All the Water in the World Read online

  “Mama?”

  She stood and turned, eggbeater in one hand, wineglass in the other, smile at the ready. “Oh, there you are! I was starting to—” At the sound of her voice I could not control my breathing or the shape of my mouth. My mother veered toward me. “What’s wrong, Maddy? What’s happened?” Eggbeater bounced to the floor. Glass hit the counter’s edge and shattered, leaving her holding a jagged cartoonish stump.

  “Did I scare you?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Careful!” I said.

  “Careful!” she said.

  I took the remains of the glass from her, dropped it in the trash, and reached for the dustpan. My mother’s clumsiness was legendary. Tools for dealing with it were always close at hand. “Don’t move. I’ll get this.” The breakage had momentarily knocked the heartache out of me. When I stood I felt something slithering down, deep inside.

  “Mom, you’re bleeding!”

  “Am I? It’s nothing.” She was trying to look into my eyes.

  I dabbed with a dish towel at the back of her hand. She was right, the cut was not deep. Her hand was strangely meek in mine. The bones were close to the surface and so were the veins. She let me press the towel until the blood no longer seeped back in when I took it away.

  “What is it?” she asked again, drawing me near and murmuring the usual things. “You’ve been at Jack’s?”

  I bowed my head and made myself as small as possible. “We’re working on the animation. I got caught in the rain.”

  “Your clothes aren’t wet,” she remarked.

  “Used his dryer.”

  “Are you cold, Maddy? You don’t want to catch a chill.”

  “I’m fine.” I burrowed into her again. “Mama?” I began in the voice of someone outdone by the events of the day.

  “Ye-ess?” crooned my mother as if she knew what was coming.

  “Why did my father leave?”

  I felt her arms go heavy and still. “What brought this on?” When I didn’t answer, she said at last: “Well, I don’t know why. Not really.”

  “He had to go back home?”

  “Yes, I suppose he did. One way or another.”

  “But he could have stayed?”

  “At the time I thought he could have.”

  “Or come back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t he?” It was like talking across an echoey tank. “Didn’t he want a baby?”

  Silence across the tank. “I guess he didn’t want one with me.”

  “You? He didn’t want you?”

  “Not enough, anyway.”

  Shivers went up my back that my mother’s patting hand could not reach.

  “Were you mad at him?”

  “At the time I was. Mad and sad.”

  “Are you still?”

  “It was a long time ago, Maddy. It’s his loss. Think of everything he missed out on.”

  “This?” I pushed away. “This?” Gesturing at the whole of my sorry, invaded self.

  “You!” she cried. “He missed out on you.”

  I don’t know what my face was doing, but my mother’s had expressions darting across it that I had never seen. She didn’t want to be having this conversation, but one of her principles was that a mother answers her child’s questions truthfully. Maybe that’s why I had never asked her so directly before. We always referred to Antonio in a certain way, as though he were a fairy-tale character whose actions had already been accounted for.

  “Well, I am,” I said.

  “You are what?”

  “Mad and sad.”

  “I know you are!” came the instant reply. “Of course you are, Maddy! I’ve known it all along.”

  “I wasn’t so much before,” I said. “I didn’t used to think about it. But I do now. All the time.”

  I could have told her then, one or both of my secrets. It was the logical thing to do. Antonio was already with us in the room, and there was time to put Jack out there too, like a troubling dream to be aired and given a daytime shape. My mother had that look again, of someone being forced to stare into harsh lights. I held my nerve, swallowing down the dread that filled my throat like laughter. Was it possible? Could I really? It seemed like another girl standing there thinking these thoughts, daring to withhold and to go without.

  That was the moment Robin picked to wander in. When he saw us, he did a speedy U-turn, glancing back over his shoulder. My mother told him with her eyes to vamoose and leave the kitchen to us. What I did then was a surprise to me as much as to anyone. I went over and dragged Robin in and propped him up between us as if he were a prize stuffed bear I had won. The astonishment on their faces was gratifying, and so was the sturdy feel of his forearm, which in truth was only pretending to resist.

  “Far be it from me,” said Robin, “to intrude on a female moment.”

  “You’re not intruding. Is he, Mom?”

  “Not at all.” My mother broke away and went to the drawer by the sink where household items end up that have nowhere else to go. Eyes down, she began flinging things out. Screwdrivers, broken earrings, a carrot-shaped magnet, a flashlight with no lens, rubber bands, candle ends, fuses, and pens tumbled together and came to a stop as though the kitchen floor had always been their true resting place.

  As if hypnotized, Robin and I watched her stretch the excavated Band-Aid, a blue Disney one, across her hand, which was not even bleeding anymore, furiously blinking away tears before they spilled down or were noticed. One of the things I hated most in the world was to see my mother cry. I longed to rush over and win her back. It was a miracle I stayed put.

  Even if Robin had not come out of his trance to tenderly gather up the objects and check the floor for shards; even if he had not made cooing sounds and offered her one of his short-man hugs, causing her to turn and hide her face in his shirt, I would have stayed put. Because I had someone with me now, or that’s the way it felt, and together we were going around silently closing windows and shutting doors and gates I didn’t even know could be shut and closed. Whether my mother saw it this way or not, the fact was, keeping a secret or two would be better for both of us in the long run. I have to think about the long run now.

  PART II

  Eve

  16

  The day after Norma rowed over to us, a storm moved in. I went down to the dock every morning as usual, even in the rain, but she did not appear again. Three days later, Robin and I drove home.

  When we pulled into the driveway, crickets were ringing the summer’s end. It could have been any August night from my childhood, returning from the cool lake to the hot city. On Corcoran Street, my brother and I would race each other into the house. Now I didn’t want to leave the car. Robin braced his arms on the steering wheel for an elaborate yawn, exactly as my father used to do, while I observed that the measures we took to make the house appear inhabited while we were gone—arranging the dormer blinds at different heights, setting the porch lamp on a timer—only drew attention to its emptiness.

  Inside, I slapped my shoulder bag on the dining room table and flipped through the mail that our neighbor, Mrs. Platt, had left in a neat pile when she came in to water the plants and feed the cat. Robin scooped Cloud up like an infant, yodeling “You Are My Sunshine” to her sulky face, until she struggled from his arms and stalked off. When I first got her for Maddy, she’d been a tiny parcel of bodiless fur. Now she had an adult’s swinging gait and the smoky features of her breed. I didn’t care if she was annoyed at us for locking the cat door and leaving her at the mercy of Mrs. Platt, who in our absence maintained a dry prison diet. I just wanted to find her there when we returned.

  Robin smiled wearily at me, his forehead scored with sunburn. When I first met Robin, he had been under this very table, on whose surface I was tracing spirals with my fingertips. I had come back from shopping the morning of my fortieth birthday to find two men assembling the gift from my parents, hand-crafted from English walnut. I don’t remember
the assistant—he has a different one now—but I often think back to that version of Robin, when he was a wiry stranger supine on the floor, his hands gripping the slab to position it and screw the legs on from underneath, squinting in concentration, his raised arms causing his T-shirt to untuck from his jeans and flap over the shadow of his waist. In his low nimble commentary he told me he had moved to northern Virginia to apprentice to a Japanese master craftsman and eventually set up his own business. He’d rescued the wood from a construction site near Culpeper where trees were being felled and burned; the slabs had been drying in his workshop when Rose and Walter went to see him about a commission.

  “Nice people, your folks. Nice as they come.” On his feet again, he stopped and studied me for the first time, to see whether niceness ran in the family.

  I called him back a few weeks later to tighten a wobble that had developed at the crossbars. We went out for lunch. He called me when he was next in town, to check on the repair. I asked him for a quote for a built-in bookcase in the family room. When he came to fit the bookcase, he took me out to dinner. Six years my senior, Robin was industrious and softhearted, with an indulgent smile that I thought was reserved for me until I saw him bestow the same smile on checkout girls, waiters, and car mechanics as he coaxed them into conversation.

  Robin slowly tunneled into my life until it seemed he’d always been there, holding forth on wood grain, sonatas, and wildlife. It was not in Robin’s nature to force things, and I had to be on my guard until I could judge the consequences for Maddy. But she was growing up and needing me less, and after the first weeks, during which she refused to smile at him, she grew more and more open to Robin’s presence in our lives, even urging me, as she put it, to “seal the deal.”

  “Seal the deal? What do you know about sealing the deal?”

  “More than you think.”

  One Saturday when Maddy was at a slumber party, Robin came over to eat fish tacos and enjoy our newly repaired fireplace. At that time, the empty house held an erotic allure and we moved from the living room floor to the bedroom, and soon we were spending most of our weekends together. We each had one child—his was a twenty-three-year-old son in Cincinnati whom he didn’t often see, the product of an early disastrous marriage—which meant that there was no pressure on us to procreate. Robin found a nearby garage to rent for a workshop, and with little ceremony, he moved in. I remember thinking at the time that life was as good as it had ever been. Maddy was diagnosed seven months later.

  I couldn’t stop my fingers tracing spirals on the wood, circling in one direction, then the other. Nothing about this table was symmetrical, apart from its uniform thickness. It was made of two lengths of golden red walnut, straight-cut across one end, tapered to curves on the other, and fastened together with inlaid butterfly joints. A long crack at the straight end was part of the design and its charm. The table was one of the few possessions I would go into a burning house to save. Maddy, though, had never liked it. She found it lopsided and unfinished.

  Robin came over and stilled my hands with his own. He wrapped his arms around me. “Turn down the AC. I’ll unload the car and call Mrs. P. We’ll go straight to sleep.”

  I hauled my bag as far as the landing upstairs. Then before I could decide not to, I turned the handle to Maddy’s room, went in, and sat on her bed.

  • • •

  In the months when I could bear neither to stray too far from the house nor to keep myself too busy, I would look into Maddy’s room from the door. It felt intrusive to enter when she could not invite me. Now I was in full view of her posters, her shaggy rug, her white dresser with the oval mirror, objects that were regarding me with the level gaze of things that could be converted to other uses.

  Experimentally I leaned back against the triangle cushion, circling one wrist with the fingers of the other hand to survey the room the way she did, queen of her world. While I was in this position, my cell phone slid from the pocket of my shirt and fell between the mattress and wall. I poked my hand down. Box. Book. Cardboard. Some kind of folder, furry with dust. I had to smile. Maddy had inherited my approach to housekeeping. Nowadays Mrs. Walsh only ran the vacuum around the rest of the house.

  It was too much trouble to find a flashlight, so instead I knelt on the bed and pulled out enough objects to make space for my hand. I blew off the dust and held each one for a moment. A collage of a city street she’d brought home in third grade. Her eager, bashful face. The Sexwise book I had given her. I hoped its no-nonsense advice had served her well. I tried a matter-of-fact smile: so far, so good. Next was the pink plastic box, half diary, half keepsake holder, a Christmas present from Rose. To open it you needed a four-digit code, long forgotten.

  What a comical performance! In my presence she had made a point of punching in the code, to remind me that she alone could gain entrance, and then elaborately shielded the contents of the box from my gaze. If I turned away too readily, she offered to let me see; if I declined, she followed me around, growing more agitated and finally insisting that I look at her private things. Of course the catch could be forced, but I was pleased to note I had no desire to break in to the diary of a nine-year-old, or to know what trinkets she had seen fit to hide there. Last item: a green file folder with one word scrawled across it. Antonio.

  Even as a teenager, Maddy had roundly childish handwriting; the i was dotted with a circle. I saw myself as if from above, kneeling on the bed. My hands felt weak, numb almost, while what they held was twitching with life. I wanted to lift the flap. I could not bring myself to lift the flap. Slowly I lifted the flap.

  Dear Antonio Jorge Romero, I read. You don’t know me . . . Dear Maddy, Naturally I was very, very surprised . . . I flipped through the pages, scanning. I’m not sure what I should call you . . . As a scientist I am gravely concerned . . . Do you always email me from work? You can never trust an English summer . . .

  I replaced the pages and closed the folder. Kneeling on the mattress, I slipped it back down between the bed and the wall. I stood on Maddy’s rug, shame thumping its way through me. I could walk away. Pretend I’d never come in. Forget what I’d seen. Instead I rushed to the bed, snatched the folder from the crevice, and holding it in front of me like a shield, made my way downstairs, calling for Robin.

  • • •

  He sat on the piano bench, swiveled around to face me. His sand-colored hair was still springy enough to do a convincing comb back; its thinness was visible only from above. Another five years, if we lasted that long, he would join the rest of the domed population. He’d fare better than most because he had so little vanity and such a characterful face. He read the two pages I handed over and whistled through his teeth, waiting for me to come to him.

  “I’m going back to the lake. I need to be alone,” I said. “I need to think.”

  Our intimate life had pretty much ground to a halt once Maddy fell sick. There were times, when she was at church with my parents, or at Jack’s, when we managed it, generating a precarious hope that lasted for days. But mostly I couldn’t bear to indulge in the comedy of sex; I couldn’t stand joy.

  Robin reached for my hands and swung them. “Can’t you think with me? I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

  I whipped my head side to side.

  Robin let go of me and stretched his arms out, tinkering behind his back with the highest and lowest keys. When he’d moved in with his Boston upright, we’d demoted the old piano Maddy had learned on to the basement. Her lessons had dropped off by that time, and once she was ill, she had no interest in practicing, or in acquiring knowledge about music or composers. She wanted to go to concerts and to lean forward, carving out with her shoulders a private space to remove herself to. She hushed me if I tried to speak to her. To the music itself she gave a hungry attention I could only observe from the corner of my eye, shut out of her world and sick with pity and fear.

  “You don’t have to hide away, Eve.”

  “Maddy wrote to him for m
onths and I never knew! She never told me.”

  He slid over on the bench to make room. I pressed my cheek to his unyielding shoulder. If it’s true that underneath we all seethe with lunatic notions, irrational beliefs, and bizarre wishes, fear knocks them out into the light. Over the year of Maddy’s illness, I was by turns remote and accusatory with Robin. It was my child who was under threat. It was my child getting thin, my child being punctured and invaded, my child who might never grow up. Robin’s son was a standoffish young man named Vince who worked as a hospital orderly and was uninterested not only in his father but, from what I could tell, in any normal human contact. At night, lying in the dark, I could not banish the thoughts. The world could do without Vince more than it could do without Maddy. Why not him? The shame of it distanced me even further from Robin, who had done nothing but stand by me, observing my anguish from afar with a look that said: Let me in.

  “I know it’s hard on you,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “The way I am. What’s happened. Everything.”

  He squeezed me a bit roughly, I thought. “I don’t like you going up there on your own. Why don’t you see if Beth or Ella will go with you?”

  I looked at him in surprise. “They bailed on me.”

  “Is that what happened?” It had grieved him when my friends and I had parted company.

  “You know what happened! We drifted apart.”

  “Well, can’t you drift back together?”

  “It’s too much for you, isn’t it?”

  He crossed his arms. “All I’m saying is, being isolated is never a good thing.”

  After a minute, I added cautiously: “Who knows? Maybe Norma will be there.”

  “Our new neighbor?”

  “It would be nice if she is.”