Spalsh

I squirm under hot water, writhing in shock. I come up gasping, trying to claw my way out of the tub. He dropped me in like a human bath bead. Water sloshes over the side of the tub and soaks into his pant legs and socks. I fight for a few more seconds, his hands holding me in the water. I don’t have the energy to fight. I let myself sink. The bath is so full that I can submerge myself completely. I sink, sink, sink into the ocean.

But there is no rest, because he grabs me under my arms and pulls me up to a sitting position. I gasp and grab the sides of the tub. I’m na**d except for a sports bra and panties. He pours shampoo on my head; I bat at his hands like a child until his fingers find my scalp. Then I let him. My body, rigid a second ago, slouches as he rubs the fight out of my head. He washes me, using his hands and a sponge that looks like it came straight from a coral reef. Surgeon’s hands rub across my muscles and my skin until I’m so relaxed I can barely move. I close my eyes when he rinses my hair. Both of his hands are holding my head up, cradling it so I don’t sink beneath the water’s surface. When they suddenly stop moving I open my eyes. Isaac is staring at me from above. His eyebrows are almost touching, so deep is his consternation. I reach up without thinking and cradle his cheek with my hand. I would be worried that he could see through my thin, white sports bra, but there is nothing to see. I’m practically a boy. I take my hand away and then I start to chortle. It sounds like a burst of madness. Why do I even wear a sports bra? It’s so stupid. I should just walk around topless. I laugh harder, swallowing a mouthful of water as my body rolls to the side. I am choking—choking and laughing. Isaac pulls me up. Then all at once the sound and the choking are gone. I am Senna again. I stare at the wall behind the tap, feeling tired. Isaac grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

“Please,” he says. “Just try to live.”

My eyes are so tired. He picks me up out of the bath. I close my eyes as he kneels on the floor to dry me, then wraps me up in a towel that smells of him. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me to the ladder. I squeeze his neck a little, just so he knows I’ll try.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No. It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come?

Days, then a week, then two. Isaac gives me the silent treatment. And when there are only two people in the universe, silence is very, very loud. I lurk in his places: the kitchen, the carousel room where he sits against the wall and stares at the horses. I don’t sleep in the attic room anymore; I curl up downstairs on the sofa and wait. Wait for him to wake up, wait for him to look at me, wait for emotions to implode.

One night I am sitting at the table … waiting … while he stands at the stove stirring something in a huge cast iron pot. We are running out of food. The freezer has seven plastic bags of indeterminate meat and about four pounds of frozen vegetables. All lima beans, which Isaac hates. The pantry is no less barren looking. We have one sack of potatoes and a two-pound bag of rice. There are some cans of ravioli, but I keep telling myself we will be out of here before I have to eat those. When he hands me my plate a few minutes later I try to catch his eyes, but they run from me. I push my plate away. The rim of my plate bumps against his. He looks up.

“Why are you treating me like this? You can barely look at me.”

I don’t expect him to answer. Maybe.

“Do you remember how we met?” he asks. I get a chill.

“How could I not?”

He runs his tongue across his teeth before leaning away from his food. He’s certainly looking at me this time.

“Do you want the story?”

“I want to know why you can’t look at me,” I say.

He rubs the tips of his fingers together as if to rub away grease. But there is no grease. We are eating dry rice with a little potato and ground beef mashed into it.

“I had a flight booked, Senna. On Christmas Day. I was supposed to leave that morning and go home to see my family. I was on my way to the airport when I turned my car around and went home. I don’t f**king know why I did it. I just felt like I needed to stay. I went for a jog to clear my head and there you were, running out of the trees.”

I stare at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me?”

“Believed what? That you went for a jog instead of hopping on a plane?”

He leans forward. “No. Don’t make me feel stupid for thinking that there is purpose. We aren’t animals. Life isn’t random. I was supposed to be there.”

“And I was supposed to get raped? So that we could meet? Because that’s what you’re saying. If life isn’t random then it was in someone’s plan for that bastard to do what he did to me!” I am out of breath, my chest heaving. Isaac licks his lips.

“Maybe it was in someone’s plan for me to be there for you…”

“To keep me alive,” I finish.

“No. I didn’t say—”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you’re saying. My savior, sent to keep the pathetic, sniveling, Senna from killing herself.”

“Senna!” he slams his fist on the table, and I jump.

“When we found each other we were both pretty dead and defeated. Something grew despite that.” He shakes his head. “You breathed life back into me. It was instinct for me to be there with you. I didn’t want to save you, I just didn’t know how to leave you.”

There is a long pause.

Not even Nick did that. Because Nick didn’t love me unconditionally. He loved me so long as I was his muse. So long as I gave him something to believe in.

“Isaac…” his name falls flat. There is something I want to say but I don’t know what it is. There is no real point in saying anything at all. Isaac is married and our situation leaves little room for anything but survival.

“I need to go get some wood,” I announce.

He smiles sadly, shakes his head.

I cook dinner that night. Red meat; I don’t know what kind it is until I smell it in the skillet and know it’s some type of game. Who took the time to hunt these animals for us? Bag them? Freeze them?

Isaac doesn’t come down from his room. I put his plate of food in the oven to keep it warm and climb onto the kitchen table. It’s big enough for two people to lie side by side. I curl up in the middle, my face turned toward the window. I can see the window above the sink, and in it the reflection of the doorway. The kitchen is his go-to place. I’ll wait for him here. It feels good to be somewhere I’m not supposed to be. The zookeeper wouldn’t care that I’m lying on his table, but in general, tables aren’t for lying on. So, I feel mildly rebellious. And that helps. No it doesn’t. Who am I kidding? I unroll myself from the ball I’m curled into and jump down from the table. Walking to the silverware drawer, I pull it back forcefully until the silver clatters. I eye its contents, examining the selection: long, short, curved, serrated. I reach for the knife Isaac uses to peel potatoes. I run the tip across my palm, back and forth, back and forth. If I press a little harder I can draw blood. I watch my skin dent underneath the tip as I wait for the puncture, the inevitable sharp pain, the red, red release.

“Stop it.”

I jump. The knife clatters to the floor. I place my palm over the blood that is beading on my skin. It wells, then flows down my arm. Isaac is standing in the doorway in pajama bottoms and nothing else. I glance at the stove, wondering if he’s come down because he’s hungry. He walks briskly over to where I’m still standing and bends to pick up the knife. Then he does something that makes my brow furrow. He puts it back in my hand. My mouth twitches as he wraps my fingers around the hilt. I watch, numb and wordless, as he points the sharp end at the skin just above his heart. My hand is locked underneath his, gripping the hilt with trepidation. I can’t move my fingers—not even a little bit. He uses his strength against me when I try to pull away, yanking my arm and the blade toward him. I see blood where the knife is pressing into his skin, and I cry out. He’s forcing me to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to see his blood. He pushes harder.

“No!” I struggle to break free, pulling my body backwards. “Isaac, no!” He lets go. The knife drops to the floor between us. I stand, riveted, and watch as the red gathers and then trickles down his chest. The cut is no longer than an inch, but it’s deeper than one I would have made on myself.

“Why would you do that?” I cry. That was so cruel. I grab the only thing I see—a dishtowel—and I hold it against the cut that we made together. He has blood running down his chest, I have it running down my arm. It’s morbid and confusing.

When I look up for his answer he is looking at me intently.

“What did you feel?” he asks.

I shake my head. I don’t know what he’s asking me. Does he need stitches? There must be a needle somewhere around here … thread.

“What did you feel when that happened?” He’s trying to catch my eyes, but I can’t take my eyes from his blood. I don’t want the life to bleed out of Isaac.

“You need stitches,” I say. “At least two…”

“Senna, what did you feel?”

It takes me a minute to focus. He really wants me to answer that? I open and close my mouth.

“Hurt. I don’t want you to hurt. Why would you do that?”

I am so angry. Confused.

“Because that’s what I feel when you hurt yourself.”

I drop the dishtowel. Nothing dramatic—it’s just become too heavy to hold along with my understanding. I look down at where it lies between my feet. There is a bright red stain on one side of it. Isaac bends to pick it up. He also picks up the knife and places it back in my hand. Grabbing my wrist, he leads me back to the table and firmly plants me in front of it.

“Write,” he says, gesturing to the wood.

“What?”

He grabs the hand that’s holding the knife. I try to pull away again, but his eyes still me.

“Trust me.”

I stop fighting.

He presses the tip into the wood this time. Carves a straight line. “Write here,” he says.

I know what he’s telling me, but it’s not the same.

“I don’t write on my body. I cut it.”

“You write your pain on your skin. With a knife. Straight lines, deep lines, jagged lines. It’s just a different kind of word.”

I get it. All at once. I feel grief for everything that I am. Landscape is playing in the background, a strange soundtrack, a constant soundtrack.

I look down at the smooth wood tabletop. Pressing down, I carve the line we made deeper. I wriggle the blade around a little bit. It feels good. I do it some more. I add more lines, more curves. My movement becomes more frantic each time the knife meets the table. He must think I’ve gone mad. But even if he does, he doesn’t move. He stands behind my shoulder as if he’s there to supervise my assault. When I’m done I toss the knife away from me. Both hands are pressed against my carvings as I lean over the table. I’m breathing hard, like I’ve just run six miles. I have, emotionally. Isaac reaches down and touches the word I’ve made. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know what it said until I watched his fingers trace it. Surgeon’s fingers. Drummer’s fingers.

HATE

“Who do you hate?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

I do a short spin into his chest, forgetting that he’s right behind me. He grabs the tops of my arms and clutches me against him. Then he wraps his arm around my head, forcing my face against his chest. The other is circling my back. He holds me and I shake. And I swear … I swear he’s just healed me a little bit.

“I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.”

A week later, Landscape stops playing. I am stepping out of my shallow, lukewarm bath when her voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. I wrap a towel around myself and dart out of the bathroom to find Isaac. He’s in the kitchen when I come careening around the corner still clutching the towel to my dripping body. We stare at each other for a good two minutes, waiting for it to start up again, thinking there is a kink in the system. But it never comes back. It feels like a relief until the silence kicks in. True, deafening silence. We are so used to the noise, it takes a few days to acclimate to the loss of it. That’s what it’s like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it, then you feel bare without your chains. I wonder if we ever get out of here, will we feel the loss? It sounds like a joke, but I know how the human mind works.

Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.