Tarryn Fisher - Mud Vein

His face is a cocktail of woebegone and shock. “But … I thought … I thought you had the surgery.”

I never told Nick about the surgery I had to remove my breasts, but my agent and publicist knew. Things get around in the writing world.

I was staining Nick’s perfect, white idealism. Cancer happened, sure. But in Nick’s world you beat it. Then you lived happily ever after.

“I have it again. It came back. Stage four.”

He starts fumbling with sentences that he never finishes. I hear the words “treatment” and “chemotherapy” and “fight” and my heart grows tired.

“Shut up,” I say.

Nick’s glow is an ephemeral phenomenon. He’s already looking like the same dumb fuck who thought I was too dark for his white room.

“It’s too late for that. The cancer metastasized. While I was there. It came back. It’s in my bones.”

“There has to be something…”

He looks so terribly forlorn.

“You’re trying to save me. But I’m not staying alive to be your muse.”

“Why are you being so cruel?”

I laugh. A good belly laugh, too.

“Charm is clothed in narcissism, you know that? Get out of my house.”

“Brenna…”

“Out!” I send my fists into his chest. “That’s not my name anymore!”

“You’re acting crazy,” he insists. “You can’t do this alone. Let me help you.”

I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice.

“I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.”

He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt.

“You see this,” I say, throwing my arms up, “this is you. You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.”

He’s artist enough to understand me.

“What do you want me to say? I’m here now.”

That’s it. That’s all he has to say and the truth hits me like an icy wind. My hair rises on its hackles. I feel flushed and bereaved.

I grab my head at the temples and squeeze with the heels of my hands. I am petrified. Never in my life have I been this afraid. Not of the cancer, not of being alone, not of my future or of my past. I am afraid of never seeing Isaac again. Of never having him hold me when life is so absolute in its unfairness that all I can do is scream. I turn to Nick. Nick, who is here now.

“Now?” I whisper, incredulous. “Now? Where were you when I was raped, or when I had my breasts cut off? Where were you when someone stole me away in the middle of the night and starved me in the middle of the goddamn arctic tundra?” I cut off the space between us and pound three hard times on his chest. “Where. Did. You. Go.”

He’s shaking. I’m dropping things on him like a hailstorm, but I don’t give a fuck. I even say things like fuck now, because I don’t want to waste another second on the white room way I lived my life. He’s here now. But, Isaac was here then … and then … and then … and then.

“I was so hung up on you that I missed it,” I say. I’m shaking so bad. I’m shaking worse than Nick, who looks like the weak, trembling leaf he’s always been. I want to crush him between my fingertips.

“What did you miss, Brenna?” I don’t like the way he says my name.

“Ahhh … agh…” I bend at the waist. Succulent, heavy tears drop right out of my eyes and onto the floor. Splat.

I cry now, I think. All the time. And it’s so much fun.

“I missed my chance,” I say, standing up straight and crushing the tears with the toe of my shoe. “With my soulmate.”

Nick looks confused, then it comes. He sees his replacement, the guy locked in a house with his ex-muse.

“The doctor?” he asks, narrowing his eyes.

“Isaac. His name is Isaac.”

“I’m your soulmate. I wrote that book for you.” He looks like he’s trying to convince himself, bobbing Adam’s apple and all.

“You don’t know the first thing about what it is to have a soulmate.”

I feel such a pull toward Isaac I wonder if he’s having this same fight with Daphne.

“It’s time for you to leave,” I say. It feels so good to say it. Because this time, I’m not even going to cry.

Before I shower, before I eat, before I crawl into bed and sleep off my fourteen-month nightmare, I call a cab. I have him pull into my garage, then I stand next to his window and check him out. Small guy, early twenties, bald by choice. I can see the shadows of where his hair should be. He’s fighting that receding hairline with a shaved head. Defiant and a little ballsy, because we can all see why he’s doing it. His eyes are wide and shifty; either the news vans freaked him out, or he’s having withdrawals. He’ll do, I think.

I climb into the front seat. “Do you mind?” I ask. But I don’t really care if he says no. I buckle my seatbelt. “Take me to one of those stores with the lumber and the tools.”

He spits out a couple options and I shrug. “Whatever.”

We pull past the news vans and I smile at them. I don’t know why except that it’s kind of funny. I used to be famous for my books, now I’m famous for something else. It kind of constipates your mind; being famous for something that someone else did to you.

I make my cabbie wait while I run into the home fix-it store he chose. The building is expansive. I walk quickly past the lighting and the doorknobs until I find what I am looking for. I am there for thirty-five minutes while two employees see to my order. I have no purse or credit cards, just the wad of hundred dollar bills I shoved into my back pocket before I left the house. I kept them in an old cookie tin in my pantry for one day; a rainy day, a needy day, a day I just felt like blowing a wad of cash. Now there were only a few days left, so I figured it was time to spend. I toss three of the bills at the cashier and wheel my purchases out to the cab. I won’t let him help me. I stack everything in the trunk, and climb back into the front seat.

My legs bounce all the way back. Flashes, doors, questions hurled up my driveway. Once again, I have him pull into the garage. He helps me this time, stacking everything just inside the door that leads into the foyer. I hand him the rest of the wad from my cookie tin.

“For one day,” I say. His eyes bulge. He thinks I’m crazy, but hey, I’m handing him lots of money. He leaves before I can change my mind. I watch him pull out and quickly close the garage door. I grab an armload of my purchases and nudge the stereo with my toe as I walk past it. The first song Isaac ever gave me kicks on. It’s loud. I make it louder until it’s pounding through the house. I’m sure they can hear it outside: a one-man party.

I carry everything to the white room and pry off the lids of the cans with a butter knife: crimson, yellow, cobalt, bubblegum pink, deep purple—like a bruise—and three different greens to match the summer leaves. I stick my hand in the red paint first, and rub my fingertips together. It falls heavy, spilling on my clothes and the floor where I am kneeling. I scoop up more, ‘til my hands are brimming. Then I throw it—a handful of red paint at my white, white wall. Color explodes. It spreads. It runs. I take more—I take all of the colors—and I stain my white room. I stain it with all the colors of Isaac, as Florence Welch sings me her song.

It’s then that my phone rings. I don’t pick it up, but when I listen to the message later that night, Detective soft s Garrison informs me that Saphira is dead. Dead by her own hand. Good, I think at first, but then my chest aches. He doesn’t tell me how she did it but something tells me she opened her own veins. Bled out. She liked her patients to bleed out their thoughts and feelings; she would have chosen to go that way. Saphira and her god-complex would never have tolerated being tried in a court of law. She thought people were stupid. It would have been beneath her to be judged. I call him the next morning. There would be no trial. He sounds disappointed when he tells me, but I feel relieved. It’s an end to the nightmare. I couldn’t have handled months and months of a trial. Wasting my last days seeking human justice. I think I forgive her for believing she was God, I’m not sure God will.

Garrison informs me that there is an ongoing investigation into Saphira’s accomplices. “Everyone we have questioned is shocked. She was well respected in the mental health community. No family in the country. No friends. She seems to have just snapped, lost touch with reality.”

Who has time for friends when you’re performing human experiments? I think.

“What about the blood on the books?” I ask. “Was it human?”

There is a long pause.

“The lab test indicated that it was animal blood. A ram or a goat, we can’t be a hundred percent sure. We found your books in her home, along with your case file from-”

“I figured,” I say quickly.

“There was something else,” he says. “We found the footage of your time in the house.”

I squeeze my eyes closed. “What are you going to do with it?”

“It’ll go into evidence,” he says.

“Good. No one will see it?”

“Not the media, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay.”

“There is one more thing…”

How many more things could there be?

“Saphira had an apartment in Anchorage. We think that’s how she got to you so quickly when Isaac was sick. She had been watching a recording of you and Doctor Asterholder. She was only able to see what was happening in the house when the power was on, and there was only sound in certain rooms. So there are gaps in the recordings. But, it was paused. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something about the context of what I was seeing.”

“What was it paused on?” I am breathless…sick. It never occurred to me that there were multiple cameras set up around the house.

“You holding a knife to Doctor Asterholder’s chest.”

I lick my lips. “He was holding a knife to his own chest,” I say. My mind is ripping through what exactly Saphira was trying to tell me.

“It was the moment I changed,” I say. “It was the reason she did what she did.”

I look for my mother’s book. I go the local bookstore and detail the plot to a wide-eyed girl of no more than eighteen behind the counter. She calls a manager to the front to help me. He looks at me earnestly while I repeat everything I just said to the girl. When I am finished, he nods like he knows just what I am talking about.

“The book I think you are talking about had a small run on the New York Times Bestsellers List,” he says. I raise my eyebrows to his back as he leads me to the rear of the store and pulls a book off the shelf. I don’t look at it as he hands it to me. I hold the weight of it in my hands and stare blankly at his face. I feel as if I’m about to see my mother face to face.

“You’re the writer, the one who—”

“Yes,” I say. “I’d like some privacy.”

He nods, and leaves me. I have a feeling he’s going to wherever managers go to tell everyone he knows that the kidnapped writer is here.

I take one of those breaths that make you burn on the inside, then I drop my head.

I see the cover—the words, the oranges and teals that make up the pattern of a woman’s dress. You can only see the back of her, but her arms are spread wide, her blonde hair cascading down her back. The Fall.

The fall of my mother. I wonder if she wrote this for me. Is that too much to ask? An explanation for your abandoned daughter … your china doll? My mother is a narcissist. She wrote this for herself, to feel better for leaving me. I flip open the cover and search for a picture on the dust jacket. There is none. I wonder if she’s still pretty. If she still wears flower skirts and headbands. She writes under the name Cecily Crowe. I grin. Her real name was Sarah Marsh. She hated the normalcy of it.

Cecily Crowe lives everywhere.

She does not believe in dogs or cats.

This is her first novel, and probably her last.

I close the book; slide it back into the space it came from. I have no desire to read it again, not even in order with page numbers. I got to know my mother in a discombobulated way. I am her china doll. She mourned me a little, but not enough. I can’t fault her for running—I’ve been running my entire life; bad blood, maybe. Or maybe she taught me, and someone taught her. I don’t know. We can’t blame our parents for everything. I don’t think I care anymore. It’s just the way it is. I walk out of the store. I put her to rest.