Mud Vein

“Senna,” he says softly.

“Hmmm?”

“Roll with me.”

It takes me a minute to get it. The human brain works like a bad internet connection when it’s freezing. He wants to be wrapped in the cocoon with me. I think.

I barely nod. My neck is stiff. He tucks the edge of the blanket around us and I tense myself. I feel brittle, like my bones are made of ice. His weight might crack me. We roll ourselves in the blanket and end up on our sides. I can feel Isaac’s heat pressed against my front, and the fire’s heat licking at my back. I realize he positioned me here on purpose to place me closest to the fire.

My hands are on his chest, so I rest my cheek there too. He still smells like spices. I start listing them all in my head: cardamom, coriander, rosemary, cumin, basil… After a few minutes my shivering becomes less. He reaches for my wrist. I don’t know why. I don’t really care. His thumb presses into my skin. He’s taking my pulse, I realize.

“Am I dying, doctor?” I ask quietly. It takes energy to put those words together in the right order, and even while I say them my brain sees a pink spade lying on green, green grass.

“Yes,” he says. “We both are. We all are.”

“Comforting.”

He kisses my forehead. His lips are cold, but his warmth is bringing me back to life. A little bit at least.

“When was the last time you let yourself feel?” his words slur like he’s been drinking, but the alcohol is long gone, it’s the cold that makes it that way.

I shake my head. For someone like me feeling is dangerous. There is nothing left to fear when you’re already dying. I lift my face to relay my answer without words.

His hands find my face.

“Can I make you feel? One more time?”

I cling to him, my fists tightening on his shirt. My yes.

His mouth is so warm. We are shivering and kissing, our bodies firing off heat and desire. We are cold and we are weak. We are emotionally destroyed. We are desperate to feel each other, and to feel hope—to feel one last piece of living. There is nothing joyful or sweet in our mouths. Just frenzy and panic. I taste salt. I’m crying. A kiss unclogged my tear ducts, I think.

When we are done kissing we lie very still.

His lips move against my hair. “I’m sorry, Senna.”

I tremble. He’s sorry? Him? “For what?”

There is a million year pause.

“I couldn’t save you this time.”

I cry into his chest. Not because he couldn’t. Because he wanted to.

I think I doze off. When I wake Isaac’s breathing is steady. I think he’s still asleep, but when I shift to change positions, he lifts his hands from my lower back and lets me move around until I’m comfortable again. We lie like that for hours. Until the fire burns out its last flame and I know the night has curved into day, even though day no longer shows her face. Until I want to sob from relief and grief. Until I remember all of the ineffable hurt from years ago that he salved with the tender way he loves. We are going to die. But at least I’ll die with someone who loves me.

Isaac is touch. Why have I ever thought anything different? He held me once to soothe me from my nightmares, and now he is holding me to protect me from the cold. He touches right where it hurts, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t hurt. Yes, Isaac is touch. I see the pink spade again. I can feel the grit of coffee grounds as I work them between my teeth. Then I see The Great Wall of China, and I know my brain is short circuiting, passing along images of things that are in my subconscious. When I see the table flash in my mind—the carved up, heavy, wooden table from the kitchen downstairs—I feel something true. It’s like when I sleep and my brain tells me what to write. What is it about the table…? Then I see it, but I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. Don’t forget, I tell myself. You have to remember the table…

The fire goes.

Our hearts are slowing. We are resolute.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I wake up. I am not dead. I push at Isaac’s chest to wake him up. He doesn’t move. His skin feels strange—cold and stiff. Oh my God.

“Isaac!” I shove at him with the little bit of leverage that I have. “Isaac!”

I press my ear to his chest. My hair is in my mouth, falling in my eyes. I can’t reach the pulse at his neck; I’m trapped between him and the blanket. I’m going to have an asthma attack. I can feel it coming. There’s not enough air in this blanket. All I can hear is my own frantic breathing. I have to unroll us, but he feels like a thousand pounds. I push him onto his back and struggle to get out of the blanket. Struggle to breathe as my airways constrict. I have to wiggle up and out. When I am free of the joint, the air hits me. It’s freezing. I need it in my lungs, but I don’t know how to get it there. I pull the blanket away from his face and press my fingers to his neck. I’m mumbling please over and over.

Please don’t be dead.

Please don’t leave me here alone.

Please don’t leave me.

Please don’t let me have this asthma attack right now.

I can feel a pulse. It’s barely there. I roll onto my back and wheeze. It’s a terrible sound. It’s the sound of dying. Why am I always dying? I arch my back, my eyes roll. I have to help Isaac.

The table! … What was it about the table?

I know. I see it all—what I saw last night in my delirium. The table from my book. I wrote about it metaphorically; the concept that all great things are made around a table: relationships, plans for war, the meals that keep our bodies alive. A table is an image that represents life and choices. We see it in Camelot when King Arthur’s knights gathered around the Round Table, and in the paintings of The Last Supper. We see it in commercials where families eat dinner, laughing and passing a basket of bread. I wrote about a table that was a well. I was at the bottom end of my relationship with Nick and I was trying to illustrate where we had gone wrong. We needed to come back to the table, draw life into our dying relationship. It was melodramatic and stupid, but the zookeeper brought it to life. Built it in our kitchen, and I refused to see it.

I roll onto my knees and crawl … to the hole. I make it halfway down before I fall. I don’t know if the cold has numbed me or if my lack of air is consuming my senses, but I feel nothing when I crack against the wood. I crawl some more toward the stairs … toward the table. I … can’t … breathe…