All the Water in the World Read online

  When I told Antonio the news, in tones of incredulity bordering on joy, he slowly rubbed my arm with his thumb and said in a wondering voice: “But E-vie . . .” He had a sweet way of lengthening the syllables of my name. “I do not want to become a father by mistake. Of that I am sure.”

  We were in my apartment, facing each other on the sofa, our arms outstretched along the top of it. He was twenty-nine. I was twenty-six. His tone was scaring me. Flippantly I reminded him we were at an age when some couples are pushing out their second or third child.

  “Yes, I know.” He snorted. Antonio had escaped from such a family. “And I am not going to be one of them.”

  We talked that night, I cried, we talked the next morning. We talked for days. To everything I said—that he could stay and do his research in America, that we could both move to Spain, that our parents would be excited once they got used to the idea, that we had both allowed it to happen, that I was not prepared to put an end to this life—Antonio gave the same reply: “I know. You may be right. But I do not want to become a father.” Sometimes it was “I am just beginning my career. I do not want to become a father.” Or “I cannot settle here and become a father.” It was as if the Antonio I knew had been replaced by an automaton. The accent I had once found sensual and charming was now a shield, a device to assert his otherness and keep me away. Woodenly he repeated himself, and in repeating himself he grew more and more distant. Had he wavered, or wept, or made propositions of his own, I might have felt different. I might have even been persuaded to abandon the pregnancy in exchange for becoming parents one day in our own time. But the more Antonio said “I do not want to become a father,” the more my defiance grew and the more insistent became the call of the life inside me.

  “Never?” I pressed him on the last morning, at his kitchen table. “You never, ever want to have a child?”

  He paused long enough to tell me what I needed to know.

  “What you mean is, you don’t want to have a child with me.”

  I waited for him to touch or contradict me. Then I stood up, tipped my coffee down the sink, walked out of his apartment, and began my life with Maddy.

  • • •

  Norma was waiting. Her gaze on my face was like a focusing of the sun’s warmth, but I was determined to keep my replies short and hold her interest by connecting my story to hers. There’s only so much a person wants to know about someone else’s child.

  “If you had become pregnant by accident, would Tanner have stood by you?”

  “Yes!” said Norma. Then: “It never came up.” Then, with the instinct women have to downplay difference: “Not that it couldn’t have.”

  I could tell from the ironic tone she assumed when referring to Tanner that he was trying but decent, a lot like Robin, I suspected, though probably better-looking. He’d have just enough flaws to make him endearing and to furnish the self-mocking stories that shore up the sisterhood.

  “Of course he would have. Especially coming from the South, as he undoubtedly does with a name like that.” Norma’s laugh told me I was right. “Antonio was just starting his career. He was a scientist. Very driven. He didn’t want a baby.”

  “But you had her anyway.”

  “I had her anyway.”

  “Was that hard?”

  “It’s impossible to think of not having had her.”

  “Once they’re here, they’re here,” said Norma. “Have you been in contact?”

  I stared. “With who?”

  “Her father.”

  I sat back. “No, never. Maddy always said she would hunt him down someday.”

  “You think she will?”

  I looked past Norma to the open water. “Genes aren’t everything. Though it’s true that when Maddy was born, I felt as if I already knew her.”

  “Aw,” said Norma.

  “In the mirror I would see her features mixed up with mine. Did you ever get that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I got that.”

  “What, exactly?” I didn’t want her to agree with me too readily.

  “Well, once I felt around for a fontanel on my own head.”

  In those early days, the soft triangle that allowed the baby’s skull to grow with the brain was a source of wonder and fear. I too remembered feeling my head for a fontanel, though I knew perfectly well they closed up by the age of two.

  “So did I,” I said a little grudgingly. I wasn’t sure I wanted Norma to have had the same experience. That was the kind of thing you’d share with the baby’s father.

  “You should have seen us driving Luke home from the hospital! Tanner was going five miles an hour. With Benjamin we were calmer about cars.”

  After a moment, I said: “I would love to have had another child. Did your second son come between you and Luke?”

  She considered this. “In a way, yes. The first year of Ben’s life was the hardest thing I ever did. I kept thinking—This is impossible! How is anyone supposed to do this? Give them both all my attention? Luke and I already had our thing together. I felt like I was cheating on him. Tanner had no idea what I went through.”

  “That never happened to us,” I said. “Maddy was all mine and I was all hers.”

  We fell silent and watched a canoe traverse the width of the lake near the north shore. Even at this distance it was easy to distinguish its long glide from the rapid joined strokes of a kayak. The canoe spun slowly in place before sliding back across with mysterious intent, barely wrinkling the surface.

  The coming of Maddy had divided my life into before and after, the kind of line that I’d imagined could never be drawn again. The name? As a child I knew by heart the Madeline books—Madeline and the Bad Hat, Madeline in London, Madeline’s Rescue; I loved their slanted drawings and cheerful orphans under the care of Miss Clavel, who allowed the girls any number of adventures but always tucked them up in two straight lines at the end of the day. The name Madeleine had a certain solemnity about it, but a playfulness too, particularly the diminutive form, which I soon started using.

  By the time Maddy was four months old, she no longer had the look of a being from another world trying to enter this one. She was curious and for the most part serene, what people call an “easy baby.” Even so, many nights I went to bed more exhausted than I thought was physically possible. I leaned on my parents a great deal, and on a Saturday mothers’ group at the local library. Three of us started meeting in one another’s kitchens, and jiggling one another’s babies to sleep, and that first summer, we spent some weekends together at the lake house. I’d assumed at the time—why would I think otherwise?—that Ella and Beth would remain my lifelong friends.

  One long weekend in June, I decided to make the trip to the lake with Maddy on my own. I arrived with misgivings, but once we were there, just the two of us, I did not feel lonely in the least. The first morning, I walked around with her in my arms, reminding her of the layout of the rooms. On the terrace, we peered together into the hole of the wooden birdhouse my father had made in his cellar and nailed to the railing. It was late in the season for breeding, but the box was full of bulky life. We withdrew and watched from behind the sliding glass door. When the mother flew off—a tree swallow, judging from the small head and beak—we rushed out with a flashlight to get a look at her eggs. I lowered Maddy’s face level with the hole so she could see them glowing in the hairy nest. That was the first time I ever heard her laugh.

  The second day the eggs hatched. The two adults, one shiny blue, one green, took turns to enter the box, from which frantic peeping could be heard. Both parents were prepared to dive-bomb us if we came near; otherwise they gave no sign of being disturbed, and from the windows we were free to observe their coming and going. When both were away, I sneaked out with the flashlight. Naked pink mice with huge beaks, the nestlings took me for their mother and instantly started begging.

  I sang to Maddy and lowered her kicking legs into the shallows, where she gripped the sand with her fists and fee
t. Temporarily I suppressed in myself what powers of perception Maddy did not yet have. The shining bowl of the lake had little definition for her, and so it had little definition for me. When she fell into her dream, her lips slick with my milk, I felt the presence of someone, half admirer, half guardian, who was watching me take care of my baby, and at the same time watching the tree swallows enter the hole in the box and do what they were driven to do there.

  On the third day, I left Maddy sleeping and strolled out to the terrace in my bathrobe to check on the family. The lake glittered between the trees. All was quiet. The nestlings must have been asleep too. There was no need for a flashlight, as morning sun poured down from behind the house. I leaned over to get a closer look. Air and light had been sucked from the box. Inside, twitching slowly, coiled around itself and completely filling the space, was a thick, black rat snake.

  Maddy

  7

  My grandfather came up with the idea. Or maybe I did. He said it first, anyway, but I was the one who led him there. We had gone to Meridian Hill Park, the best place near their house to walk the dog. I found it hard to climb the hill, so we drove to the entrance at the top of the park. Barney the golden retriever was straining on the leash. But first we had to pay a visit to the fountain, which in fact is more like a controlled waterfall. Thirteen shallow pools drop down to a huge one at the end made of old-fashioned stonework and arches in the style of an Italian villa. The water fills one pool, then spills into the next until some hidden system—Grandpa explained it to me once—pumps it back to the top.

  When we got to the overlook, chambers of dingy concrete stared up at the sky. Nothing moved. This was its winter look. Funny how a thing like running water can be so important. Without running water the apartment building at the end seemed to be forcing its ugly way into the park.

  “What’s the matter with this place?” grumbled my grandfather. “The water’s supposed to be on. Why isn’t the water on?”

  “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I don’t mind.”

  “Well, I mind.”

  We made our way back to the grassy stretch where we could let Barney off the leash. Strictly speaking, this was against the rules. When Grandpa knelt to unbuckle the leash, I felt honor-bound to say: “Isn’t this against the law?”

  “It’s a weekday,” he scoffed, still annoyed about the empty fountain. “There’s no one around. Where’s the harm in it? You have to keep your own counsel.” That was one of his mottoes.

  I threw Barney his tennis balls before we settled onto one of the weather-beaten side benches. He galloped off, doing his best to track the bouncing balls with jerks of his head. He preferred to catch them midair rather than to nose them out of the grass, but these days his jaws mostly snapped the air. He never seemed to mind. There was bound to be something foul and delicious to check out on the way.

  “Have you ever read the Cat and Dog Diaries?” I asked.

  “What are they?”

  “This thing someone put online. The cat one goes: ‘Another day in captivity. My guards give me hash and some kind of dry crackers, while they dine like kings on fresh meat . . .’ The dog one goes: ‘Waking up. My favorite thing! Food in my dish. My favorite thing! A ride in the car. My favorite thing!’ Get it?”

  “I think so.” He smiled.

  “Chasing balls with arthritis in my hips. My favorite thing!”

  Barney came toward us with his lopsided gait, the balls tucked in the loose skin at the sides of his mouth where retrievers hold their birds. He made a detour to offer his services to a Frisbee game before dropping the balls one by one at our feet, grinning like a lunatic. Twelve years old and still a lot of life in him.

  My grandfather scrubbed Barney’s ruff with both hands. “Tell me about it,” he crooned into the watery eyes. “Tell me all about it.”

  I picked up a ball and flung it, making a face. “Slimy disgusting tennis ball! My favorite thing!” Barney hurled himself away. It never crossed his mind that he was old. “And he tries to trip his owner,” I said.

  “Who does?”

  “The cat writing the diary. ‘Next time I’ll try it at the top of the stairs.’ ”

  “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?” asked Grandpa mildly. “Would your cat do that to you?”

  “Of course not! Cloud luuuves me.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But she’s still a kitten.”

  “Wait ’til she gets to be a teenager. Then watch out.” My grandfather laughed with his narrow teeth and laid his hand on my head. I liked the weight of it through my baseball cap.

  “Grandpa?”

  “Yes?”

  “How would you feel if you knew something didn’t want you?”

  “Didn’t want me?”

  “Someone, or something, was telling you no.”

  He studied my face for a minute. He said carefully, “Are you talking about your illness, Maddy?”

  “What do you think I’m talking about?”

  He turned his head, suddenly interested in the candy bar wrappers dotted about on the grass. “I wish they took better care of this place.”

  I swung my legs under the bench and waited. Barney had missed his midair catch again and was sniffing in tight circles at the edge of the shrubs.

  “That’s a subjective feeling, Maddy,” Grandpa said at last. “I can understand you might feel like that. But it doesn’t accord with the facts. We have to think scientifically.”

  “Facts!” I said with scorn. “The fact is there’s something in the universe, or multiverse, or whatever you want to call it, that doesn’t want me.”

  “Sweetie . . .”

  “No more Maddy, it’s saying. You can’t argue with that. It’s not saying no to you, is it? Or to Barney, even.”

  “Well, actually I can argue with that,” my grandfather began, but I pushed on.

  “You know what I think? I think it all started with my father.”

  Grandpa cupped his ear with one hand. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I think that’s where the idea came from. Originally.”

  I knew he’d heard what I said because he didn’t ask again. He fixed his eyes on some picnickers sprawled on the ground amid the remains of their lunch.

  “Know what I mean?” I prompted.

  Grandpa’s lips were a thin line and he was tense about the eyes. That’s the way he looks when he feels out of his depth. I bet he was longing for Grandma to rise up out of the bushes and take over.

  No one talked about my father much when I was growing up. There was nothing to say about someone who had bowed out so early. My mother always answered my questions because she believes in honesty and always tries to do the right thing. I know my father is Spanish, he’s a scientist, he’s named Antonio, and he has my height and eyes and hair. Or rather, I have his. They had never planned on having children together, and besides, he had to return home.

  “What I want to know is why would a father not want to raise his own child?”

  Grandpa spoke at last. “I wouldn’t call him a father,” he said reluctantly. “A father is someone who does raise his child.”

  “What am I supposed to call him? A sperm donor?”

  “I would call him a young man sowing his wild oats who made a mistake. He was too lacking in imagination, or too weak—”

  “He had to go back!”

  My grandfather looked at me as if that was the first he had heard of it. “Well, whatever happened, the point is he didn’t decide against you. You—Maddy—had not come into being yet. He decided against an abstract idea. He might have regretted it ever since. We don’t know.”

  “But anyway,” I persisted, “the fact is he didn’t want me. As an abstract idea. And now it turns out the universe doesn’t want me either. You can’t argue with that.”

  But Grandpa was prepared to try. He launched into one of his long explanations about evolutionary change and variation and the way genetic accidents ensure that the species is strong in the long
run.

  “I get sick so everyone else can be healthy?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s not personal. There’s not someone out there giving Maddy a disease just to be mean. It’s the way nature works. It’s chance. Some people have diabetes and some people have weak hearts. Some people get cancer.”

  He had said this before. I could never decide what I thought about it. I knew he meant it to be comforting, and I wanted it to be. But this idea of no one being responsible—not me, not my mother, not the doctors, not even God, if by any chance he exists—I found incredibly scary. I would prefer it if someone, somewhere, was making the decisions, even if what they decided, cruelly and maliciously or just indifferently, was to harm me. Otherwise, what is anything supposed to mean? Who is in charge?

  “Okay, I get that.”

  My grandfather returned his attention to the litter-speckled grass, his nostrils flared in relief, or in further thought, or in contempt for slapdash park maintenance.

  “Grandpa, would you have abandoned your daughter?”

  Mutely, he shook his head.

  “And if you did abandon your daughter, would you want to know whether or not she even existed? Would you want to meet her? Or would you think, Oh, that has nothing to do with me?”

  Barney was at our feet again with the slathery balls. Neither of us picked them up. He pranced back and forth, trying to thrust one into our hands; eventually he gave up and lay down.

  “Let’s see,” said Grandpa in a helpless kind of voice, stalling for time.

  “I mean, men should have an idea how other men think, shouldn’t they?”

  He stretched his arm along the bench top. “I suppose they should.” He crossed his legs one way. “I suppose they should.” He recrossed them the other way.

  I was about to repeat the question when, with his eyes not on me but on the buildings beyond the park, my grandfather said: “Well, why don’t you find out?”