Mud Vein (23 page)

“Am I dying, doctor?” I ask quietly. It takes energy to put those words together in the right order, and even while I say them my brain sees a pink spade lying on green, green grass.

“Yes,” he says. “We both are. We all are.”

“Comforting.”

He kisses my forehead. His lips are cold, but his warmth is bringing me back to life. A little bit at least.

“When was the last time you let yourself feel?” his words slur like he’s been drinking, but the alcohol is long gone, it’s the cold that makes it that way.

I shake my head. For someone like me feeling is dangerous. There is nothing left to fear when you’re already dying. I lift my face to relay my answer without words.

His hands find my face.

“Can I make you feel? One more time?”

I cling to him, my fists tightening on his shirt. My yes.

His mouth is so warm. We are shivering and kissing, our bodies firing off heat and desire. We are cold and we are weak. We are emotionally destroyed. We are desperate to feel each other, and to feel hope—to feel one last piece of living. There is nothing joyful or sweet in our mouths. Just frenzy and panic. I taste salt. I’m crying. A kiss unclogged my tear ducts, I think.

When we are done kissing we lie very still.

His lips move against my hair. “I’m sorry, Senna.”

I tremble.
He’s sorry? Him?
“For what?”

There is a million year pause.

“I couldn’t save you this time.”

I cry into his chest. Not because he couldn’t. Because he wanted to.

I think I doze off. When I wake Isaac’s breathing is steady. I think he’s still asleep, but when I shift to change positions, he lifts his hands from my lower back and lets me move around until I’m comfortable again. We lie like that for hours. Until the fire burns out its last flame and I know the night has curved into day, even though day no longer shows her face. Until I want to sob from relief and grief. Until I remember all of the ineffable hurt from years ago that he salved with the tender way he loves. We are going to die. But at least I’ll die with someone who loves me.

Isaac is touch. Why have I ever thought anything different? He held me once to soothe me from my nightmares, and now he is holding me to protect me from the cold. He touches right where it hurts, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t hurt. Yes, Isaac is touch. I see the pink spade again. I can feel the grit of coffee grounds as I work them between my teeth. Then I see The Great Wall of China, and I know my brain is short circuiting, passing along images of things that are in my subconscious. When I see the table flash in my mind—the carved up, heavy, wooden table from the kitchen downstairs—I feel something true. It’s like when I sleep and my brain tells me what to write. What is it about the table…? Then I see it, but I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open.
Don’t forget,
I tell myself.
You have to remember the table…

The fire goes.

Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.

I wake up. I am not dead. I push at Isaac’s chest to wake him up. He doesn’t move. His skin feels strange—cold and stiff.
Oh my God.

“Isaac!” I shove at him with the little bit of leverage that I have. “Isaac!”

I press my ear to his chest. My hair is in my mouth, falling in my eyes. I can’t reach the pulse at his neck; I’m trapped between him and the blanket. I’m going to have an asthma attack. I can feel it coming. There’s not enough air in this blanket. All I can hear is my own frantic breathing. I have to unroll us, but he feels like a thousand pounds. I push him onto his back and struggle to get out of the blanket. Struggle to breathe as my airways constrict. I have to wiggle up and out. When I am free of the joint, the air hits me. It’s freezing. I need it in my lungs, but I don’t know how to get it there. I pull the blanket away from his face and press my fingers to his neck. I’m mumbling
please
over and over.

Please don’t be dead.

Please don’t leave me here alone.

Please don’t leave me.

Please don’t let me have this asthma attack right now.

I can feel a pulse. It’s barely there. I roll onto my back and wheeze. It’s a terrible sound. It’s the sound of dying. Why am I always dying? I arch my back, my eyes roll. I have to help Isaac.

The table! … What was it about the table?

I know. I see it all—what I saw last night in my delirium. The table from my book. I wrote about it metaphorically; the concept that all great things are made around a table: relationships, plans for war, the meals that keep our bodies alive. A table is an image that represents life and choices. We see it in Camelot when King Arthur’s knights gathered around the Round Table, and in the paintings of The Last Supper. We see it in commercials where families eat dinner, laughing and passing a basket of bread. I wrote about a table that was a well. I was at the bottom end of my relationship with Nick and I was trying to illustrate where we had gone wrong. We needed to come back to the table, draw life into our dying relationship. It was melodramatic and stupid, but the zookeeper brought it to life. Built it in our kitchen, and I refused to see it.

I roll onto my knees and crawl … to the hole. I make it halfway down before I fall. I don’t know if the cold has numbed me or if my lack of air is consuming my senses, but I feel nothing when I crack against the wood. I crawl some more toward the stairs … toward the table. I … can’t … breathe…

I am there. My scribbles in the wood are there. I can feel them with the tips of my fingers, but it’s so dark. I go to the cabinet, under the sink, and find the industrial flashlight that Isaac won’t let us use unless it’s an emergency. I flip the switch and place it on top of the counter, pointing it toward the object of my interest. I stagger forward. I know what I need to do, but I don’t have the energy to do it. Three steps feel like twenty. I stand sideways and place my hip just below the lip of the table. Planting one foot against the wall, and the other on the floor, I push. With all and everything.

At first there is nothing, then I hear the grating. It is louder than the hissing, rattling noise that is coming from between my lips. It is confirmation. It’s enough to make me push harder. I push until the heavy wooden slab has moved off center and is wobbling and ready to fall. I stand back to watch. There is an impressive thud as it angles sideways and then tips over, landing upright between the base and the wall. I stumble forward and peer down. I am looking into a dark hole. It’s a well. Or, sort of, because there is no water. There is something down the table/well. But I still can’t breathe, and Isaac is dying. I have nothing to lose. I climb onto the bench and swing my legs over the side. Then I jump.

The fall isn’t a long one. But when I land I hear a crack. There is no pain, but I know I’ve broken a part of my body, and in a minute, when the shock passes and I try to stand up, I’m going to know what part that is. There is light filtering in from the flashlight I left in the kitchen; it stabs gently at the darkness around me, but it’s not enough. Why didn’t I bring it with me? I feel around with my hands, above my head, to my left. The zookeeper is precise. If he gave me a dark hole, he will provide a light with which to see it. The floor is uneven—dirt. I am on my back. I reach lower. My fingers touch a metal cylinder the width of my forearm. I lift it, bring it to my face. A flashlight.

Neither of my arms is broken.
That’s so good
, I tell myself.
So, so good.
But it means something else is broken. I am breathing again. Not normally, but better. The fall must have knocked the breath back into me, given my body some perspective. I grimace and mess with the flashlight until my fingers find the switch. It powers on with bold, white light. I direct the beam at my body, and my fear is confirmed. There is a bone sticking out of my shin, pink and white. As soon as I see it, the pain hits me. It envelops, folding me over, stretching me out. I writhe. I open my mouth to cry out, but there is no sound for this kind of pain. I have nothing in my stomach to vomit. So I retch instead.

I don’t have time to waste, so while I retch I direct the beam around. My eyes water but I can make out piles of wood, bags of rice, cans and cans and cans of food, shelves of food. I pull off my shirt, it’s just one of three I’m wearing. I make a tourniquet, tying it above my knee. I gasp as I pull myself up.
You’re going to faint,
I think.
And there isn’t time for that. Breathe!

I drag myself to the wood. I have to make him warm. I have to bring him back. I’m not a doctor; I studied art history, for God’s sake, but I know that Isaac has one foot in this goddamn cabin and one foot in the fog beyond. There is a bag of rice that has split open. I rip at the hole and quickly turn the bag over, emptying the rice onto the floor. Then leaning against the wall, I drop one, two, three logs into the sack. I grab a can of creamed corn off a shelf—it’s the nearest thing to me—and toss that in, too. There is a steel ladder in the corner of room, propped against a wall. Despite the cold, I am sweating; sweating and shivering. The zookeeper left us everything we needed to survive another…what? Six months? Eight? It was sitting here all along while we starved, and we didn’t know. I pass a metal box with a big, red medical cross on it. I rip open the door. Inside there are bottles, so many bottles. I grab for the aspirin, popping off the lid, I tilt my head back and let half a dozen pills slide into my mouth. There is a roll of gauze. I rip the package open with my teeth until the material unravels in my fingers. I bend down and wrap it around the bone, flinching, feeling hot blood on my fingers. I want to look at the bottles, see what he left us.
Isaac first.

I scream when I open the ladder … it’s stiff with cold and time, and it jars my lower body, shooting pain everywhere. I climb backwards, keeping my leg extended and using my arms and good leg to lift myself up each rung. My arms burn, dragging the sack with me. When I reach the top of the ladder I have to lift my leg over the side of the well. There is no way to get to the floor gracefully and without pain.
Your leg is already broken. What more can happen?
I glance at the bone: nerve damage, tissue damage, I could bleed to death, die of an infection.
A lot more, Senna.
And then I drop my good leg to the floor with my sack clutched against my chest and my eyes closed. I stand there for a second, shivering and wanting to die. Another flight of stairs, another ladder, then I’ll be there. First, the can opener.
This is nothing,
I tell myself.
There is a bone sticking out of your leg. It can’t kill you.
But it can. Who knows what type of infection I might get after this? My pep talk doesn’t bring me comfort. If Isaac dies, his death will kill me. My leg is preventing me from getting to Isaac.
Ignore the leg. Get to Isaac.

It’s easier to sit on the stairs and lift myself backward, sticking my injured leg straight out while I use my arms and good leg to lift myself. I toss my sack up ahead of me. I feel every bump, every movement. The pain is so intense I am beyond screaming. It is taking concentration not to pass out. I’m sweating. I can feel fat rivulets rolling down the sides of my face and the back of my neck. I use the railing to lift myself up on the top step, then I hop to the ladder. This is going to be the hard part. Unlike the ladder in the well, this one angles straight up. There is nothing to lean on and the rungs are narrow and slippery. I sob with my face pressed against the wall. Then I pull myself together and drag myself up Mt. Everest.

I lay the logs. I light them. Just one at first, then I add a second. I put his head in my lap and rub his chest. I’ve done so much research as a writer; I know that when someone has hypothermia you’re supposed to focus on building heat in the chest, head and neck. Rubbing their limbs will push cold blood back toward the heart, lungs and brain, making things worse. I know I’m supposed to give him the heat from my body, but I can’t get my pants off, and even if I could I wouldn’t know how and where to put my body with a bone sticking out of it. I feel so much guilt. So much. Isaac was right. I knew the zookeeper was playing a game with me. I knew it when I saw the lighters and the carousel room. But I shut down and refused to help him figure things out. I shut down. Why?
God.
If I’d put two and two together, we could have found that well weeks ago. If he dies it’s my fault. He’s here and it’s my fault. I don’t even know why. But I want to. This is a game, and if I want to get out, I have to find the truth.

There is a carousel in Mukilteo. It sits in a copse of evergreens at the bottom of a hill called The Devil’s Backbone. The animals impaled on that ride are angry, their eyes rolling, heads kicked back like something has spooked them. It’s what you would expect from a ride that sits on the devil’s tailbone. Isaac took me there for my thirtieth birthday, on the last day of winter.