The Memory of Water

by Karen White

  He’d been fairly successful, the number of acres he owned between the river and the ocean growing at a somewhat faster rate than the number of children he and his wife brought into the world. He was prosperous and prolific and presumably content with his life until the night his wife burned the house to the ground, killing herself and nine out of their ten children. That tenth child was my great-great-great-grandmother.

  Diana, after we had moved in with our grandfather, would delight in scaring me with stories of poor old Josiah, driven to curse God in his grief and forever damning future generations of Maitlands. Diana had me almost believing that on still nights when the moon nested in the open arms of the dead cypress trees, you could smell the smoke of wood burning and hear the cries of children. I never heard them. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of my own screams.

  But before our mother’s death, before the time our lives changed, Diana and I lived in a small house on Jeremy Creek in the coastal village of McClellanville, a short boat ride on the Intracoastal Waterway from our grandfather’s house. Our parents were free spirits, artists who didn’t believe in conventions like being married before having children. I suppose this was one of the many reasons why we didn’t see much of our Bible-thumping grandfather during our early years.

  Despite the occasional snide remarks from other children, Diana and I were oblivious to our unconventional household, immersed as we were in the joys of growing up in the Lowcountry. There were always other children to play with, barefoot like us, to climb oak trees, skip oyster shells across Jeremy Creek, or play kick the can. We were experts at crabbing and in navigating the myriad fingers and estuaries of the marsh in our small boats. And then later, when Diana and I were old enough to help hoist a mainsail, our mother taught us to sail.

  I suppose it’s these childhood memories that brought me back to this place and to Gil. If the child needed help, I could only imagine that this magical place could provide it. Maybe for both of us.

  It was with these thoughts that I made the plan for our day’s trip, and I set out with feelings of both excitement and trepidation. Gil and I were heading to my rental car to take the long route by paved road to McClellanville when we were intercepted by Quinn.

  “Are you off to town?”

  I nodded. I had asked for permission to take Gil, knowing that disappearing with Gil, despite my good intentions, might justifiably be cause for Quinn to worry. I tucked my sketch pad and small case of charcoal pencils more securely under my arm. “Yes. We’ll be back for lunch, though.”

  He looked behind me to my parked car. “You’re driving?”

  “I’ll make sure he wears his seat belt. And don’t worry about me getting lost. I lived here for eighteen years, remember?” I avoided looking directly into his eyes knowing that I hadn’t answered his real question.

  “Why don’t you take my jon boat? It’ll get you there in half the time than it would take by car. Besides, Diana’s told me that you could navigate the marsh blindfolded.”

  My gaze slid to his as I felt Gil leave my side and head for my car. After pulling the passenger-side door open, he plopped himself into the front seat with his pad of paper on his lap and shut the door.

  I looked down at my feet, unable to meet his eyes as I lied. “I think Gil’s more comfortable riding in the car. It’s too soon….”

  When he didn’t say anything, I dragged my eyes back to his face.

  “Too soon for Gil? Or for you, Marnie?”

  I glanced at my watch. “It’s getting late and we’re going to lose the morning light if we don’t leave now.”

  He didn’t move. “It’s just the marsh, Marnie. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that either one of you should head out into the ocean on any kind of watercraft.”

  “It’s too soon,” I said again as I watched Gil staring straight ahead out the windshield.

  “All right,” he said and I could hear the reluctance in his voice. “But I want you to know that Gil loved the water more than anything—even more than his painting. And I will give that back to him. Even if I have to drag you kicking and screaming along for the ride.”

  My eyes met his, and I was surprised to see that his were dead serious.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said under my breath as I turned and headed for the car.

  “Yes, we will,” he said before I could close the door. I didn’t look at him as I backed the car out of the long gravel drive before heading out toward the highway.

  It was a short drive down Highway 17. I flipped on the radio to erase the silence and began to sing aloud to a pop song that had been played so many times I knew every word by heart. I had no delusions about my singing talent or lack thereof, and had sometimes been accused of not being able to carry a tune in a bucket. I kept giving Gil sidelong glances to gauge his reaction and was rewarded with a dimple and a crooked smile. When I belted out the final chorus, he opened his mouth wide as if to laugh but no sound came. It unsettled me enough that I swerved on the road, my tires slipping off the asphalt onto soft grass for a quick moment. Watching Gil trying to laugh was like watching the television with the sound turned off. In his open mouth, I could almost see the sadness he had swallowed as if it were a clenched fist, letting nothing past. He closed his mouth and stared at me silently as if telling me that I didn’t have the whole story, that it wasn’t just sadness.

  A loud honk of a horn had me swerving back into my lane, focusing on the road ahead instead of on my silent nephew. I threw a quick glance at him and saw that his face was once again passive and his gaze was trained on the yellow dotted line disappearing beneath the car. I remained silent until we spotted the first welcome sign.

  McClellanville, known as the Village to locals, began in 1771 when Archibald McClellan bought land along Jeremy Creek. It’s had its share of prosperity and decline, but it’s come back into favor as one of those “quaint” small towns outsiders move to in an attempt to escape from the cities and suburbia and end up creating exactly what they’re moving away from.

  I only ever knew it as home, and all the shop owners and shrimping boat captains knew who the Maitland sisters were. We spent a lot of time on the docks, ruining our teeth chewing on saltwater taffy from Mrs. Crandall at the post office and watching the shrimpers bringing in their haul. Diana’s earliest paintings are of the shrimpers with their deep-creased faces folded in on themselves like extra protection from the wind and sun. It was in watching Diana create those paintings that I first began to realize that whatever I put on canvas was simply water-diluted paint. But what Diana created was life and light and truth. I was the liar when I painted and I watched in my hurt and disillusionment as our mother began to notice it, too.

  It was the first time I’d felt jealousy, and it grew into a grotesque black finger that scratched at my insides. I was sick with it and couldn’t leave my bed for a week. My father, as always, was oblivious, but my mother knew. She didn’t call a doctor and she didn’t coddle me. She let me writhe in my pitiful state until she came and sat by my bed one night. She didn’t say anything for a very long time but sat watching me with her green cat eyes—so much like Diana’s yet I had never noticed until that night. Mama told me that Diana was gifted in ways that neither of us could ever understand or attain. And Diana deserved my jealousy. But I needed to stop wallowing and deal with it. It’s a blessing and a curse, she’d said, and I turned my face to the wall, feeling the scratching inside where I couldn’t make it stop. Then Mama had leaned over my bed and whispered very close to my ear. Be careful what you wish for. She stayed there for a long time, as if she wanted to say more, and I could feel her warm breath on my cheek, but I didn’t turn my head to look at her. Eventually, she straightened and I waited in my misery as she walked out of the room.

  She never spoke about it again. I got out of bed the next day and tried to pretend that things were the same between Diana and me. But they weren’t. And they would never be again. The incessant scratching was still there. I le
arned how to keep it at bay so that sometimes I was hardly aware of it. But it became like a bruise you think has gone away until you accidentally bump against it and the pain is there again.

  I closed my eyes to the memories, and concentrated on finding my way to a place I had once known like the back of my hand. I had planned to take Gil to the docks, but not today. I wasn’t sure I was ready. Besides, it was too near the water for us to visit on our first outing together, and I decided to save it for another time. Instead, I headed down North Pinckney, the town’s main street, toward the intersection of Oak and Pinckney where the one-thousand-year-old Deerhead Oak towered and lurched over the square plot of land where an acorn had once fallen ten centuries before.

  I parked the car and waited while Gil scrambled out of the passenger side, his sketchbook clutched tightly to his chest. He looked up at me expectantly and I waited for him to speak for a moment before I remembered. I still wasn’t used to his silence.

  “Let’s sit on one of these benches, and I’ll talk about the tree for a bit, and then we can do a quick study of it in our sketch pads.” He followed me to a bench and we both sat down. “And then I thought we could walk down the street and get an ice-cream cone before heading home.”

  He grinned and he looked so much like his mother at his age that I had to look away. I dragged my gaze back to the tree, to its swollen trunk divided into a crooked “v” and its arthritic fingers festooned with weeping Spanish moss. I began to tell one of my stories about the ancient oak, how the moss was the tears of the tree as it wept over all the things it had witnessed in one thousand years. I closed my eyes, still picturing the tree but seeing Diana at my side instead of her son. I remembered how, before Diana could paint, she’d have me tell a story first. I kept my eyes closed as I spoke, recalling a story from memory, and when I opened them again, I saw that Gil had moved to another bench, and he was busy working in his sketch pad.

  I flipped mine open, too, and gave a few halfhearted stabs at it, the old familiar feelings of frustration resurfacing as I tried to re-create the play of light and shadow on the tree trunk and its branches onto paper. Something always seemed to get lost in translation, as if I were transcribing Shakespeare without being allowed to use any vowels. After about half an hour of useless scratchings on my pad, I closed it and looked over at Gil. He had stopped, too, but when I stood to go take a look, he abruptly closed the cover. I understood and I wouldn’t press. His art was for him alone, but I’d make a point to discuss his sketches later. And, eventually, I hoped that he would want to open up more and tell me what he saw and how he translated that onto paper. Eventually. He stared up at me, his silence unnerving, and for the first time since Quinn’s call, I wondered if Gil might be another one of my failures.

  I smiled. “Are you ready for ice cream?”

  He nodded and stood. Then, after sticking our sketch pads inside the car, we headed into the town’s center. I was struck by how much had changed and how much hadn’t. When I left, the effects of Hurricane Hugo were still visible, but now the piles of lumber and broken trees were gone, roofs repaired, buildings rebuilt. The Victorian storefronts were the same, but the names of the businesses were mostly different. I remembered Mrs. Crandall at the post office and the saltwater taffy she used to give us. I made a mental note to stop in later, but not today. I was treading lightly into my past, gently prodding at the old bruises.

  There was a veneer to the town, a spit-and-polish job done for the benefit of those moving into the new suburban developments on the outskirts of McClellanville. She was like an old woman who had suddenly decided to wear makeup, and I wasn’t completely convinced that it was change for the better.

  We bought our ice creams from a teenager too young to know who I was, and we took our cones out to the sidewalk, where we could leisurely walk and window-shop. The humidity had crept up on the day, and I worked hard to keep the ice cream from melting and spilling down the cone before I could eat it. I kept up a one-sided conversation, still unnerved by the silence of the boy next to me. I knew he was listening, and I still paused, as if waiting for him to speak.

  I was in midsentence when a storefront across the street caught my eye. It was an art store, with framed paintings displayed in the front windows and a large sale sign in red splayed across the glass. One large painting sat on an easel in front of the entrance, its deep marsh colors pulling at the eye, easily enticing browsers to stop. I stopped suddenly, feeling the old scratching again, and Gil almost ran into me. Without even looking for traffic, I headed across the street, vaguely aware of Gil following me. I stared at the painting on the easel and my throat constricted. My ice-cream cone, now forgotten, fell to the sidewalk

  I didn’t need to look in the corner to see the author’s signature; Diana’s name was all over the painting in the lush greens and yellows of the marsh at sunset, in the undulating of the cord grass, and in the punches of the storm clouds that crept into the corner of the painting. And there, in the bottom left corner, was a girl. She sat at the edge of the dock with her back to the artist. Her hands reached out to the sun and marsh in unobstructed joy, her face turned toward the wind with her brown hair streaming wildly behind her, the side of her face creased in a smile and unaware of the approaching storm.

  Once, I had known that girl; she was as familiar to me as breathing. My heart broke a little as I looked at her in oils and light, knowing that she had died long ago and the only thing that remained of her was her ghost, which followed my every waking moment.

  A cold, sticky hand gripped mine and I looked down at Gil, surprised to find him next to me. His eyes had that strange light in them again, reminding me of the way he had looked in the car when he had opened his mouth to laugh and no sound came. I had thought at the time it was sadness but knew now that it was much more, the word defining it dangling on my tongue but as elusive as a raindrop.

  He tugged on my hand, pulling me away from the painting. Reluctantly I allowed him to lead me away, our ice cream and walk forgotten but neither of us caring. It wasn’t until we were pulling into the gravel drive leading to the house that I realized what I had seen in Gil’s eyes. I recognized it as the same thing I saw in my own eyes every time I saw my reflection. It was more than sadness and loss. It was grief: the grief of losing the one thing in your life that mattered the most.

  I reached for his hand and squeezed it, and he squeezed back, and I knew then that whatever it took, I would be there for Gil until he was better. We were Maitlands, after all, and we had survived for centuries despite being battered against the unforgiving land. I put my arm around his thin shoulders, and we walked together up to the house, while we both pretended that we didn’t see the pale face in the window of Diana’s studio watching us until we moved out of sight.

  CHAPTER 7

  The mottled-leaved paphiopedilums have developed black spots on their leaves. Except for their leaves, these orchids are nearly identical to the solid green paphs that are potted next to them and they are doing fine. From my research, I’ve discovered that the black spots could be sunburn, so I’m moving them out of direct sunlight. It’s remarkable that two nearly identical orchids could be so different in their requirements for survival.

  —DR. QUINN BRISTOW’S GARDENING JOURNAL

  Quinn

  While growing up on Cape Cod with my older brother, Sean, I collected sick animals like other kids collected baseball cards. Our parents fought all the time, and Sean told me he figured that was my way of trying to fix things in a world where I felt pretty much mute and powerless. When I set the broken wing of a sparrow or rescued an abandoned kitten from a Dumpster, it was like shouting to the world, “I am here!”

  But that was in the days when I kept the animals I saved. My parents were too busy with their own turmoils to take much notice that I had accumulated a small menagerie of animals in my bedroom and backyard. I divided my time between my animals and sailing, and I planned to live the rest of my life like that. But life never happ
ens the way you plan it.

  When I was ten, Sean died. My mother said that I killed him and I suppose I had. But whether you call it an accident or not, my brother was dead at fourteen, and I had to spend the rest of my life looking next to me for somebody who was never there. That’s the thing about guilt, I’ve learned. On the outside you look perfectly normal, going about your daily routine. But on the inside there’s a little hamster on a wheel spinning furiously, urging you on to make restitution for your crime. There’s no rest from it; I suspect I’ll always be running and seeking until my last exhausted breath.

  On the day after Sean’s funeral, I began to let all my animals go. I sold some and gave others away, and the wild animals who had long since been healed, I set free. I never stopped fixing the broken ones that came into my life after that, but I never kept one again. It was as if I couldn’t trust myself with the soul of another living creature.

  Until I met Diana or, rather, until I saw the portrait she’d painted. But I ended up letting her go, too, and the only thing different about her departure was that I was left with Gil. The child I’d never planned on having but who became my life. I love my son more than a sail loves the wind, and it scares me, because I know what it’s like to lose the one thing that matters the most. And I don’t think that I could survive that again.

  I missed my son—the boy that he had been before the accident—and I was willing to resort to drastic measures to bring him back. That was my entire motivation for bringing Marnie home, although since her arrival I’d begun to have doubts about my judgment. Since the night she arrived, I’ve been having dreams about her. Dreams where she’s emerging from the water and the sunlight or the moonlight—I’m not sure which—is glinting off of her. And the light is so bright that it nearly blinds me, but I can’t walk away until I can figure out why it looks like she’s on fire. When I get closer to examine the light, I see that her skin is made of splinters.