Mud Vein

  It’s then that my phone rings. I don’t pick it up, but when I listen to the message later that night, Detective soft s Garrison informs me that Saphira is dead. Dead by her own hand. Good, I think at first, but then my chest aches. He doesn’t tell me how she did it but something tells me she opened her own veins. Bled out. She liked her patients to bleed out their thoughts and feelings; she would have chosen to go that way. Saphira and her god-complex would never have tolerated being tried in a court of law. She thought people were stupid. It would have been beneath her to be judged. I call him the next morning. There would be no trial. He sounds disappointed when he tells me, but I feel relieved. It’s an end to the nightmare. I couldn’t have handled months and months of a trial. Wasting my last days seeking human justice. I think I forgive her for believing she was God, I’m not sure God will.

  Garrison informs me that there is an ongoing investigation into Saphira’s accomplices. “Everyone we have questioned is shocked. She was well respected in the mental health community. No family in the country. No friends. She seems to have just snapped, lost touch with reality.”

  Who has time for friends when you’re performing human experiments? I think.

  “What about the blood on the books?” I ask. “Was it human?”

  There is a long pause.

  “The lab test indicated that it was animal blood. A ram or a goat, we can’t be a hundred percent sure. We found your books in her home, along with your case file from-”

  “I figured,” I say quickly.

  “There was something else,” he says. “We found the footage of your time in the house.”

  I squeeze my eyes closed. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “It’ll go into evidence,” he says.

  “Good. No one will see it?”

  “Not the media, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Okay.”

  “There is one more thing…”

  How many more things could there be?

  “Saphira had an apartment in Anchorage. We think that’s how she got to you so quickly when Isaac was sick. She had been watching a recording of you and Doctor Asterholder. She was only able to see what was happening in the house when the power was on, and there was only sound in certain rooms. So there are gaps in the recordings. But, it was paused. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something about the context of what I was seeing.”

  “What was it paused on?” I am breathless…sick. It never occurred to me that there were multiple cameras set up around the house.

  “You holding a knife to Doctor Asterholder’s chest.”

  I lick my lips. “He was holding a knife to his own chest,” I say. My mind is ripping through what exactly Saphira was trying to tell me.

  “It was the moment I changed,” I say. “It was the reason she did what she did.”

  I look for my mother’s book. I go the local bookstore and detail the plot to a wide-eyed girl of no more than eighteen behind the counter. She calls a manager to the front to help me. He looks at me earnestly while I repeat everything I just said to the girl. When I am finished, he nods like he knows just what I am talking about.

  “The book I think you are talking about had a small run on the New York Times Bestsellers List,” he says. I raise my eyebrows to his back as he leads me to the rear of the store and pulls a book off the shelf. I don’t look at it as he hands it to me. I hold the weight of it in my hands and stare blankly at his face. I feel as if I’m about to see my mother face to face.

  “You’re the writer, the one who—”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’d like some privacy.”

  He nods, and leaves me. I have a feeling he’s going to wherever managers go to tell everyone he knows that the kidnapped writer is here.

  I take one of those breaths that make you burn on the inside, then I drop my head.

  I see the cover—the words, the oranges and teals that make up the pattern of a woman’s dress. You can only see the back of her, but her arms are spread wide, her blonde hair cascading down her back. The Fall.

  The fall of my mother. I wonder if she wrote this for me. Is that too much to ask? An explanation for your abandoned daughter … your china doll? My mother is a narcissist. She wrote this for herself, to feel better for leaving me. I flip open the cover and search for a picture on the dust jacket. There is none. I wonder if she’s still pretty. If she still wears flower skirts and headbands. She writes under the name Cecily Crowe. I grin. Her real name was Sarah Marsh. She hated the normalcy of it.

  Cecily Crowe lives everywhere.

  She does not believe in dogs or cats.

  This is her first novel, and probably her last.

  I close the book; slide it back into the space it came from. I have no desire to read it again, not even in order with page numbers. I got to know my mother in a discombobulated way. I am her china doll. She mourned me a little, but not enough. I can’t fault her for running—I’ve been running my entire life; bad blood, maybe. Or maybe she taught me, and someone taught her. I don’t know. We can’t blame our parents for everything. I don’t think I care anymore. It’s just the way it is. I walk out of the store. I put her to rest.

  Three months after I get home, I drive to the hospital to see Isaac. I don’t know if he wants to see me. He hasn’t tried to contact me since I’ve been back. It hurts after the emotional violence we experienced together, but it’s not like I tried to contact him either. I wonder if he told Daphne everything. Maybe that’s why…

  I don’t know what to say. What to feel. Relief because we both survived? Do we talk about what happened? I miss him. Sometimes I wish we could go back, and that’s just sick. I feel as if I have Stockholm Syndrome, but not for a person—for a house in the snow.

  I pull into a space and sit in my car for at least an hour, picking at the rubber on the steering wheel. I called ahead, so I know he’s here. I don’t know what it’s going to feel like to see him. I held his body while he was dying. He held mine. We survived something together. How do you stand back and shake someone’s hand in the real world when you were clutched together in a nightmare?

  I fling open my car door and it cracks against the side of an already beat up minivan. “Sorry,” I tell it, before stepping away.

  The doors to the hospital slide open, and I take a moment to look around. Nothing has changed. It’s still too cold in here; the fountain still sprays a crooked stream into air that smells deeply of antiseptic. Nurses and doctors cross paths, charts clutched against chests or hanging droopy from their hands. It all stayed the same while I was changing. I turn my face toward the parking lot. I want to leave, stay out of this world. No one but Isaac knows what it was like. It makes me feel like the only person on the planet. It makes me angry.

  I need to talk to him. He’s the only one. I walk. Then I’m in the elevator, sliding slowly up to his floor. He is probably doing rounds, but I’ll wait in his office. I just need a few minutes. Just a few. I walk quickly once the doors open. His office is just around the corner and past the vending machine.

  “Senna?”

  I spin. Daphne is standing a few feet away. She is wearing black scrubs and a stethoscope is hanging around her neck. She looks tired and beautiful.

  “Hello,” I say.

  We stand looking at each other for a minute, before I break the silence. I wasn’t expecting to see her. It was stupid. An oversight. I didn’t come here to make her uncomfortable.

  “I came to see—”

  “I’ll get him for you,” she says, quickly. I am surprised. I watch as she turns on her heel and trots down the hallway. Maybe he didn’t tell her everything.

  He won’t speak to the news stations either. My agent called me days after I got back, wanting to know if I could write a book detailing what happened to me—to us. The truth is I don’t know that I’ll ever write another book. And I’ll never tell about what happened in that house. It’s all mine.

  When I see him I hurt. He looks grea
t. Not the skeleton man I kissed goodbye. But there are more lines around his eyes. I hope I put a few there.

  “Hello, Senna,” he says.

  I want to cry and laugh.

  “Hi.”

  He motions for his office door. He has to open it with a key. Isaac steps inside first and turns on the light. I cast a quick glance over my shoulder before walking in to see if Daphne is lurking anywhere. Thankfully, she’s not. I can’t bear her burdens on top of the ones I’m already carrying.

  We sit. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not entirely tea and cookies either. Isaac sits behind his desk, but after a minute he comes and sits in the chair next to me.

  “You’re back to work,” I say. “Couldn’t stay away.”

  “I tried.” He shakes his head. “I went to Hawaii and saw a shrink.”

  I sort of laugh at that one. “Brave.”

  “I know,” he smiles. “The entire session was me trying not to tell her things that could get me kidnapped.”

  We get serious.

  “How are you?” he asks cautiously. I appreciate the way he’s tiptoeing around my feelings, but we are a little too crushed for such gentle sentiments. For the first time, I answer him.

  “Shitty.”

  The corner of his mouth turns up. Just one corner. It’s his trademark.

  “That’s better than being closed off, I guess,” he says.

  I feel emotion rush me—the intimacy, the awkwardness. I want to revolt against it, but I don’t. It takes an awful toll on a person to fight down everything they’re feeling. Elgin tried to tell me that once. The bitch.

  “I heard about your prognosis…”

  “I’m okay with it,” I say quickly. “It just … is.”

  He looks like he has a million things to say, and he can’t.

  “I wanted to come see you, Senna. I just didn’t know how.”

  “You didn’t know how to come see me?” I ask, partially amused.

  He looks at my eyes, in them. So sadly.

  “It’s okay,” I say, slowly. “I get it.”

  “What do we do now?” he asks. I don’t know if he’s asking how we are supposed to live, or how we are supposed to finish this conversation. I don’t ever know what to do.

  “We live then we leave,” I say. “Do the best we can.”

  He runs his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. It puffs out and settles back down. It reminds me of when you’re baking a cake and you open the oven too early. I toy with the jagged edges of my hair, glancing up at him every so often.

  “Are things good? With you and Daphne?” I have no right to ask him, none at all. Especially considering that everything Elgin did was because of me.

  “No,” he says. “How can they be?” He shakes his head. “She has been supportive. I can’t complain there, but it was like they gave me a month and then they wanted the old me back. They being my family,” he tells me. “But I don’t know how to be him. I’m different.”

  Isaac was always so honest with his emotions. I wish I could be like that. I feel as if I need to say something.

  “I don’t have anyone to disappoint,” I confess. “I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder.”

  He looks startled. His black scrubs wrinkle as he leans toward me. “You’re loved,” he says.

  Love is a possession; it’s something that you own from the layers of people in your life. But if my life were a cake it would be un-layered, unbaked, missing ingredients. I isolated myself too soundly to own anyone’s love.

  “I love you,” says Isaac. “From the moment you ran out of the woods, I’ve loved you.”

  I don’t believe him. He’s a nurturer by profession and by person. He saw something broken and needed to heal it. He loves the process.

  As if reading my thoughts he says, “You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you’ll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a sad thing.”

  “How do you know?” I ask, brimming with anger. “It’s a big deal to say those words. How do you know that you love me?”

  He pauses for a long time. Then he says, “I was offered a way out.”

  “A way out? A way out of what?” But I spit that out too soon. It’s like a stone that drops between us. I wait for the thud, but it never comes because my brain loses its footing and the room tips and turns.

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the morning after we opened the door, I found a note in the shed with sleeping pills and a syringe. It said that I could leave. All I had to do was put you to sleep, inject myself, and I would wake up at home. The stipulations were that I could never talk about you. Not to police, not to anyone. I had to tell them that I had an emotional breakdown and ran away. If I told anyone about you, she said she would kill you. If I left you there, I could go home. I threw them over the side of the cliff.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I stand but my legs can’t hold me. I sit again, burying my face in my hands. Saphira, what have you done?

  When I look up, my soul is in my face, twisting my features. It’s angry and sad.

  “Isaac. Why would you do that?” My voice cracks. I know why Saphira did it. She knew he wouldn’t leave me. She knew eventually he would tell me, and that in telling me, I would see everything clearly. I would see…

  “Because I love you.”

  My face goes slack.

  “I didn’t leave you because I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to.” There is a pause and then, “Not unless you make me go. And if I’d known you better back then, I wouldn’t have left you. I thought it was what you needed. But you didn’t know yourself. I knew you. You needed me, and I let you push me out. And for that I’m very sorry.”

  He presses his lips together, and the vein in his head pops.

  “I got another chance, too,” he says. “She gave me another chance not to leave. So I took it.”

  “Are you saying Saphira—”

  “I’m not saying anything about Saphira,” he cuts me off. “She did what she did. We can’t change that. Life happens. Sometimes crazy people kidnap you and make you a part of their personal psychological experiment.”

  The noise that comes from my throat is part laugh, part groan.

  “She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.”

  Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things.

  I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did. We almost died because of what she did. But it changed me. The change that Isaac started, before I filed a restraining order to keep him out, Saphira Elgin finished in that house in the snow.

  A part of me is grateful to her, and it makes me feel sick to admit that.

  On the day I am scheduled to leave, I find a brown envelope on my windshield. I briefly think that I received a parking ticket somewhere, and failed to notice it until now. But when I lift my wiper and pull it away the paper is crisp, not something that’s been sitting outside in the wet, Seattle air. It’s also heavyish. My universe tilts. I spin in a circle looking for him in the trees and down the driveway. I know he’s not here. I know that. But he was, and I can feel him.

  Everything is boxed up in my house, including my sound system, so I turn the car on and push the silver disc into the car radio. It has just started to snow, so I open all of the windows and blast my heat so I can have the best of both worlds. I hit play, and hold on to the steering wheel. I’m about to careen off a cliff. I know it.

  I can hardly breathe as I listen to the last song that Isaac will ever give me. I listen to it while my breath freezes and smokes into the air.

  And while snow flies into the car windows.

  And while my heart beats, and then aches, and then beats.

 
I listen to my soulmate’s heart with saltwater seeping out of my eyes. He’s speaking to me through a song. Like he always has. It’s a hard thing to know that I’m never going to see him again or hear his music, which woke me up from a long, restless sleep. The shadows still chase me. And I know that when I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, he won’t be there to climb in bed behind me and command them away with the complex way he loves me. The song crushes me. Our cosmic love, our cosmic connection.

  Nick was wrong about me. Having a mud vein didn’t kill me; it saved me. My vein drew Isaac. He was the light and he followed me into the darkness. He became the darkness, then he carried my burdens so I wouldn’t have to. Isaac saved me from myself, but in the end, no one could save me from cancer.

  I’m terminal. That’s a funny word. Cancer can kill my body, but it can’t kill me. I have a soul. I have a soulmate. We are vapors; here today and gone tomorrow. But before tomorrow comes I want to see color—the color threaded throughout Italy and France and Sweden. I want to see the Northern Lights. And when I die, I know there will be an invisible red thread connecting me to my soulmate. It can tangle, and it can stretch, but it can never break. When I die, I’ll be in the light. And someday Isaac will find me, because that’s what he is.

  I put the letter in my mailbox and flip the little red flag up.

  Dear Isaac,

  I finally understand your tattoos. I never voiced how much they bothered me, but sometimes in that house in the snow, you’d catch me looking and I’d see the hidden smile on your face. You knew I was trying to work it out. When I asked you about it, you told me that we were all bound by something because we needed something to hold us together. What you wrap around your soul determines your outcome—that’s what you said to me. But I didn’t get it. I though that was crazy, until the day you held my hand, clamped over a knife, and pointed it at your body: both of us cutting into your skin.