All the Water in the World Read online

  “Thanks, Mom, but I’m extremely relaxed. You’re the one who needs relaxing.” I grinned when I said this so she wouldn’t take it the wrong way, and accepted her offering. Like everyone else, I drew pictures when I was little. Unlike everyone else, I kept it up till the end of middle school. Kids used to put in orders for me to make them drawings, from a photograph, say of their dog or their sister, or a scene from The Simpsons. By high school I mainly did what I had to do to stay in favor with the art teacher, Mr. Yam. “What would I draw, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “You could draw what you see out the window. Your clothes hanging in the closet. Or in your case, thrown on the floor.”

  “Ha! Look who’s talking.”

  “More interesting to draw if they’re thrown on the floor.” She kept standing there. “Are you okay, Maddy? Do you need anything? Just say.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.” I put down the sketchbook and held out my hands. “Do you like my nails?”

  “Love the colors!” she said a little too quickly. “Love the spots!”

  I could see she was having a not-so-great day.

  “Can I do your nails, Mama?” From the corner of my eye I saw my mouth talking in the mirror, as if it had started leading a life of its own. “Puleeese . . . ?” I said this in my Tweetie-Pie voice, knowing that although my mother is a sucker for my Tweetie-Pie voice, she was still going to say no. She always says no. She won’t even wear subtle shades of lipstick.

  “No offense, Mom, but the way you look at the moment? Believe me, nail polish would help!” She laughed, so I thought it was safe to follow this up with: “You should listen to the younger generation. Let us show you the way.”

  Since I’ve been sick, my mother gets this look as though someone is forcing her to stare into a light that’s way too bright. I should have known better. Teasing strikes her as cute, and cute means sad, and sad brings on the look, which I was in no mood for today.

  “I know it’s me doing this to you, Mom! Do you think I want to do this to you?” There. I’d said it out loud, though not necessarily in the right tone.

  We stared at each other.

  I could also say: I’m the kid around here!

  I could also say: Well, you’re the one who made me! But that would be mean, because what’s happened is no more her fault than it is mine. Grandpa’s always telling me that.

  My mother was smiling and frowning at the same time, like someone had just told her a terrible joke. “Of course you don’t!” she said. “No one wants this. We didn’t ask for this. But we do have to bear it. All of us together.”

  Well, thumbs-up, Mom! Earnest-motherly I can take. When I go to pieces she gets strong, and vice versa. She always comes through. Eres una estrella. In fact, that was so stellar, there might be a two-way eye-watering thing going on here soon if we’re not careful. But I feel we can conclude with dignity.

  “Thanks,” I murmured. “Mama mia.” She likes it when I call her that. Our favorite slushy movie. I gave her one of the back-patting hugs I learned from her. Bony spine, sharp shoulder blades. We both need fattening up.

  “And yes, please,” she said, pulling away. “I want you to do my nails. Makeup too. The works.”

  Good thing she can’t read my mind. The afterlife! I’m the kid around here! You’re the one who made me! If they turn on you like that, I never want to have children. But I guess if I did, I’d get the hormone, and then I would be exactly like my mother.

  3

  Jack Bell had recently had his braces off, and his teeth looked blank and unused, like he was trying them out for the first time. I am five nine and a half, one of the tallest girls in the tenth grade, but he had passed me by a good two inches. What pimples he had were confined to his chin. His broad cheekbones narrowed his eyes in a friendly way. We stood there like we had both been hypnotized. I hadn’t had much to do with Jack since sixth grade. We weren’t mean to him—Fiona, Vicky, and me—but he was so quiet we tended to forget he was there. Now I felt sick to my stomach, standing on his porch in my beret, staring at his teeth. If only I had hair!

  There is a thing I do at moments like this, that I’ve done since I was little. I imagine wrapping myself in some big thick material until everything is muffled and distant. Then I imagine I am being observed by someone I can’t exactly picture, who knows everything I’m thinking and loves me anyway. It makes me feel I can do all kinds of difficult things.

  I considered Jack from inside my invisible cloak. “I’ve come about the campaign.”

  “I know.”

  “Miss Sedge’s idea.”

  “I know.”

  He went up the stairs in front of me, dragging his sneakers on each step, his big wrists swinging. At the top he turned. “Want a Coke? Water? Cranberry juice?” I hesitated. “Vodka and tonic?” Jack asked, grinning with his new teeth.

  “Water, please.” I pretended to look around. “Nice house.” Though I don’t like split-levels. They remind me of a doll’s house where everything is in view.

  “It’s my dad’s place. He’s at work.”

  “Lucky you.” I had met Jack’s father when we were young and they lived in their other house, predivorce. Tall, talkative, nice is all I remember.

  Jack went to the fridge and I took a seat at the breakfast bar. On the counter a laptop was open to a website, Tar Sands Action 2011, next to a stack of books and a DVD. Did that mean I was to be dealt with quickly and ushered out?

  This kitchen didn’t even have a door on it. Anyone could see us from the landing or through the windows that started half a floor below. My eyes kept flitting down to the front door, expecting a lordly version of Jack to charge in at any moment to see what his son was getting up to.

  He was taking his time by the fridge, his back to me, head tipped down. Enough thick brown hair for both of us. Judging by the bony, stretched-out look of him, Jack had grown tall a little too fast.

  In fourth grade he used to come over to my house and we’d cut out constellations from National Geographic and prick the pages to make light-box planetariums. Back then he was a pigeon-toed kid with a buzz cut. We went on our bikes to the new subdivision at Sligo Creek. The creek had been drained to build the houses, but water came up anyway in all the ditches. We brought pollywogs home in pails. Some of them grew tiny back legs. Some even grew front legs, but we never got as far as a real toad. Jack said the pollywogs couldn’t grow up because they had been taken out of their natural environment. I said I didn’t think a stinking hole on a construction site was very natural. Jack said it was more natural than a pail.

  Hiss of a bottle cap.

  Don’t turn around yet . . .

  Second hiss.

  I whipped off my beret. When Jack faced me again, a glass in each hand, I was there with my naked head out in plain sight.

  It is a blink reaction people cannot help. I was prepared for his surprised look. I had planned to get some satisfaction from it. What I was not prepared for was the expression that immediately took its place: This is curious. But: It is what it is. And: No huge deal. Maybe it is the look of someone with a scientific turn of mind. Miss Sedge has a very similar expression. If you believe everything is part of the world, then everything is equally astonishing, so nothing by itself can be too astonishing.

  “Beer?” He held one out, looking proud to have prepared me a stronger option.

  “Sure,” I said. We sat in worldly silence, sipping our drinks. I hate beer.

  It was up to me to say the next thing. “Miss Sedge tutors me at home. Even between treatments there is no point in me going to school.” He nodded. “Dr. O says I could, but Mom thinks I’m too tired and I could catch something.” He nodded again. “I probably shouldn’t even be here.” Further nod. “I’m about to go through another round.” I was taxing Jack’s nodding faculties.

  “Do you like to talk about it?” he asked. “Or not? Fine if you don’t.”

  “Sometimes yes,” I said. “Sometimes n
o.”

  “How will I know?”

  “I’ll post it on Facebook: ‘I now wish to speak about my cancer. Please make an appointment.’ ”

  I liked the way his eyes almost shut when he laughed and I liked him asking “How will I know?” as if it were up to me but in theory I could talk about it if I wanted to. As if there would be lots of times to talk about it. I guess the campaign meant he’d be seeing me again.

  “Miss Sedge is pretty cool.”

  “I know.” After a minute: “We weren’t very nice to her.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “Way back in ninth grade,” I rushed to say. “Vicky drew a cartoon of her on the board. One time she caught us outside the library, making fun of her voice.” She told us to get to class or we would be in big trouble, but the look on her face before she covered it up is something I don’t like to think about, even now. Especially now.

  I picked up a book and read the title out loud. “Life as We Know It: Varieties of Global Catastrophe. Well, catastrophe’s better than warming! What I hate is these words. Warming sounds so cozy. Who wouldn’t want to be warm? Keystone Pipeline. How could something called a ‘keystone’ be dangerous?” In Jack’s presence, with the air flowing freely around the bare bulb of my head, I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth before I heard myself say it.

  “It’s impression management,” said Jack. “The extractive industries are good at that.”

  “Where do you get this stuff from? Impression management. Extractive industries.” I felt subdued by his earnestness, by what he knew that I didn’t.

  “My dad, mostly,” he admitted.

  “What I don’t understand is, aren’t the people making the pipeline worried about the planet? They live here too.”

  “It’s the biggest mystery of my life,” said Jack, so stiff and serious that I couldn’t help smiling. He spoke rapidly. “I mean the fact that people aren’t more interested in what’s happening to the earth. Maybe they can’t take too much reality. No. It’s money, basically. The companies will rake in billions if the pipeline is built. But it’s our future—” He was in the middle of a you-and-me loop with his hand when he stopped. I could see him backtracking for a second, then deciding to go on. “For you and me, if we want a future, we have to leave fossil fuels in the ground. It’s that simple.”

  He said some more things about the Anthropocene, the Faustian bargain, the two degrees Celsius. I could see he loved the science of it and the details and the words. Facts were facts, and I could read them and even try to let them become, as Miss Sedge said, part of my worldview. But Jack was wrong. It was not simple. Nothing was the least bit simple.

  I could think about supereruptions and methane burps with calm curiosity during the day. But at night the images conjured up by the facts would wash over me until I was lying rigid in the dark, my whole body thumping with fear. What I couldn’t explain was the thrill it gave me to imagine it. Especially the tsunamis. As the ocean floor got shallower, the waves grew bigger and stronger until the shelf ran out and the waves were set loose. Then the buildings and the scattering people, dignified on their own scale, were just crumbs. Over and over the images ran through me in the dark. I felt each wave slowly gathering power into itself, like a creature thinking cruel and merciless thoughts, and on the other hand like a creature just doing what it couldn’t help doing, and what it would not stop doing until it was finished.

  “So . . .” I could hardly admit any of this to Jack. “What are we going to do?”

  “Have a look at this.”

  He angled the laptop toward me and together we leaned in to the screen. I could have stayed there for a long time near the heat of his shoulder, scrolling through the site as he told me about the march students were planning from Georgetown to the White House. The point was to demand that the president follow through on his promise to reconsider the pipeline.

  “It says here, ‘Participants must be at least eighteen years old.’ ”

  “That’s just for the civil disobedience.” Jack tilted away from me, gripping the edge of the table with one hand and balancing on the back legs of his stool. “That’s the best part! But we can raise money. We can publicize it. We can go on the march. We’ve got a permit to be on the sidewalk in front of the White House for the whole afternoon.”

  “Do you know what they call it?” I read off the screen. “The picture-postcard zone.”

  “As long as you keep moving, you don’t break any regulations. But if you sit down there and refuse to move, you could get arrested. That’s why minors can’t take part.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting arrested,” I said.

  “Well . . .” He was still balancing on his stool, trying to impress me with his acrobatic skills.

  “I might have minded before.”

  “I’d love to get arrested,” said Jack. “But it could damage the campaign.” With his free hand, he took a slug of beer. I watched his Adam’s apple moving up and down under the smooth skin of his throat, and smiled like I knew some joke he didn’t. The beer had trickled down onto my legs and made them warm and pliable.

  “I’m thinking,” I said dreamily, “what will the picture-postcard zone look like when the White House is underwater?”

  His stool hit the floor with a thump. He slapped the counter and sprang to his feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jack turned around once, waving both arms in the air. I saw the muscular back of his neck, the loose seat of his jeans, and for a second the complicated front of them before he sat down again, grinning.

  “What a great idea! We can make postcards of the White House underwater and sell them to raise money!”

  He was looking at me in this easy way, and it seemed as if the fourth-grade, crew-cut, planetarium Jack was saying, “Remember me?” At that exact moment I made a decision. I would find a way to do it. Not right now, but soon. To know what it’s like. And just as that thought entered my head, Jack Bell in his enthusiasm about the postcards laid his hand on my arm, near the wrist. He removed it instantly, and went to the sink on some pretext or other, but my arm was fizzing and sparkling so much where he’d touched me that it didn’t even feel like an arm anymore. I knew then that it wasn’t just a matter of curiosity. The thing was this: I wanted to be with someone who, unlike my family, didn’t have to love me but just decided to. Even if it was only for one day.

  • • •

  Fiona collapsed on my beanbag chair, more than an hour late. With her fierce blue eyes and white blond hair, she looked like some third-string angel down on her luck.

  “Sedge caught me at my locker between fourth and fifth. No pass.”

  “Where’s Vicky?”

  “Home with a temperature. Hundred and two point six. She had such an unbelievably sore throat in French, she was almost hysterical—”

  “She should try chemo,” I said, reclining on my cushions.

  “I know,” said Fiona in her motherly voice. “It’s a good thing we didn’t come see you yesterday. She might have already been contagious.”

  “Dr. O says I have more to fear from my own germs than other people’s.” I’d had enough science forced on me in the past six months to last a lifetime.

  “So I took her to the infirmary,” Fiona went on. “Guess who tagged along just to get out of French? Guess who inveigled the nurse into letting her stay, so was not in the hall when the bell went?”

  “Natalie Flynn?”

  “Sniveling sycophant.” Fiona was famous for her vocabulary, which never seemed to match her flyaway appearance. She jabbed herself in the collarbone. “Who took Vicky to the infirmary in the first place? Who knew all the symptoms of spinal meningitis? Hel-lo? I thought I’d make it to study hall in time. I only stopped for a second to check my cell, and I got the detention.”

  “Bad luck,” I said, though I know how Fiona thrives on close calls. As I see it, the occasional detention is more like a close-call tax than a major miscarri
age of justice.

  “She’s vile.” Her nail-bitten fingers sliced the air. “She’s detestable.”

  “Annoying, maybe,” I said, stroking Cloud. “Not detestable.”

  At first I’d said no way when I heard Miss Sedge would be one of my tutors. I’d thought it was someone’s idea of a joke. But my mother refused to get me out of it. She has this idea about the glorious benefits of facing things. Personally, I’d rather look the other way. But in this case she was right. Miss Sedge is not at all like she is at school, where she has no sense of humor whatsoever. At our kitchen table she acts as if I’m not a pupil or even necessarily a kid, let alone a sick one, but just another interesting person to talk to.

  “Did you get my text?” I asked, to move us off the subject.

  One great thing about Fiona is she doesn’t stay mad. “I was reading it when she caught me. I’m lucky she didn’t confiscate my cell phone.” She scrambled upright on the beanbag, working her eyebrows cartoonishly. “Jack Bell . . . ?”

  I did not want to let her down, and I do not believe in lying to your best friend. However, a certain coolness had taken hold of me. “I went to see him,” I said. “I didn’t know his parents had split.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “We talked about the Keystone Pipeline.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They pump oil down from Canada and ship it to the Gulf Coast. There’s a campaign to stop it. Miss Sedge wants Jack and me to get involved.” I tried to look demure. “He’s nice. He’s cute.”

  Eyebrows hitched up and down.

  “Don’t get too excited. Nothing happened.”

  “Nothing?”

  “But it might.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He touched my arm.” Pathetic! Just when you’re wanting to lie, you find yourself telling the truth.

  She sank back in the beanbag, unimpressed. Fiona was almost fifteen when she got her period, and she still had the high-waisted, spindly look of a middle school girl. Her wrists were so small she had to punch extra holes in her watchband. “But Jack Bell? Isn’t he kind of basic?”