When did this happen? When did my thoughts shift to Isaac’s needs? I stare at the ceiling. That’s the way it happened with Nick. It started out with him loving me, him being obsessed with me; then, all of a sudden … osmosis.
The minute I started freely loving Nick he left me.
Chapter Thirty
Three times a day Isaac makes a trip down to the well to get food and restock our wood. We use a bucket to relieve ourselves, and it’s his job to empty that too. He goes carefully. I can hear his steps creaking across the floorboards until he reaches the landing, and then the clomp, clomp, clomp on the stairs. I lose his sound once he’s down the well, but he’s never there for more than five minutes, except when he’s doing laundry or throwing our trash over the side of the cliff. Laundry consists of filling the bathtub with snow and soap and swishing the clothes around until you think they’re clean. We never had a shortage of soap, there are stacks of white bars, wrapped in a filmy white paper on the bottom shelf of the pantry. They smell like butter, and on more than one occasion when I was bent over with hunger I thought about eating them.
Isaac takes the smaller of the two flashlights—the one I found when I f**ked up my leg. He leaves me the big one. He leaves it right next to my bed and tells me not to use it. But as soon as I hear his socked feet on the stairs, my fingers reach down to find the switch that turns it on. I let the light flow. Sometimes I reach over and pass my hand across it, playing with the shadows. It’s a sad, sad thing when the highlight of your day becomes five minutes with a flashlight.
One day when Isaac comes back, I ask him why he doesn’t just bring everything up at once.
“I need the exercise,” he says.
After a week, he comes up the stairs with a handful of green bandages.
“There’s no infection that I can see around the wound. It’s healing.” I notice that he didn’t say, Healing well. “The bone could still become infected, but we can hope the penicillin will take care of that.”
“What’s that?” I ask, nodding toward his hands.
“I’m going to put your leg in a cast. Then I can move you to the bed.”
“What if the bone doesn’t fuse together properly?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a long time as he works with the supplies.
“It’s not going to heal properly,” he says. “You’ll most likely walk with a limp for the rest of your life. On most days, you’ll have pain.”
I close my eyes. Of course. Of course. Of course.
When I look up again, he’s cutting the toes off of a white sock. He fits it over my foot as gently as he can and pulls it up my leg. I force breath from my nostrils to keep from wailing. It must be one of his. The sock. The zookeeper didn’t give me any white socks. He didn’t give me anything white. Isaac does the same thing with a second sock, and then a third, until I have them lined from the middle of my foot to my knee. Then he takes one of the bandages from the bucket of water. It’s not a bandage, I realize. It’s rolls of a fiberglass cast.
He starts mid foot, rolling the cast around and around until it runs out. Then he plucks out a new roll and does it again. Over and over until he’s used all five rolls and my leg is fully cast. Isaac leans back to examine his work. He looks exhausted.
“Let’s give it some time to dry, then I’ll move you to the bed.”
We stay in the attic room, forgetting the rest of the house. Day after day … after day … after day.
I count the days we’ve lost. Days I’ll never get back. Two hundred and seventy-seven of them. One day I ask him to drum for me.
“With what?”
I can’t really see his face—it’s too dark—but I know that his eyebrows are raised and there is a trace of a smile on his lips. He needs this. I need this.
“Sticks,” I suggest. And then, “Please, Isaac. I want to hear music.”
“Music without words,” he says, softly. I shake my head, though he can’t see me do it.
“I want to hear the music you can make.”
I wish I could see his face. I want to see if he’s offended that I asked him to do something he hated giving up. Or maybe if he’s relieved to be asked. I just want to see his face. I do the strangest thing, then. I reach out and touch his face with my fingertips. His eyes close when I trace my way from his forehead, down over his eyes and around his lips. He’s serious. Always so serious. Dr. Isaac Asterholder. I want to meet the drummer, Isaac.
He disappears for an hour. When he comes back his arms are stacked with things I can’t make out in the dark. I sit up straighter in bed and my mind hums with excitement. He works in front of the fire so that he won’t have to use the flashlight. I watch him unload what he’s brought up with him: two buckets, one smaller than the other, a metal skillet and a metal pot, duct tape, rubber bands, a pencil and two sticks. The sticks look smooth—like real drumsticks. I wonder if he’s been carving them secretly while he disappears downstairs every day. I wouldn’t blame him. I’ve been wanting to carve my skin for days.
He is making things. I can’t tell what they are, but I hear the rip of the duct tape every few minutes. He swears a couple times. It’s a soundtrack: rriiiip … swear … bang … rriiiip … swear … bang.
Finally, after what seems like hours, he stands up to examine his work.
“Help me up,” I beg him. “Just this once so I can see.”
He puts another log on the fire, and reluctantly comes over to my bed. I mouth, please, please, please, please. He picks me up before I can protest the help and carries me to what he made.
I stare in wonder at his creation, my leg jutting in front of me awkwardly. He’s taped the larger bucket to a makeshift stand he’s made out of some logs. The smaller bucket sits upside down next to it. On the opposite side are the two pots—both faced down.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a mess of a thing on the floor.
“That’s my pedal. I wrapped rubber around a pencil. I cut out the sole of one of my shoes for the actual pedal.”
“Where did you get the rubber?”
“From the fridge.”
I nod. Genius.
“That’s my snare.” He points to the smaller bucket. “And bass…” The larger one, turned on its side.
“Can you stand me against the wall? I promise I won’t put weight on my cast.”
He props me against the wall near to where his drum set sits. I lean back, thrilled to be out of bed and on my … foot.
Isaac sits on the edge of the window seat. He leans down to test his pedal, then he plays.
I close my eyes and listen to his heart. This is the first time—the very first time—that I am meeting this side of Isaac. After all these years. Without his permission I turn on the flashlight and aim it at him like it’s a spotlight. He gives me a warning look, but I just smile and keep it on him. This moment deserves a little something special.
It’s four days ‘til Christmas. Give or take a day or two. I do my best to keep track, but I’ve lost days along the way. They dropped out from under me and messed up my mental calendar. You’re the one who went crazy and pissed herself like some dink in a mental institution. Isaac says I was like that for a week. Which still makes it Christmas.
Christmas in the dark.
Christmas in the attic room.
Christmas drinking melted snow and eating pinto beans out of a can.
Christmas was when we met. Christmas was when the bad thing happened. The zookeeper will do something on Christmas. I know it. And that’s when it hits me. It was sitting there in my subconscious the whole time.
I moan out loud. Isaac is downstairs so he doesn’t hear me. And then I can’t quite catch my breath.
“Isaac,” I wheeze. “Isaac!”
I hate this feeling. And I hate how it hits me out of nowhere so that I can never be prepared. I don’t know what’s more overwhelming at this moment, the fact that I can’t breathe, or the realization that was powerful enough to steal my breath away. Either way, I have to get to a nebulizer. Isaac found them down the table. He brought one up. Where did he put it? I look helplessly around the room. The top of the wardrobe. I get out of bed. It’s a struggle. When I’m halfway there he walks in carrying our wood ration for the day. He drops his armload when he sees my face. He darts to the wardrobe and grabs the nebulizer. Then he’s pushing it between my lips. I feel a cold rush; the vapor hits my lungs and I can breathe again.
Isaac looks pissed.
“What happened?”
“I had an asthma attack, idiot.”
“Senna,” he says, swinging me into his arms and carrying me back to the bed. “Ninety percent of the time your asthma attacks are stress induced. Now. What happened?”
“I didn’t know I needed anything extra,” I snap. “Other than being imprisoned in a house made of ice with my…”
I lose my words.
“Doctor,” he finishes.
I twist my body so that I’m facing away from him.
I need to think. I need to form a structure for this theory. The Rubik’s cube twists. Isaac gives me space.
I’m locked in a house with my doctor. He’s right.
I’m locked in a house with my doctor.
I’m locked in a house with my doctor.
With my doctor.
Doctor…
Christmas comes. Isaac is very quiet. But I was wrong; we don’t eat beans. He cooks us a feast over our little makeshift stove in the attic: canned corn, spam, green beans and, to top it all off, a can of pumpkin pie filling. For breakfast.
For a moment, we are happy. Then Isaac looks at me and says, “When I first opened my eyes and saw you standing over me, I felt like I took my first breath in three years.”
I grind my teeth.
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
“We only knew each other for three months before this,” I say. “You don’t know me.” But, even as I say it, I know it’s not true. “You were just my doctor…”
He’s wearing the expression of someone being slapped over and over again. I slap him once more to put an end to this.
“You took things too far.”
He walks out before I can say any more.
I bury my face. “Fuck you, Isaac,” I say into my pillow.
At noon the lights turn on.
Isaac’s head appears through the trapdoor a minute later. I wonder where he’s been. My bet is on the carousel room. He takes one look at my face and says, “You knew.”
I knew.
“I suspected.”
He looks incredulous. “That the power would come back?”
“That something would happen,” I correct him.
I knew that the power would come back.
He disappears again, and I hear his steps pounding down the stairs. Clomp, clomp, clomp. I count them until he reaches the bottom. Then I hear the front door hit the wall as he swings it wide. I flinch at all the cold air he’s letting in, then remember that the power is back. HEAT! LIGHT! A WORKING TOILET!
I feel impassive. This is a game. The zookeeper gave us light. As a gift. On Christmas Day. It’s symbolic.
He thinks light came into my life on Christmas Day when I met Isaac.
“You’re just a badly written character,” I say out loud. “I’ll kill you off, my darling.”
When Isaac comes back his face is ashen.
“The zookeper was here,” he says.
I get chills. They skitter up my legs and arms like little spiders.
“How do you know?”
He holds out his hand. “We have to go downstairs.”
I let him pull me up. He doesn’t like me to walk on the leg, which means he’s making an exception, which means this is dirt serious. I use him as a crutch. When we reach the ladder he helps me sit on the floor. Then he climbs down first. He has me lower my injured leg through the hole first. It takes me ten minutes to get it right, to maneuver it while not falling over. But I am determined. I don’t want to be in the attic a second longer. When both legs are through, he reaches for my waist. I think we’re both going to fall, but he gets me down. Steady hands, I remind myself. A surgeon’s steady hands.
He hands me something. It’s a tree branch—almost as tall as I am—shaped like a wishbone. A crutch.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s part of our Christmas present.”
He stares intently into my eyes, and motions for the stairs. A few weeks ago we were burning everything we could. There is no way this could have escaped our fire. I lean on my crutch as I hobble for the stairs. I want to scream at how long it takes to make it to the bottom. I look around. I haven’t seen this part of the house since I broke my leg. I have a need to walk around, touch things, but Isaac pushes me toward the door.
It’s dark outside. So cold. I shiver.
“I can’t see anything, Isaac.”
My foot is about to sink into the snow when my cast hits something.
Chapter Thirty-One
They never found the man who raped me. There was never another report of a rape in those woods, or any woods in Washington. The police said it was an isolated incident. With blithe nonchalance, they told me that he had probably been watching me for a while and possibly followed me into the woods. They used words like “intent” and “stalker”. I’d had those before: letters, e-mails, Facebook messages that went from high praise to intense anger when I didn’t respond. None of them were men. None threatening enough to concern me. None with the tone of a rapist, or a sadist, or a kidnapper. Just angry moms who wanted something from me—recognition maybe.