Mud Vein(58)

When did this happen? When did my thoughts shift to Isaac’s needs? I stare at the ceiling. That’s the way it happened with Nick. It started out with him loving me, him being obsessed with me; then, all of a sudden … osmosis.

The minute I started freely loving Nick he left me.





Three times a day Isaac makes a trip down to the well to get food and restock our wood. We use a bucket to relieve ourselves, and it’s his job to empty that too. He goes carefully. I can hear his steps creaking across the floorboards until he reaches the landing, and then the clomp, clomp, clomp on the stairs. I lose his sound once he’s down the well, but he’s never there for more than five minutes, except when he’s doing laundry or throwing our trash over the side of the cliff. Laundry consists of filling the bathtub with snow and soap and swishing the clothes around until you think they’re clean. We never had a shortage of soap, there are stacks of white bars, wrapped in a filmy white paper on the bottom shelf of the pantry. They smell like butter, and on more than one occasion when I was bent over with hunger I thought about eating them.

Isaac takes the smaller of the two flashlights—the one I found when I f*cked up my leg. He leaves me the big one. He leaves it right next to my bed and tells me not to use it. But as soon as I hear his socked feet on the stairs, my fingers reach down to find the switch that turns it on. I let the light flow. Sometimes I reach over and pass my hand across it, playing with the shadows. It’s a sad, sad thing when the highlight of your day becomes five minutes with a flashlight.

One day when Isaac comes back, I ask him why he doesn’t just bring everything up at once.

“I need the exercise,” he says.

After a week, he comes up the stairs with a handful of green bandages.

“There’s no infection that I can see around the wound. It’s healing.” I notice that he didn’t say, Healing well. “The bone could still become infected, but we can hope the penicillin will take care of that.”

“What’s that?” I ask, nodding toward his hands.

“I’m going to put your leg in a cast. Then I can move you to the bed.”

“What if the bone doesn’t fuse together properly?” I ask.

He’s quiet for a long time as he works with the supplies.

“It’s not going to heal properly,” he says. “You’ll most likely walk with a limp for the rest of your life. On most days, you’ll have pain.”

I close my eyes. Of course. Of course. Of course.

When I look up again, he’s cutting the toes off of a white sock. He fits it over my foot as gently as he can and pulls it up my leg. I force breath from my nostrils to keep from wailing. It must be one of his. The sock. The zookeeper didn’t give me any white socks. He didn’t give me anything white. Isaac does the same thing with a second sock, and then a third, until I have them lined from the middle of my foot to my knee. Then he takes one of the bandages from the bucket of water. It’s not a bandage, I realize. It’s rolls of a fiberglass cast.

He starts mid foot, rolling the cast around and around until it runs out. Then he plucks out a new roll and does it again. Over and over until he’s used all five rolls and my leg is fully cast. Isaac leans back to examine his work. He looks exhausted.

“Let’s give it some time to dry, then I’ll move you to the bed.”



We stay in the attic room, forgetting the rest of the house. Day after day … after day … after day.

I count the days we’ve lost. Days I’ll never get back. Two hundred and seventy-seven of them. One day I ask him to drum for me.

“With what?”

I can’t really see his face—it’s too dark—but I know that his eyebrows are raised and there is a trace of a smile on his lips. He needs this. I need this.

“Sticks,” I suggest. And then, “Please, Isaac. I want to hear music.”

“Music without words,” he says, softly. I shake my head, though he can’t see me do it.

“I want to hear the music you can make.”

I wish I could see his face. I want to see if he’s offended that I asked him to do something he hated giving up. Or maybe if he’s relieved to be asked. I just want to see his face. I do the strangest thing, then. I reach out and touch his face with my fingertips. His eyes close when I trace my way from his forehead, down over his eyes and around his lips. He’s serious. Always so serious. Dr. Isaac Asterholder. I want to meet the drummer, Isaac.



He disappears for an hour. When he comes back his arms are stacked with things I can’t make out in the dark. I sit up straighter in bed and my mind hums with excitement. He works in front of the fire so that he won’t have to use the flashlight. I watch him unload what he’s brought up with him: two buckets, one smaller than the other, a metal skillet and a metal pot, duct tape, rubber bands, a pencil and two sticks. The sticks look smooth—like real drumsticks. I wonder if he’s been carving them secretly while he disappears downstairs every day. I wouldn’t blame him. I’ve been wanting to carve my skin for days.

He is making things. I can’t tell what they are, but I hear the rip of the duct tape every few minutes. He swears a couple times. It’s a soundtrack: rriiiip … swear … bang … rriiiip … swear … bang.