Mud Vein(63)

God knows I didn’t want to be in love. It was cliché—men and women and their social conformities to celebrate love. Engagement pictures made me want to vomit—especially when they were taken on railroad tracks. I always pictured Thomas the Train rolling over them, his smiley blue face beaded with their blood. I didn’t want to want those things. Love was good enough, without the three-layered almond/fondant wedding cake and the sparkly blood diamonds encased in white gold. Just love. And I loved Nick. Hard.

Nick loved wedding cake. He told me so. He also told me that he’d like for us to have one someday. In that moment, my heart rate slowed, my eyes glazed and I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. It was pretty—because it was with Nick. But I hated it. It made me angry that he’d expect me to live that way. The way normal people lived.



“I don’t want to get married,” I told him, trying to control my voice. We used to have this game we’d play. As soon as we’d see each other, we’d dialogue the physical description of what the other person looked like. It was a writer’s game. He’d always start with, button nose, limpid eyes, full lips, freckles.

Now he was looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “Well, what do you want to do then?”

We were sitting on our knees in front of his coffee table, sipping warm sake and eating lo mein with our fingers.

“I want to eat with you, and f*ck and see things that are beautiful.”

“Why can’t we do that after the wedding?” he asked. He licked each of his fingers and then mine, and leaned back against the couch.

“Because I respect love too much to get married.”

“That’s bitter.”

I stared at him. Was he kidding?

“I don’t think I’m bitter just because I don’t want the same things you want.”

“We can come to a compromise. Be like Persephone and Hades,” he said.

I laughed. Too much sake. “You’re not brooding enough to be Hades, and unlike Persephone, I don’t have a mother.”

My mouth clamped shut and I started sweating. Nick’s head immediately tilted to the right. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and stood up, grabbing the containers of food and carrying them to the kitchen. He followed me in there. I wanted to kick him off my heels. Nick’s mother was still married to his father. Thirty-five years. And from what I’d seen they were happy, uncomplicated years. Nick was so well balanced it was ridiculous.

“Is she dead?”

He had to ask twice.

“To me.”

“Where is she?”

“Off being selfish somewhere.”

“Aha,” he said. “Do you want dessert?”

And that’s what I liked about Nick. He was only interested in what you were interested in. And I was not interested in my past. He liked that I was dark, but he didn’t know why. And he didn’t ask. He definitely didn’t understand. But for all of our differences he took me as I was. I needed that.



Until he didn’t. Until he said that I was an emotional fort. Until nothing about me came easy, and he grew tired of trying. Nick and his words. Nick and his promises of never-ending love. I believed them all and then he left me. Love comes slow, but God does it go fast. He was beautiful—then he was ugly. I esteemed him, then I esteemed him not.



Dr. Saphira Elgin had tried to teach me to control my anger. She wanted me to be able to pinpoint the source of it so I could rationalize my feelings. Talk myself down. I can never pinpoint the source. It runs around and around in my body without a point of origin.

I blew her off. I always blew her off. But now I try to pinpoint it. I’m angry because…

Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him. I was afraid of feeling brightly—afraid I would become used to the color and sounds and smells, and they would be taken from me. I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed. I wrote about women like that, I didn’t realize I was one. For years I believed that Nick left me because I failed him. I couldn’t be what he needed because I was empty and shallow. That’s what he insinuated.



“Why can’t you love wedding cake, Brenna?”



“Why can’t I take your darkness away?”



“Why can’t you be who I need?”



But, I didn’t fail Nick. He failed me. Love sticks, and it stays and it braves the bullshit. Like Isaac did. And I am mad at Isaac because he is all of that. And I am all of this. It’s irrational.





We finish our project—the page project, as we call it. In the end we have four piles and only three books: Mine, Nick’s, and the nameless book. The fourth pile is the thickest and the most confusing. I stack each one with care that is mostly habit, lining up the corners until none of the pages poke past each other. The problem is, there is nothing on the pages. Each one is bone white. I have the fleeting thought that the zookeeper wants me to write a new book, then Yul Brenner reminds me that my personal Annie Wilkes didn’t leave me a pen. Can’t write a book without a pen. I wonder if I can resuscitate the old Bic we used when we first woke up here.