Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

“I’m making lunch,” Isaac said, standing just outside my room. “Do you want me to bring it up here?”

“I want to shower. I’ll come down after.”

He saw me staring at the bathroom door and cleared his throat. “Let me take a look before you do that.” I nodded and sat down on the edge of my bed, unbuttoning my shirt. When I was finished, I leaned back, my fingers gripping the comforter. You’d think I’d be used to this by now—the constant gawking and touching of my chest. Now that there was nothing there I should feel less ashamed. I was just a little boy as far as what was underneath my shirt. He unwound the bandages from my torso. I felt the air hit my skin and my eyes closed automatically. I opened them, defying my shame, to watch his face.

Blank

When he touched the skin around my sutures I wanted to pull back. “The swelling is down,” he said. “You can shower since the drain is out, but use the antibacterial soap I put in your bag. Don’t use a sponge on the stitches. They can snag.”

I nodded. All things I knew, but when a man was looking at your mangled breasts he needed something to say. Doctor or not.

I pulled my shirt closed and held it together in a fist.

“I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

I couldn’t look at him. My breasts weren’t the only thing torn and ripped. Isaac was a stranger and he had seen more of my wounds than anyone else. Not because I chose him like I did Nick. He was just always there. That’s what scared me. It was one thing inviting someone into your life, choosing to put your head on the train tracks and wait for imminent death, but this—this I had no control over. What he knew, and what he’d seen about me brought so much shame I could barely look him in the eyes. I tiptoed to the bathroom, glancing once more at the nightstand before shutting the door.

Someone could take your body, use it, beat it, treat it like it’s a piece of trash, but what hurts far worse than the actual physical attack is the darkness it injects into you. Rape works its way into your DNA. You aren’t you anymore, you’re the girl who was raped. And you can’t get it out. You can’t stop feeling like it’s going to happen again, or that you’re worthless, or that anyone could ever want you because you’re tainted and used. Someone else thought you were nothing, so you assume that everyone else will as well. Rape was a sinister destroyer of trust and worth and hope. I could fight cancer. I could cut chunks out of my body and inject poison into my veins to fight cancer. But I had no idea how to fight what that man took from me. And what he gave me—fear.

I didn’t look at my body when I undressed and stepped into the shower. It wouldn’t be me in that mirror. Over the last few months my eyes had emptied out, become hollow. When I happened upon my reflection somewhere, it hurt. I stood with my back to the water, like Isaac told me, and my eyes rolled back in my head. This was my first shower since the surgery. The nurses had given me a sponge bath, and one had even washed my hair in the little bathroom. She’d pushed a chair right up against the rim of the sink and had me bend my head back while she massaged little bottles of shampoo and conditioner into my hair. I let the water run over me for at least ten minutes before I had the nerve to reach up and soap the empty place below my collar bone. I felt…nothing.

When I was finished, patted dry and dressed in pajama pants, I called Isaac upstairs. Some of my steri-strips had come loose. I stood quietly as he worked to fit new ones on, my wet hair dripping down my back, my eyes closed. He smelled like rosemary and oregano. I wondered what he was making downstairs. When he was done, I slipped on a shirt and turned my back to him while I buttoned up the front of it. When I turned back around Isaac was holding the hairbrush I’d tossed on the bed. I’d been unsure of how to lift my arms high enough to work out the tangles. Pouring shampoo on my head had been one thing, brushing felt like an impossible feat. He gestured to the stool in front of my vanity.

“You’re so strange,” I said, once I was seated. I was working hard to keep my eyes on his reflection and not look at my face.

He glanced down at me, his strokes gentle and even. His fingernails were square and broad; there was nothing messy or ugly about his hands.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re brushing my hair. You don’t even know me, and you’re in my house brushing my hair, cooking me dinner. You were a drummer and now you’re a surgeon. You hardly ever blink,” I finished.

His eyes looked so sad by the time I finished that I regretted saying it. He ran the brush through my hair one last time before setting it on the vanity.

“Are you hungry?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded. I stood and let him lead me out of my room.

I glanced once more at my nightstand before I followed him to the food.

People lie. They use you and they lie, all the while feeding you bullshit about being loyal and never leaving you. No one can make that promise, because life is all about seasons, and seasons change. I hate change. You can’t rely on it, you can only rely on the fact that it will happen. But before it does, and before you learn, you feel good about their stupid, bullshit promises. You choose to believe them, because you need to. You go through a warm summer where everything is beautiful and there are no clouds—just warmth, warmth, warmth. You believe in a person’s permanence because humans have a tendency to stick to you when life is good. I call them honey summers. I’ve had enough honey summers in life to know that people leave you when winter comes. When life frosts you over and you’re shivering and layering on as much protection as you can just to survive. You don’t even notice it at first. The cold makes you too numb to see clearly. Then all of a sudden you look up and the snow is starting to melt, and you realize you spent the winter alone. That makes me mad as hell. Mad enough to leave people before they left me. That’s what I did with Nick. That’s what I tried to do with Isaac. Except he wouldn’t leave. He stayed all winter.

The seasons split at the seams: spring, summer, fall and winter. I’ve always pictured them as giant sacks filled with air and color and smell. When it’s time for one season to be over, the next seasons splits open and pours over the world, drowning its tired and waning predecessor with its strength.

Winter was over. Spring split and burst forth, spilling warm air and bright pink trees all over Washington. The sky was blue, and Isaac was trimming back the bushes in front of my house. A branch caught my arm the week before as I was walking to my front door and made me bleed. Isaac thought I cut myself. I could see the way he examined it. When he deemed my wound to be too curvy to come from a knife’s blade, he went searching for shears in my garage. Normally I hired a landscaping company to do the yard work, but here was my doctor, hacking away at my little spruce trees.

I watched him through the window, flinching every time his arms flexed and the shears took a new branch in their mouth. If he accidentally hacked off a finger I’d be responsible. There were leaves and branches littered around his tennis shoes. I was never really hot enough in Washington to be dripping with sweat, but Isaac was damp and exhausted. You couldn’t tell Isaac not to do something. He didn’t listen. But, winter was over and I was tired of being his project. He was like a fixture here. On my couch, in my kitchen, trimming my hedges. The air was warm and the change had come. Nick used to tell me I was a daughter of winter—that the grey streak in my hair proved it. He said when the seasons changed, I changed. For the first time I think he was right.

“When are you going home?” I asked when he came inside. He was washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

“In a few minutes.”

“No, I mean for good. When are you going home and staying home?”

He dried his hands, took his time doing it.

“Are you ready for me to?”

That made me so angry. He always answered my questions with a question. Infuriating. I wasn’t a child. I could take care of myself.

“I never asked you to be here in the first place.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“Well, it’s time for you to leave.”

“Is it?”

He walked straight at me. I braced myself, but at the very last second he veered to the left and breezed right past where I was standing. I closed my eyes as the air that he stirred wrapped around me. I had the strangest thought. The strangest. You’re never going to smell him again.

I was not a smell person. It was my least favorite sense. I didn’t light candles, or wander into a bakery, drawn in by the scent of the bread. Smell was just another sense that I wrestled into my white room. I didn’t use it, I didn’t care about it. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. But … I was going to miss Isaac’s smell. Isaac was smell. That was his sense. He smelled like spices and the hospital. I could smell his skin, too. He just had to be a few feet away from me and I could catch the smell of his skin.

“Isaac.” My voice was full of conviction, but when he turned to face me, hands in pockets, I didn’t know what to say. We stared at each other. It was awful. It was painful.

“Senna, what do you want?”

I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music.

“I don’t know.”

He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to.

“Senna…”

He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another.

His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone.

“Goodbye, Isaac.”

I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything.

Seven days after he walked backwards out of my house I went to the mailbox and on my way back, found a CD on my windshield. I clutched it to my chest for an hour before I slipped it into my stereo. It was an intense crescendo of lyrics and drums and harp and everything he was feeling—and I was, too. The most remarkable thing was that I was feeling.

It ripped at me until I wanted to gasp for breath. How could music know what you were feeling? How could it help you name it? I went to my closet. There was a box on my top shelf. I pulled it down and ripped off the lid. There was a red vase. Bright. Brighter than blood. My father sent it to me when my first book was published. I thought it was terrible—so bright it hurt my eyes. Now, my eyes were drawn to the color. I carried it to my white room and set it on the desk. Now there was blood everywhere.

I searched for a song for days. I was new to the wonders of iTunes. I went back to Florence Welch. There was something about the intensity of her. I found it. I didn’t know how to transfer it to one of those generic CD’s he used. But I found out. Then I drove to the hospital, the disk on my lap the whole time. I stood for a long time next to his car. This was a bold move. It was color. I didn’t know I had any color. I put the brown envelope on his windshield, and hoped for the best.

His songs reminded me of swimming, which somehow I’d forgotten.

He didn’t come right away. He probably wouldn’t have come at all if he hadn’t seen me at the hospital a few weeks later. I’d gone to sign some of the financial paperwork for my bill. Insurance crap. I only saw him briefly—a few seconds, tops. He was with Dr. Akela. They had been walking down the hall together, their identical white coats differentiating them from the other humans milling around the nurses’ station—two demi-gods in a sea of humans. I froze when I saw him, felt a feeling only drugs can give you. He was headed for the elevator, same as me. Oh great, this is going to suck. If there were people in the elevator I could scoot to the back and hide. I waited hopefully, but when the doors slid open the only people inside were on the poster advertisement for erectile dysfunction. We should do this more often, the slogan said. A handsome, athletic couple in their late forties, woman looking coy. I jumped in and hit the lobby button with my fist. Close! It did. Thankfully, it did, but before the doors sealed shut Isaac appeared in the gap. For a second it looked like he was going to hold a hand between the doors, force them to open. He drew back instead, the shock sketched around his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting to see me today. We should do this more often, I thought. It all happened in a dizzy three seconds. The time it takes for you to blink, blink and blink. But I didn’t blink, and neither did he. We locked into a three second staring contest. We couldn’t have said any more in those three seconds.