Mud Vein

  He didn’t come back that night, or the next.

  Or the next.

  Or the next.

  Or the next.

  There were no more dreams, but not for lack of horror. I was afraid to sleep, so I didn’t. I sat in my office at night, drinking coffee and thinking of his red bike. It was the only color in the room—Isaac’s red bike. On January thirty-first my father called me. I was in the kitchen when the phone vibrated on the counter. There was no house phone, just my cell. I answered without looking.

  “Hello, Senna.” His voice always distinct, nasally with an accent he tried not to have. My father was born in Wales and moved to America when he was twenty. He retained the European mentality and accent and dressed like a cowboy. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

  “How was your Christmas?”

  I immediately felt cold.

  “Fine. How was yours?”

  He began a detailed minute-by-minute account of how he spent Christmas Day. I was, for the most part, grateful I didn’t have to speak. He wrapped things up by telling me about his promotion at work; he said the same thing he repeated every time we spoke.

  “I’m thinking about taking a trip out there to see you, Senna. Should be soon. Bill said I get an extra week’s vacation this year because I’ve been with the company twenty years.”

  I’d lived in Washington for eight years and he’d never come to visit me once.

  “That’d be great. Listen Dad, I’ve got some friends coming over. I should go.”

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up, resting my forehead on the wall. That would be it from him until the end of April, when he would call again.

  The phone rang a second time. I almost didn’t answer it, but the area code is from Washington.

  “Senna Richards, this is the office of Dr. Albert Monroe.”

  I racked my brain trying to place the doctor and his specialty, and then for the second time that day, my blood ran cold. “Something came up on your scan. Dr. Monroe would like you to come in to the office.”

  I was leaving my house the next morning, walking to my car when his hybrid pulled into my horseshoe driveway. I stopped to watch him climb out and pull on his jacket. It was casual, almost beautiful in its grace. He’d never come this early before. It made me wonder what he did on the mornings of his days off. He walked toward me and stopped just in time to keep two solid feet between us. He was wearing a light blue fleece, pushed up past his elbows. I was shocked to see the dark ink of tattoos peeking out. What type of doctor had tattoos?

  “I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said stepping around him.

  “I’m a doctor.”

  I was glad to be turned away from him when I smiled.

  “Yes, I know. There are quite a few others in the state of Washington.”

  His head jerked back like he was surprised I was anything but the stoic, expressionless victim he’d been cooking for.

  I was opening the driver’s side door to my Volvo when he held out his hand for my keys.

  “I’ll drive you.”

  I dropped my eyes into his hand and snuck another look at the tattoos.

  Words—I could just make out the tip of them. My eyes slid up the sleeves of his shirt and rested on his neck. I didn’t want to look in his eyes when I handed him my keys. A doctor who loved words. Imagine that.

  I was curious. What did a man who had held a screaming woman all night have written on his body? I sat in the passenger seat and instructed Isaac where to go. My radio was on the classical station. He turned it up to hear what was playing and then lowered it back down.

  “Do you ever listen to music with words?”

  “No. Turn left here.”

  He turned the corner and shot me a curious look.

  “Why not?”

  “Because simplicity speaks the loudest.” I cleared my throat and stared straight ahead. I sounded like such a chump. I felt him looking at me, cutting into me like one of his patients. I didn’t want to be dissected.

  “Your book,” he said. “People talk about it. It’s not simple.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “You need simplicity to create complexity,” he said. “I get it. I suppose too much can clog up your creativity.”

  Exactly.

  I shrugged.

  “This is it,” I said softly. He turned into a medical complex and pulled into a parking spot near the main entrance.

  “I’ll wait for you right here.”

  He didn’t ask where I was going or what I was here for. He simply parked the car where he could see me walk in and out of the building and waited.

  I liked that.

  Dr. Monroe was an oncologist. In mid December I found a lump in my right breast. I forgot about the worry of cancer in the wake of a more immediate and needier pain. I sat in his waiting room, my hands pressed between my knees, a strange man waiting in my car, and all I could think about were Isaac’s words. The ones on his arms and the ones that came out of his mouth. A red bicycle in a stark white room.

  A door opened next to the reception window. A nurse said my name.

  “Senna Richards.”

  I stood. I went.

  I had breast cancer. I could talk about the moment Dr. Monroe confirmed it, the emotions I felt. The words he said to me afterwards, meant to comfort, reassure; but the bottom line was, I had breast cancer.

  I thought about his red bike as I walked to the car. No tears. No shock. Just a red bike that could fly. I didn’t know why I wasn’t feeling anything.

  Maybe a person could only deal with one dose of mental atrophy at a time. I slid into the passenger seat. He’d changed the radio station, but he switched it back to the classical one before he put the car in reverse. He didn’t look at me. Not until we arrived at my house and he opened the front door with my keys. Then he looked at me, and I wanted to disappear into the cracks between my brick driveway. I didn’t know what color his eyes were; I didn’t want to know. I pushed past him into the foyer and stopped dead. I didn’t know where to go—the kitchen? The bedroom? My office? Everywhere seemed stupid. Pointless. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to die.

  I went to my barstool, the one positioned to get the perfect view of the lake, and I sat. Isaac moved into the kitchen. He started to make coffee and then stopped, turning to look at me.

  “Do you mind if I put on some music? With words?”

  I shook my head. His eyes were grey. He set his phone on top of the breadbox while he spooned grinds into the filter.

  This time he played something more upbeat. A man’s voice. The beats were so strange I stopped my incessant ability to not feel and listened.

  “Alt-J,” he said, when he saw that I was listening. “The song is called Breezeblocks.”

  He glanced at my face. “It’s different, right? I used to be in a band. So I get a kick out of their beats.”

  “But, you’re a doctor.” I realized how stupid that sounded when it was already out. I pulled an inch-wide chunk of grey hair free, and wound it around my finger twice, right by the roots. I left it there, with my elbow resting on the counter. My security blanket.

  “I wasn’t always a doctor,” he said, grabbing two mugs out of my cabinet. “But when I became one, my love of music remained … and the tattoos remained.”

  I glanced at his forearms where they peeked out of his shirtsleeves. I was still looking when he brought me my coffee. I caught the tips of the words that faced me.

  After he handed me the coffee, he started making food. I didn’t have an appetite, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I didn’t want to, but I listened to the words of the song he was playing. The last time I listened to this type of music the boy bands had just taken the world by storm and filled every radio with their cliché-licked songs. I wanted to ask him who was singing, but he beat me to it.

  “Florence and the Machine. Do you like it?”

  ?
??You’re fixated on death.”

  “I’m a surgeon,” he said, not looking up from where he was dicing vegetables.

  I shook my head. “You’re a surgeon because you have a fixation on death.”

  He didn’t say anything, but slightly hesitated as he cut into a zucchini—barely noticeable, but my eyes caught mostly everything.

  “We all do don’t we? We are consumed with our own mortality. Some people eat right and exercise to preserve their lives, others drink and do drugs daring fate to take theirs, and then there are the floaters—the ones who try to ignore their mortality altogether because they’re afraid of it.”

  “Which are you?”

  He set down his knife and looked at me.

  “I’ve been all three. And now I’m undecided.”

  Truth. When was the last time I heard such stark truth? I stared at him for a long time as he spooned food onto plates. When he set a plate down in front of me, I said it. It was like a sneeze ejecting from my body without permission, and when it was out I felt mildly embarrassed.

  “I have breast cancer.”

  Every part of him stopped moving except his eyes, which dragged slowly to mine. We stayed like that for … one … two … three … four seconds. It was like he was waiting for the punch line. I felt compelled to say something else. A first for me.

  “I don’t feel anything. Not even fear. Can you tell me what to feel, Isaac?”

  His throat spasmed, then he licked his lips.

  “It’s emotional Morphine,” he said finally. “Just go with it.”

  And that was it. That’s all we said for that night.

  Isaac drove me to the hospital the next day. It was only my third time leaving the house and the thought of going back there made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t eat the eggs or drink the coffee he put in front of me. He didn’t push me to eat like most people would, or give me the concerned eyes that most people would. It was all matter of fact; if you don’t want to eat—don’t. The moment you are diagnosed with cancer a gavel comes down on life, you start being afraid. And since I was already afraid, it felt compounded; fear pressing against fear. And just like that you inherit a cancer gremlin. I imagined it looked mutated, like my genes. It was sinister. Lurking. It kept you awake at night, gnawing on your insides, turning your mind into a distillery of fear. Fear trumps good sense. I wasn’t ready to go back to the hospital; it was the last place I was really afraid, but I had to because cancer was eating at my body.

  The tests and scans started around noon. My first consult was with Dr. Akela, an oncologist Isaac went to medical school with. She was Polynesian and so strikingly beautiful my mouth hung open when she walked in. I could smell fruit on her skin; it reminded me of the bowl Isaac kept filling on my counter. I expelled the smell from my nostrils and breathed through my mouth. She spoke about chemotherapy. Her eyes had a heart and I was under the impression that she was an oncologist because she cared. I hated people who cared. They were prying and nosy and made me feel less human because I didn’t care.

  After Dr. Akela, I saw a radiation oncologist, and then a plastic surgeon who pressured me to make an appointment to see a grief counselor. I saw Isaac in between each appointment, each scan. He was on his rounds, but he came to walk me to my next appointment. It was awkward. Though each time his white coat emerged, I became a little more familiar with him. It was a weird form of brand recognition—Isaac the Good. His hair was brown, his eyes were deep-set, the bridge of his nose was wide and crooked, but the most telling part of him was his shoulders. They moved first, then the rest of his body followed.

  I had a tumor on my right breast. Stage II cancer. I was a candidate for a lumpectomy with radiation.

  Isaac found me in the cafeteria sipping on a cup of coffee, staring out the window. He slid into the chair across from me and watched me watch the rain.

  “Where is your family, Senna?”

  Such a hard question.

  “I have a father in Texas, but we’re not close.”

  “Friends?”

  I looked at him. Was he kidding? He had spent every night for a month in my house and my telephone hadn’t rung once.

  “I don’t have any.” I left off the haven’t you figured that out yet? bit.

  Dr. Asterholder shifted in his seat like the topic made him uncomfortable, and then, as an afterthought, folded his hands over the crumbs on the tabletop.

  “You’re going to need a support system. You can’t do this alone.”

  “Well what would you suggest I do? Import a family?”

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “There might be more than one surgery. Sometimes, even after radiation and chemotherapy, the cancer comes back…”

  “I’m having a double mastectomy. It’s not going to come back.”

  I wrote about shock on people’s faces: shock when they find out their love has been cheating on them, shock when they discover faked amnesia—heck, I even wrote about a character who constantly wore a look of shock on his face, even when there was nothing to be shocked about. But I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen true shock before. And here it was, written all over Isaac Asterholder. He dove in immediately, his eyebrows drawing together. “Senna, you don’t—”

  I waved him off.

  “I have to. I can’t live every day in fear, knowing it might come back. This is the only way.” He searched my face, and I knew then that he was the type of man who always considered what someone else was feeling. After a while the tension left his shoulders. He lifted his hands from where they’d been resting on the table, and placed them over mine. I could see the crumbs sticking to his skin. I focused on them so I wouldn’t pull away. He nodded.

  “I can recommend—”

  I cut him off for the third time, jerking my hands out from beneath his. “I want you to do the surgery.”

  He leaned back, put both hands behind his head and stared at me.

  “You’re an oncologic surgeon. I Googled you.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask?”

  “Because I don’t do that. Asking questions is at the forefront of developing relationships.”

  He cocked his head. “What’s wrong with developing relationships?”

  “When you get raped, and when you get breast cancer, you have to tell people about it. And then they look at you with sad eyes. Except they’re not really seeing you, they’re seeing your rape or your breast cancer. And I’d rather not be looked at if all people are seeing are the things I do, or the things that happen to me instead of who I am.”

  He was quiet for a long time.

  “What about before those things happened to you?”

  I stared at him. Maybe a little too fiercely, but I didn’t care. If this man wanted to show up in my life, and put his hands over mine, and ask why I didn’t have a best friend—he was going to get it. The full version.

  “If there was a God,” I said, “I’d say with confidence that he hates me. Because my life is the sum of bad things. The more people you let in, the more bad you let in.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Isaac said. His eyes weren’t wide; there was no more shock. He was a cucumber.

  It was the most I’d ever said to him. It was probably the most I’d said to any person in a long time. I pulled my cup up to my mouth and closed my eyes.

  “All right,” he said, finally. “I’ll do the surgery on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You see a counselor.”

  I started shaking my head before the words were out of his mouth.

  “I’ve seen a psychiatrist before. I’m not into it.”

  “I’m not talking about medicating yourself,” he said. “You need to talk about what happened. A therapist—it’s very different.”

  “I don’t need to see a shrink,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m dealing.” The idea of counseling petrified me; all of your inner thoughts put in a glass box, to be seen by someone who spent years studying how to properly
judge thoughts. How was that okay? There was something perverse about the process and the people who chose to do it for a living. Like a man being a gynecologist. What’s in this for you, you freak?

  Isaac leaned forward until he was uncomfortably close to my face and I could see his irises, pure grey without any flecks or color variations. “You have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You were just diagnosed with breast cancer. You. Are. Not. Okay.” He pushed away from the table and stood up. I opened my mouth to deny it, but I sighed instead, watching his white coat disappear through the cafeteria doors.

  He was wrong.

  My eyes found the scar from the night I cut myself. It was pink, the skin around it tight and shiny. He hadn’t said anything when he found me bleeding, hadn’t asked me how or why. He had simply fixed it. I stood up and walked in his wake. If someone was going to be digging around in my chest with a scalpel, I wanted it to be the guy who showed up and fixed things.

  He was standing at the main entrance to the hospital when I found him, hands tucked into his pockets. He waited until I reached him and we walked in silence to his car. We were far enough apart that we couldn’t touch, close enough together that it was clear we were together. I slid quietly into the front seat, folding my hands in my lap and staring out the window until he pulled into my driveway. I was about to get out—halfway suspended between car and driveway—when he put his hand on my arm. My eyebrows were drawn together. I could almost feel them touching. I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to promise I’d see a counselor.

  “Fine.” I yanked myself out of his reach and stalked toward my house. I had the key in the lock, but my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t turn it. Isaac came up behind me and put his hand over mine. His skin was warm like it had been sitting in the sun all day. I watched in mild fascination as he used both of our hands to turn the key. When the door swung open, I stood frozen on the spot, with my back toward him.