Mud Vein (31 page)

Doctor—no, I won’t call her a doctor after what she’s done—Saphira looks smug.

I’m so cold I can’t be anything but cold. I can’t even muster anger.

I rest my hand on the outside of my pocket where my inhaler is. I don’t want to have to use it again.

“Take him,” I say again. “Please. He’s very sick. Take him now.” My voice is frantic. The wind is picking up. When I turn my head I can’t see the house anymore. I’ll do anything she says, so long as she saves Isaac.

She takes a syringe out of her pocket and hands it to me.

“Go say goodbye to him. Then use this.”

I take the syringe and nod, though I don’t think she can see me through the snow.

“What if I put this in your neck right now?”

I can feel her grinning.

“Then we’d all die. Are you ready for that?”

I’m not. I want Isaac to live because he deserves it. I wish he could tell me what to do. I was wrong about the zookeeper. I didn’t expect this. I profiled my kidnapper, but I never hung the face of Saphira Elgin on him. She changes everything; because of her knowledge of me, she has the ability to outplay me.

I clutch the syringe. I can’t see the house, but I know the direction it’s in. So I walk. I walk until I see the logs. Then I walk running my frozen hands along the logs until I reach the door. I swing it open and collapse on the bottom stair, shivering. It’s warmer in here, but not warm enough. I climb the stairs. Isaac is in his room where I left him. I add a log to his dwindling fire and crawl into the bed with him. He’s burning up; his skin is the heat I crave so badly. I press my lips against his temple. There is a lot of grey there now. We match.

“Hey,” I say. “Do you remember that time you showed up every day to take care of a perfect stranger? I never really thanked you for that. I’m not really going to thank you now either, because that’s not my style.” I press closer to him, cup his cheek in my hand. The hair prickles my palm. “I am going to do something to take care of you for once. Go see your baby. I love you.” I lean over and kiss him on the mouth, then I roll out of bed and climb up to the attic room.

I feel nothing…

I feel nothing….

I feel everything.

I look at the needle for a long time, balancing it in the palm of my hand. I don’t know what will happen when I do this. Saphira could be lying to me. She could have a more sinister plan now that Isaac is out of the picture. What’s in the syringe could kill me. Maybe it’ll make me sleep and she’ll leave me here to die. I’d be grateful for that. I could fight back. I could wait and push this needle into her neck and take my chances with getting Isaac out of here myself. But I don’t want to risk his life. He has no idea Saphira is responsible for bringing us here. Her taking him out of here and getting him help will put her at the risk of being discovered. I push the needle into the vein in my hand. It hurts. Then I stand with the back of my knees pressed against the mattress, spreading my arms wide.
This is what it feels like to love,
I think. It’s heavy. Or maybe it’s the responsibility that comes with it that’s heavy.

I fall backwards. For the first time I feel my mother in the fall. She chose to save herself. She couldn’t bear the weight of love—not even for her own flesh and blood. And in that fall, I feel her decision to leave me. It rocks my heart and breaks it all over again. The first person you are connected to is your mother. By a cord composed of two arteries and a vein. She keeps you alive by sharing her blood and her warmth and her very life. When you are born, and the doctor severs that cord, a new one is formed. An emotional cord.

My mother held me and fed me. She brushed my hair gently, and told me stories about fairies that lived in apple trees. She sang me songs, and baked me lemon cakes with rose frosting. She kissed my face when I cried and made little circles on my skin with her fingertips. And then she abandoned me. She walked out like none of that meant anything. Like we were never connected by a cord with two arteries and a vein. Like we were never connected by our hearts. I was disposable. I could be left. I was a broken- hearted little girl. Isaac broke the spell she put me under. He taught me what it was to
not
be left. A stranger who fought to keep me alive.

I scream aloud. I roll to my side and grab my shirt, bringing the material up to my face, pressing it against my eyes and nose and mouth. I cry ungracefully, my heart hurting so exquisitely I cannot hold in the ugly noises that rise from my throat.

I once read that there is an invisible thread that connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break. As the drugs dull me, I can feel that cord. I close my eyes, choking on my own spit and tears, and I can almost feel it tug and pull as she takes Isaac.

Please don’t let it break,
I silently plead to him. I need to know that some cords can’t be cut. Then the drugs take me.

Acceptance

Isaac is not in his bed when I wake. He’s not in the house. I check every corner, dragging my half useless leg behind me. My guess is that I’ve been unconscious for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. I step outside in Isaac’s oversized clunky boots, sinking into the fresh snow. The blizzard has all but covered the lower half of the house. Snow piles in graceful sweeps of white. White, white, white. All I see is white. It looks like the house is wearing a wedding dress. If there were tire marks, they are gone now. I walk as far as I can before reaching the fence. I am tempted to touch it. To let the volts shake my body and send my heart to a screeching stop. I reach my gloves toward the chain link. My light wool gloves that do nothing to stave off the frigid air.
I might as well be wearing lace on my hands
, I think for the thousandth time.

Isaac is out. My hands pause midair. I have no idea if Elgin will take him to a hospital. My hands move an inch toward the fence. But if she does, he will live. And I might see him again. I drop my hands to my sides. She’s crazy. For all I know she’s locked him up somewhere else where she can play more of her sick games.

No. Dr. Elgin always did what she said she was going to do. Even if it meant locking me up like an animal to fix me.

The last time I had seen Saphira Elgin was a year past the date I filed a restraining order against Isaac. I’d been seeing her once a week for over a year. Our visits, that had started with her extracting one sliver at a time from the lockdown that is my mind, eventually became more relaxed. More pleasant. I got to speak to someone who didn’t really care about me. She wasn’t trying to save me, or love me to better health; she was paid (a hundred dollars an hour) to take an unbiased look into my soul and help me find the crickets. That’s what she called them: crickets. The little chirping noises that were either alarms, or echoes, or the unspoken words that needed to be spoken. Or that’s what I thought anyway. Turns out Saphira cared above and beyond her pay grade. She entered God’s pay grade. Toying with fate and lives and sanity. But that last time, the last time I saw her, she’d said something that in hindsight should have been my clue in to her insanity.

I’d told her I was writing a new book. One about Nick. She’d become flustered at that. Not in the extreme outward way a normal person becomes flustered. I don’t even know if I can pinpoint how I knew it upset her. Maybe her bracelets tinkled a little extra that day as she jotted notes down on her yellow pad. Or maybe her ruby lips pulled a little tighter. But I knew. I’d confessed to her that I’d messed everything up, but I wasn’t sure how. When we ended our session she’d grabbed my hand.

“Senna,” she’d said, “do you want another chance at the truth?”

“The truth?” I’d repeated, not sure of what she was getting at.

“The truth that can set you free...”

Her eyes had been two hot coals. I’d been close enough to smell her perfume; it smelled exotic like myrrh and burning wood.

“Nothing can set me free, Saphira,” I’d said in turn. “That’s why I write.”

I’d turned to leave. I was halfway out the door when she’d called my name.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

I’d half smiled, and gone home and forgotten what she’d said. I’d written my book in the month after that meeting. I only needed thirty days to write a book. Thirty days in which I didn’t eat or sleep or do anything at all but clack away at my keyboard. And after the book was finished and catharsis was complete, I’d never made another appointment to see her. Her office called and left messages on my phone. She eventually called and left a message. But I was finished.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” I say it out loud, the memory aching in my brain. Is that where she had the idea? To put me in this place where for a time both the sun and the moon were hidden? Where like slow, seeping molasses I would discover the crickets of truth in my heart?

My zookeeper thought it kind to be my savior. And now what? I would starve and freeze here alone? What was the point of that? I hate her so. I want to tell her that her sick game didn’t work, that I’m just the same as I’ve always been: broken, bitter and self-destructive. Something comes to me then, a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

“Fuck you, Saphira!” I call out.

Then I reach out in defiance and grab the fence.

I cry out because of what I think is coming. But nothing comes. It’s then that I acknowledge that there is no humming. The fence used to hum. My vocal chords are frozen, my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I unstick my tongue and try to lick my lips. But my mouth is so dry there is nothing to wet them with. I let go of the chain link and look over my shoulder at the house. I left the front door open, it’s swung wide, the one dark spot beneath the veils of snow. I don’t want to go back. The smart thing would be to go get more layers. More socks. I threw on one of Isaac’s sweatshirts before I left, over the one I was already wearing. But the air cuts through both like they’re made of tissue. I head back for the house, my leg aching. I throw on more clothes, stuff food in my pockets. Before I leave I climb the stairs to the carousel room. Kneeling in front of the chest, I search for the single puzzle piece that escaped the fire. It’s there, in the corner, overlaid with dust. I place it in my pocket, and then I walk through my prison for the last time.

The fence. I lace my fingers through the wire and pull up. In Saphira’s exit with Isaac, she might have overlooked turning the fence back on. If she comes back I don’t want to be here. I’d sooner die free, cold and in the woods than locked up behind an electrical fence, turning into a human ice cube in that house.

Isaac’s boots are big. I can’t fit the toes into the octagons that make up the pattern of the fence. I slip twice and my chin bumps down the metal like something out of a Looney-Tunes cartoon. I feel blood running down my neck. I don’t even bother to wipe it up. I am desperate … manic. I want out. I claw at the fence. My gloves snag on twisted pieces of steel. When I rip them away the metal catches the skin on my palm, ripping into the tender flesh. I keep going. There is barbed wire along the top of the fence, running in loops as far as I can see. I don’t even feel the spikes when I grab onto one and swing my leg over the side. I manage to get both feet balanced precariously on the far side of the fence. The barbed wire wavers against my weight. I sway … then I fall.

I feel my mother in that fall. Maybe it’s because I’m so near to the Reaper. I wonder if my mother is dead, and if I will see her when I die. I think all of this as I make the three-second spill to the ground.

One.

Two.

Three.

I gasp. I feel as if all the air in the world was pumped into my lungs, and then rapidly sucked out, lickety-split
.

Right away I search myself. I can hardly breathe, but my hands are running over my limbs looking for broken things. When I am sufficiently comforted that
this
fall didn’t break anything, I sit up, groaning, holding onto the back of my head like my brains are falling out. The snow broke my fall, but my head hit something. It takes me a while to get all the way to my feet. I’m going to have a huge knot … maybe a concussion. The good new is if I have a concussion I’ll just pass out. No feeling wild animals rip my limbs apart. No feeling myself freeze to death. No eating tree bark and suffering the claws of hunger. Just a nice, bleeding brain and then … nothing. The bags of peanuts I put into my pockets are scattered around in the snow. I pick them up one by one as I bend my head back to look at the top of the fence. I want to see how far I fell. What is that—twelve feet? I turn toward the woods, my bad leg sinking low into the soft mounds of snow. It’s hard to get it back up. I have worked a nice little path to the tree line when I suddenly turn back. It’s only ten feet back to the chain link, but it’s an arduous journey. I look one last time. I hate it. I hate that house. But it’s where Isaac showed me a love that expects nothing in return. So, I can’t hate it too much.