Текст книги "Mud Vein"

Автор книги: Tarryn Fisher

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-One

The seasons split at the seams: spring, summer, fall and winter. I’ve always pictured them as giant sacks filled with air and color and smell. When it’s time for one season to be over, the next seasons splits open and pours over the world, drowning its tired and waning predecessor with its strength.

Winter was over. Spring split and burst forth, spilling warm air and bright pink trees all over Washington. The sky was blue, and Isaac was trimming back the bushes in front of my house. A branch caught my arm the week before as I was walking to my front door and made me bleed. Isaac thought I cut myself. I could see the way he examined it. When he deemed my wound to be too curvy to come from a knife’s blade, he went searching for shears in my garage. Normally I hired a landscaping company to do the yard work, but here was my doctor, hacking away at my little spruce trees.

I watched him through the window, flinching every time his arms flexed and the shears took a new branch in their mouth. If he accidentally hacked off a finger I’d be responsible. There were leaves and branches littered around his tennis shoes. I was never really hot enough in Washington to be dripping with sweat, but Isaac was damp and exhausted. You couldn’t tell Isaac not to do something. He didn’t listen. But, winter was over and I was tired of being his project. He was like a fixture here. On my couch, in my kitchen, trimming my hedges. The air was warm and the change had come. Nick used to tell me I was a daughter of winter—that the grey streak in my hair proved it. He said when the seasons changed, I changed. For the first time I think he was right.

“When are you going home?” I asked when he came inside. He was washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

“In a few minutes.”

“No, I mean for good. When are you going home and staying home?”

He dried his hands, took his time doing it.

“Are you ready for me to?”

That made me so angry. He always answered my questions with a question. Infuriating. I wasn’t a child. I could take care of myself.

“I never asked you to be here in the first place.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“Well, it’s time for you to leave.”

“Is it?”

He walked straight at me. I braced myself, but at the very last second he veered to the left and breezed right past where I was standing. I closed my eyes as the air that he stirred wrapped around me. I had the strangest thought. The strangest. You’re never going to smell him again.

I was not a smell person. It was my least favorite sense. I didn’t light candles, or wander into a bakery, drawn in by the scent of the bread. Smell was just another sense that I wrestled into my white room. I didn’t use it, I didn’t care about it. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. But … I was going to miss Isaac’s smell. Isaac was smell. That was his sense. He smelled like spices and the hospital. I could smell his skin, too. He just had to be a few feet away from me and I could catch the smell of his skin.

“Isaac.” My voice was full of conviction, but when he turned to face me, hands in pockets, I didn’t know what to say. We stared at each other. It was awful. It was painful.

“Senna, what do you want?”

I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music.

“I don’t know.”

He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to.

“Senna…”

He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another.

His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone.

“Goodbye, Isaac.”

I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything.

Seven days after he walked backwards out of my house I went to the mailbox and on my way back, found a CD on my windshield. I clutched it to my chest for an hour before I slipped it into my stereo. It was an intense crescendo of lyrics and drums and harp and everything he was feeling—and I was, too. The most remarkable thing was that I was feeling.

It ripped at me until I wanted to gasp for breath. How could music know what you were feeling? How could it help you name it? I went to my closet. There was a box on my top shelf. I pulled it down and ripped off the lid. There was a red vase. Bright. Brighter than blood. My father sent it to me when my first book was published. I thought it was terrible—so bright it hurt my eyes. Now, my eyes were drawn to the color. I carried it to my white room and set it on the desk. Now there was blood everywhere.

I searched for a song for days. I was new to the wonders of iTunes. I went back to Florence Welch. There was something about the intensity of her. I found it. I didn’t know how to transfer it to one of those generic CD’s he used. But I found out. Then I drove to the hospital, the disk on my lap the whole time. I stood for a long time next to his car. This was a bold move. It was color. I didn’t know I had any color. I put the brown envelope on his windshield, and hoped for the best.

His songs reminded me of swimming, which somehow I’d forgotten.

He didn’t come right away. He probably wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t seen me at the hospital a few weeks later. I’d gone to sign some of the financial paperwork for my bill. Insurance crap. I only saw him briefly—a few seconds, tops. He was with Dr. Akela. They had been walking down the hall together, their identical white coats differentiating them from the other humans milling around the nurses’ station—two demi-gods in a sea of humans. I froze when I saw him, felt a feeling only drugs can give you. He was headed for the elevator, same as me. Oh great, this is going to suck. If there were people in the elevator I could scoot to the back and hide. I waited hopefully, but when the doors slid open the only people inside were on the poster advertisement for erectile dysfunction. We should do this more often, the slogan said. A handsome, athletic couple in their late forties, woman looking coy. I jumped in and hit the lobby button with my fist. Close! It did. Thankfully, it did, but before the doors sealed shut Isaac appeared in the gap. For a second it looked like he was going to hold a hand between the doors, force them to open. He drew back instead, the shock sketched around his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting to see me today. We should do this more often, I thought. It all happened in a dizzy three seconds. The time it takes for you to blink, blink and blink. But I didn’t blink, and neither did he. We locked into a three second staring contest. We couldn’t have said any more in those three seconds.

When you spend extraordinary amounts of time pushing someone away, their reaction to your apology tends to be slow. I imagined so, anyway. That’s how I wrote it in my stories. He came a week later. Since then I’d put away the red vase, gone back to craving white.

I was at the mailbox when his car pulled into my driveway. I felt.

You feel.

When had that started happening again? I waited with the stack of junk mail clutched in my hands. He stepped out of his car and walked to me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m headed to the hospital, but I wanted to see you first.” I took it. I missed him. You miss Nick, You know Nick. You don’t know this man.

I pushed that away.

We walked up to my house together. When I closed the door behind us, he took my mail from my hands. I watched as he set it on the table next to the door. A single, white envelope slipped off the edge and slid to the floor. It skidded to a stop behind Isaac’s right heel. He turned to me and took my face in his hands. I wanted to keep looking at the safe white of that envelope, but he was right there, making me look at him. His gaze was slicing. Sluicing. There was too much emotion. He kissed me with color, with drumbeat, and a surgeon’s precision. He kissed me with who he was, the sum of his life—and it was all encompassing. I wondered what I kissed him with since I was only broken parts.

When he stopped kissing me I felt the loss. His lips, for a brief moment, touched my darkness, and there was a glimpse of light. His hands were still in my hair, touching my scalp, and we were only a nose apart as we looked at each other.

“I’m not ready for this,” I said softly.

“I know.”

He shifted positions until he had me wrapped up in his arms. A hug. This was far more intimate than anything I’d done with a man in years. My face was underneath his chin, pressed to his collarbone.

“Goodnight, Senna.”

“Goodnight, Isaac.”

He let me go, took a step back, and left. His impressions were so short and so acute. I listened to the hum of his car as it left my driveway. There was a small kick of gravel as he pulled onto the street. When he was gone everything was still and quiet as it always was. Everything but me.

Part Three
Anger and Bargaining

Chapter Twenty-Two

Out of the walls, music begins to play. We stand frozen, looking at each other, the whites of our eyes expanding with each beat. There is an invisible chord between us; there has been since Isaac saw my pain and accepted it as his own. I can feel it tugging as the music accelerates and Isaac and I stand immobilized by shock. I want to step into the circle of his arms and hide my face in his neck. I am frightened. I can feel the fear in the hollows of my mind. It’s pounding like a doomsday drum.

Dum

Da-Dum

Dum

Da-Dum

Florence Welch is singing Landscape through our prison walls.

“Get warm clothes,” he says, without taking his eyes from mine. “Layer everything you have. We are getting out of here.”

I run.

There are no coats in the closet. No gloves, no thermal underwear—nothing warm enough to venture into negative ten-degree weather. Why didn’t I notice this before? I push through the hangers in the closet, frantic. The music plays around me; it plays in every room. It’s making me move faster. Those songs Isaac gave me, who knew about them? They were private … sacred to me; as unspoken as my thoughts. There are plenty of long-sleeved shirts, but most of them are thin cotton or light wool. I pull each one over my head until I have so many layers I am too stiff to move my arms. I already know it won’t be enough. To get anywhere in this weather I’d need thermals, a heavy coat, boots. I pull on the only pair of shoes that looks warm: a pair of fur-lined ankle boots—more fashionable than practical. Isaac is waiting for me downstairs. He is holding the door open like he’s afraid to let it go. I see that he doesn’t have a jacket, either. He’s wearing a pair of black gum boots on his feet. Something for rain or yard work. Our eyes lock as I walk past him, through the door and into the snow. I sink into it. Right up to my knees. Knee-high snow, that can’t be good. Isaac follows me. He leaves the door open and we make it twenty feet before we stop.

“Isaac?” I grab onto his arm. His breath puffs out of his mouth. I can see him shivering. I am shivering. God. We haven’t even been outside for five minutes.

“There’s nothing, Isaac. Where are we?”

I spin in a circle, my knees brushing a pathway through the snow. There is only white. In every direction. Even the trees seem to be far off. When I squint I can see the glint of something in the distance, just before the tree line.

“What is that?” I ask, pointing. Isaac looks with me. At first it just looks like a piece of something, then my eyes follow it. I follow it until I spin and come back, full circle. I make a sound. It starts in my throat, a noise you’d make when surprised, and then it changes into something mournful.

“It’s just a fence,” Isaac says.

“We can climb it,” I add. “It doesn’t look that high. Twelve feet maybe…”

“It’s electric,” Isaac says.

I spin to look at him. “How do you know?”

“Listen.”

I swallow and listen. A hum. Oh God. We couldn’t hear that from behind the three inch plated windows. We are caged in like animals. There has to be a way around. An electrical wire we can cut… something. I look at the snow. It covers the trees beyond the fence and falls in a graceful white skirt down a steep ravine that drops off to the left of the house. There are no roads, no houses and no breaks in the cover of white. It never ends. Isaac starts walking back toward the house.

“Where are you going?”

He ignores me, his head down. The effort it takes to walk through the snow makes it look like he’s climbing stairs. I watch as he circles around the back of the house, not knowing what to do. I linger for a few more minutes before following him, grateful for the path his struggle has cut for me. I find him facing what looks like a shed. Since there are no windows facing this way, it’s the first time I am seeing what’s back there.

There is a smaller structure to the right of it. The generator, I realize. When I look at Isaac’s face I see that it’s neither the shed nor the generator he’s looking at. I follow his eyes past the structures and feel my breath seize. I stop shivering, I stop everything. I reach for his hand and we plow together through the snow, our breath returns, laboring from the effort. We stop when we reach the edge of the cliff. Laid out in front of us is a view so sharp and dangerously beautiful I am afraid to blink. The house backs right up to a cliff. One that our captor—our zookeeper—didn’t give us windows to see. It seems like he’s trying to tell us something. Something I don’t want to hear. You are trapped, maybe. Or, You’re not seeing everything. I’m in control.

“Let’s go back inside,” Isaac says. His voice is wiped clean of emotion. It’s his doctor’s voice; factual. His hope just fell down that cliff, I think. He heads back without me. I stay to look—look at the spread of mountains. Look at the dangerous drop-off that could turn a falling body into a sack of skin and liquid organs.

When I turn around, Isaac is carrying armfuls of wood from the shack and into the house. It’s not a house, I tell myself. It’s a cabin in the middle of nowhere. What happens when we run out of food? Fuel for the generator? I walk back toward the shed and peer inside. There are piles and piles of chopped wood. An axe rests against the wall closest to where I stand to the back of the shed are several large metal containers. I am about to go investigate them when Isaac comes back for more wood.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Diesel,” he says, without looking up.

“For the generator?”

“Yes, Senna. For the generator.”

I don’t understand the edge in his voice. Why he’s speaking to me like he is. I crouch down beside him and reach for the logs, loading my arms. We walk back together and stock the wood closet in the cabin. I am about to follow him outside for more when he stops me.

“Stay here,” he says, touching my arm. “I’ll do the rest.”

If he hadn’t touched my arm, I would have insisted on helping. But there is something to his touch. Something he is telling me. I crouch in front of the fire he’s built until my shivering stops. Isaac makes a dozen more trips before our wood closet is full, then he starts piling logs in the corners of the room. In case we get locked in again, I think.

“Could we leave the door open? Wedge something in between the door jamb so it can’t close?”

Isaac runs a hand along the back of his neck. His clothes are filthy and covered in a thousand flecks of wood.

“Would we be guarding it, too? In case someone closes it in the middle of the night?”

I shake my head. “There is no one here, Isaac. They dropped us off and left us here.”

He seems to be torn about telling me something. This pisses me off. He’s always had the tendency to treat me like I’m fragile.

“What, Isaac?” I snap. “Just say it.”

“The generator,” he says. “I’ve seen them before. They have underground tanks with a hose system attached.”

I don’t get it at first. A generator … no windows on the back of the house … a hose system to refill the diesel.

“Oh my God.” I collapse on the couch and stick my head between my knees. I can feel myself gasping for air. I hear Isaac’s footsteps on the wood floor. He grabs me by the shoulders and drags me to my feet.

“Look at me, Senna.”

I do. “Calm down. Breathe. I can’t afford to have anything happen to you, okay?”

I nod. He shakes me until my head snaps back.

“Okay?” he says again.

“Okay,” I mimic. He lets me go, but doesn’t step away. He pulls me into a hug and my face buries itself in the crook of his neck.

“He’s been filling that tank hasn’t he? That’s why there are no windows on the back of the house.”

Isaac’s silence is confirmation enough.

“Will he come back? Now that we have the door open and can fill it ourselves?” It seems unlikely. Is it our punishment now that we figured out the code? A reward and a punishment: you can go outside, but now it’s only a matter of time before you run out of fuel and freeze to death. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

He squeezes me tighter. I can feel how tense his muscles are underneath my palms.

“If he comes back,” I say. “I’m going to kill him.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

I haven’t cut myself since the day I met Isaac. I don’t know why. It might be because he made me feel things, and I didn’t need a blade to feel anymore. That’s why we do it, right? Cut ourselves to feel? Saphira would have said so. The dragon and her existential bullshit. “Since humans can choose to be eitherrrr cruel or good, they arrre, in fact, neither of these things essentially.”

Now I am feeling too many things. I crave my white room. What was the opposite of cutting? Wrapping yourself in a cocoon and never coming out. I roll myself in the feather comforter on the attic bed—that’s what we we’re calling it—the attic. My room. The place where my kidnapper put me in pajamas and laid me. Laid me out to what? I don’t know, but I’m starting to like it in the attic. I can’t hear the music as well when I’m wrapped in feathers. Landscape has not stopped playing. The first of our songs. The one he gave to me to let me know he understood.

“You look like a joint,” Isaac says. He hardly ever comes up here. I feel him touch my hair, which is sticking out of the top of my cocoon. I bury my face in the white and try to suffocate myself. I traded comforters with him. He took the red because I couldn’t stand to look at it.

“There is something downstairs you should probably see,” he says. He’s touching my hair in a way that’s lulling me. If he wants me to get up he’s going to have to stop doing that.

I came straight up here after we carried the wood into the house and discovered the electric fence. Isaac must have found something more outside.

“Unless it’s a dead body, I don’t want to see it.”

“You’d want to see a dead body?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not a dead body, but I need you to come with me.” He unrolls me from my self-made joint, and pulls me to my feet. He doesn’t let go right away. He squeezes where he holds. Then he pulls me along by my hand like I’m a child. I stumble after him. He leads me downstairs. To the wood closet. Pulling open the door, he holds me by the tops of my arms, forcing me to stand in front of him and look inside.

I see only the wood at first. Then he reaches over me with a pink Zippo and holds it as close to the inner wall as he can. Strange, I think, at first—there is writing on the walls. Some of the wood is obscuring it. I reach inside and move a couple of the logs over. I start shaking. He wraps his arms around my torso and squeezes, then leads me backwards to the sofa where I sit. Part of me wants to break away to go look some more, but I feel. I feel too much. If I don’t stop feeling I’m going to explode. Pages of my book—over and over—wall-papered on the inside of the closet like a slap in the face.

“What does it mean?” I ask Isaac.

He shakes his head. “A fan? I don’t know. It’s someone playing games.”

“How did we never notice that before?”

I want to press my fingers into the sides of his face and force him to look at me. I want him to tell me that he hates me, because for some reason he is here as a result of me. But he doesn’t. Nothing he does is encumbered by blame or anger. I wish I could be like that.

“We weren’t looking,” he says. “What else are we not seeing because we aren’t looking?”

“I have to read what’s in there.” I stand up, but Isaac pulls me back.

“It’s Chapter Nine.”

Chapter Nine?

I reach for it in my mind. Then I let it go. Chapter Nine hurts. I wish I hadn’t written it. I tried to get the publishers to take it out of the manuscript before the book went to print. But they felt it was necessary to the story.

The day the book hit shelves, I sat in my white room, holding back my vomit, knowing that everyone was reading Chapter Nine and living my pain. I don’t want to read it, so I stay sitting.

“Chapter Nine is—”

I cut him off.

“I know what it is,” I snap. “But why is it there?”

“Because someone is obsessed with you, Senna.”

“No one knew that was real! Who did you tell?”

I am screaming; so angry I want to throw something large. But the zookeeper didn’t give us anything large to throw. Everything is bolted, sewn into the walls and floors like this is a dollhouse.

“Stop it!” He grabs me, tries to slow me down.

His voice is getting loud. I release mine, too. If he’s going to yell I’m going to yell louder.

“Then why are you here?” I punch his chest with both of my fists.

He sits down abruptly. It throws me off. I was all geared up to fight.

“You’ve said those words to me so many times I’ve lost count. But this time it’s not my choice. I want to be with my wife. Planning for our baby. Not locked up like a prisoner with you. I don’t want to be with you.”

His words hurt so bad. My pride keeps my knees stiff, otherwise I would have buckled from the pain. I watch him walk up the stairs, my heart pounding to the beat of his anger. I guess I was wrong about him. I was wrong about so many things with regard to him.

I am wrapped in my cocoon again when Isaac comes up with dinner. He brings two plates and sets them on the floor by the fire before unwrapping me.

“Food,” he says. I lay on my back staring up at the ceiling for a minute, before throwing my legs off the side of the bed and slowly walking to his picnic.

He’s already eating, staring at the flames while he chews. I sit on my knees as far away from him as I can—on the corner of the rug—and pick up my plate. The plate is square. There are squares around its edge. It’s the first time I’m noticing. I’ve been eating off these dishes for weeks, but I’m just now observing things like color and pattern and shape. They are familiar to me. I touch one of the squares with my pinkie.

“Isaac, these plates…”

“I know,” he says. “You’re in a fog, Senna. I wish you’d wake up and help me get out of here.”

I set my plate on the floor. He’s right.

“The fence. How far does it run around the house?”

“About a mile in every direction. With the cliff on one side of us.”

“Why did he give us that much room?”

“Food,” Isaac says. “Wood?”

“So he means for us to take care of ourselves when the food runs out?”

“Yes.”

“But the fence will keep the animals out, and there are only so many trees to cut down.”

Isaac shrugs. “Maybe he intended for us to make it ‘til summer. We’d see some animals then.”

“There is a summer here?” I say it sarcastically, but Isaac nods.

“There is a short summer in Alaska, yes. But depending on where we are, there might not be one. If we are in the mountains it will be winter year round.”

I don’t long for the sun. I never have. But I don’t like being told it has to be winter all year either. It makes me want to claw at the walls.

I fidget with the hem of my sweater.

“How much food do we have left?”

“Couple months’ worth if we ration it.”

“I wish this song would stop playing.” I pick up my plate and start eating. These are Isaac’s plates. Or were his plates. I only ate at his house once. He probably has the type of china now that married people have. I think about his wife. Small and pretty, eating off her china alone because her husband is missing. She doesn’t feel like eating, but she’s doing it anyway because of the baby. The baby they tried and tried for. I blink the image of her away. She helped save my life. I wonder if they’ve tied our disappearances together? Daphne knew some of what happened with Isaac and me. They had been seeing each other when he met me. He put everything on hold with her during those months he was keeping me alive.

“Senna,” he says.

I don’t lift my head. I’m trying not to crack. There is rice on my plate. I count the grains.

“It took me a long time…” he pauses. “To stop feeling you everywhere.”

“Isaac, you don’t have to. Really. I get it. You want to be with your family.”

“We’re not good at this,” he says. “The talking.” He sets his plate down. I hear the clatter of silverware. “But I want you to know one thing about me. Want being the key word, Senna. I know you don’t need words from me.”

I brace myself against the rice; it’s all that stands between me and my feelings. Rice.

“You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”

I set my plate down and wipe my palms on my pant legs. I have yet to look at him, but I hear the angst in his voice. I have nothing to say. I don’t know what to say. That proves his point, and I don’t want him to be right.

“I hear you still.”

I stand up. I upset my plate; it topples.

“Isaac, stop.”

But he doesn’t. “It’s never that I don’t want to be with you. It’s that you don’t want to be with me.”

I bolt for the ladder. I don’t even bother using the rungs. I jump … land on my haunches. I feel feral.

“The life you choose to live is the essence of who you arrre.”

I am an animal, bent on surviving. I let nothing in. I let nothing out.