Mud Vein (33 page)

Detective Garrison chooses that exact moment to come back. I want more time with her. I want more answers, but I know my time is up. He leads me to the door by my elbow. I look back at Saphira. She’s staring into space, serene.

“He would have died without you, too,” she says before the door closes. I want to ask her what she means, but the door swings closed. And that is the last time I ever see Saphira Elgin alive.

Detective Garrison is kind. I think this case is above his pay grade. He’s not sure what to do with me—so he tries to feed me doughnuts and sandwiches. I eat none of it, but I appreciate the sentiment. There are six people in the room with me; two of them leaning against the wall, the others sitting. I give them my statement. I tell a tape recorder what the last fourteen months looked like; each day, each hunger pain, each time I thought one of us would die. When I am finished the room is quiet. Detective Garrison is the first to clear his throat. That’s when I dare ask about Isaac. I’ve been too afraid up until now. Thinking his name alone hurts me. Hearing someone speak about him feels … wrong. He’s been with me for all this time. Now he’s not.

“Dr. Elgin got him over the Canadian border and took him to a hospital in Victoria. Took him is an ambitious word,” he says. “She dropped him outside the Emergency room and drove off. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours before he finally started to come out of it. He grabbed a nurse by the arm and managed to say your name. The nurse recognized your name right away due to the media buzz you caused when you disappeared. She notified the police. By the time they got there Isaac was able to talk. He told them you were in a cabin somewhere near a cliff, but couldn’t give them much more than that.”

I am quiet.

“So he’s okay?”

“Yes, he is. He’s with his family in Seattle.”

That hurts and brings me relief. I wonder what it was like meeting his baby for the first time.

“How did she do it? Get both of us to that house? Cross borders? She must have had help.”

He shakes his head. “We are still questioning her. She took Isaac to the hospital in an RV. She was in the same RV when she tried to cross the border back into Alaska. When they searched her vehicle they found a false floorboard with a space large enough to hold two bodies. We think she drugged you and put you both in there. We don’t know anything about help, we’re still questioning her.”

“Back into Alaska?” I ask. “She was coming back for me?”

He shakes his head. “We don’t know.”

I slam my fist on the table, frustrated. “What
do
you know?”

He looks affronted. I try to soften my face. This isn’t his fault. Or maybe it is.

“How did you find me, then?”

“The Canadian police put out an APB on her vehicle. She was picked up at the border. She gave us the coordinates to the house where she was keeping you.”

“Just like that?”

He nods.

“I don’t get it.”

“The house is on a large portion of land that she owns. Actually, large portion is an understatement. She owns forty thousand acres. Her late husband owned oil wells. He was also a conspiracy theorist. He published some books on Armageddon survival. We think he built the house out there as a result of those theories.”

“You know all of that, but you don’t know what she was going to do with me?”

“It’s easy to find information that is already there, Ms. Richards. Extracting information from the human mind proves a little more difficult.”

Maybe I underestimated soft
s
Detective Garrison.

“My mother…?” I ask. He cocks his head, his eyebrows drawing together. “Never mind.” Perhaps she had no part in this. Perhaps Saphira found her and read her book without ever contacting her.

“I want to go home,” I say, suddenly.

He nods. “Just a few more days. Bear with us…”

Nick is waiting for me when my flight lands in Seattle. I knew he would be. He contacted me through e-mail asking when I’d be coming home. He asked if he could be there. I sent him a quick response telling him the day, time, and flight number. When I come down the escalator to baggage claim, he doesn’t see me right away. He looks nervous, which is unusual for him. I hide behind a huge potted plant, and peer at him through the leaves. My muse. My ten years wasted. It used to be that when I saw him my emotions would pitch a fever. I’d feel as if I were tumbling down, down, down, into something deep. Now he just looks like a guy in a trench coat with too much gel in his hair. No, that’s unfair. He looks like a stew pot of memories; his hands are memories, his lips are memories, his body is a memory. But they don’t entrance me like they used to. Either a year of imprisonment has left me more numb, or I’ve outgrown the love of my life.

“Where did your glimmer go, Nick?” I say through the plant. I am curious to know if it’s still there. If I’ll burst open the minute we make contact, like some quintessential love story.

He is sitting; a loner in an airport chair, watching the passers-by with apprehension on his face. It’s a fine mental picture. Nick sees me as soon as I step out from my hiding place. When I walk toward him, he quickly stands. He embraces me without hesitation and with so much familiarity, my heart does a lurch. Maybe this is the spark.

He knows me. He knows what to say, what not to say. He speaks the language of my face, and waits for my expression to dictate his tone. That’s what time does. It gives you space to learn each other. I soften into his embrace. It’s no use fighting something like this.

“Brenna.” He breathes my name into my hair.

I want to say his name, to return it, but my words are clotted in my throat.

“You ready?” he asks. “Do you have a bag?”

I shake my head. “I have nothing.”

He takes my hand and leads me to the parking garage. He has a rental car. I fold into the front seat and stare at him. He is the only person I can stare at like this and not feel completely awkward.

The entire ride home I wait for him to ask me about it. Anything. Something. Anything. Why isn’t he asking? It’s unfair of me to expect it. Nick has never pried. He waits, and he knows that with me you can wait forever. But now I’m accustomed to something new. Funny how that can happen. Now I’m mentally begging him to ask me something. Anything. I feel the change in myself as the wheels of the car spray up water on the highway. When did that move in? I don’t even know. In a house in the snow, probably. Where a surgeon sliced me open emotionally, and a musician brought me more color than I could handle.

It’s summertime in Washington. More’s the pity. When we reach my house there are reporters outside. They look sleepy until they see the car turn into the driveway. I wonder how long they have been camped here. I flew into Seattle under my real name to avoid this. Grabbing, scrambling, straightening hair, I look away from them and point Isaac toward the garage on one side of my circular driveway.
Nick.
I point Nick toward the garage. I rub my forehead. Since I don’t have keys, we will have to go through the garage to get in the house. I tell him the code for the garage door, and he hops out and punches it in. They can’t climb my driveway, but I hear them at the bottom, calling out my name.

Senna!

Senna Richards!

Did you know Dr. Elgin was behind your kidnapping?

Senna, tell us what it was like to—?

Senna, have you seen Isaac Asterholder since—?

Senna, did you think you were going to die?

Then the garage closes, muting their cacophony.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

Goes my heart…

Nick opens the door for me and we walk into my house. Dust fills my nose and mouth as I breathe in fourteen months of packed-up air. I touch the edge of his hand with my fingertip. He opens his fingers and entwines them with mine. He walks with me from room to room, and I feel like a ghost. He’s never been in my house. Making money off of heartbreak is a good business to be in. When we reach the white room I jerk to a stop in the doorway. I can’t go in. Isaac looks down at me.
Nick.
Nick looks down at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Everything.

“This,” I say, staring at all the white. Then, “Why did you come, Nick?”

We are on the edge of the white room. Technically a room that he created, inside of me and out.

He looks stricken. “Did you read my book?”

“Did you
mean
the book?” I spin back.

“Can we talk about this somewhere else?” He starts to step into my white room like he wants to take a look around. I grab his arm.

“We talk about this right here.”

I want him on the brink of what he drove me to. I want to know what this is before I cross any more thresholds.

He leans against one side of the doorframe. I lean against the other.

“I was wrong. I was young and idealistic. I didn’t realize…” He grimaces. “I didn’t realize your value until it was too late.”

“My value?”

“Your worth to me, Brenna. You spark things in me. You always have. I love you. I never stopped. I was just…”

“Young and idealistic,” I repeat.

He nods. “And stupid.”

I study him. Look at the white. Look at him.

“You have writer’s block,” I say. “You wrote the last book, and everyone freaked out. And now you have nothing else.”

He looks startled.

“Tell me it’s not true.” I flick at the grey falling into my eyes. Then I think better of it, and let it drop back to cover them.

“It’s not like that,” he says. “You know we are good together. We inspire each other. Greatness comes when we are together.”

I think about this. He is right, of course. We were great together. Some days I woke up playful. I wanted to laugh and flirt and be a love story. The very next day I couldn’t stand being looked at or spoken to. Nick let me be. He spoke to me on the days I wanted to be spoken to. He left me alone when I shot eye daggers at him. We coexisted fluently and effortlessly. With him I can have companionship and love, and never have who I am questioned. We were great together. Until Isaac taught me something new.

I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to be questioned. I needed it.

I didn’t know I needed someone to dig into my heart and figure out why on some days I wanted to play, and why on others I craved solitude. I didn’t even like it when he did it. It’s a painful thing to look inside yourself and see the whys and the hows of your clockwork. You are a lot uglier than you think, plenty more selfish than you are ever likely to admit. So, you ignore what’s inside of you. Thinking if you don’t acknowledge it, it’s not really there. Until someone unlikely comes along and cracks you. They see every dark corner, and they get it. And they tell you it’s okay to have dark corners, instead of making you feel ashamed of them. Isaac wasn’t afraid of my ugly. He rolled through the highs and lows with me. There was no judgment in his love. And all of a sudden there were fewer lows and more highs.

Nick loved me enough to leave me alone. Isaac knew me better than I knew me. I said I wanted to be left alone, he knew better. I said I wanted white, he knew better. He brightened me. He enlightened me. Because Isaac was my soulmate. Not Nick. Nick was just some great love. Isaac knew how to heal my soul.

“We were good together,” I say to Nick. “But I’m not her anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. “You’re not who?”

“Exactly.”

“Brenna, you’re not making sense.”

“Do I ever?”

He pauses.

I shake my head. “I don’t make sense to you. That’s why you left me.”

“I’ll try harder.”

“I have cancer. You can try as hard as you want, but I have cancer and I’m not going to be here in a year.”

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.”