Mud Vein

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 br**sts. Her hair was damp, her face flushed, but I wanted to grab her and kiss her.

“Come with me to my parents’. I want to have Christmas dinner with you.”

I thought she was going to say no and I’d have to spend the next ten minutes convincing her. She didn’t. She nodded. I was too afraid to say anything as she walked with me to my car, in case she changed her mind. Without any objections, she climbed into the front seat and folded her hands in her lap. It was all very formal.

As soon as we were on the road, I reached for the radio. I wanted to put on Christmas music. At least prepare her for the Christmas crack she was about to experience at the Nissley house. She grabbed my hand.

“Can you leave it off?”

“Sure,” I said. “Not a fan of music?”

She blinked at me, then looked out the window.

“Everyone is a fan of music, Nick,” she said.

“But not you…?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it. I’m begging for a detail about you, Brenna. Just give me one.”

“Okay,” she said. “My mother loved music. She played it in our house from morning ‘til night.”

“And that made you dislike it?”

We pulled into my parent’s driveway and she used the distraction to avoid answering my question.

“Pretty,” she said as we slowed to a stop.

My parents lived in a modest home. They’d spent the last ten years making upgrades. If she thought the outside was pretty I couldn’t wait to see what she thought of my mother’s pink granite kitchen counters, or the fountain depicting a peeing boy they installed in the middle of the foyer. When I lived at home we’d had linoleum and plumbing that only worked a tenth of the time. She made no comment about the giant reindeer lawn ornaments, or the wreath almost the size of the front door. She hopped out without any reservation and followed me to the house of my very happy childhood. I looked at her before I opened the door, dressed in running clothes, her hair messy and stuck to her face. What type of woman jumped in the car with you on Christmas Day to meet your family, without putting on a cardigan and a dress? This one. She made every woman I’d ever been with feel insignificant and fake. This was going to be fun.

Chapter Twenty

“Is this you, Senna?”

He was looking at me intensely. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew what I was thinking: Damn Nick and his book.

I could barely … I didn’t know how to … My thoughts were trembling out of my hands.

“You’re shaking,” Isaac said. He set the book on the nightstand and poured me a glass of water. The cup was one of those heavy plastic things, the color of too many colors of Play-Doh mixed together. It grossed me out, but I took it and sipped. The cup felt too heavy. Some of the water spilled down the front of my hospital gown, plastering it to my skin. I handed the cup back to Isaac, who set it aside without taking his eyes off my face. He put each one of his hands over mine to steady them. It absorbed a little of my shaking.

“He wrote this for you,” Isaac said. His eyes were dark, like he had too many thoughts and they were filling him up. I didn’t want to answer.

There was no mistaking the similarities in name—Senna/Brenna. There was also no mistaking the actual story itself. The fine line that squiggled between fiction and truth. It made me sick that Nick told the story. Our story? His version of our story. Some things should be buried and left to rot.

I pointed to the book. “Take it,” I said. “Throw it away.”

His eyebrows drew together. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want the past.”

He stared at me for a long minute, then picked up the book, tucked it under his arm and walked for the door.

“Wait!”

I held out my hand for the book and he walked it back to me. Opening the cover I flipped to the dedication, touching it softly, running my fingers over the words … then I ripped it out. Hard. I handed the book back to Isaac, with the jagged page clutched in my fist. Stone faced, he left, the soles of his shoes sucking on the hospital floor. Thwuup ... Thwuup … Thwuup. I listened until they disappeared.