I am just scars and pieces of a woman. Isaac has seen me like this. In a sense he made me like this, with his scalpel and steady hands, but I still reached up to cover my chest. He stopped me. Reaching for my waist he lifted me up until I was sitting sideways in the saddle of my pierced horse. He opened my fleece the rest of the way, then he kissed the skin where my br**sts used to be. He kissed softly, over the scars. My heart—surely he could feel my pounding heart. My nerve endings had been damaged, but I felt his warm lips and his breath move across my skin. I made a sound. It wasn’t a real sound. It was air and relief. Every breath I’d ever caught came whooshing out of me at once.
Isaac kissed up my neck, behind my ear, my chin, the corner of my mouth. I turned my head when he tried to kiss the other corner, and we met in the middle. Soft lips and his smell. He’d kissed me once before in the foyer of my house, it had been a drumbeat. This kiss was a sigh. It was relief and we were so drunk from it that we clung to each other like we’d been waiting for a kiss like this our whole, entire lives. His hands wrapped around my ribcage, inside of my fleece. Mine were holding his face. He pulled me off the horse. I steered him toward the only bench on the carousel. It was a chariot, curved with a leather seat. Isaac sat. I sat on his lap.
“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” I said. I pulled down the zipper on his pants. I was determined. I was sure. He didn’t move his hands from my waist. He didn’t speak. He waited as I lifted myself up, pulling off my jeans and climbing back onto his lap. I left my panties on. His pants were pushed mid thigh. We were clothed and we were not. Isaac let me do everything, and that’s the way I needed it to be; half concealed, in the cold air, with the ability to climb off and leave if I wanted to. I felt less than I thought I would. I also felt more. There was no fear, just the vibrations of something loud that I didn’t quite understand. He kissed me while we moved. Then once, when it was over. The old man never came back. We zipped our clothes, and walked back up the hill chilled and in a daze. There were no more words between us. The next day I filed a restraining order against him.
And that was the last of Isaac Asterholder and me.
I try to remember sometimes what his last words to me had been. If he said something as we walked up that hill, or on the car ride home. But all I remember was his presence and his silence. And the slight echo of, and yet I love you.
And yet he loved me.
And yet I couldn’t love him back.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When I wake Isaac isn’t there. I weigh my panic against the pain. I can only focus on one at a time. I choose my pain because it won’t loosen its grip on my brain. I am familiar with heart pain—intense, excruciating heart pain, but I’ve never experienced a physical pain quite this exquisite. Heart pain and physical pain are only comparable in that neither relinquish their hold on you once they get rolling. The heart releases a dull ache when it is broken; the pain in my leg so acute and sharp it’s hard to breathe.
I wrestle with the pain for a minute … two, before I discard it. I broke my body and there is no way to fix it. I don’t care. I need to find Isaac. And that’s when I think it: Oh God. What if the zookeeper came while I was passed out and did something to him? I roll slightly onto my side until I have some leverage, and try to drag myself up using my good leg. That’s when I see my leg. The lower half of my pants has been cut away. The place where the bone was sticking out has been wrapped in thin gauze. I feel liquid running down to my foot as I move. I hold my hand over my mouth and breathe through my nose. Who was here? Who did this? The fire is burning. The fire I built would have given up the ghost by now. Someone had built it back up, fed it new logs.
I wobble where I’m standing. I need light. I need to—
“Sit down.”
I start, jarred by the voice. I twist my neck around as far as it can go.
“Isaac,” I cry out. I start to teeter, but he darts over and catches me. Darts is a strong word, I think. For a minute it looks like he is going to fall with me. I lift my hand up, touch his face. He looks terrible. But he’s alive and walking. He lowers me gently to the ground.
“Are you okay?”
He shakes his head. “Alive’s not enough for you?”
“You shouldn’t be,” I hiss. “I thought you were going to die.” He doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead he walks over to a pile of something I can’t see in the dark.
“Look who’s talking,” he says, softly.
“Isaac,” I say again. “The table…” All of a sudden I’m feeling hot … weak. The adrenaline, which carried me up the well, up the stairs, up the ladder, has run out.
He walks over to me, his arms full. “I know,” he says, dryly. “I saw.”
He’s looking at my leg as he sets things down next to me. He’s lining them up, double-checking everything. But every few seconds he looks at my leg again like he doesn’t know how to fix it.
“Is that how this happened?”
“I jumped down the table,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. The asthma—”
The corners of his mouth pull tight. “You had an asthma attack? While this happened?” I nod. I can only see his face with the dim light of the fire, but it looks as if it’s paled.
“Your tibia is fractured. Your leg must have bent at just the right angle when you fell to cause the break.”
“When I jumped,” I said.
“When you fell.”
He’s working with his hands, opening packages. I hear little rips, the clatter of metal. I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear little bursts of air, I think it’s Isaac, but then I realize that I’m panting.
He looks straight at me. “You must have gotten my body temperature back up. You did everything right.”
“What?” I’m dizzy. I want to hurl again.
“You saved me life,” he says. He glances up at me at the same time I crack open an eye.
“I need to move you.”
“No!” I grab his arm. “No, please. Just let me stay here.” I’m panting. The thought of moving makes me sick. “There is nowhere to move me, Isaac. Just do it here.”
Do what here? Was he really planning to operate on the floor of the attic room?
“There’s not enough light,” I say. The pain is intensifying. I’m hoping he’ll forget this whole thing and let me die. He reaches round his back and brings out the flashlight from downstairs. When I was a little girl, my mother would have chided me for reading under that light, now Isaac is planning on operating with it.
“What are you going to do?” I do a quick survey of what he’s brought with him. There are six rolls of what look like bandages, alcohol, a bucket of water, a needle and thread, a bottle of tequila. There are some other things but he’s placed them on a baking sheet and covered them with what looks like a bandage.
“Fix your leg.”
“Where’s the morphine?” I joke. Isaac props my upper body under pillows he gets from the bed so that I’m in a half sitting position. Then he unscrews the lid from the tequila and holds it to my mouth.
“Get drunk,” he says without looking at me. I chug it.
“Where did you find all of this?” I take a couple of deep breaths letting what I’ve already swallowed settle, and then I lift the bottle back to my mouth. I want to hear how he found my discovery. He speaks while the cactusy taste of tequila burns its way to my stomach in small gulps.
“Where do you think?”
I bite my lip. My mind is numb from the alcohol. I wipe away what’s running down my chin.
“We were starving, and all along…”
“I have to operate,” he says. Is it my imagination or are there beads of sweat on his forehead? The light is so vague it could be a trick of the eyes.
He screws the cap off of a bottle of clear liquid and before I can open my mouth to stop him, he uncovers the gauze and pours it over my wound. I brace myself to scream, but the pain isn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.
“You could have warned me!” I hiss at him, rearing up.
“Hush,” he says. “It’s just saline. I need to clear away the dead tissue … irrigate the wound.”
“And then…?”
“Set the bone. It’s been too long already … the risk of infection … your soft tissue…” He’s mumbling things. Words I don’t hold the meaning to: debridement … osteomyelitis. He reaches up and wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve. I’m going to have to set your bone. I’m not an orthopedic surgeon, Senna. We don’t have the equipment…”
I stare at him as he leans back on his haunches. He has a face full of scruff, and a head of hair that is standing every which way. He looks so different from the doctor that operated on me last time. The cuts around his mouth deepen as he stares into my wound. He’s more scared than I am, I think. This is his job, his profession—saving lives. He is an expert at saving lives. Yet, this is out of his area of expertise. There is no one to consult with. Isaac Asterholder is positioned at a keyboard instead of the drums, and he doesn’t quite know where to put his hands.
“It’s okay.” I sound peculiarly calm. Detached. “Do what you can.”
He reaches for the flashlight, holds it right above the gash.
“The tissue is red, that’s good,” he says. I nod though I don’t know what he’s talking about. The room has started to spin and I just want him to get on with it.
“It’s going to hurt like hell, Senna.”
“Fuck you,” I say. “Just do it.” I sob on the last word. Such a tough guy.
Isaac gets to work. He washes his hands in the bucket using an amber colored soap. Then he douses his hands and arms in alcohol. He pulls on a pair of gloves. He must have found them down the well with the other supplies. So the zookeeper left us gloves. For what? Surgery? For when we decided to spring clean? Maybe we were supposed to fill them with air and draw faces on them with markers. Our captor though of everything. Except morphine, of course. Somehow I know that one was on purpose. No pain, no gain. This guy likes us to suffer.
Isaac does it. Without warning. While I’m thinking about the zookeeper. This time I don’t scream. I pass out.
When I come to, my leg is throbbing and I’m wasted. That’s what you get when you pour half a bottle of tequila in your starving stomach. He is sitting a few feet away with his back resting against the wall. His head droops down like he’s sleeping. I crane my neck trying to get a look at my leg. Isaac cleaned up most of the mess, but I can see dark spots on the floor around my body—blood. My leg is propped on a pillow, the area where the bone broke through my skin is wrapped in gauze. He’s splinted the leg between what looks like slabs of wood. I feel good about the scar it’ll leave. It’ll be long and jagged.
Isaac wakes up. Once again I notice how terrible he looks. Last night I thought he was dead, and now here he is fixing me. This wasn’t right. I want to do something to make him better, but I’m lying on my back, drunk. He gets up and comes to me. He half scoots, half crawls.
“You were lucky. The bone only broke in one part. It was a clean break so you didn’t have any fragments floating around. But since it tore through the skin there could be nerve and tissue damage. There was no internal bleeding that I could see.”
“What about infection?” I ask.
Isaac nods. “You could develop an infection in the bone. I found a bottle of penicillin. We will do what we can. The greater the damage is to the bone, soft tissues, nerves, and blood vessels, the higher the risk for infection. And since you were dragging yourself all over the house…”
I lean my head back because the room is spinning. I wonder if I’ll remember any of this when the effects of the tequila clear.
“It’s the best I could do,” he says. I know it is.
He hands me a mug with a spoon sticking out of it. I take it, peering inside. He picks up his own mug.
“What is it?” there is a lumpy looking yellow fluid in the cup. It looks disgusting, but my stomach clenches in anticipation anyway.
“Creamed corn.” He sticks the spoon in his mouth, sucks it dry. I follow suit. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks. I have hazy memories of grabbing the can the night before, the way it dug into my hip as I climbed the ladder.
“Take it slow,” Isaac warns. I have to force myself not to down the whole mug in one gulp. My hunger pain subsides ever so slightly, and I am able to focus solely on the other pain my body is feeling. He hands me four large white pills.
“It’ll just dim it, Senna.”
“Okay,” I whisper, letting him drop them in my hand. He hands me a cup of water and I drop all four pills into my mouth.
“Isaac,” I say. “Please rest.”
He kisses my forehead.
“Hush.”
When I wake up the room is warm. I’ve noticed that the highlight of most of my days here are waking up and going to sleep. It’s what I remember most about The Caging of Senna and Isaac: wake up; go to sleep; wake up; go to sleep. There is little in between to make a difference; we wander … we eat … but mostly we sleep. And if we’re lucky it’s warm when we wake. Now there is a new sensation—pain. I look around the room. Isaac is asleep on the floor a few feet away. He has a single blanket covering him. It’s not even long enough to cover his feet. I want to give him my blanket, but I don’t know how to stand up. I groan and lean back against the pillows. The painkillers have worn off. I am hungry again. I wonder if he’s eaten, if he’s okay.