running down my chin.

  “We were starving, and all along…”

  “I have to operate,” he says. Is it my imagination or are there beads of sweat on his forehead? The light is so vague it could be a trick of the eyes.

  He screws the cap off of a bottle of clear liquid and before I can open my mouth to stop him, he uncovers the gauze and pours it over my wound. I brace myself to scream, but the pain isn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

  “You could have warned me!” I hiss at him, rearing up.

  “Hush,” he says. “It’s just saline. I need to clear away the dead tissue … irrigate the wound.”

  “And then…?”

  “Set the bone. It’s been too long already … the risk of infection … your soft tissue…” He’s mumbling things. Words I don’t hold the meaning to: debridement … osteomyelitis. He reaches up and wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve. I’m going to have to set your bone. I’m not an orthopedic surgeon, Senna. We don’t have the equipment…”

  I stare at him as he leans back on his haunches. He has a face full of scruff, and a head of hair that is standing every which way. He looks so different from the doctor that operated on me last time. The cuts around his mouth deepen as he stares into my wound. He’s more scared than I am, I think. This is his job, his profession—saving lives. He is an expert at saving lives. Yet, this is out of his area of expertise. There is no one to consult with. Isaac Asterholder is positioned at a keyboard instead of the drums, and he doesn’t quite know where to put his hands.

  “It’s okay.” I sound peculiarly calm. Detached. “Do what you can.”

  He reaches for the flashlight, holds it right above the gash.

  “The tissue is red, that’s good,” he says. I nod though I don’t know what he’s talking about. The room has started to spin and I just want him to get on with it.

  “It’s going to hurt like hell, Senna.”

  “Fuck you,” I say. “Just do it.” I sob on the last word. Such a tough guy.

  Isaac gets to work. He washes his hands in the bucket using an amber colored soap. Then he douses his hands and arms in alcohol. He pulls on a pair of gloves. He must have found them down the well with the other supplies. So the zookeeper left us gloves. For what? Surgery? For when we decided to spring clean? Maybe we were supposed to fill them with air and draw faces on them with markers. Our captor though of everything. Except morphine, of course. Somehow I know that one was on purpose. No pain, no gain. This guy likes us to suffer.

  Isaac does it. Without warning. While I’m thinking about the zookeep
er. This time I don’t scream. I pass out.

  When I come to, my leg is throbbing and I’m wasted. That’s what you get when you pour half a bottle of tequila in your starving stomach. He is sitting a few feet away with his back resting against the wall. His head droops down like he’s sleeping. I crane my neck trying to get a look at my leg. Isaac cleaned up most of the mess, but I can see dark spots on the floor around my body—blood. My leg is propped on a pillow, the area where the bone broke through my skin is wrapped in gauze. He’s splinted the leg between what looks like slabs of wood. I feel good about the scar it’ll leave. It’ll be long and jagged.

  Isaac wakes up. Once again I notice how terrible he looks. Last night I thought he was dead, and now here he is fixing me. This wasn’t right. I want to do something to make him better, but I’m lying on my back, drunk. He gets up and comes to me. He half scoots, half crawls.

  “You were lucky. The bone only broke in one part. It was a clean break so you didn’t have any fragments floating around. But since it tore through the skin there could be nerve and tissue damage. There was no internal bleeding that I could see.”

  “What about infection?” I ask.

  Isaac nods. “You could develop an infection in the bone. I found a bottle of penicillin. We will do what we can. The greater the damage is to the bone, soft tissues, nerves, and blood vessels, the higher the risk for infection. And since you were dragging yourself all over the house…”

  I lean my head back because the room is spinning. I wonder if I’ll remember any of this when the effects of the tequila clear.

  “It’s the best I could do,” he says. I know it is.

  He hands me a mug with a spoon sticking out of it. I take it, peering inside. He picks up his own mug.

  “What is it?” there is a lumpy looking yellow fluid in the cup. It looks disgusting, but my stomach clenches in anticipation anyway.

  “Creamed corn.” He sticks the spoon in his mouth, sucks it dry. I follow suit. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks. I have hazy memories of grabbing the can the night before, the way it dug into my hip as I climbed the ladder.

  “Take it slow,” Isaac warns. I have to force myself not to down the whole mug in one gulp. My hunger pain subsides ever so slightly, and I am able to focus solely on the other pain my body is feeling. He hands me four large white pills.

  “It’ll just dim it, Senna.”

  “Okay,” I whisper, letting him drop them in my hand. He hands me a cup of water and I drop all four pills into my mouth.

  “Isaac,” I say. “Please rest.”

  He kisses my forehead.

  “Hush.”

  When I wake up the room is warm. I’ve noticed that the highlight of most of my days here are waking up and going to sleep. It’s what I remember most about The Caging of Senna and Isaac: wake up; go to sleep; wake up; go to sleep. There is little in between to make a difference; we wander … we eat … but mostly we sleep. And if we’re lucky it’s warm when we wake. Now there is a new sensation—pain. I look around the room. Isaac is asleep on the floor a few feet away. He has a single blanket covering him. It’s not even long enough to cover his feet. I want to give him my blanket, but I don’t know how to stand up. I groan and lean back against the pillows. The painkillers have worn off. I am hungry again. I wonder if he’s eaten, if he’s okay.

  When did this happen? When did my thoughts shift to Isaac’s needs? I stare at the ceiling. That’s the way it happened with Nick. It started out with him loving me, him being obsessed with me; then, all of a sudden … osmosis.

  The minute I started freely loving Nick he left me.

  Three times a day Isaac makes a trip down to the well to get food and restock our wood. We use a bucket to relieve ourselves, and it’s his job to empty that too. He goes carefully. I can hear his steps creaking across the floorboards until he reaches the landing, and then the clomp, clomp, clomp on the stairs. I lose his sound once he’s down the well, but he’s never there for more than five minutes, except when he’s doing laundry or throwing our trash over the side of the cliff. Laundry consists of filling the bathtub with snow and soap and swishing the clothes around until you think they’re clean. We never had a shortage of soap, there are stacks of white bars, wrapped in a filmy white paper on the bottom shelf of the pantry. They smell like butter, and on more than one occasion when I was bent over with hunger I thought about eating them.

  Isaac takes the smaller of the two flashlights—the one I found when I fucked up my leg. He leaves me the big one. He leaves it right next to my bed and tells me not to use it. But as soon as I hear his socked feet on the stairs, my fingers reach down to find the switch that turns it on. I let the light flow. Sometimes I reach over and pass my hand across it, playing with the shadows. It’s a sad, sad thing when the highlight of your day becomes five minutes with a flashlight.

  One day when Isaac comes back, I ask him why he doesn’t just bring everything up at once.

  “I need the exercise,” he says.

  After a week, he comes up the stairs with a handful of green bandages.

  “There’s no infection that I can see around the wound. It’s healing.” I notice that he didn’t say, Healing well. “The bone could still become infected, but we can hope the penicillin will take care of that.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, nodding toward his hands.

  “I’m going to put your leg in a cast. Then I can move you to the bed.”

  “What if the bone doesn’t fuse together properly?” I ask.

  He’s quiet for a long time as he works with the supplies.

  “It’s not going to heal properly,” he says. “You’ll most likely walk with a limp for the rest of your life. On most days, you’ll have pain.”

  I close my eyes. Of course. Of course. Of course.

  When I look up again, he’s cutting the toes off of a white sock. He fits it over my foot as gently as he can and pulls it up my leg. I force breath from my nostrils to keep from wailing. It must be one of his. The sock. The zookeeper didn’t give me any white socks. He didn’t give me anything white. Isaac does the same thing with a second sock, and then a third, until I have them lined from the middle of my foot to my knee. Then he takes one of the bandages from the bucket of water. It’s not a bandage, I realize. It’s rolls of a fiberglass cast.

  He starts mid foot, rolling the cast around and around until it runs out. Then he plucks out a new roll and does it again. Over and over until he’s used all five rolls and my leg is fully cast. Isaac leans back to examine his work. He looks exhausted.

  “Let’s give it some time to dry, then I’ll move you to the bed.”

  We stay in the attic room, forgetting the rest of the house. Day after day … after day … after day.

  I count the days we’ve lost. Days I’ll never get back. Two hundred and seventy-seven of them. One day I ask him to drum for me.

  “With what?”

  I can’t really see his face—it’s too dark—but I know that his eyebrows are raised and there is a trace of a smile on his lips. He needs this. I need this.

  “Sticks,” I suggest. And then, “Please, Isaac. I want to hear music.”

  “Music without words,” he says, softly. I shake my head, though he can’t see me do it.

  “I want to hear the music you can make.”

  I wish I could see his face. I want to see if he’s offended that I asked him to do something he hated giving up. Or maybe if he’s relieved to be asked. I just want to see his face. I do the strangest thing, then. I reach out and touch his face with my fingertips. His eyes close when I trace my way from his forehead, down over his eyes and around his lips. He’s serious. Always so serious. Dr. Isaac Asterholder. I want to meet the drummer, Isaac.

  He disappears for an hour. When he comes back his arms are stacked with things I can’t make out in the dark. I sit up straighter in bed and my mind hums with excitement. He works in front of the fire so that he won’t have to use the flashlight. I watch him un
load what he’s brought up with him: two buckets, one smaller than the other, a metal skillet and a metal pot, duct tape, rubber bands, a pencil and two sticks. The sticks look smooth—like real drumsticks. I wonder if he’s been carving them secretly while he disappears downstairs every day. I wouldn’t blame him. I’ve been wanting to carve my skin for days.

  He is making things. I can’t tell what they are, but I hear the rip of the duct tape every few minutes. He swears a couple times. It’s a soundtrack: rriiiip … swear … bang … rriiiip … swear … bang.

  Finally, after what seems like hours, he stands up to examine his work.

  “Help me up,” I beg him. “Just this once so I can see.”

  He puts another log on the fire, and reluctantly comes over to my bed. I mouth, please, please, please, please. He picks me up before I can protest the help and carries me to what he made.

  I stare in wonder at his creation, my leg jutting in front of me awkwardly. He’s taped the larger bucket to a makeshift stand he’s made out of some logs. The smaller bucket sits upside down next to it. On the opposite side are the two pots—both faced down.

  “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a mess of a thing on the floor.

  “That’s my pedal. I wrapped rubber around a pencil. I cut out the sole of one of my shoes for the actual pedal.”

  “Where did you get the rubber?”

  “From the fridge.”

  I nod. Genius.

  “That’s my snare.” He points to the smaller bucket. “And bass…” The larger one, turned on its side.

  “Can you stand me against the wall? I promise I won’t put weight on my cast.”

  He props me against the wall near to where his drum set sits. I lean back, thrilled to be out of bed and on my … foot.

  Isaac sits on the edge of the window seat. He leans down to test his pedal, then he plays.