All the Water in the World Read online

  “Well,” he said, “I’d rather that than you being alone.”

  17

  After the last of the factory towns, the road ran through mile after mile of cropland fitted to the earth like carpet, broken only by corrugated sheds and farm machinery lined up on paved lots. Every so often there appeared a barn in such a perfect storybook shape, painted such a perfect red, that it seemed to have come off the cover of a brochure. But don’t ask me; I’m not the one to gauge the truth of appearances. These days the outside world strikes me as either a backdrop or a façade, with brushed-on highlights and hidden seams that I could expose if I looked closely enough.

  My week back at work had passed in a daze. After summer vacation at the lake, the encounter with Norma, and the discovery of the letters, it was hard for me to believe I was assistant director of anything, let alone the education service of an award-winning museum. I drew up the fall schedule for the interns, debated with my boss the pros and cons of evening workshops, led tourists, amateur artists, and retired people from gallery to gallery, while my mind was fixed on Friday afternoon, when I could leave early, go home, pack my overnight bag, and set off. Now, with the light draining from the day and Bach’s two-part inventions ringing around me in the car, time seemed to be moving forward again in fits and starts.

  More cropland, more stalled machinery, more unlikely barns. In the eastbound lane a twelve-wheeler slid past, heading for the lower lakes, where fracking was under way. They wait until dusk to send unmarked trucks through with their cargo of water. Tawasentha was the highest of the trio of lakes, and thus far the association had stood firm; but the payment offered was eye-watering, and at the last meeting a quarter of the members had voted in favor. For all I knew, it was only a matter of time before landslides and poisoned groundwater came to us too.

  I should be the ideal activist, inspired by how Maddy had faced the unthinkable. Courage could be taken from courage. Imagination could be brought to bear. Where was my imagination? Where was my bravery?

  I turned left at the country store and began the claustrophobic ascent up the mountain through National Park forestland, coming to a stop at the single bar gate, the entrance to the lakeshore road. Up rose the thick, spicy scent of the ferns. A bearded man appeared on the stoop of the caretaker’s bungalow and, as he swung open the gate, I was overcome by misgivings I should have been prey to all along. Was I out of my mind? I did not want to see anyone. She was probably not even there. But I could hardly turn around now, so I stepped on the gas and drove through with a wave. The caretakers came and went. Who could live for long in that exposed place, close enough to smell the lake but not to see it?

  • • •

  In the morning I boiled an egg and ate it on the terrace, then I took my coffee down to the lake. Without Robin in the house behind me, the dock felt like a boat whose moorings had been cut. I oversaw the lifting of the mist, observed the water’s surface become pocked by little competing breezes, and searched for signs of life in the yellow monstrosity opposite. I even stood up and did some stretches and deep knee bends. Without binoculars I could not confirm whether the movement I thought I saw was people or foliage. There was nothing to do but shoulder my bag and set off down the lakeside path. Narrow as an animal track, it snaked around between the tree roots, pine needles giving way underfoot to spongy moss. It was this path that kept the perimeter of the lake passable, fulfilling another bylaw of the Tawasentha charter: The shoreline had to be accessible to residents at all times.

  I had to admit that up close the yellow of the house was more dignified than from a distance, an ocher shade that was almost Venetian. Stealthy as I was, I still managed to alert the dog, a curly brown terrier, who bounded out from behind the woodpile and bayed stiff-legged by the overturned kayak.

  Norma appeared at the ground-level door to see what the commotion was. She stepped out, scolding, “Shhh! It’s okay, Homer. Friend, not foe,” and stood there, looking surprised. “Oh. Hello!”

  “Sorry to disturb you.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s just showing off. He’s a big baby. Aren’t you, Homey?” She bent to stroke him. The cartoon name sounded strange in Norma’s soft voice.

  “I was walking around the lake.”

  “That’s nice.” She frowned at the sky. “It’s a good day for it.”

  I spotted the bumper of a pickup truck in the driveway. “You must be busy.”

  “Always.” She straightened up, grinning her can-do grin, her gray sweatshirt spattered with paint. Today a tortoiseshell headband held her hair back from her face. She looked more self-contained than I remembered. “Want to come in? See what we’re doing to the house?”

  Now that my aim was in reach, I said: “Maybe another time.”

  “Sure? It’s no trouble. The boys are at my mom’s. I don’t want them around when we’re doing the floors. Some nasty chemicals.”

  I shaded my eyes and studied the lake. I did not especially want to enter Norma’s house. Tanner might be in there. I doubted he was, given the unguarded way she was speaking, but even so I did not want to be ambushed by the trappings of happy-go-lucky family life.

  “We could have coffee out here,” Norma offered. When I turned back, she bestowed on me such a hospitable smile that I had an urge to say something unpleasant, just to see what it would do to her face.

  “Okay.”

  Their dock was larger than ours but in worse shape. The top of the T was roped off. I saw from the chalky mounds on the boards that the ducks used it as a rest stop. The whole lakefront, for that matter, could do with attention. Even in the shallows there was none of the fine white sand my father replenished every year that made swimming a pleasure. Norma’s lake floor was all muck and sticks, and the ground was swamp, I could tell, from the shoreline to the house. Up close I could see no obvious signs of tree felling. Had I been wrong about that? Maybe they had just trimmed back the branches.

  Norma parked me at the wooden picnic table and went to make coffee. That gave me a chance to look around and make friends with Homer, who assumed a sphinxlike dignity at my feet. It was a different lake from here. Whereas we had a view down the entire length, they could see only the stretch of water between their cottage and ours, the rest being hidden by the promontory that separated this lobe from the main body of the lake. It gave them greater privacy but also an oppressive sense of enclosure. Across the water all that could be seen of our house was the point of the roof through the trees. Our dock made a pale line under the green dabs of the chairs. It would be hard to tell what someone was up to there; I could see why Norma had interpreted my arm waving as a call for help.

  She appeared with two cups on a tray. We exchanged small talk about the recent cold snap. The sun dipped in and out of halfhearted clouds. A breeze lifted the reddish frizz at Norma’s forehead, causing her to reach up and try to tuck it under her headband. Scattered over the ground were a wagon, a ball and bat, and an assortment of water toys.

  “How are the boys?” I asked, wanting to be reminded that she presided over a world unconnected to mine.

  “You know. Angels or criminals. Nothing in between.” She sighed. “What would I do without my mother? She’s fantastic with them. They’re a handful. Especially Ben, of course. But then he gets Luke going.”

  “Why especially Ben?”

  “Benjamin has a lot of issues,” said Norma easily. “Did I mention that? He’s on the spectrum. Pretty far over on the spectrum.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  Norma smiled in a practiced way, to let me know there was no need for awkwardness or pity. “We tried the public school. School doesn’t work out for Ben, at the moment, anyway. There’s a place he goes to half the week.”

  “That must be tough.”

  “It’s been awful.” She corrected herself: “Quite a journey.”

  It was a word I particularly disliked, one that had been employed by a number of people over the last two years to describe my situa
tion. “Is that the way you see it?”

  “Well.” Norma studied me. “Better a journey than an affliction, right?” She smiled her sunny smile. “So how are things with you? How’s Maddy?”

  The moment had arrived, with little effort on my part. Norma was not a friend, but she was warm and wholesome and free from contamination. I’d had friends and I’d lost friends. What I needed was another stranger.

  “Maddy didn’t make it,” I said.

  “At her age, I’m sure she has other things to do. At least you and Robin are free to come and go.” She wrapped her mug in both hands and looked down at them, thinking, perhaps, of the freedom that she and Tanner might never have.

  “No, I mean Maddy didn’t make it. She died last November.”

  Norma’s head jerked up.

  “She had cancer.”

  It was a relief to have said it, to have given it to her to hold; also a triumph, a shame, and a burden. Her light blue eyes filmed with tears. I had turned a coffee morning into a tragic drama, an acquaintance into a confessor. Would I have to carry Norma now too?

  She was searching my eyes for a last-minute sign that I was joking, knuckles jammed to her lips. “You didn’t say!”

  “It’s not easy!”

  “Of course not . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve got kids. It must be a shocking thing to hear.”

  Did I invent these thoughts for her, or did I read them in her eyes and the set of her shoulders, the tiny changes that flickered like light across her features? The desire to know everything. The desire to compare my life to hers. The desire to look away. The desire to rewind time, to withdraw into her own troubles, to never have kayaked over to my dock in the first place, because now she and I were roped together by what I’d told her, and a person as kind as she was would not know how to detach herself.

  “In case you’re wondering,” I said, “I’m not crazy.” Norma made a noise but I hurried on. “I don’t particularly believe in anything. Do you? But now I think: Maybe it’s arrogant to be so sure. Who knows if she’s still somewhere? No one does. Even if they think they do. Especially if they think they do.”

  Norma nodded mutely.

  “So sometimes it helps to act as if. There’s nothing wrong with as if.” I saw now that everything anchoring me to what was correct and in the scheme of things had gone with Maddy’s death. There was no long run. There was no last analysis. As if was not just a matter of survival, of getting through in any way possible. It stood for the fact that my relationship to meaning itself had profoundly changed.

  Slowly, wonderingly, Norma whispered: “The snake . . .”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” I winched what bound us together a little tighter. “I hadn’t thought about that in years. The fact is,” I said, “I get some comfort from the snake.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s as though it was already decided. As though nothing could have prevented it.”

  A year ago, had I given it any thought, a coincidence like the snake would have struck me as cruel and irrelevant, another sick game the universe was playing at my expense. Now all I had were the patterns I could make, the metaphorical resonance I could find. Perhaps that was all there was to have.

  I let Norma ask me questions. I told her about Maddy’s exhaustion and weight loss, the symptoms we mistook for teenage recalcitrance and sleep deprivation, the demands of a new body and a hectic social life; my absorption with Robin at the time and my sense that Maddy was on the eve of a new life and so was I; the misdiagnosis, which meant that the illness had been relatively advanced by the time it was discovered.

  “Do you know how strange it is to have to think about the inside of your child’s body?”

  She shook her head.

  “A child’s supposed to be a child. Not an arrangement of matter in better or worse shape.”

  I told her about the music, the campaign, Maddy’s determination to fit as much as possible into what time she had. I told her about my friends who organized a team of standby drivers, cooks, networkers, and consolers, and a rotation of people to stay with Maddy when Robin and I went out. I told her about our hopes for the new drugs, the relapse, the rapid decline. Maddy’s death I passed over in one sentence.

  “You’d think, if the worst happened, that all your friends would be there for you forever? Instead of which, they seemed to withdraw. Even my close friends. Maybe especially my close friends. Ella was in the middle of moving, but Beth . . .”

  Norma looked aghast. “They abandoned you?”

  “Not exactly. Well, I don’t remember much about the first few weeks. I know people were there, helping. But after a while, something changed. It was like I was radioactive. No one wanted to come too close.”

  “I guess no one knows how to do it,” said Norma. “What to say.”

  “Maybe it’s me. Robin thinks it’s me, I’m sure he does. Whenever Beth came by with her kids, I was rude, or I made some excuse so they would go. I couldn’t stand it.”

  I bent down and rubbed Homer’s neck. I felt the quiver of his skin under the fur, the sun’s heat on my back. Norma was watching the white flake of a sailboat out on the lake, her hands around one raised knee. I straightened up.

  “Something else happened this week.”

  She turned to me the troubled eyes of someone who had never known Maddy and was incapable of missing her.

  “Do you want to hear? You can say no. I’ve dumped a lot on you already . . .”

  She shook her head and then nodded, dazed with secondhand calamity.

  “Remember I told you about Maddy’s father? I hadn’t seen or heard from him since I found out I was pregnant?”

  “He’s contacted you.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve contacted him.”

  “No.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “Maddy did. I found the emails this week.”

  Norma’s hand moved across the tabletop and covered mine as easily as she had examined my nail polish the week before.

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” I said. “Why did she have to go behind my back?”

  “Is that the worst thing? That she didn’t tell you?”

  Wasn’t it obvious? The past and Maddy’s part in it were a sealed box. She would not be following me around, begging me to open it and look inside.

  Norma tried again. “Well, what were the emails like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said sullenly. “I was too shocked to take them all in.” This was true, but I had seen enough. The salutations and sign-offs, the familiarity, the occasional cajoling tone, left no doubt it was an exchange over many months: a two-way street, a relationship.

  “Well, do you have them with you?” asked practical Norma.

  I gave her an aggrieved look. “Yes.”

  “Well, do you want to look at them now?”

  Did she have to start every sentence with well? There was nothing to do but open my bag. The zipper made a tearing sound. Homer stirred; Norma patted him down. I set the green folder on the table between us. Norma’s hands stayed in her lap. I pulled out the top page and handed it to her. Then another, and another and another. I gave her the first six letters. They did not take long to read. She laid the last one facedown on the table and raised her glistening eyes. I was as dry as could be.

  “You get the gist. Her last one was in September. I don’t know if he kept writing after that.”

  “Did she tell him she was sick?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh!” Norma moaned. “What a terrible punishment!”

  “He’s probably thinking she’ll contact him again one of these days.”

  She touched the papers. “Was he a nice guy? He sounds like a nice guy.”

  “Nice enough. I was crazy about him at the time.” I paused. “Well, he can’t be that nice if he abandoned a pregnant girlfriend.”

  “No.”

  “And never tried to contact me.”
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  “Did you want him to?”

  “I’d have shut him out if he had. My unforgiving streak.”

  “Did Maddy know about your unforgiving streak?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is that why she didn’t tell you?”

  “How should I know!”

  Norma did an “okay, okay” thing with her palms and gazed off at the dock.

  “See, that’s the problem,” I began in a conciliatory tone. “I can’t ask her. I can’t even—”

  A workman stood before us, thumbs hooked in his tool belt. He glanced from Norma to me and back again. “Could I borrow you for a sec? It’s about that corner cabinet. We could’ve measured wrong.”

  Norma got up, shooting me an apologetic look. “Be right back.”

  In her absence I studied my fingernails. I had not repainted them. The color had shrunk to an island of white-flecked purple in the center of each nail. Picnic table benches were hard to relax on. I adopted a number of stiff positions while gazing off, pretending to enjoy the view; our cottage looked far away and closed up. I would call Robin when I got back.

  I didn’t hear Norma until she was sitting down again.

  “There is a way to find out,” she said. “Two ways.”

  “Did they measure wrong?”

  She looked blank.

  “The cabinet.”

  “Oh. They did, as a matter of fact. But it’s salvageable. I’m not even calling Tanner.”

  “Find out what?” I asked.

  “Didn’t Maddy say her grandfather knew she was contacting him?”

  “True.” I had not allowed myself to consider this yet.

  “Your dad didn’t tell you what was going on?”

  “No,” I said shortly.

  “Wow,” said Norma. “What a secretive family.”

  “What’s the other way?”

  “Find Antonio,” she said.

  I snorted and my foot collided with Homer. Gamely he rose and stretched. “I’m not doing that! I raise his child, and then he starts something with her behind my back? No thanks.”

  “Maddy wrote to him first . . .” Norma ventured.