Mud Vein (26 page)

Finally, after what seems like hours, he stands up to examine his work.

“Help me up,” I beg him. “Just this once so I can see.”

He puts another log on the fire, and reluctantly comes over to my bed. I mouth,
please, please, please, please.
He picks me up before I can protest the help and carries me to what he made.

I stare in wonder at his creation, my leg jutting in front of me awkwardly. He’s taped the larger bucket to a makeshift stand he’s made out of some logs. The smaller bucket sits upside down next to it. On the opposite side are the two pots—both faced down.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a mess of a thing on the floor.

“That’s my pedal. I wrapped rubber around a pencil. I cut out the sole of one of my shoes for the actual pedal.”

“Where did you get the rubber?”

“From the fridge.”

I nod. Genius.

“That’s my snare.” He points to the smaller bucket. “And bass…” The larger one, turned on its side.

“Can you stand me against the wall? I promise I won’t put weight on my cast.”

He props me against the wall near to where his drum set sits. I lean back, thrilled to be out of bed and on my … foot.

Isaac sits on the edge of the window seat. He leans down to test his pedal, then he plays.

I close my eyes and listen to his heart. This is the first time—the very first time—that I am meeting this side of Isaac. After all these years. Without his permission I turn on the flashlight and aim it at him like it’s a spotlight. He gives me a warning look, but I just smile and keep it on him. This moment deserves a little something special.

It’s four days ‘til Christmas. Give or take a day or two. I do my best to keep track, but I’ve lost days along the way. They dropped out from under me and messed up my mental calendar.
You’re the one who went crazy and pissed herself like some dink in a mental institution.
Isaac says I was like that for a week. Which still makes it Christmas.

Christmas in the dark.

Christmas in the attic room.

Christmas drinking melted snow and eating pinto beans out of a can.

Christmas was when we met. Christmas was when the bad thing happened. The zookeeper will do something on Christmas. I know it. And that’s when it hits me. It was sitting there in my subconscious the whole time.

I moan out loud. Isaac is downstairs so he doesn’t hear me. And then I can’t quite catch my breath.

“Isaac,” I wheeze. “Isaac!”

I hate this feeling. And I hate how it hits me out of nowhere so that I can never be prepared. I don’t know what’s more overwhelming at this moment, the fact that I can’t breathe, or the realization that was powerful enough to steal my breath away. Either way, I have to get to a nebulizer. Isaac found them down the table. He brought one up. Where did he put it? I look helplessly around the room. The top of the wardrobe. I get out of bed. It’s a struggle. When I’m halfway there he walks in carrying our wood ration for the day. He drops his armload when he sees my face. He darts to the wardrobe and grabs the nebulizer. Then he’s pushing it between my lips. I feel a cold rush; the vapor hits my lungs and I can breathe again.

Isaac looks pissed.

“What happened?”

“I had an asthma attack, idiot.”

“Senna,” he says, swinging me into his arms and carrying me back to the bed. “Ninety percent of the time your asthma attacks are stress induced. Now. What happened?”

“I didn’t know I needed anything extra,” I snap. “Other than being imprisoned in a house made of ice with my…”

I lose my words.

“Doctor,” he finishes.

I twist my body so that I’m facing away from him.

I need to think. I need to form a structure for this theory. The Rubik’s cube twists. Isaac gives me space.

I’m locked in a house with my doctor. He’s right.

I’m locked in a house with my doctor.

I’m locked in a house with my doctor.

With my doctor.

Doctor…

Christmas comes. Isaac is very quiet. But I was wrong; we don’t eat beans. He cooks us a feast over our little makeshift stove in the attic: canned corn, spam, green beans and, to top it all off, a can of pumpkin pie filling. For breakfast.

For a moment, we are happy. Then Isaac looks at me and says, “When I first opened my eyes and saw you standing over me, I felt like I took my first breath in three years.”

I grind my teeth.

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

“
We only knew each other for three months before this,” I say. “You don’t know me.” But, even as I say it, I know it’s not true. “You were just my doctor…”

He’s wearing the expression of someone being slapped over and over again. I slap him once more to put an end to this.

“You took things too far.”

He walks out before I can say any more.

I bury my face. “Fuck you, Isaac,” I say into my pillow.

At noon the lights turn on.

Isaac’s head appears through the trapdoor a minute later. I wonder where he’s been. My bet is on the carousel room. He takes one look at my face and says, “You knew.”

I knew.

“I suspected.”

He looks incredulous. “That the power would come back?”

“That something would happen,” I correct him.

I knew that the power would come back.

He disappears again, and I hear his steps pounding down the stairs.
Clomp, clomp, clomp.
I count them until he reaches the bottom. Then I hear the front door hit the wall as he swings it wide. I flinch at all the cold air he’s letting in, then remember that the power is back.
HEAT! LIGHT! A WORKING TOILET!

I feel impassive. This is a game. The zookeeper gave us light. As a gift. On Christmas Day. It’s symbolic.

He thinks light came into my life on Christmas Day when I met Isaac.

“You’re just a badly written character,” I say out loud. “I’ll kill you off, my darling.”

When Isaac comes back his face is ashen.

“The zookeper was here,” he says.

I get chills. They skitter up my legs and arms like little spiders.

“How do you know?”

He holds out his hand. “We have to go downstairs.”

I let him pull me up. He doesn’t like me to walk on the leg, which means he’s making an exception, which means this is dirt serious. I use him as a crutch. When we reach the ladder he helps me sit on the floor. Then he climbs down first. He has me lower my injured leg through the hole first. It takes me ten minutes to get it right, to maneuver it while not falling over. But I am determined. I don’t want to be in the attic a second longer. When both legs are through, he reaches for my waist. I think we’re both going to fall, but he gets me down.
Steady hands,
I remind myself.
A surgeon’s steady hands.

He hands me something. It’s a tree branch—almost as tall as I am—shaped like a wishbone. A crutch.

“Where did you get this?”

“It’s part of our Christmas present.”

He stares intently into my eyes, and motions for the stairs. A few weeks ago we were burning everything we could. There is no way this could have escaped our fire. I lean on my crutch as I hobble for the stairs. I want to scream at how long it takes to make it to the bottom. I look around. I haven’t seen this part of the house since I broke my leg. I have a need to walk around, touch things, but Isaac pushes me toward the door.

It’s dark outside. So cold. I shiver.

“I can’t see anything, Isaac.”

My foot is about to sink into the snow when my cast hits something.

They never found the man who raped me. There was never another report of a rape in those woods, or any woods in Washington. The police said it was an isolated incident. With blithe nonchalance, they told me that he had probably been watching me for a while and possibly followed me into the woods. They used words like “intent” and “stalker”. I’d had those before: letters, e-mails, Facebook messages that went from high praise to intense anger when I didn’t respond. None of them were men. None threatening enough to concern me. None with the tone of a rapist, or a sadist, or a kidnapper. Just angry moms who wanted something from me—recognition maybe.

But there was something I never told the police about the day I was raped. Even when they pressed me for more details. I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

No, I didn’t see his face.

No, he didn’t have tattoos or scars.

No, he didn’t say anything to me…

The truth was that he did speak to me. Or perhaps he just spoke. To God, to the air, to himself, or perhaps to some person who abandoned him. I can still hear his voice. I hear it when I sleep, whispering in my ear and I wake up screaming. From the moment he started to the moment he finished, he chanted one thing over and over.

Pink Zippo

Pink Zippo

Pink Zippo

Pink Zippo

It was an omission. Maybe he got away because of it. Maybe another woman will be raped because I could have done more. But in that moment, when you’ve been violated, your soul darkened for no reason other than someone’s sadistic cruelty, you’re only thinking about your survival.

I didn’t know how to live with my survival, and I didn’t know how to kill myself. Instead, I plotted what I’d do to him. While Isaac was feeding me, and pulling me out of dreams that made me thrash and scream, I was cutting up my rapist, throwing him into Lake Washington. Pouring gasoline over him and burning him alive. I was carving his skin like Lisbeth Salander did to
Nils Bjurman
. I took the revenge I would never get in my flesh and blood life.

But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough. So I took revenge on myself for allowing it to happen. I felt worthless. I didn’t want anyone who had worth to be near me. Isaac had worth. So I got rid of him. But here we were; locked up and caged. Starved. The man who chanted
Pink Zippo
might have been a stalker, but he had nothing, nothing on the zookeeper. You can stalk a woman’s body, but this animal was stalking my mind.

My cast hits something. Isaac flicks the switch that turns on the bulb above the door. It’s been so long since light and not darkness has been my companion that it takes a moment for my eyes to catch up. The zookeeper has indeed left me something; a box, rectangular in shape, it reaches my knees. The box is pure white, shiny and smooth like the inlay of an oyster shell. On its lid are red words, the letters look as if someone dipped a finger in blood words that look as if someone dipped a finger in blood before tracing them.
For MV.

My reaction is internal. The very essence of me writhes as if I am an open wound and someone has poured salt over me like one of those snails the kid next door used to torture. I hobble forward and lean over the box.
Please God, please, don’t let it be blood.

Not blood.

Not blood.

My hand is shaking as I reach down to touch the words. I go for the V, slicing it in half. It has dried, but some of it chips away on the tip of my finger. I place my finger in my mouth, the flecks of red clinging to my tongue. All this, and Isaac has been a statue behind me. When I bend over, letting my crutch drop away, moaning in some sort of grief, I feel his arms circle my waist. He pulls me back into the house and kicks the door closed.

“Noooooo! It’s blood, Isaac. It’s blood. Let me go!”

He holds me from behind as I twist to get away from him.

“Hush,” he says into my ear. “You’re going to hurt your leg. You can sit on the sofa, Senna. I’ll bring it to you.”

I stop fighting. I’m not crying, but somehow my nose is running. I reach up and wipe it as Isaac carries me to the living room and sits me down. The couch is barely a couch. We hacked parts of it away to burn when we discovered that there was a wooden frame underneath the stuffing. The cushions are gouged; they sink beneath me. The back of the sofa is gone; there is nowhere to rest my back. I sit straight, my leg poking out in front of me. My anxiety climbs every second that Isaac is gone. My ears follow him to the door, where his breath hitches as he lifts the box. It’s heavy. The door closes again. When he walks back into the room he’s carrying it like a body, his arms stretched around its sides. There is no coffee table to set it on—we hacked that up too—so he places it at the floor by my feet, and steps back.

“What’s
MV
, Senna?”

I stare at the blood, the part of the V that I smudged with my finger.

“It’s me,” I say.

He tilts his head forward. It feels like he’s lining up our eyes. Truth. I’m going to have to feed him some truth.

“Mud Vein. I’m Mud Vein.” My mouth feels dry. I want to purge it with a gallon of snow.