Mud Vein

  He doesn’t look convinced. I’d rather steer him toward the carousel, especially if it mean he’ll stops looking at me like I have the magical key to get out of here.

  “The carousel is creepy,” I say. That’s all it takes to get his theory fuel going. I half listen to his surmisings—no, I don’t listen at all. I pretend to listen and count the knots in the wood walls instead. Eventually, I hear my name.

  “Tell me how you remember it,” he urges me.

  I shake my head. “No. What good will that do?”

  I am not in the mood to revisit those instances of my life. They trudge up the other stuff. The stuff that landed me in the plushy couch of a therapist.

  “Fine.” He stands up this time. “I’m going to make dinner. If you’re staying up here, lock the trapdoor.”

  This time he doesn’t stay to check if I do. He’s all over the place. I hate him.

  We eat in silence. He defrosted hamburgers and opened a can of green beans. He’s rationing our food. I can tell. I push the beans around and eat hamburger by using the side of my fork to cut it into pieces. Isaac eats with a knife and a fork, slicing with one, spearing with the other. I asked him about it once, and he said, “There are tools for everything. I am a doctor. I use the right tool for the right purpose.”

  He is aggravated with me. I shoot him a look every few bites, but his eyes are on his food. When I am finished, I stand up and take my plate to the sink. I wash and dry it. Put it back in the cabinet. I stand behind him as he finishes up his meal, and watch the back of his head. I can see grey in his hair, it’s mostly at his temples. Just a little bit. The last time I saw him there had been no grey. Maybe in vitro put it there. Or his wife. Or surgery. I was born with mine, so who knows? When he pushes back from the table, I turn around quickly and busy myself with wiping the counter. Three wipes in and the chore seems foolish. I’m cleaning my captor’s house. It feels a little like betrayal: live in filth or clean your prison. I should burn it to the ground. I finish wiping, rinse the rag, fold it neatly and hang it over the faucet. Before I go back upstairs, I grab an armful of wood from the wood closet. We all but collide at the foot of the stairs.

  “Let me carry it for you.”

  I cling to my wood.

  “Don’t you have to stay to guard the door?”

  “No one is coming, Senna.” He looks almost sad. He tries to take the wood from me. I yank my arms out of reach.

  “You don’t know that,” I retort. He looks at my freckles.

  “Hush,” he says, softly. “They would have come by now. It’s been fourteen days.”

  I shake my head. “It hasn’t been that long…” I mentally do the calculations. We’ve been here for … fourteen days. He’s right. Fourteen. My God. Where are the search parties? Where are the police? Where are we? But, most importantly, where is the person who brought us here? I yield my wood. Isaac half smiles at me. I follow him up the stairs and climb the ladder to the attic room so he can hand me the logs.

  “Night, Senna.”

  I look at the bright sun streaming into the window behind me.

  “Morning, Isaac.”

  We are nowhere.

  Isaac is losing it. Most days he paces in front of the kitchen window for hours, his eyes on the snow like it’s speaking to him. It looks like he’s seeing something, but there is nothing to see—only mounds of white in the middle of white, spread out over white, covered in white. We are nowhere and snow doesn’t speak. I hide from him up in my attic bedroom, and sometimes when I’m tired of that I lie on the floor in the carousel room and stare at the horses. He doesn’t come in here, says it creeps him out. I try to hum songs, because that’s what one of my characters would do, but it makes me feel nutty.

  No matter where I am, I can feel him pulsing through the walls. He’s always been intense. That’s what makes him a good doctor. He’s trying to figure out why we are here, why no one has come. I should, too, I guess, but I can’t focus. Every time I start wondering why someone would do this my head starts throbbing. If I press at my thoughts I will implode. Like a grapefruit in the microwave, I think.

  When we are in the same room his eyes press on me. They press like fingers into my flesh—harder and harder until I pull away, run to my trapdoor and hide. He doesn’t come up to my room anymore. He started sleeping in the room where I found him tied up, instead of on the couch. It happened after the six-week mark. He just moved in there one night and stopped guarding the door.

  “What are you doing?” I said, following him to the bed. He pulled off his shirt and I quickly averted my eyes.

  “Going to bed.”

  I watched in bewilderment as he tossed his shirt aside.

  “What if … what about…?”

  “No one is coming,” he said, ripping the sheets aside and climbing in. He wouldn’t look at me. I wondered what he didn’t want me to see in his eyes.

  I hadn’t argued with him. I’d carried my blankets and my knife downstairs and sat on the sofa, my eyes on the door. Isaac may be letting his guard down, but I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to trust my prison. I sure as hell wasn’t going to accept this as permanent. I brewed a pot of coffee, grabbed some beef jerky and took watch. When he’d come downstairs the next morning, and found me still awake, he’d acted surprised. He brought me a fresh cup of coffee and some oatmeal, then sent me off to bed.

  “Good morning, Isaac.”

  “Good night, Senna.”

  I hadn’t slept. I could go ungodly amounts of time without sleep. Instead, I’d pulled a chair to the window that sat directly above the kitchen and watched the snow with him.

  Now, a week later, I wake up with clarity as sharp and cold as the snow outside my window. Sometimes, when I am writing a book, I’ll go to sleep with a plot hole in my story that I don’t know how to fix. When I wake up, I know. It’s as if it were there all along and I just needed the right sleep to access the answer.

  I am on my feet in an instant, running to the trapdoor barefoot and dropping from the ladder before I reach the last rung. I take the stairs two at a time and come to a halt in the doorway of the kitchen. Isaac is sitting at the table, his head in his hands. His hair is spiked up like he’s been running his fingers through it all night. I eye his knee bouncing beneath the table at jackrabbit speed. He’s going through a kidnapped version of the seven stages of grief. By the look of his bloodshot eyes, I’d say he was well into Acceptance.

  “Isaac.”

  He looks up. Despite my need to know what he is feeling, I avert my eyes. I lost my privilege to his thoughts long ago. My feet are freezing, I wish I’d put on socks. I walk to the window, and point at the snow.

  “The windows in this house,” I say, “they all face the same direction.”

  The fog in his eyes seems to clear a little. He pushes back from the table and comes to stand beside me.

  “Yeah…” he says. Of course he knew that too. Just because I was in a haze didn’t mean that he was.

  He has more hair on his face than I have ever seen on him. I direct my eyes away from him, and we look at the snow together. We are so close I could extend a pinkie and touch his hand.

  “What’s behind the house?” he asks.

  There is some silence between us before I say, “The generator…”

  “Do you think…?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  We look at each other. I have goose pimples along my arms.

  “He can refuel it,” I say. “I think that as long as we stay put, he will refill the generator. If we figure out the code and get out, we will lose power and freeze.”

  He thinks long and hard about this. It sounds right. To me, at least.

  “Why?” asks Isaac. “Why would you think that?”

  “It’s in the Bible,” I say, and then automatically flinch.

  “You’re going to have to break this one down for me, Senna,” he says, frowning. His voice is terse. He’s losing patience with me, which isn’t really fair
since we are both sinking in the same ship.

  “Have you seen the picture hanging next to the door?” He nods. Of course. How could he miss it? There are seven prints hanging on the walls of this house. When you spend six weeks locked up somewhere, you spend a lot of time examining the art on the walls.

  “It’s a painting by F. Cayley. It’s supposed to be of Adam and Eve when they find out they have to leave Eden.”

  He shakes his head. “I thought it was just of two very depressed people on the beach.”

  I smile.

  “We are like the first two people,” I say.

  “Adam and Eve?” He’s already so full of disbelief I don’t even want to tell him the rest.

  I shrug. “Sure.”

  “Go on,” he says.

  “God put them in the garden and told them not to eat the forbidden fruit, remember?”

  Now it’s Isaac’s turn to shrug. “Yeah, I guess. Sunday school one-o- one.”

  “Once they were tempted and ate the fruit they were on their own, exiled from God’s provision and his protection in the place he created for them.” When Isaac doesn’t say anything, I go on. “They leave perfection and have to fend for themselves—hunt, garden, experience cold and death and childbirth.”

  I flush after the last word leaves my mouth. It was dumb of me to mention childbirth considering Daphne and their unborn baby. But Isaac doesn’t skip a beat.

  “So you’re saying,” he says, crinkling his eyebrows together, “that so long as we stay here—in the place our kidnapper provided for us—we will be safe and he will keep the heat and food coming?”

  “It’s just a wild guess, Isaac. I don’t really know.”

  “So what’s the forbidden fruit?”

  I tap my finger on the tabletop. “The keypad, maybe…”

  “This is sick,” he says. “And if one painting means that much, what else is hidden in here?”

  I don’t want to think about it. “I’ll make dinner tonight,” I say.

  I look out the window as I peel potatoes over the sink. And then I look down at the peelings, all piled up and gross looking. We should eat those. We will probably be starving soon, wishing we had a sliver of potato skin. I scoop up shreds and hold them in my palm, not sure what to do with them. I counted the potatoes before I chose four of the smallest ones out of the fifty-pound bag. Seventy potatoes. How long could we stretch that? And the flour, and rice and oatmeal? It seemed like a lot, but we had no idea how long we’d be imprisoned here. Imprisoned. Here.

  I eat the skins. At least they won’t go to waste that way.

  God. I am grimacing and gagging on my potato skin when I drop the potato I’m holding into the sink and press the heel of my hand to my forehead. I have to focus. Stay positive. I can’t let myself sink into that dark place. My therapist tried to teach me techniques to cope with emotional overload. Why hadn’t I listened? I remember something about a garden … walking through it and touching flowers. Was that what she’d said? I try to picture the garden now, but all I see are the shadows that the trees make and the possibility that someone is hiding behind a hedge. I am so fucked up.

  “Need help?”

  I look over my shoulder and see Isaac. I’d sent him upstairs to take a nap. He looks rested. Surgeons are used to the lack of sleep. He’s taken a shower and his hair is still wet.

  “Sure.” I point to the remaining potato and he picks up a knife.

  “Feels like old times,” I half smile. “Except I’m not catatonic and you don’t have that perpetually worried look on your face.”

  “Don’t I? This situation is kind of dire.”

  I put my knife down. “No, actually. You look calm. Why is that?”

  “Acceptance. Embrace the suck.”

  “Really?”

  I feel his smile. Across the two feet of air between us and a sink speckled with new potato skins. For a minute my chest constricts, then the peeling is done and he moves away, taking his soap smell with him.

  I have a need to know where a person is in a room at all times. I hear him in the fridge, he crosses the room, sits down at the table. By the noises he’s making I can tell that he has two glasses and a bottle of something. I wash my hands and turn away from the sink.

  He is sitting at the table with a bottle of whiskey in his hands.

  My mouth drops open. “Where did you find that?”

  He grins. “Back of the pantry behind a container of croutons.”

  “I hate croutons.”

  He nods like I’ve said something profound.

  We take our first shot as the meat is simmering in the skillet. I think it’s deer. Isaac says it’s cow. It really doesn’t matter since this sort of situation steals most of your appetite. We don’t really taste anything—deer or cow.

  We both pretend that the drinking is fun instead of a necessity to cope. We click glasses and avoid eye contact. It feels like a game; click your glass, shoot whiskey, stare at the wall with a stiff smile. We eat our meal in near silence, faces hanging like limp sunflowers over our plates. So much for fun. We are coping willy-nilly. Tonight it’s with whiskey. Tomorrow it might be with sleep.

  When we are finished, Isaac clears the table and washes our plates. I stay where I am, stretching my arm across the wood and resting my head on the table to watch him. My head is spinning from the whiskey and my eyes are watering. Not watering. Crying. You’re not crying, Senna. You don’t know how.

  “Senna?” Isaac dries his hands on a dishtowel and straddles the bench to face me. “You’re leaking fluid otherwise known as tears. Are you aware of this?”

  I sniff pathetically. “I just hate croutons so much…”

  He clears his throat and squashes a smile.

  “As your doctor I’d advise you to sit up.”

  I sniff and straighten myself until I am in a sort of upright slump.

  We are both straddling the bench, now, facing each other. Isaac reaches out both thumbs and uses them to clear my cheeks of tears. He stops when he is cupping my face between his hands.

  “It hurts me when you cry.” His voice is so earnest, so open. I can’t speak like this. Everything I say sounds sterile and robotic.

  I try to look away, but he holds my face so that I can’t move. I don’t like being this close to him. He starts seeping into my pores. It tingles.

  “I’m crying, but I don’t feel anything,” I assure him.

  He pulls his lips into a tight line and nods.

  “Yes, I know. That’s what hurts me the most.”

  After the deal with the F. Cayley print, I take inventory of everything in the house. We could be missing something. I wish I had a pen, some paper, but our single Bic ran out of ink a long time ago… so I have to use my good ol’ memory for this one.

  There are sixty-three books scattered throughout the house. I’ve picked up each one, flipped through the pages, touched the numbers at the top right corners. I started reading two of them—both classics that I’ve already read—but I can’t get my mind to focus. I have twenty-three light, colorful sweaters, six pairs of jeans, six pairs of sweatpants, twelve pairs of socks, eighteen shirts, twelve pairs of yoga pants. One pair of rain boots—in Isaac’s size. There are six additional pieces of artwork on the walls, other than the F. Cayley; each of the others is by the Ukranian illusionist, Oleg Shuplyak. In the living room is “Sparrows” one of his milder pieces. But scattered across the rest of the house are the blurred faces of famous historical figures, blended almost indecipherably with landscapes. The one in the attic room disturbs me the most. I’ve tried to pry it from the wall with a butter knife, but it’s cemented so firmly I can’t get it to budge. It depicts a hooded man, his outstretched arms wielding two scythes. His mouth gapes and his eyes are two dark, empty holes. At first all you see is the eerie emptiness—the impending violence. Then your eyes adjust and the skull comes into view: the dark sockets of eyes between the scythes, the teeth, which seconds ago were simply a pattern on a garment. My
kidnapper hung death in my bedroom. The sentiment makes me sick. The rest of the prints scattered throughout the house include: Hitler and the dragon, Freud and the lake, Darwin under the bridge with the mysterious cloaked figure. My least favorite is “Winter” in which a man is riding a yak over a snow-covered village while two eyes peer coldly at me. That one feels like a message.

  When I have counted everything in my closet and Isaac’s, I start counting things in the kitchen. I note the colors of the furniture and the walls. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I need to do something with my brain. When I run out of things to count, I talk to Isaac. He makes us coffee like he used to, and we sit at the table.

  “Why did you want to fly away on your red bike?”

  He raises his eyebrows. He’s not used to questions from me.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” I say.

  “You never seemed to want to.”

  That stings. It’s not entirely untrue. I have that whole stay the hell away from me thing going on.

  “I didn’t.”

  I count the kitchen cabinets. I forgot to do that.

  “Why not?” He spins his coffee cup in a circle, and lifts it to his mouth. Before he can take a sip he sets it down again.

  I have to take a moment to think about that one.

  “It’s just who I am.”

  “Because you choose to be?”

  “This conversation was supposed to be about you.”

  He finally takes a sip of his coffee. Then he pushes his mug across the table to me. I’ve already finished mine. It’s a peace offering.

  “My dad was a drinker. He used to rough up my mom. Not so much a unique story,” he shrugs. “What about you?”

  I consider pulling my usual stunts of avoid and retreat, but I decide to surprise him instead. It gets boring always being the same.

  “My mom left before I hit puberty. She was a writer. She said my dad sucked all of the life out of her, but I think suburban life did. After she left, my dad went a little crazy.”