Mud Vein (20 page)

“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.”

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.”