The Memory of Water

by Karen White

  But there was something in her voice that wasn’t right, and when she leaned forward and looked in my face, I knew why. She was thinking I could do all that stuff she talked about without her. She really had no idea that she was stuck in the elevator, too.

  I grabbed her hand and squeezed and her forehead wrinkled, making her look old. “What is it, Gil? Do you want to? Would you like to give it a try?”

  I let go of her hand and got out of the bed. Crouching on the floor, I stuck my hand under the bed and pulled out an old sailing trophy. It was made of blue glass and shaped like a sail, but the top of it was rounded and wet-looking, as if the sail itself was turning into a wave. I’d wanted to look at it closer so I could paint it, and had hidden it under my bed before the accident. I had to hide it because Mama didn’t want me anywhere near the sailing trophies.

  I handed it to Aunt Marnie, but she didn’t take it at first, so I placed it in her hand. She stared at it for a long time as I sat listening to the storm move away and watched the grayness lighten as if a curtain had been pulled open across the sky. I could tell when she understood what I was trying to tell her when her shoulders drooped forward, reminding me of my dad’s orchids when they haven’t had enough water.

  She swallowed again and I could hear it in the quiet room. “You want me to do it with you, don’t you? That’s what you’re trying to tell me.”

  I nodded and her shoulders rounded even more.

  After a deep breath, she said, “I guess that’s what we’ll have to do then, isn’t it?” She put the trophy on the bed behind her, as if she didn’t want to look at it. Then she smiled at me, but her eyes were dark and cloudy like the sky before a storm. She stood and put an arm around me. “Let’s go find your dad and let him know, then.”

  We began to walk out of the room together, but I pulled away and ran back to the bed and picked up the trophy. I slid it under my bed where Mama couldn’t find it, then joined my aunt to go find my dad.

  As we headed for the stairs, Aunt Marnie’s hand slid from my head to my ear and I felt her fingers tugging on my earlobe, just as Mama used to do when I was small and still does when she thinks I’m asleep. I guess they both must have learned to do that from the same person, and that little thing was probably all they had left that reminded them that they were sisters.

  CHAPTER 8

  The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.

  —MARTIN LUTHER

  Marnie

  The one thing a person never forgets about the Lowcountry marsh is the smell. What seasonal visitors wrinkle their noses at and call rotten eggs, the longtime resident simply remembers as the aroma of home. Even in the Arizona desert in the middle of a windstorm, I could close my eyes and smell the pluff mud left behind by the outgoing tides.

  Once, on a bet with Diana, I looked up the word “pluff” in the dictionary. She’d always said it meant the sound your bare feet made when you jumped over the side of your jon boat. The dictionary simply defined it as “to blow out like smoke or breath with an explosive action; to puff.” I told her we were both right.

  After leaving Gil with his father and passing on lunch, I made my way through the tall grasses to the long dock that stretched out into the marsh like a long finger pointing toward the ocean. All marshes here lead to creeks, the creeks to rivers, and the rivers to the great Atlantic. Even out in the marsh, the ocean always lets you know that it’s near by the tangy smell of salt in the air and the seabirds that circle and cry above you. And by the sucking in and spitting out of the marsh’s waters like the breaths of the ocean orchestrating the tides.

  I watched Quinn’s flat-bottomed aluminum jon boat lift gently in the shallow water as the ripples nudged at the bottom of the boat and at my memories. Quinn was right. I had once known these creeks and estuaries so well that I could navigate them at night blindfolded. They were the highways and byways of my childhood, not easily forgotten. And the smell, always the smell to remind you of where you came from.

  Two large blue herons stood regally on an exposed mud flat watching me and the receding tide with studied nonchalance. The hot sun had already begun to bake a jagged oyster bed, laid bare by the tide, the smell mixing with that of dried salt and decaying marine life and wafting in waves around me. I closed my eyes and bent my head to my raised knees, wishing that I couldn’t remember.

  The sound of a footfall on the wooden dock behind me made me raise my head, and I sat watching while Quinn walked toward me. He stood in front of me, and I had to raise my hand to my forehead to block the sun from my eyes.

  “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

  I shrugged, still stung by his role, however unintentional, in making me face my biggest fears. I had moved to the desert, after all, yet he seemed not to notice or care that he had lured me out of my refuge like a fish from the ocean, then left me exposed on the beach with no escape from the burning sun.

  He sat beside me and handed me a foil-wrapped square. I didn’t take it but looked at him for an explanation.

  “It’s from Gil. He thought you might be hungry since you didn’t have lunch. I hope you like peanut butter and jelly.”

  My stomach had begun to rumble and I took the proffered sandwich. “Thank you. Gil’s very considerate.”

  He laughed quietly but didn’t say anything.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked in between bites of sandwich.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I stopped chewing. “No, I do. What?”

  He looked at me and I noticed belatedly that he was sitting very close, close enough that I could see how very blue his eyes were. I looked down at my sandwich, suddenly intrigued by the layers of brown and red between two slices of white bread.

  “I was just thinking that you’re more like your sister than you think.”

  I polished off the last of my sandwich. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, since you asked. She’s always indirect when she’s pissed. Like by you telling me that Gil was considerate I knew that you were really saying that I wasn’t. Which isn’t always true, but in this case I’ll have to agree with you. And you both twirl your hair when you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t twirling my hair,” I said, annoyed that this virtual stranger could have figured out so much in such a relatively short period of time.

  He reached over and lifted a small handful of hair that I had worked out of my bun and then twisted around my finger so that now it bore a distinct circular pattern. He didn’t let the hair drop immediately, but when I looked at him to tell him to let go, I froze. He was looking at me oddly, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that he was seeing what I looked like naked.

  I jerked my hair out of his hand and let my legs dangle over the edge of the dock, a small cloud of gnats zipping around my ankles.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Quinn stretch his long legs out in front of him as he leaned back on his hands. I wanted him to go away. I’d come here to think and to prepare myself. And, I had to admit, to feel sorry for myself.

  Quinn broke the silence. “I wanted to thank you. For agreeing to help out with Gil. I know it won’t be easy for you.”

  I didn’t say anything, not wanting to make it any easier for him. A trickle of perspiration ran down my back between my shoulder blades, making my blouse stick to my skin. I watched the herons stand absolutely still, and I wished that Diana were here to paint it. I stopped my thought, surprised at it. I hadn’t wanted Diana near me in so very long. I looked away, making a mental note to bring Gil here another day to paint.

  “How did you and Diana meet?” The question popped out of me without thought, and when I looked at him, I could tell that he was as startled by it as I was.

  He paused for a moment as if weighing his words. “I fell in love with one of her paintings.”

  He held that odd look in his eyes again and I knew there was more to this story that he wasn�
��t going to tell me. Uncomfortable, I looked away and saw one of the herons take off from his perch, his wings splayed out against the cloudless sky in such perfect beauty that for a moment I forgot to miss the desert and its dry wind and brown creatures.

  “And that was it?” I asked, testing him, surprising myself at how hungry I was for information about Diana during my years away from the water.

  “No, it wasn’t.” He studied the remaining heron. “Did you know that the greatest threat to the blue heron is utility wires? They’re at the top of the food chain out here in the marsh, yet they’re completely helpless when it comes to avoiding utility wires.”

  I turned to look at him, trying not to notice how nice his T-shirt fit or how the sun turned the ends of his hair gold. Annoyed at myself, I said, “Are you sharing this useless information with me because you’re trying to distract me from thinking about what you’re going to make me do, or is it because you’re a vet and you think everybody’s as interested in animals as you are?”

  He looked hurt and I regretted my harsh words.

  “A little of both, I suppose. I thought you liked blue herons. I saw the pair of paintings you did in high school. I figured you had to have really studied them for a long time to portray them so accurately.”

  I stared at him. I knew what paintings he was talking about, of course. I had entered them into an art competition in high school and they had placed second. Diana had placed first. I had thrown them into the garbage afterward. I later learned that my mother had pulled them from the garbage and had them framed and hung in her bedroom. I’d always thought that she’d done it as some sort of a joke. Until now.

  “How did you see them?” I asked.

  He looked surprised. “They’re still hanging in your mother’s old room. Diana moved into it after you left and, I assumed, liked them enough to keep them.”

  “Oh,” I said, not wanting to talk about it anymore. I searched for something to change the conversation. “Since you’re a veterinarian, isn’t it a bit odd that you don’t have even a single dog?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment but raised his eyebrow. “Probably,” he said. “But it’s not something I like to talk about.”

  Intrigued, I asked, “Why not?”

  He turned bright blue eyes on me. “Probably for the same reason that you don’t want to talk about blue herons.”

  “Touché,” I replied, and settled back on my hands just in time to see the remaining heron stretch out his neck and take off, uttering a loud kraak as he spread his wings and flew out over the marsh toward the ocean.

  Diana

  I had begun to get used to Joanna’s appearance every morning, as she carried a tray with food and medications. She would stay until I’d eaten every bite and swallowed both pills, as she had been directed to do by Quinn. I don’t know if she ever reported back to him if I had slept in my studio again and had on the clothes I’d worn the previous day, or that I sat in front of an empty canvas with nothing to mar the white expanse of it except my hopeless ambitions.

  She handed me a cup of water as I picked up my pills and put them one at a time on the back of my tongue and washed them back with a water chaser. I took my Lithium pill—for seizures—and my Prozac, and swallowed them down like a good girl, showing my empty mouth to Joanna when I was through. With a rueful grin, she turned to leave, picking up wet towels on the floor on her way out.

  My doctors say I have bipolar disorder, something they suspect I may have inherited from my mother. What they don’t know is that with every pill I take, the truth is pushed farther and farther away until I see it only through a congealed fog of faces and words and memories. But what I can’t seem to make them understand is that in the other world, the world I knew before the pills, I saw such indescribable beauty with color and movement, and it reached out to me through my hands and my paintbrushes.

  With the medication, that part of me is asleep. Living my life now is like being forced into a wheelchair when you know that you can run marathons. But it’s the price I pay for not having to face the truth.

  My diagnosis came after Gil was born, and I guess I owe Quinn my life. I had felt highs and lows before, but memories of my mother had somehow held them in check. But my defenses were useless in the onslaught of postpartum hormones. To give Quinn credit, he’d reacted like any good doctor when he saw me attempting to skydive out of my bedroom window with an umbrella. He had me committed to a hospital until we figured out what was wrong. I couldn’t be grateful. I hated him for taking away my passion, for stealing my art. And when Gil’s first word was “Daddy,” I hated him even more.

  Slowly, I came back to his world and even resumed painting. But the colors seemed dimmer, the nuances of movement less clear, the flow of the paintings less passionate. I still sold paintings, but I knew in my heart that they were the paintings of the drugs and not the true heart of the damaged artist.

  I continued taking my medication for Gil, staying on it even through my divorce. I fought against my chains, but my son, and my avoidance of the truth, kept me bound to them. Until the night I went searching through my grandfather’s papers and unwittingly became Pandora.

  Yesterday, I watched Marnie and Quinn walk out of the marsh, keeping close to each other to stay on the narrow path. There was something in their posture, something that reminded me of bees dancing around flowers that alerted my senses. I felt a pang somewhere my heart used to be, which changed abruptly to a thud as a different emotion began to overtake me. My hand trembled against my chest and I could feel the clammy coolness of my fingers against my skin. It was fear I felt: fear of discovery. Separately, I could keep my secrets from them. But not if Marnie let down her reserve with Quinn. He had a way with damaged women, I knew. He could get them to tell him their most intimate secrets without them even knowing what they were doing. And then I’d have no more power over Marnie, no one at whom to direct my hatred. There could be no reconciliation; the truth would blind us both.

  I stilled my hand, holding it tightly against my chest, and turned to the wall, where splashes of color reflected the light from the window. Just last night I had begun to paint again. It wasn’t a portrait or a landscape, but an illustrated time line that I wanted to edge my ceiling with so that it was the first thing I saw when I walked into my studio and the last thing I saw before I turned out the light. It was as if Marnie had truly been my muse and with her return came the return of my painting. But I’d never tell her. I sickened at the thought of her returning to Arizona to her little job as an art teacher and telling everyone that she was the muse of the great artist Diana Maitland.

  The skin under my bandage began to throb and itch, recalling the dream I’d had the night before, where a thousand bugs had crawled out of my wounded leg and proceeded to eat the damaged flesh. The drugs made me dream disturbing dreams, but my visits to the nursing home also had a similar effect. Both were essential to my recovery, and as my grandfather would say, God never gives more than we can handle. Maybe he was right. Or maybe I was just out to prove him wrong.

  I looked down at my nightgown, splattered with paint, and wrinkled my nose. When I’d put it on the previous evening, I’d had every intention of going to sleep in my bedroom. But I’d found myself drawn to my studio, and I had escaped this life for just a few hours to paint.

  There was a brief rapping on the door. “Come in,” I said, thinking it was Joanna. I was surprised to see Quinn stick his head into the room as if making sure the coast was clear.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Am I being allowed into the inner sanctum?”

  “What do you want?” I asked, rolling my eyes. “If you’re just here to make sure I took my pills, you could have asked Joanna. She just left.”

  “I did,” he said, entering the room and closing the door behind him. It had been a very long time since Quinn had been in my studio, and when I saw the way he filled the space and disturbed the air, I knew that I’d been right to keep him away. He still had the
power to suck the air out of my lungs by just walking into the same room. I would admit to no one that I was still half in love with my ex-husband, because that would make me an even more pathetic person than I already was. Besides, marrying a man who was in love with somebody else was already one failure too many according to my calculations. Being second-best seemed to be a running theme for me, and the less I admitted to it, the better I felt.

  I remained sitting on the futon in the corner of the room, the unraveled sheets and blankets testament to the fact that I had slept there. I watched his eyes take it all in, including the fresh paint on the walls and me, and the large sheet-draped canvases on the other side of the room. I felt a strap from my nightgown slip off my shoulder, and I let it fall, exposing the top of my breast. His gaze flickered over that, too, before settling on my face.

  “How are you feeling today?”

  I shrugged, knowing the action pressed my breasts a little closer to the neckline of my nightgown. “Fine. Not full-blown crazy, but just a little crazy.”

  He raised his eyebrow. “You’re not crazy, Diana. You have a mental disorder caused by an imbalance…”

  I flopped back on the futon. “Save it, Quinn. Let a crazy lady keep a bit of her sense of humor, okay?”

  He sat down in a paint-speckled armchair and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his thighs. “Sorry. It’s just that you were agitated when you came home last night from your visit to the nursing home and wouldn’t talk to me. I was hoping you were feeling better this morning.”

  “I’m just great, so you can go now.”

  Quinn stayed where he was, as I knew he would. “I’m not your enemy, Diana.” He dropped his head in his hands for a moment before looking over at me. “Besides, I need to talk to you. About Gil.”