Mud Vein (19 page)

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.

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.