Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

I understood. I knew what it was like to be bound.

“I’m this now,” he said. He used two fingers to point to the words on his forearm.

Die to Save

My eyes go to his other arm.

Save to Die

“What does that mean?”

Isaac looked at me closely, like he didn’t know if he should tell me.

“A part of me had to die in order to save myself.” My eyes move to his left arm.

Save to Die

He saved lives to die to himself. To keep the bad part dead he had to be constantly reminded of the frailty of life. Being a doctor was Isaac’s only salvation.

God.

“What’s the difference?” I asked him. “Between the love of your life, and your soulmate?”

“One is a choice, and one is not.”

I’d never thought of love as a choice. Rather, it seemed like the un-choice. But if you stayed with someone who was self-destructing and chose to keep loving, I suppose it could be a choice.

I waited for him to go on. To explain how I fit in.

“There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye,” he said. “Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings.” As if to make his point, his finger traced a black ribbon that ran through my horse’s mane. “Maybe the chances that you’ll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you’re lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it’s not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.”

He was talking about soulmate polygamy. How could you take something like that seriously?

“You’re a fool,” I breathed. “You don’t make any sense.”

I felt angry with him. I wanted to lash out and make him see how stupid he was for believing in such flimsy ideals.

“I make too much sense for you,” he said.

I shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it. The distance between us grew for just a second as his left foot took a step backward to keep his balance. Then I launched myself at him, throwing him against the painted horse at his back. Fury in fists. I pounded at his chest and slapped at his face while he stood and let me. How dare he. How dare he.

Every blow I delivered set my anger to a lower simmer. I hit him until it was gone and I was mostly spent. Then I slid down, my hands touching the metal diamonds of the carousel floor as my back rested against the hooves of the horse I’d ridden.

“You can’t fix me,” I said, looking at his knees.

“I don’t want to.”

“I’m mangled,” I said. “On the inside and the outside.”

“And yet I love you.”

He leaned down and I felt his hands on my wrists. I let him pull me up. I was wearing a black fleece that had a zipper down the length of it. Isaac reached for my neck; grabbing the top of the zipper, he pulled it down to my waist. I was so shocked I didn’t have time to react. Minutes ago he had been bare-chested, now I was. If I had nipples they would have peaked in the frigid air. If.

I am just scars and pieces of a woman. Isaac has seen me like this. In a sense he made me like this, with his scalpel and steady hands, but I still reached up to cover my chest. He stopped me. Reaching for my waist he lifted me up until I was sitting sideways in the saddle of my pierced horse. He opened my fleece the rest of the way, then he kissed the skin where my breasts used to be. He kissed softly, over the scars. My heart—surely he could feel my pounding heart. My nerve endings had been damaged, but I felt his warm lips and his breath move across my skin. I made a sound. It wasn’t a real sound. It was air and relief. Every breath I’d ever caught came whooshing out of me at once.

Isaac kissed up my neck, behind my ear, my chin, the corner of my mouth. I turned my head when he tried to kiss the other corner, and we met in the middle. Soft lips and his smell. He’d kissed me once before in the foyer of my house, it had been a drumbeat. This kiss was a sigh. It was relief and we were so drunk from it that we clung to each other like we’d been waiting for a kiss like this our whole, entire lives. His hands wrapped around my ribcage, inside of my fleece. Mine were holding his face. He pulled me off the horse. I steered him toward the only bench on the carousel. It was a chariot, curved with a leather seat. Isaac sat. I sat on his lap.

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I said. I pulled down the zipper on his pants. I was determined. I was sure. He didn’t move his hands from my waist. He didn’t speak. He waited as I lifted myself up, pulling off my jeans and climbing back onto his lap. I left my panties on. His pants were pushed mid thigh. We were clothed and we were not. Isaac let me do everything, and that’s the way I needed it to be; half concealed, in the cold air, with the ability to climb off and leave if I wanted to. I felt less than I thought I would. I also felt more. There was no fear, just the vibrations of something loud that I didn’t quite understand. He kissed me while we moved. Then once, when it was over. The old man never came back. We zipped our clothes, and walked back up the hill chilled and in a daze. There were no more words between us. The next day I filed a restraining order against him.

And that was the last of Isaac Asterholder and me.

I try to remember sometimes what his last words to me had been. If he said something as we walked up that hill, or on the car ride home. But all I remember was his presence and his silence. And the slight echo of, and yet I love you.

And yet he loved me.

And yet I couldn’t love him back.

When I wake Isaac isn’t there. I weigh my panic against the pain. I can only focus on one at a time. I choose my pain because it won’t loosen its grip on my brain. I am familiar with heart pain—intense, excruciating heart pain, but I’ve never experienced a physical pain quite this exquisite. Heart pain and physical pain are only comparable in that neither relinquish their hold on you once they get rolling. The heart releases a dull ache when it is broken; the pain in my leg so acute and sharp it’s hard to breathe.

I wrestle with the pain for a minute … two, before I discard it. I broke my body and there is no way to fix it. I don’t care. I need to find Isaac. And that’s when I think it: Oh God. What if the zookeeper came while I was passed out and did something to him? I roll slightly onto my side until I have some leverage, and try to drag myself up using my good leg. That’s when I see my leg. The lower half of my pants has been cut away. The place where the bone was sticking out has been wrapped in thin gauze. I feel liquid running down to my foot as I move. I hold my hand over my mouth and breathe through my nose. Who was here? Who did this? The fire is burning. The fire I built would have given up the ghost by now. Someone had built it back up, fed it new logs.

I wobble where I’m standing. I need light. I need to—

“Sit down.”

I start, jarred by the voice. I twist my neck around as far as it can go.

“Isaac,” I cry out. I start to teeter, but he darts over and catches me. Darts is a strong word, I think. For a minute it looks like he is going to fall with me. I lift my hand up, touch his face. He looks terrible. But he’s alive and walking. He lowers me gently to the ground.

“Are you okay?”

He shakes his head. “Alive’s not enough for you?”

“You shouldn’t be,” I hiss. “I thought you were going to die.” He doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead he walks over to a pile of something I can’t see in the dark.

“Look who’s talking,” he says, softly.

“Isaac,” I say again. “The table…” All of a sudden I’m feeling hot … weak. The adrenaline, which carried me up the well, up the stairs, up the ladder, has run out.

He walks over to me, his arms full. “I know,” he says, dryly. “I saw.”

He’s looking at my leg as he sets things down next to me. He’s lining them up, double-checking everything. But every few seconds he looks at my leg again like he doesn’t know how to fix it.

“Is that how this happened?”

“I jumped down the table,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. The asthma—”

The corners of his mouth pull tight. “You had an asthma attack? While this happened?” I nod. I can only see his face with the dim light of the fire, but it looks as if it’s paled.

“Your tibia is fractured. Your leg must have bent at just the right angle when you fell to cause the break.”

“When I jumped,” I said.

“When you fell.”

He’s working with his hands, opening packages. I hear little rips, the clatter of metal. I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear little bursts of air, I think it’s Isaac, but then I realize that I’m panting.

He looks straight at me. “You must have gotten my body temperature back up. You did everything right.”

“What?” I’m dizzy. I want to hurl again.

“You saved me life,” he says. He glances up at me at the same time I crack open an eye.

“I need to move you.”

“No!” I grab his arm. “No, please. Just let me stay here.” I’m panting. The thought of moving makes me sick. “There is nowhere to move me, Isaac. Just do it here.”

Do what here? Was he really planning to operate on the floor of the attic room?

“There’s not enough light,” I say. The pain is intensifying. I’m hoping he’ll forget this whole thing and let me die. He reaches round his back and brings out the flashlight from downstairs. When I was a little girl, my mother would have chided me for reading under that light, now Isaac is planning on operating with it.

“What are you going to do?” I do a quick survey of what he’s brought with him. There are six rolls of what look like bandages, alcohol, a bucket of water, a needle and thread, a bottle of tequila. There are some other things but he’s placed them on a baking sheet and covered them with what looks like a bandage.

“Fix your leg.”

“Where’s the morphine?” I joke. Isaac props my upper body under pillows he gets from the bed so that I’m in a half sitting position. Then he unscrews the lid from the tequila and holds it to my mouth.

“Get drunk,” he says without looking at me. I chug it.

“Where did you find all of this?” I take a couple of deep breaths letting what I’ve already swallowed settle, and then I lift the bottle back to my mouth. I want to hear how he found my discovery. He speaks while the cactusy taste of tequila burns its way to my stomach in small gulps.

“Where do you think?”

I bite my lip. My mind is numb from the alcohol. I wipe away what’s running down my chin.

“We were starving, and all along…”

“I have to operate,” he says. Is it my imagination or are there beads of sweat on his forehead? The light is so vague it could be a trick of the eyes.

He screws the cap off of a bottle of clear liquid and before I can open my mouth to stop him, he uncovers the gauze and pours it over my wound. I brace myself to scream, but the pain isn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

“You could have warned me!” I hiss at him, rearing up.

“Hush,” he says. “It’s just saline. I need to clear away the dead tissue … irrigate the wound.”

“And then…?”

“Set the bone. It’s been too long already … the risk of infection … your soft tissue…” He’s mumbling things. Words I don’t hold the meaning to: debridement … osteomyelitis. He reaches up and wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve. I’m going to have to set your bone. I’m not an orthopedic surgeon, Senna. We don’t have the equipment…”

I stare at him as he leans back on his haunches. He has a face full of scruff, and a head of hair that is standing every which way. He looks so different from the doctor that operated on me last time. The cuts around his mouth deepen as he stares into my wound. He’s more scared than I am, I think. This is his job, his profession—saving lives. He is an expert at saving lives. Yet, this is out of his area of expertise. There is no one to consult with. Isaac Asterholder is positioned at a keyboard instead of the drums, and he doesn’t quite know where to put his hands.

“It’s okay.” I sound peculiarly calm. Detached. “Do what you can.”

He reaches for the flashlight, holds it right above the gash.