Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

I blinked up at him.

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Eating lunch with a patient?”

He smiled. “Yes, we’d have to go somewhere other than the hospital cafeteria.”

I was about to say no, when I heard the lyrics of the song he gave me this morning, playing in my head. Who gave someone a song that said, No need to worry because everybody will die when they had cancer?

I liked it. It was the honesty.

“All right,” I said.

He glanced at his watch. “Meet you in the parking lot in ten?”

I nodded.

I got dressed and made my way downstairs. “I’m over this way,” he said, once I found him in the parking lot. He’d changed out of his scrubs and was wearing a white shirt and grey pinstriped pants. I followed him to his car, and he opened the door for me. It was too much. I freaked.

“I can’t do this,” I said. I backed away from the car. “I’m sorry. I need to get home.”

I didn’t look back as I walked toward my car.

He probably thought I was losing my mind. There was a good chance I was.

Isaac was waiting for me when I got home a few hours later, leaning against his car with his face turned upward. Soak it up, Isaac, I thought. Tomorrow my clouds will be back. For a brief second, I thought about not turning into my driveway and heading up to Canada instead. But I’d been driving around for hours and the needle to my gas tank was pointing to E. I wanted to go home. I walked past him to the front door. We were barely past the foyer when I said, “Why didn’t you ask me why I don’t want reconstruction?”

“Because if you want to tell me, you will.”

“We’re not friends, Isaac!”

“No?”

“I don’t have friends. Can’t you see that?”

“I can see that,” he said. I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I was wearing a navy blue jacket over my shirt. I took it off and flung it on the couch. Then I piled my hair on top of my head and tied it into a knot.

“So why are you here?”

He looked at me then. “I want you to be okay.”

Too much. I ran upstairs. I was crazy. I knew that. Normal people didn’t leave conversations right in the middle. Normal people didn’t let strangers sleep on their couch.

Two years ago I purchased a stationary bike from an eighty-eight year old widower with pink hair named Delfie. She’d put an ad in the Penny Saver after she’d had hip replacement and couldn’t damn well use it, as she’d said. I’d picked it up the same day I made the call. After all the hassle and tassle of hauling the thing up the stairs, I’d yet to sit on it. I walked over to where it was collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom and climbed on. I had to adjust Delfie’s setting on the padded seat. I pedaled until my legs felt like jelly. I was panting when I climbed off, my bare feet sore from the plastic pedals. I walked on the sides of my feet to my night table. I flipped open the cover of Knotted with my pinkie.

For MV

I closed it, and went downstairs to see what Isaac was making for dinner.

Fortune favors the brave. That’s what I repeated to myself as they prepped me for surgery. Except I didn’t say it in English, I said the Latin words: fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat. Mantras sounded better in Latin. Repeat any phrase in the educated fancy-pants language most of the ancient philosophers used, you sounded like a goddamn genius. Repeat the same phrase in English, you sounded like a loon. Who wrote that phrase? A philosopher. I should have remembered his name, but I couldn’t. Nerves, I told myself. I searched for something else to focus on, something that could comfort my decision. I knew that the Bible said something about cutting out your eye if it offended you. I was cutting out my breasts. I thought that this was both my brave move and my offended one. It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy. I tried to focus on something else so I wouldn’t have to think about how crazy I was. There was a nurse taking my blood.

The nurses were very attentive even when they were sticking needles into my flesh. Oh, sorry honey, you have small veins. This will only sting for a second. They told me to close my eyes as if I were a child. This one didn’t have any problems with finding the right vein in my arm. I wondered if Isaac admonished them to take good care of me. It seemed like something he would do. The hospital room was white. Thank God for that. I could think in peace without the colors breaking through. Isaac came in to examine me. I was trying to be strong when he sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at me with soft eyes.

“Why did you stop playing music?” My voice cracked on the last word. I needed something to distract myself. A truth from Isaac.

He considered my question for a minute, then he said, “There are two things that I love.”

I stopped breathing. I thought he was going to tell me about a woman. Someone he’d loved and that he’d given up music for. Instead he surprised me. “Music and medicine.”

I settled down in the bed with my head against the pillows to listen to him.

“Music makes me destructive—to myself and everyone around me. Medicine saves people. So I chose medicine.”

So matter-of-fact. So simple. I wondered what it would be like to give up writing. To choose something else over what I craved.

“Music saves people too,” I said. I don’t know this personally, but I was a writer and it was my job to know how other people thought. And I’d heard them say it.

“Not me,” he said. “It makes me destructive.”

“But you still listen to it.” I thought of his songs. The ones he’d left me, and the ones he played in his car.

“Yes. But I don’t create it anymore. Or get lost in it.”

I couldn’t keep it out of my eyes, the desire to know more. Isaac caught it.

“How does a person get lost in music?”

He grinned and looked at the lines running from my veins into the IV a few feet away.

“What drugs do they have you on?” he teased.

I stayed quiet, afraid that if I responded to his joke he wouldn’t tell me the answer.

“You let it live in you. The beat, the lyrics, the harmonies … the lifestyle,” he added. “There is only room for one of you, eventually.”

I was quiet for a bit. Processing.

“Do you miss it?”

He smiled. “I still have it. It’s just not my focus.”

“What did you play?”

He took my hand, turned it over until the inside of my wrist was facing up. Then with his pointer and middle finger began tapping a beat on my pulse. I let him for at least a minute. Then I said, “A drummer.”

I had another question on the tip of my tongue, but I held it there when the nurse walked in. Isaac stood up and I knew our conversation was over. In my mind, I replayed the beat he’d played on my wrist as the nurse fit a cap over my hair. I wondered what song it belonged to. If it was one of the ones he’d left on my windshield.

“I’m going to walk you through the procedure,” he said, lowering my gown. “Then Sandy is going to take you to surgery.” He morphed from Isaac the man to Isaac the doctor in just a few seconds. He told me where he was going to make the incisions, outlining them on my breasts with a black marker. He spoke about what he was going to be looking for. His voice was steady, professional. While he spoke tears streamed down my face and fell into my hair in a silent but torrid emotional cacophony. It was the first time I’d cried since my childhood. I hadn’t cried when my mother left, or when I was raped, or when I found out cancer was eating at my body. I hadn’t even cried when I made the decision to cut out the very essence of what made me a woman. I cried when Isaac played drums on my pulse and told me he had to give it up before they destroyed him. Go figure. Or maybe that statement had just broken it all open. My cry felt anticlimactic. Like something more profound should have kicked the last stone out of the dam before it burst open.

He saw my tears, but he didn’t acknowledge them. I was so, so grateful. They wheeled me into the OR and the anesthesiologist greeted me by name. I was asked to count backwards from ten. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was Isaac, staring intently into my eyes. I thought he was telling me to live.

“Senna … Senna…”

I heard his voice. My eyes felt weighted. When I opened them Isaac was standing over me. It was an alarming comfort to see him.

“Hi,” he said softly. I blinked at him, trying to clear my vision.

“Everything went well. I need you to rest. I’ll be back later to talk to you about the surgery.”

“Is it gone?” My voice was just a scratch. He smelled like coffee when he leaned down. He spoke into my ear as if he were telling me a secret.

“I got it all.”

I could barely nod before I closed my eyes again. I drifted off wanting coffee and wishing my eyelids weren’t so heavy so I could see his face a little longer.

When I woke up there was a nurse in my room checking my vitals. She was blonde and had pink fingernails. They were smooth and shiny like little candies. She smiled at me and told me she was going to page Dr. Asterholder. He came back a few minutes later and sat on the edge of my bed. I watched as he poured water into a glass from a pitcher and held the straw to my lips. I drank.

“I took out three lymph nodes. We had them tested to see how far the cancer spread.” He paused. “You made the right call, Senna.”

My chest felt tight. How did he get the results that soon? I wanted to reach up and touch the bandages, but it hurt too much. “You just need to rest for now. Can I get you anything?”

I nodded. When I spoke my voice sounded charred. “There is a book on my nightstand, next to my bed. Can you get it for me next time you—”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” he said. “Your cell phone is there.” He pointed to the table next to my bed. I had no need for a cell phone, so I didn’t look. “I have to do rounds. Call me if you need anything.” I nodded, half wishing he’d leave a business card like the old days.

True to his word, the next day Isaac brought me Nick’s book. I held it in my hands for a long time before I had a nurse put it on my hospital nightstand. Old habits die hard.

Isaac came to check on me after his shift ended. He was out of his scrubs and wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. The nurses twittered when he walked in dressed that way. He looked closer to a drummer than a doctor. He sat on my bed. But he was not a doctor this time. He was a drummer. I wondered if drummer Isaac was very different than doctor Isaac. He reached for the book and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. My eyes followed the tattoos on his forearm. It felt strange to see Nick’s book in Isaac’s hands. He studied it for a while, then he said, “Do you want me to read it to you?”

I didn’t answer him, so he opened it to the first chapter. He breezed right past the dedication page without even looking. Bravo, I thought. Good for you.

When he started reading, I wanted to scream at him to stop. I was tempted to cover my ears. To refuse the assault of a book written to make me hurt. But I did neither. I listened, instead, to Isaac Asterholder read the words that the love of my life wrote to me. And they went like this…

Nick’s Book

You don’t have to be alone. We are mostly born that way, though. We grow up being nurtured to believe that the other half of our soul is somewhere out there. And since there are six billion people inhabiting our planet, chances are one of them is for you. To find that person, to find your soul-piece, or your great love, we must count on our paths diverging, the tangling of lives, the soft whispering of one soul recognizing another.

I found my piece. She wasn’t what I was expecting. If you formed a woman’s soul out of black graphite, bathed it in blood, and then rolled it around in the softest rose petals, you still wouldn’t have touched on the complication that was my match.

I met her on the last day of summer. It felt appropriate that I would meet a daughter of winter as the last of the Washington sunshine sieved through the sky. Next week there would be rain, rain and more rain. But today, there was sun, and she stood underneath it, squinting even beneath her sunglasses as if she were allergic to the light. I was walking my dog through a busy park on Lake Washington. We’d just turned around to head home when I stopped to look at her. She was lean—a runner, probably. And she was wearing one of those things that’s longer than a sweater and shorter than a dress. A sweater dress? I followed the line of her legs to camo boots. You could tell she loved those shoes by the worn creases and the way she stood so comfortably in them. I loved those boots for her. And on her. I wanted to be in her. A rough manly thought I’d be too ashamed to admit out loud. The straps of a messenger bag crossed over her chest and hung at her left thigh. Now, I consider myself a bold man, but not quite bold enough to approach a woman whose every body movement said she wanted to be left alone. I did that day. And the closer I got, the stranger she became.