All the Water in the World Read online

  “Find out what?”

  “Find out what his thinking was.”

  “Whose thinking?” I asked cautiously.

  “Your biological father’s thinking.”

  “Antonio, you mean?”

  “He did seem like a nice young man.”

  I stared at my grandfather until he was forced to turn his head. “You knew him?”

  “We met him a few times. Your mother brought him over to the house.”

  “You’re telling me you knew my father?”

  “I can’t say we knew him,” he said hastily. “We met him, that’s all, on a couple of occasions.”

  “Grandma too?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why did you never mention it?”

  My grandfather spread his hands on his knees. He leaned his weight forward on his arms, his shoulders up around his ears. “I guess because your mother had buried the whole thing pretty deep. He made his decision, and she had to make hers. It wasn’t easy. In order to carry through with it and build a life for herself, she had to decide he didn’t exist for her. So we followed suit.”

  “And what about me?” It came out shrill and babyish. “Didn’t anyone think about me?”

  “We were thinking about you. All the time.”

  “How could you, when I was only an idea?”

  “Don’t be hard on her, Maddy. Your mother’s done a first-rate job. She did tell you.”

  “The bare facts of the matter, yes. I always said when I was eighteen I would track him down.”

  “How old are you now?” As if he didn’t know.

  “Sixteen and two months.”

  He gave me a long look.

  “Sixteen and two months, with cancer,” I said.

  “So why don’t you do it now?”

  It was like a conversation in a dream. “Could I really do that?”

  “You’re asking me?” Grandpa smiled. “I thought you were the Internet generation.”

  “I mean could I do it, you know, with Mom and everything?”

  After a while he said: “Your mother has enough to worry about. It would stir the whole mess up again for her.” Another pause. “If she knew.”

  Some serious yoga was taking place in the center of the park. Two men in shorts were offering their bodies to the sky. All at once my grandfather’s head swiveled around.

  “Listen to me, Maddy.” For an easygoing person, he could drop into command mode just like that. “This is very important.” He raised one knotty forefinger. “Sixteen years is a long time. You’d have to be prepared for anything. Anything. He could decide not to reply. He could be unpleasant.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “He could be dead.”

  I didn’t look away. “All right, already.”

  “He could have a family now and not want to hear from you.”

  That stopped me for a minute. I said severely: “Listen, Grandpa. Think about it. What have I got to lose?”

  He sat back. “A lot.”

  “But you were the one who said I should find him!”

  “You might have to give up an idea you have about him.”

  “Big deal.” I snorted. “So I lose an idea? Add it to the list.”

  Now his eyes were watering. That I could not stand. I grabbed his arm and summoned my most encouraging voice. “But it might have a good ending! And then wouldn’t it all be worth it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess it would.”

  Silence thickened between us. Sensing a change of heart, Barney pushed his ball into my hand. I drew my arm back and hurled a long hard overhand.

  “Good one,” said Grandpa approvingly. “You don’t throw like a girl.”

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’d better be. Look! He caught it.” I made a fuss over Barney on his return. He had already forgotten what he’d done, but accepted the praise as his due.

  My grandfather and I stood up at the exact same time. He snapped on the leash. “See?” he said with satisfaction. “No harm in a little strategic rule breaking.”

  On the way back, we took a detour between the yellow shrubs past the statue of Serenity. She sits on a low base, looking out over Sixteenth Street. When I was little, I was terrified of this statue. She used to appear in my dreams. Later on I made a point of visiting her. Still, I always approached from her right side, where she has a complete hand. The one on the left is gone; the wrist ends in a stump. Grandpa told me Meridian Hill used to be the most dangerous park in the city. Someone back then must have broken off her hand just for the fun of it.

  It wasn’t only her hand that was missing. Most of her face was gone. The eyes were blanks, and where the nose and lips should have been there was only pitted stone. It was a shame, because you could tell she used to be beautiful, and her gown still was, gathered at the waist and flowing between her knees. Her ruined features gave her a surprised look, but she had her bare feet planted apart in a proud, strong pose as if she didn’t know she was damaged or else had decided not to care.

  “Did you know there is a statue identical to this one in Luxembourg?” asked Grandpa, yanking Barney away from the pedestal, where he was lifting his leg. I sat down on the edge to rest.

  “You mean with her face and hand gone?”

  “No, silly. Same subject, by the same artist. It was bought at the Paris Exhibition in nineteen hundred. Apparently the sculptor used Isadora Duncan as a model.”

  “Why do you love facts so much, Grandpa?”

  “Do I?” He sounded pleased that someone had noticed. “I guess because the more you know about something, the more interesting it becomes.”

  “But you don’t like rules.”

  “Not when they’re invented to keep us in line. Or show who’s boss.”

  “To stop people from attacking statues, you mean?”

  He laughed. “It’s petty rules I don’t care for. Small-minded officiousness.”

  “What about the rules for speaking English?”

  “Well, yes. That’s different. We wouldn’t get very far grunting at each other and pointing, would we?” My grandfather gets this faraway look in his eyes when he’s got hold of an idea and he’s trying to separate out the parts. “And then there are family rules.”

  He removed his glasses and polished them. His eyes looked old and naked until he put them back behind glass. Once he’s got the parts of the idea lined up in the right order, like cars on a toy train, he can pull the train forward.

  “It might be: Don’t keep secrets from each other. Or it might be: Don’t give too much away. See what I mean? Rules can always be broken. Whereas facts,” he said, bending from the waist to examine a patch of mold on the statue’s knee, “you can’t break facts. You can’t disobey facts. They just are.”

  “Grandpa?” Even thinking it made my heart flap in my chest like something trying to get out. “Do you really think I should try to find my so-called father?”

  My grandfather took my arm the way Grandma does, though without the same need. We turned our backs on the statue and followed Barney up the sidewalk to the car.

  “Yes,” he replied. “With all the aforementioned caveats, I really do.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not,” said my grandfather.

  But he was. And we both knew it.

  • • •

  Two days later, in a voice that would not have carried past the living room sofa, I asked my grandfather what Antonio’s last name was. We were alone in the front hall. My mother and Grandma had gone into the kitchen. He glanced around and held out his palms in a helpless gesture that said: Don’t involve me. My face went red hot. It had been his idea in the first place!

  My grandfather put his hands in his pockets and bounced his keys and coins. I could see in his eyes that he wanted to encourage me while refusing to collaborate. Was it: If he didn’t click the mouse himself then he would not be responsible for any ensuing disaster? Was it: Fa
mily business is women’s business? Was it: He couldn’t possibly tell Eve or Rose, so he should have kept his mouth shut on that park bench?

  He was working his loose change hard. I waited until he looked at me. Then I trained on him such a long, injured stare that he drew me to his side and scraped his chin on my bare head and kept it there, hugging me close. Why do I always feel sorry for people when they are in the wrong? I wanted to hold out and get him to apologize, but then I thought maybe it was his clumsy way of telling me a search like this was something I had to do on my own.

  I went to bed early and dreamed of blackbirds rising in a flock from the ground. When they crossed the horizon, their bodies turned into letters of the alphabet. Soon swarms of small black letters were crisscrossing the white sky, but they never formed any words.

  After breakfast I switched on my computer. My screen saver had seaweed and sea horses in it, though, strangely, no fish. Even if he wanted to help me, I doubted my grandfather would even remember Antonio’s last name. It’s not the kind of thing men notice. I took a deep breath and typed “Antonio Spain scientist” into Google and clicked on Images. A grid of faces sprang to the screen. I scanned, clicked, and zoomed, as if I were shopping. What did a fortysomething-year-old Spanish scientist look like? Small pointed beard or a wraparound leprechaun one? Sharp eyeteeth? Shoe-brush hair? Gaunt? Jowly? The precise, alien quality of each image confused me. Antonios galore. More Antonios than I could ever need.

  There had to be another way. I went to Georgetown’s graduate student records, but when I put in the search box “Antonio 1994”—the summer I was conceived!—they asked for a last name and informed me that the online database only went back to 1998. I returned to the page of “Antonio Spain scientist” faces and clicked on one I liked the look of in the fifth row. No. He’d finished his PhD in 2000 at a university in Granada.

  I abandoned that Antonio. I exited the bank of other Antonios who may or may not have been my father, and folded them up in my laptop, where it seemed to me they continued to lead a murmuring half-life. Sliding down in the chair, I tried to imagine what came next.

  According to Miss Sedge, the particles that make up the solid world are not actual things but tendencies to exist. You can’t be sure an electron is here and not there at any given time. No one understands it, not even the scientists.

  I loved the idea of a jumpy, mysterious world inside the normal one. But what I didn’t get was this: With all that uncertainty, a book or a tree or anything made out of atoms is always in one place and not another. So what if the particles behave in mysterious ways? In the real world, where it counts, there’s no magic or flexibility whatsoever. You don’t say my house was on Minter Place last week and this week it’s on Greenwood Circle. You don’t go downstairs in the morning and find the furniture’s been rearranged or your white count has gone back to normal.

  My father’s tendency to exist seemed to increase once I started looking for him. But when I sat at my desk the next day and opened my laptop, my fingers hesitated over the keys. Chemo was starting on Monday. I was suffering from the faraway feeling that signaled I was about to be poisoned in order to be saved. Far away from Mom, far away from Cloud, far away from everyone and everything that mattered. Father, father, father, father. What on earth did that mean?

  • • •

  After church my grandparents arrived, and my mother cooked a special lunch of my choice, meat loaf with piquant sauce, as it would be a while before I could enjoy food again. These rituals gave impending chemotherapy the feel of an almost but not quite festive occasion, like Christmas without the lights or presents or fun.

  As usual my mother could not settle down. She sat on the couch with her legs under her and beckoned me over to rub my back, as much for her sake as for mine. Robin shut himself in the music room. When passing me in the hallway, my grandmother laid the back of her hand on my cheek as though I was already running a temperature. Later on, when I was watching TV, Grandpa lowered himself heavily beside me. He stared at the screen for a while, jiggling his foot up and down, pretending to be fascinated by American Idol. I ignored him. Finally he leaned over and asked, in a double-agent whisper, “How’s the search going?”

  Slowly I turned and gave him a wide-open stare. “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it!” I put maximum reproach in my voice, although, being a sucker for sheepish smiles, I had already started to forgive him.

  He pressed a finger to his lips and continued in his hilarious whisper. “I don’t remember his last name, but I know he was a neuroscientist.”

  “Brain, right?” I whispered back. “Well, I can’t find him in Georgetown alumni.”

  Brows up. “He wasn’t at Georgetown. He was at GWU.”

  I whooped and high-fived him, knowing he would try solemnly to shake my hand instead. He used to get the high five wrong for real; now the handshake is one of our running jokes.

  The noise brought Grandma to the doorway. She smiled from his eyes to mine. “What’s going on here?”

  “Deep, dark secrets, Rose,” I said. “Don’t ask.”

  I rushed upstairs. I closed my curtains, though it was the middle of the afternoon. George Washington University had better alumni records. In no time at all I found an Antonio Jorge Romero who had received a PhD in neurochemistry in 1994. I checked for other science PhDs that year received by anyone named Antonio. None.

  I went to the window and pinched the hem of my curtains. My mother made them out of this cloth I found online. The design was like a musical score. With the sun coming through, the notes looked like birds on telephone wires.

  After a minute I returned to my laptop and typed in “Antonio Jorge Romero neuroscientist.” Up came a photograph of a smiling, brown-haired, tanned, intense-looking man. There was only one. He was on the faculty of University College London. With a few clicks I confirmed the year and place of his doctorate.

  I went to my dresser and made faces in the mirror. Mask of tragedy. Mask of scorn. Who do you think you are? Why should anyone care?

  Back at my desk, the screen had gone blank. I jabbed in alarm at the tracking pad until his face lit up, still smiling, though not for me. I could breathe again, but for the life of me I could not look straight at his picture. I could take my father in only with quick sideways glances.

  Warm eyes.

  Lips-together smile.

  Welcoming smile?

  Something wrong with his teeth?

  Eyebrows slightly raised. In humor? Arrogance?

  Hair reddish brown like mine. Shoots of gray, like my mother’s.

  The closer I looked, the more the eyes withdrew.

  I exited his picture and tapped a drumroll on the desk with my nails.

  ¡Coraje!

  I went to Outlook and typed out an email.

  Put it in Drafts.

  Closed the lid.

  Stared at the glowing bitten apple.

  Stared at the place in my arm where the needle goes in.

  Opened the lid.

  Opened the draft.

  Unfocused my eyes so the words were unreadable.

  Stitches in straight lines.

  A winter’s worth of birds.

  ¡Coraje!

  ¡Coraje!

  Send.

  Dear Antonio Jorge Romero,

  You don’t know me. My name is Maddy. I got your email address online. I hope you don’t mind me writing out of the blue like this. I will get straight to the point. You were at George Washington University in 1994. Did you know a girl named Eve Wakefield? If you and Eve were an item at that time, you probably know what I am going to say. You might want to sit down. She is my mother. I am sixteen years and two months old. I know this might come as a big shock. Have no fear. I don’t want anything from you except to introduce myself and hopefully for you to do the same. I was going to wait until I was eighteen to look for you, but due to various circumstances which I will not go into, I am doing it now. I sincerely hope this is not too m
uch of a shock and that you will write back. Thank you for reading this, if you have read to the end of it.

  Madeleine Rose Wakefield

  (Maddy)

  P.S. I haven’t told Mom I am doing this.

  P.P.S. If you don’t reply, I might turn up on your doorstep.

  P.P.P.S. Just kidding!

  8

  Until this happened I had hardly set foot in a hospital. Now, like it or not, the hospital was my place. The gift store at the entrance was my place. The receptionist who called me “honey lamb” belonged to me, and so did the lady with her glasses on a chain rattling her cart past the outpatient desk, and so did the cleaner in his two-toned blue shirt, kneeling on a pad to wipe the baseboards. I was drawn to the people who weren’t in charge of life-or-death affairs, only these everyday tasks they were touchingly intent on doing no matter what.

  We sat on the orange seats in the waiting room.

  “Okay, Maddy?”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll get through it.”

  “Yup.”

  “In a week or two you’ll be a shiny new penny.”

  I held my mother’s arm and laid my cheek on her shoulder as if I were a little kid in need of a nap. This made her draw me close and kiss the top of my head, which I wanted her to do because I was feeling bad about not telling her I was looking for Antonio. I especially felt bad when we were together just the two of us, with time to kill and plenty of silence.

  She held me snug for a minute, then let me go and opened her book. The difference between my mother and me is that she can read when she’s worried, and I can’t. Her pixie cut was growing out. More gray than before. My fault. She raked her bangs back every page or so with two fingers of one hand. Her hair was getting shaggy down the back of her neck. Not what she should be aiming for, in my opinion. I didn’t particularly want to have a shaggy mother.

  You can take a lot in with sideways glances. A mother reading. A mother reading beside her sick daughter. A mother reading beside her sick daughter who the day before sent an email to her long-lost father. A secret does funny things to a person, and not just if you’re found out. Inside your own mind, I mean. It’s a delicious burdensome thing that takes up all the space so you can’t believe that other people, my mother, for instance, shifting in her chair, blinking down at the page, and from time to time reaching out and giving my knee or arm a little press, could not tell. You want to show the secret off and you want to hug it to yourself. Should I have made that joke about turning up on Antonio’s doorstep? He probably wouldn’t reply anyway. Like Grandpa said, I had to be prepared for anything.