After the deal with the F. Cayley print, I take inventory of everything in the house. We could be missing something. I wish I had a pen, some paper, but our single Bic ran out of ink a long time ago… so I have to use my good ol’ memory for this one.
There are sixty-three books scattered throughout the house. I’ve picked up each one, flipped through the pages, touched the numbers at the top right corners. I started reading two of them—both classics that I’ve already read—but I can’t get my mind to focus. I have twenty-three light, colorful sweaters, six pairs of jeans, six pairs of sweatpants, twelve pairs of socks, eighteen shirts, twelve pairs of yoga pants. One pair of rain boots—in Isaac’s size. There are six additional pieces of artwork on the walls, other than the F. Cayley; each of the others is by the Ukranian illusionist, Oleg Shuplyak. In the living room is “Sparrows” one of his milder pieces. But scattered across the rest of the house are the blurred faces of famous historical figures, blended almost indecipherably with landscapes. The one in the attic room disturbs me the most. I’ve tried to pry it from the wall with a butter knife, but it’s cemented so firmly I can’t get it to budge. It depicts a hooded man, his outstretched arms wielding two scythes. His mouth gapes and his eyes are two dark, empty holes. At first all you see is the eerie emptiness—the impending violence. Then your eyes adjust and the skull comes into view: the dark sockets of eyes between the scythes, the teeth, which seconds ago were simply a pattern on a garment. My kidnapper hung death in my bedroom. The sentiment makes me sick. The rest of the prints scattered throughout the house include: Hitler and the dragon, Freud and the lake, Darwin under the bridge with the mysterious cloaked figure. My least favorite is “Winter” in which a man is riding a yak over a snow-covered village while two eyes peer coldly at me. That one feels like a message.
When I have counted everything in my closet and Isaac’s, I start counting things in the kitchen. I note the colors of the furniture and the walls. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I need to do something with my brain. When I run out of things to count, I talk to Isaac. He makes us coffee like he used to, and we sit at the table.
“Why did you want to fly away on your red bike?”
He raises his eyebrows. He’s not used to questions from me.
“I don’t know anything about you,” I say.
“You never seemed to want to.”
That stings. It’s not entirely untrue. I have that whole stay the hell away from me thing going on.
“I didn’t.”
I count the kitchen cabinets. I forgot to do that.
“Why not?” He spins his coffee cup in a circle, and lifts it to his mouth. Before he can take a sip he sets it down again.
I have to take a moment to think about that one.
“It’s just who I am.”
“Because you choose to be?”
“This conversation was supposed to be about you.”
He finally takes a sip of his coffee. Then he pushes his mug across the table to me. I’ve already finished mine. It’s a peace offering.
“My dad was a drinker. He used to rough up my mom. Not so much a unique story,” he shrugs. “What about you?”
I consider pulling my usual stunts of avoid and retreat, but I decide to surprise him instead. It gets boring always being the same.
“My mom left before I hit puberty. She was a writer. She said my dad sucked all of the life out of her, but I think suburban life did. After she left, my dad went a little crazy.”
I take a sip of Isaac’s coffee and avoid his eyes.
“What kind of crazy?”
I purse my lips. “Rules. Lots of rules. He became emotionally volatile.” I finish off his coffee and he stands up to get the whiskey. He pours us each a shot.
“You trying to keep me talking, Doctor?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tequila works better.”
He smiles. “I’ll just run down to the liquor store and grab a bottle.”
I take my shot and spill my guts. I’m not even drunk. Saphira would be so proud of me. I crinkle my nose when I think of her. What does she think about all of this? She probably thinks I dipped out of town. She was always accusing me of … what was the word she used? Running?
“Tell me something about your life with him,” Isaac urges. I purse my lips. “Hmmm … so much f*ckedupness. Where should I start?”
He blinks at me.
“A week before I graduated from high school he found a chip in one of our drinking glasses. He came storming into my room, demanding to know how it got there. When I couldn’t give him an answer he refused to talk to me. For three weeks. He didn’t even come to my graduation. My dad. He can make a drinking glass feel like a teen pregnancy.”
I hold out my mug and Isaac refills me.
“I hate whiskey,” I say.
“Me too as well.”
I cock my head.
“Hush,” he says. “You don’t get to judge my turn of phrase.”
I lay my arm across the table and rest my head on it.
He looks less and less like a doctor nowadays with his scruffy face and long hair. Come to think of it, he’s acting less like one too. Maybe this is rockstar Isaac. I don’t ever remember him drinking during the time we spent together. I lift my head and rest my chin on my arm.
I want to ask if he had a drinking problem back in the day—when he was actually living his tattoo. But it’s none of my business. We all medicate with something. He notices me looking at him funny. He’s on his fifth shot.
“Something you want to ask me?”
“How many more bottles of that stuff do we have?” I ask. The one he’s holding has a third left. I’m thinking we might have some darker days. We need to save the happy juice for sadder times.
He shrugs. “What does it matter?”
“Hey,” I say. “We are sharing family memories. Bonding. Don’t be depressing.”
He laughs, and sets the bottle on the counter. I wonder if he’d notice if I hid it. I watch him walk into the living room. I’m not sure if I should follow him or give him space. In the end, I go upstairs. It’s not my business what Isaac is struggling with. I barely know him. No, that’s not entirely true. I just don’t know this side of him.
I wrap myself in my comforter and try to sleep. The whiskey has made my head spin. I like it. I’m surprised I never got addicted to alcohol. It’s such a nice way to check out. Maybe I should find a new addiction. Maybe I should find Isaac.
Maybe…
When I wake up I feel sick. I just barely make it down the ladder and into Isaac’s room. The bathroom door is closed. I don’t think twice before flinging it open and throwing myself at the toilet. Isaac opens the shower curtain just as I do. I have a moment where the vomit is halfway up my esophagus and Isaac is naked in front of me, everything stands still, then I push him aside and hurl.
It’s a terrible feeling, everything coming up from your stomach. Bulimics should get a medal. I use his toothbrush because I can’t find mine. The one thing I’m not is a germaphobe. When I walk out of the bathroom, he’s lying on the bed. Dressed, thank God.
“How come you didn’t get sick?”
He looks up at me. “I guess I’m an old pro.”
I have a fleeting thought, one where I wonder if he’s the one who brought us here. I narrow my eyes and scan my mind for motive. Then I come to my senses. Isaac has no reason for wanting to be here. There is no reason for him to be here at all.
“Do me a favor,” I say, against my better judgment. “If in your past life—the one where you tattooed emotion all over your body—you had a drinking problem, don’t drink.”
“Why do you care, Senna?”
“I don’t,” I say quickly. “But your wife and baby do.”
He looks away.
“We are going to get out of here eventually.” I sound way more sure than I actually am. “You can’t go back to them all messed up.”
“Someone left us here to die,” he says, blandly.
“Bullshit.” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m feeling queasy again. “All the food … the supplies. Someone wants us to survive.”
“Limited food. Limited supplies.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. We both stopped messing with the keypad the day I spilled all that nonsense about Adam and Eve.
“Maybe we should get back to breaking out of here,” I say.
Then I run back to the bathroom and throw up.
Later as I lie in my bed, still green-faced and queasy, I decide not to try to help anymore. It’s not my forte. I want to be left alone, I should therefore leave others alone. We pick up our code breaking again, for lack of anything else to do.
To stave off boredom I try my hand at reading again. It doesn’t work; I have kidnapped ADD. I like the feel of paper beneath my fingertips. The sound a page makes when it turns over. So I don’t see the words, but I touch the pages and turn them until I’ve finished the book. Isaac sees me doing it one day, and laughs at me.
“Why don’t you just read the book?” he asks.
“I can’t focus. I want to, but I can’t.”
He comes over and takes it from my hands. The sofa yields as he sits down next to me and opens it to the first page. He’s sitting so close our legs are touching.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
I close my eyes and listen to his voice. When he reads the words, “I was destined to be unlucky in life…” my eyes shoot open. I want to say Jinx. Maybe I’ll like David Copperfield after all. This isn’t the first time Isaac’s read to me. The last time was under very different circumstances. Very different and very much the same. He reads until his voice becomes hoarse. Then I take the book from him and read until mine gives, too. We mark the spot and set it down until tomorrow.
Nothing happens for weeks. We develop a routine, if you can call it that. It’s more of a day-to-day stay sane and survive kind of thing. I call it Sanity Circulation. When you’re caged up you need somewhere to send your hours, or you start getting prickly, like when you sit in the same position for too long and your legs get pins and needles. Except when you get them in your brain, you’re pretty much on your way to the nuthouse. So we try to circulate. Or, I do at least. Isaac looks like he’s two blinks away from needing Haloperidol and a padded room. He makes coffee in the morning, that’s consistent. There is a huge sack of coffee beans in the pantry and several industrial sized cans of instant. He uses the beans, saying that when we run out of juice in the generator we can heat water for the instant over the fire. When … not if.
We drink our coffee at the table. Usually in silence, but sometimes Isaac talks to fill the space. I like those days. He tells me about cases that he’s had … difficult surgeries, the patients who lived and ones who didn’t. We eat breakfast after that: oatmeal or powdered eggs. Sometimes crackers with jam spread on them. Then we part ways for a few hours. I go up, he stays down. Usually I use that time to shower and sit in the carousel room. I don’t know why I sit in there except to focus on the bizarre. We switch after that. He comes up to take his shower and I go down to sit for a while in the living room. That’s when I pretend to read the books. We meet up in the kitchen for lunch. We know it’s lunch by our hunger, not by the position of the sun, or by a clock. Tick-tock, tick- tock.
Lunch is canned soup or baked beans cooked with hot dogs. Sometimes he defrosts a loaf of bread and we eat that with butter. I clean the dishes. He watches the snow. We drink more coffee, then I go to the attic room to sleep. I don’t know what he does during that time, but when I come downstairs again he’s restless. He wants to talk. I climb up and down the stairs for exercise. Every other day I jog around the house and do sit-ups and push-ups until I feel as if I can’t move. There are a lot of hours between lunch and dinner. Mostly we just wander around from room to room. Dinner is the big event. Isaac makes three things: meat, vegetable and starch. I look forward to his dinners, not just because of the food, but the entertainment as well. I come downstairs early and perch myself on the tablet to watch him cook. Once I asked him to verbalize everything he was doing so I could pretend I was watching a cooking show. He did, only he changed his voice and his accent and spoke in the third person.
Isseeec veel sautee zees undetermined meat over ze stove veeth butter and….
Every few days when the mood is lighter I request a different Isaac cook me dinner. My favorite being Rocky Balboa, in which Isaac calls me Adrian and mimics Sylvester Stallone’s awful attempt at a Philly accent. Those are the better nights—little slivers in between the very bad ones. On the bad ones we don’t speak at all. On those days the snow is louder than the kidnapped houseguests.