Mud Vein(81)

“You didn’t know how to come see me?” I ask, partially amused.

He looks at my eyes, in them. So sadly.

“It’s okay,” I say, slowly. “I get it.”

“What do we do now?” he asks. I don’t know if he’s asking how we are supposed to live, or how we are supposed to finish this conversation. I don’t ever know what to do.

“We live then we leave,” I say. “Do the best we can.”

He runs his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. It puffs out and settles back down. It reminds me of when you’re baking a cake and you open the oven too early. I toy with the jagged edges of my hair, glancing up at him every so often.

“Are things good? With you and Daphne?” I have no right to ask him, none at all. Especially considering that everything Elgin did was because of me.

“No,” he says. “How can they be?” He shakes his head. “She has been supportive. I can’t complain there, but it was like they gave me a month and then they wanted the old me back. They being my family,” he tells me. “But I don’t know how to be him. I’m different.”

Isaac was always so honest with his emotions. I wish I could be like that. I feel as if I need to say something.

“I don’t have anyone to disappoint,” I confess. “I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder.”

He looks startled. His black scrubs wrinkle as he leans toward me. “You’re loved,” he says.

Love is a possession; it’s something that you own from the layers of people in your life. But if my life were a cake it would be un-layered, unbaked, missing ingredients. I isolated myself too soundly to own anyone’s love.

“I love you,” says Isaac. “From the moment you ran out of the woods, I’ve loved you.”

I don’t believe him. He’s a nurturer by profession and by person. He saw something broken and needed to heal it. He loves the process.

As if reading my thoughts he says, “You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you’ll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a sad thing.”

“How do you know?” I ask, brimming with anger. “It’s a big deal to say those words. How do you know that you love me?”

He pauses for a long time. Then he says, “I was offered a way out.”

“A way out? A way out of what?” But I spit that out too soon. It’s like a stone that drops between us. I wait for the thud, but it never comes because my brain loses its footing and the room tips and turns.

“What do you mean?”

“On the morning after we opened the door, I found a note in the shed with sleeping pills and a syringe. It said that I could leave. All I had to do was put you to sleep, inject myself, and I would wake up at home. The stipulations were that I could never talk about you. Not to police, not to anyone. I had to tell them that I had an emotional breakdown and ran away. If I told anyone about you, she said she would kill you. If I left you there, I could go home. I threw them over the side of the cliff.”

“Oh my God.”

I stand but my legs can’t hold me. I sit again, burying my face in my hands. Saphira, what have you done?

When I look up, my soul is in my face, twisting my features. It’s angry and sad.

“Isaac. Why would you do that?” My voice cracks. I know why Saphira did it. She knew he wouldn’t leave me. She knew eventually he would tell me, and that in telling me, I would see everything clearly. I would see…

“Because I love you.”

My face goes slack.

“I didn’t leave you because I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to.” There is a pause and then, “Not unless you make me go. And if I’d known you better back then, I wouldn’t have left you. I thought it was what you needed. But you didn’t know yourself. I knew you. You needed me, and I let you push me out. And for that I’m very sorry.”

He presses his lips together, and the vein in his head pops.

“I got another chance, too,” he says. “She gave me another chance not to leave. So I took it.”

“Are you saying Saphira—”

“I’m not saying anything about Saphira,” he cuts me off. “She did what she did. We can’t change that. Life happens. Sometimes crazy people kidnap you and make you a part of their personal psychological experiment.”

The noise that comes from my throat is part laugh, part groan.

“She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.”

Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things.

I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did. We almost died because of what she did. But it changed me. The change that Isaac started, before I filed a restraining order to keep him out, Saphira Elgin finished in that house in the snow.

A part of me is grateful to her, and it makes me feel sick to admit that.





On the day I am scheduled to leave, I find a brown envelope on my windshield. I briefly think that I received a parking ticket somewhere, and failed to notice it until now. But when I lift my wiper and pull it away the paper is crisp, not something that’s been sitting outside in the wet, Seattle air. It’s also heavyish. My universe tilts. I spin in a circle looking for him in the trees and down the driveway. I know he’s not here. I know that. But he was, and I can feel him.