Mud Vein

  “Dr. Elgin got him over the Canadian border and took him to a hospital in Victoria. Took him is an ambitious word,” he says. “She dropped him outside the Emergency room and drove off. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours before he finally started to come out of it. He grabbed a nurse by the arm and managed to say your name. The nurse recognized your name right away due to the media buzz you caused when you disappeared. She notified the police. By the time they got there Isaac was able to talk. He told them you were in a cabin somewhere near a cliff, but couldn’t give them much more than that.”

  I am quiet.

  “So he’s okay?”

  “Yes, he is. He’s with his family in Seattle.”

  That hurts and brings me relief. I wonder what it was like meeting his baby for the first time.

  “How did she do it? Get both of us to that house? Cross borders? She must have had help.”

  He shakes his head. “We are still questioning her. She took Isaac to the hospital in an RV. She was in the same RV when she tried to cross the border back into Alaska. When they searched her vehicle they found a false floorboard with a space large enough to hold two bodies. We think she drugged you and put you both in there. We don’t know anything about help, we’re still questioning her.”

  “Back into Alaska?” I ask. “She was coming back for me?”

  He shakes his head. “We don’t know.”

  I slam my fist on the table, frustrated. “What do you know?”

  He looks affronted. I try to soften my face. This isn’t his fault. Or maybe it is.

  “How did you find me, then?”

  “The Canadian police put out an APB on her vehicle. She was picked up at the border. She gave us the coordinates to the house where she was keeping you.”

  “Just like that?”

  He nods.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The house is on a large portion of land that she owns. Actually, large portion is an understatement. She owns forty thousand acres. Her late husband owned oil wells. He was also a conspiracy theorist. He published some books on Armageddon survival. We think he built the house out there as a result of those theories.”

  “You know all of that, but you don’t know what she was going to do with me?”

  “It’s easy to find information that is already there, Ms. Richards. Extracting information from the human mind proves a little more difficult.”

  Maybe I underestimated soft s Detective Garrison.

  “My mother…?” I ask. He cocks his head, his eyebrows drawing together. “Never mind.” Perhaps she had no part in this. Perhaps Saphira found her and read her book without ever contacting her.

  “I want to go home,” I say, suddenly.

  He nods. “Just a few more days. Bear with us…”

  Nick is waiting for me when my flight lands in Seattle. I knew he would be. He contacted me through e-mail asking when I’d be coming home. He asked if he could be there. I sent him a quick response telling him the day, time, and flight number. When I come down the escalator to baggage claim, he doesn’t see me right away. He looks nervous, which is unusual for him. I hide behind a huge potted plant, and peer at him through the leaves. My muse. My ten years wasted. It used to be that when I saw him my emotions would pitch a fever. I’d feel as if I were tumbling down, down, down, into something deep. Now he just looks like a guy in a trench coat with too much gel in his hair. No, that’s unfair. He looks like a stew pot of memories; his hands are memories, his lips are memories, his body is a memory. But they don’t entrance me like they used to. Either a year of imprisonment has left me more numb, or I’ve outgrown the love of my life.

  “Where did your glimmer go, Nick?” I say through the plant. I am curious to know if it’s still there. If I’ll burst open the minute we make contact, like some quintessential love story.

  He is sitting; a loner in an airport chair, watching the passers-by with apprehension on his face. It’s a fine mental picture. Nick sees me as soon as I step out from my hiding place. When I walk toward him, he quickly stands. He embraces me without hesitation and with so much familiarity, my heart does a lurch. Maybe this is the spark.

  He knows me. He knows what to say, what not to say. He speaks the language of my face, and waits for my expression to dictate his tone. That’s what time does. It gives you space to learn each other. I soften into his embrace. It’s no use fighting something like this.

  “Brenna.” He breathes my name into my hair.

  I want to say his name, to return it, but my words are clotted in my throat.

  “You ready?” he asks. “Do you have a bag?”

  I shake my head. “I have nothing.”

  He takes my hand and leads me to the parking garage. He has a rental car. I fold into the front seat and stare at him. He is the only person I can stare at like this and not feel completely awkward.

  The entire ride home I wait for him to ask me about it. Anything. Something. Anything. Why isn’t he asking? It’s unfair of me to expect it. Nick has never pried. He waits, and he knows that with me you can wait forever. But now I’m accustomed to something new. Funny how that can happen. Now I’m mentally begging him to ask me something. Anything. I feel the change in myself as the wheels of the car spray up water on the highway. When did that move in? I don’t even know. In a house in the snow, probably. Where a surgeon sliced me open emotionally, and a musician brought me more color than I could handle.

  It’s summertime in Washington. More’s the pity. When we reach my house there are reporters outside. They look sleepy until they see the car turn into the driveway. I wonder how long they have been camped here. I flew into Seattle under my real name to avoid this. Grabbing, scrambling, straightening hair, I look away from them and point Isaac toward the garage on one side of my circular driveway. Nick. I point Nick toward the garage. I rub my forehead. Since I don’t have keys, we will have to go through the garage to get in the house. I tell him the code for the garage door, and he hops out and punches it in. They can’t climb my driveway, but I hear them at the bottom, calling out my name.

  Senna!

  Senna Richards!

  Did you know Dr. Elgin was behind your kidnapping?

  Senna, tell us what it was like to—?

  Senna, have you seen Isaac Asterholder since—?

  Senna, did you think you were going to die?

  Then the garage closes, muting their cacophony.

  Boom!

  Boom!

  Boom!

  Goes my heart…

  Nick opens the door for me and we walk into my house. Dust fills my nose and mouth as I breathe in fourteen months of packed-up air. I touch the edge of his hand with my fingertip. He opens his fingers and entwines them with mine. He walks with me from room to room, and I feel like a ghost. He’s never been in my house. Making money off of heartbreak is a good business to be in. When we reach the white room I jerk to a stop in the doorway. I can’t go in. Isaac looks down at me. Nick. Nick looks down at me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  Everything.

  “This,” I say, staring at all the white. Then, “Why did you come, Nick?”

  We are on the edge of the white room. Technically a room that he created, inside of me and out.

  He looks stricken. “Did you read my book?”

  “Did you mean the book?” I spin back.

  “Can we talk about this somewhere else?” He starts to step into my white room like he wants to take a look around. I grab his arm.

  “We talk about this right here.”

  I want him on the brink of what he drove me to. I want to know what this is before I cross any more thresholds.

  He leans against one side of the doorframe. I lean against the other.

  “I was wrong. I was young and idealistic. I didn’t realize…” He grimaces. “I didn’t realize your value until it was too late.”

  “My value?”

  “Your worth to me, Brenna. You spark things in me
. You always have. I love you. I never stopped. I was just…”

  “Young and idealistic,” I repeat.

  He nods. “And stupid.”

  I study him. Look at the white. Look at him.

  “You have writer’s block,” I say. “You wrote the last book, and everyone freaked out. And now you have nothing else.”

  He looks startled.

  “Tell me it’s not true.” I flick at the grey falling into my eyes. Then I think better of it, and let it drop back to cover them.

  “It’s not like that,” he says. “You know we are good together. We inspire each other. Greatness comes when we are together.”

  I think about this. He is right, of course. We were great together. Some days I woke up playful. I wanted to laugh and flirt and be a love story. The very next day I couldn’t stand being looked at or spoken to. Nick let me be. He spoke to me on the days I wanted to be spoken to. He left me alone when I shot eye daggers at him. We coexisted fluently and effortlessly. With him I can have companionship and love, and never have who I am questioned. We were great together. Until Isaac taught me something new.

  I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to be questioned. I needed it.

  I didn’t know I needed someone to dig into my heart and figure out why on some days I wanted to play, and why on others I craved solitude. I didn’t even like it when he did it. It’s a painful thing to look inside yourself and see the whys and the hows of your clockwork. You are a lot uglier than you think, plenty more selfish than you are ever likely to admit. So, you ignore what’s inside of you. Thinking if you don’t acknowledge it, it’s not really there. Until someone unlikely comes along and cracks you. They see every dark corner, and they get it. And they tell you it’s okay to have dark corners, instead of making you feel ashamed of them. Isaac wasn’t afraid of my ugly. He rolled through the highs and lows with me. There was no judgment in his love. And all of a sudden there were fewer lows and more highs.

  Nick loved me enough to leave me alone. Isaac knew me better than I knew me. I said I wanted to be left alone, he knew better. I said I wanted white, he knew better. He brightened me. He enlightened me. Because Isaac was my soulmate. Not Nick. Nick was just some great love. Isaac knew how to heal my soul.

  “We were good together,” I say to Nick. “But I’m not her anymore.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “You’re not who?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Brenna, you’re not making sense.”

  “Do I ever?”

  He pauses.

  I shake my head. “I don’t make sense to you. That’s why you left me.”

  “I’ll try harder.”

  “I have cancer. You can try as hard as you want, but I have cancer and I’m not going to be here in a year.”

  His face is a cocktail of woebegone and shock. “But … I thought … I thought you had the surgery.”

  I never told Nick about the surgery I had to remove my breasts, but my agent and publicist knew. Things get around in the writing world.

  I was staining Nick’s perfect, white idealism. Cancer happened, sure. But in Nick’s world you beat it. Then you lived happily ever after.

  “I have it again. It came back. Stage four.”

  He starts fumbling with sentences that he never finishes. I hear the words “treatment” and “chemotherapy” and “fight” and my heart grows tired.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  Nick’s glow is an ephemeral phenomenon. He’s already looking like the same dumb fuck who thought I was too dark for his white room.

  “It’s too late for that. The cancer metastasized. While I was there. It came back. It’s in my bones.”

  “There has to be something…”

  He looks so terribly forlorn.

  “You’re trying to save me. But I’m not staying alive to be your muse.”

  “Why are you being so cruel?”

  I laugh. A good belly laugh, too.

  “Charm is clothed in narcissism, you know that? Get out of my house.”

  “Brenna…”

  “Out!” I send my fists into his chest. “That’s not my name anymore!”

  “You’re acting crazy,” he insists. “You can’t do this alone. Let me help you.”

  I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice.

  “I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.”

  He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt.

  “You see this,” I say, throwing my arms up, “this is you. You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.”

  He’s artist enough to understand me.

  “What do you want me to say? I’m here now.”

  That’s it. That’s all he has to say and the truth hits me like an icy wind. My hair rises on its hackles. I feel flushed and bereaved.

  I grab my head at the temples and squeeze with the heels of my hands. I am petrified. Never in my life have I been this afraid. Not of the cancer, not of being alone, not of my future or of my past. I am afraid of never seeing Isaac again. Of never having him hold me when life is so absolute in its unfairness that all I can do is scream. I turn to Nick. Nick, who is here now.

  “Now?” I whisper, incredulous. “Now? Where were you when I was raped, or when I had my breasts cut off? Where were you when someone stole me away in the middle of the night and starved me in the middle of the goddamn arctic tundra?” I cut off the space between us and pound three hard times on his chest. “Where. Did. You. Go.”

  He’s shaking. I’m dropping things on him like a hailstorm, but I don’t give a fuck. I even say things like fuck now, because I don’t want to waste another second on the white room way I lived my life. He’s here now. But, Isaac was here then … and then … and then … and then.

  “I was so hung up on you that I missed it,” I say. I’m shaking so bad. I’m shaking worse than Nick, who looks like the weak, trembling leaf he’s always been. I want to crush him between my fingertips.

  “What did you miss, Brenna?” I don’t like the way he says my name.

  “Ahhh … agh…” I bend at the waist. Succulent, heavy tears drop right out of my eyes and onto the floor. Splat.

  I cry now, I think. All the time. And it’s so much fun.

  “I missed my chance,” I say, standing up straight and crushing the tears with the toe of my shoe. “With my soulmate.”

  Nick looks confused, then it comes. He sees his replacement, the guy locked in a house with his ex-muse.

  “The doctor?” he asks, narrowing his eyes.

  “Isaac. His name is Isaac.”

  “I’m your soulmate. I wrote that book for you.” He looks like he’s trying to convince himself, bobbing Adam’s apple and all.

  “You don’t know the first thing about what it is to have a soulmate.”

  I feel such a pull toward Isaac I wonder if he’s having this same fight with Daphne.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” I say. It feels so good to say it. Because this time, I’m not even going to cry.

  Before I shower, before I eat, before I crawl into bed and sleep off my fourteen-month nightmare, I call a cab. I have him pull into my garage, then I stand next to his window and check him out. Small guy, early twenties, bald by choice. I can see the shadows of where his hair should be. He’s fighting that receding hairline with a shaved head. Defiant and a little ballsy, because we can all see why he’s doing it. His eyes are wide and shifty; either the news vans freaked him out, or he’s having withdrawals. He’ll do, I think.

  I climb into the front seat. “Do you mind?” I ask. But I don’t really care if he says no. I buckle my seatbelt. “Take me to one of those stores with the lumber and the tools.”

  He spits o
ut a couple options and I shrug. “Whatever.”

  We pull past the news vans and I smile at them. I don’t know why except that it’s kind of funny. I used to be famous for my books, now I’m famous for something else. It kind of constipates your mind; being famous for something that someone else did to you.

  I make my cabbie wait while I run into the home fix-it store he chose. The building is expansive. I walk quickly past the lighting and the doorknobs until I find what I am looking for. I am there for thirty-five minutes while two employees see to my order. I have no purse or credit cards, just the wad of hundred dollar bills I shoved into my back pocket before I left the house. I kept them in an old cookie tin in my pantry for one day; a rainy day, a needy day, a day I just felt like blowing a wad of cash. Now there were only a few days left, so I figured it was time to spend. I toss three of the bills at the cashier and wheel my purchases out to the cab. I won’t let him help me. I stack everything in the trunk, and climb back into the front seat.

  My legs bounce all the way back. Flashes, doors, questions hurled up my driveway. Once again, I have him pull into the garage. He helps me this time, stacking everything just inside the door that leads into the foyer. I hand him the rest of the wad from my cookie tin.

  “For one day,” I say. His eyes bulge. He thinks I’m crazy, but hey, I’m handing him lots of money. He leaves before I can change my mind. I watch him pull out and quickly close the garage door. I grab an armload of my purchases and nudge the stereo with my toe as I walk past it. The first song Isaac ever gave me kicks on. It’s loud. I make it louder until it’s pounding through the house. I’m sure they can hear it outside: a one-man party.

  I carry everything to the white room and pry off the lids of the cans with a butter knife: crimson, yellow, cobalt, bubblegum pink, deep purple—like a bruise—and three different greens to match the summer leaves. I stick my hand in the red paint first, and rub my fingertips together. It falls heavy, spilling on my clothes and the floor where I am kneeling. I scoop up more, ‘til my hands are brimming. Then I throw it—a handful of red paint at my white, white wall. Color explodes. It spreads. It runs. I take more—I take all of the colors—and I stain my white room. I stain it with all the colors of Isaac, as Florence Welch sings me her song.