Mud Vein (17 page)

She didn’t stop to look around when she walked through the corridor that connected my foyer to the rest of the house. I had several pictures hanging on my walls—art and some family stuff. Normally women stopped to examine each one. I always thought they did it to ease their nerves. She took off her jacket and dropped it on the floor. Puddles formed around it as the rainwater skirted off. She was an odd bird. She walked right to the kitchen like she’d been there a hundred times before, stopping in front of my beat-up Mr. Coffee. She pointed to the cabinet above it, and I nodded. She chose a Dr. Seuss mug—smart girl. I tended to stick to the Walt Whitman with the chip on the rim. I watched her lift the pot from the warmer and pour without looking. She was staring out my window. Right when the liquid reached the rim of the mug, her hand automatically pulled back. I breathed a sigh of relief. She had the weight and timing perfected in that strange little head of hers. When she was done, she leaned back against the counter and looked at me expectantly.

“So, the other day…”

“What?” I said. “You’re the one that just left.”

“It wasn’t the right day.”

What the hell type of thought was that?

“And today is the right day?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I just felt like coming, I guess.”

She ambled over and sat across from me at the worn dinette I’d taken through three relationships. If I ended up with this girl I was going to buy a new table. I’d had sex on it too many times for it to be relationship kosher.

“This is a stupid world,” she said, and traced her finger along the edge of the table like she was reading brail.

I waited for her to go on but she didn’t. My forehead was creased. I felt the skin wrinkling against itself. She was sipping her coffee, already thinking about something else.

“Do you ever have a complete thought?”

She seriously considered my question and languidly took another sip. “I have many.”

“Finish the last one then.”

“I don’t remember what it was.”

She drank the rest of her coffee, then stood up to leave.

“See you Tuesday,” she said, heading for the door.

“What’s Tuesday?” I called after her.

“Dinner at your house. I don’t eat pork.”

I heard the screen slam behind her. Max raced for the door, barking, his nails clicking against the tile as he scrambled past me. I leaned back in my chair, smiling. I didn’t eat pork either. Except bacon, of course. Everyone eats bacon.

She showed up on Tuesday, right at six. I had no idea when to expect her, so I made sushi with the salmon I’d bought that morning from the market. I was busy wrapping my rolls in seaweed when she let herself in. I heard the screen door slam and Max’s manic barking.

She slid a bottle of whiskey across the counter.

“Most people bring wine,” I said.

“Most people are pussies.”

I choked on my laugh.

“What’s your name?”

“Brenna. What’s yours?”

“You already know my name.”

It was mostly true. She knew my pen name.

“Your real name,” she said.

“It’s Nick Nissley.”

“So much better than John Karde. Who are you hiding from?”

She unscrewed the lid from the Jack and drank straight from the bottle.

“Everyone.”

“Me, too.”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye as I poured soy sauce into two ramekins. She was young, much younger than me. What did she have to hide from? Probably an ex-boyfriend. Nothing serious. Just a guy who didn’t want to let go, most likely. I had some exes who probably wanted to hide from me. It was a shallow thought, because if this woman was really that simple, she wouldn’t have struck my interest. I saw her standing still and quiet, and she caused movement in my brain. I’d already written over sixteen thousand words since she’d walked with me to my house and then disappeared. A feat, considering I’d been claiming writer’s block for the last year of my life.

No, if this woman said she was running away, she was.

“Brenna,” I said that night as we lay in my bed.

“Mmmm.”

I said it again, tracing a finger along her arm.

“Why do you keep saying my name?”

“Because it’s beautiful. I’ve known Brianna’s, but never a Brenna.”

“Well, congratulations to you.” She rolled off the bed and reached for her skirt. That skirt had been what started it all. I see a skirt and I want to know what’s underneath it.

“Where are you going?”

The corner of her mouth lifted. “Do I look like the kind of girl who sleeps over on the first date?”

“No ma’am.”

She fished around on the floor for the last of her clothes, and then I walked her to the door.

“Can I take you home?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to know where I live.”

I scratched my head. “But you know where I live.”

“Exactly,” she said. She pushed up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth.

“Tastes like a
New York Times Bestseller
,” she said. “Goodnight, Nick.”

I watched her go and felt conflicted. Did I really just let a woman walk out of my house in the middle of the night and not take her home? I hadn’t seen a car. My mother would have a coronary. I knew so little about her, but there was no question that she wouldn’t take well to me galloping after her on my imaginary steed. And why the hell didn’t she drive? I walked back into the kitchen and started cleaning up our dinner plates. We had only made it through half of the sushi before I leaned across the table and kissed her. She hadn’t even acted surprised, just dropped her chopsticks and kissed me back. The rest of our night was impressively graceful. I credit her with that. She undressed me in the kitchen and made me wait to take her clothes off until we reached the bedroom. Then she made me sit on the edge of the bed while she undressed herself. Her back never touched the sheets. A true control freak.

I put the last of the dishes in the dishwasher and sat at my desk. My thoughts were coming at me fast. If I didn’t get them down, I’d lose them. I wrote ten thousand words before the sun came up.

A week later we took our first trip into Seattle together. It was her idea. We rode in my car since she said she didn’t have one. She looked nervous sitting in the front seat with her hands folded in her lap. When I asked her if she wanted me to put on the radio she said no. We ate Russian pastries from paper bags and watched the ferries cross the sound, shivering and standing as close as we could get to each other. Our fingers were so greasy when we were done we had to rinse them off in a water fountain. She laughed when I splashed water in her face. I could have written another ten thousand words just from hearing her laugh. We bought five pounds of prawns from the market and headed back to my house. I don’t know why the hell I asked for five pounds, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.

“You have one of these,” I said, as we were cleaning the prawns together at my kitchen sink. I ran my finger laterally along its body, pointing out the dark line that needed to be cleaned out. She frowned, looking down at the prawn she was holding.

“It’s called a mud vein.”

“A mud vein,” she repeated. “Doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“Maybe not to some people.”

She de-headed her shrimp with a flick of her knife and tossed it in the bowl.

“It’s your darkness that pulls me in. Your mud vein. But sometimes having a mud vein will kill you.”

She set down the knife and washed her hands, drying them on the back of her jeans.

“I have to go.”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t move until I heard the screen door slam. I wasn’t upset that my words had run her off. She didn’t like to be found out. But she’d be back.

Nick’s Book

She didn’t come back. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care. There were plenty of women. Plenty. There were women everywhere I looked. They all had skin and bones, and I’m sure some of them even had silver streaks in their hair. And if they didn’t have a silver streak in their hair I’m sure I could convince them to put it there. But there is something about the process of convincing yourself that you don’t care that just confirms even more that you do. Every time I passed the window in my kitchen I found myself looking up to see if she was standing in the rain, judging the weeds poking out of the driveway. I looked at those weeds so much that eventually I went out there in the rain and pulled them up one by one. It took me all afternoon and I got a nasty head cold. I was cleaning up my driveway for a woman.

I wanted to go look for her, but she’d told me little to nothing about herself. I could hold the five things she’d said in the palm of my hand, and still find plenty of room. Her name was Brenna. She came from the desert. She liked to be on top. She ate bread by pulling off little pieces and placing them in the center of her tongue. I had asked her questions, and she had skillfully turned them back on me. I had been eager to give her answers—too eager—and in the process I’d forgotten to collect answers from her. She had played me like a narcissistic trombone. Tooting, tooting, tooting my own horn. She must have been thinking what a fool I was the entire time.

Toot, toot.

I went back to the park, hoping to run into her again. But something told me that day in the park was a fluke. It wasn’t her day to be there, and it wasn’t mine. We met because we needed to, and I’d gone and screwed it up by telling her she had a mud vein. I thought she knew.
God.
If I had another chance with her, I’d never talk again. I’d just listen. I wanted to know her.

I sat in front of my laptop and wrote more words than had come to me in years—all at once. They just strung themselves together and I felt like a writing god. I had to have more of this woman. I’d write a library full of books if I had a year with her. Imagine a lifetime. She was meant for me. I cleaned out my weeds, I cleaned out my closets, I bought a new table and chairs for my kitchen. I finished my book. E-mailed it to my editor. I lingered some more at my kitchen window, industriously washing and rewashing my dishes.

It was Christmas before I found her again. Actual Christmas—the day of tinsel and turkey and colorful paper wrapped around goodies we don’t want or need. I have a mother and a father and twin sisters with rhyming names. I was on my way to their house for Christmas dinner when I saw her jogging along the barren sidewalk. She was headed for the lake, her fluorescent sneakers blurring beneath her. She was a flash of speed. Her legs were chorded with muscle. I’d bet she could outrun a deer if she tried. I sped up and pulled into the empty lot of an Indian restaurant about half a mile ahead of her. I could smell the curries seeping from the building: green and red and yellow. I hopped out of my car and crossed the street, planning to cut her off before she reached the lake. She would have to go through me to get to the trail. I looked bolder than I felt. She could tell me to go to hell.

By the time she saw me it was too late to pretend she hadn’t. Her pace slowed until she was bent at the knees in front of me. I watched the way her back rose and fell. She was breathing hard.

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “Sorry for interrupting your run.”

She glared at me from her bent position, confirming my guess that she didn’t want to see me.

“I didn’t mean to upset you the last time you were at my house,” I said. “If you’d given me the chance to apologize I wo—”

“You didn’t upset me,” she said. And then, “I finished my book.”

Finished her book?
I gaped. “In the three weeks I haven’t seen you? I thought you’d barely started.”

“Yes, and now I’ve finished it.”

I opened and closed my mouth. It took me a year to complete a manuscript, and that didn’t include the time I spent on research.

“So when you just left like that…?”

“I knew what I had to write,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Why didn’t you say something? Call me?” I felt like a clingy high school girl.

“You’re an artist. I thought you’d understand.”

I was wrestling with my pride to tell her that I didn’t. I’d never in my life run out on dinner to finish a story. I’d never felt even a chord of passion strong enough to drive me to do that. I didn’t tell her because I was afraid of what she would think. Me—New York Times Bestseller of over a dozen sappy novels.

“What did you write about?” I asked.

“My mud vein.”

I got a chill.

“You wrote about your darkness? Why would you do that?”

There was nothing pretentious about her. No show, no thriving to impress me. She didn’t even try to guard the ugly truth, which made every one of her words feel like a cold dousing of water to the face.

“Because it was the truth,” she said, so matter of fact. And I fell in love with her. She didn’t have to try to be anything. And everything that she was was something that I was not.

“I missed you,” I said. “Can I read it?”

She shrugged. “If you want to.”

I watched a trickle of sweat wind down her neck and disappear between her breasts. Her hair was damp, her face flushed, but I wanted to grab her and kiss her.