The Memory of Water

by Karen White

  I stared at her for a few moments. “You have a son, Diana. Maybe if you spent more time with him instead of painting a morbid mural, you’d feel better. And so would he.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know the first thing about me. But I know you. You’ve always wanted what I had. And that hasn’t changed. You see Quinn and Gil, a ready-made family, and you’re setting your sights on them.”

  I was so shocked for a moment that I couldn’t find any words. I faced the door, put my hand on the doorknob, and took a deep breath. “I once wanted your talent. And our mother’s love. It was always obvious to me that her affections rested solely on you because of your talent and because you were both so much alike. There was never any room for me.” I swallowed. “But I have my own life now. I’m a damn fine teacher and I make a difference in troubled kids’ lives.” I closed my eyes and instead of seeing the vindictive and ravaged woman my sister had become, I saw the image of my sister and me on an old vinyl couch. She had her arm around me while I kept my head buried in her neck as she made everything all right. I softened and heard myself sigh. Without looking at her, I said, “Every once in a while, when I see a beautiful sunset over the desert or an odd-looking cactus that’s so ugly it’s beautiful, I wish I could create it in paint the way that you can. And I wish, just once, that I could remember our mother looking at me the way I remember her looking at you.”

  I pulled open the door and she didn’t stop me. But before I could close the door behind me, I heard her whisper, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  I didn’t turn around but kept walking, feeling the chill on the back of my neck and remembering what our mother used to tell us about ghosts.

  Quinn

  I heard the muffled bark of a dog and then the bell on the receptionist’s desk rang impatiently. Putting down my sandwich, I looked at my watch and frowned. My assistant, Vickie, was at lunch and I wasn’t expecting my first patient until one. I had hoped to use the extra hour to catch up on the never-ending battle against paperwork.

  I left my office and headed toward the reception area, moving a little quicker when I heard the unmistakable whine of a hurt dog. I pushed open the door and spotted Trey Bonner, a longtime resident of McClellanville whose ancestors had lived in the Village pretty much since its beginnings. There were lots of Bonners, and I had trouble keeping their first names straight, but those with pets were easier for me to remember. I could usually recall the dog’s name first, and then their owner’s weren’t too far behind.

  Trey was a shrimper and had the muscled arms and strong grip to prove it, as I learned by his handshake, which left the tips of my fingers slightly numb.

  “Hello, Dr. Bristow. I don’t have an appointment, but I was hoping you might have a few minutes to look at Tahoe here. He’s been limping and pretty much miserable all day but he won’t let me close enough to see what’s wrong.”

  The German shepherd whimpered as I knelt in front of him, but allowed me to scratch him behind his ears while I did a quick visual assessment. “Is it his back left paw?”

  Trey nodded. “He’s probably just got a big splinter in there from the dock, but he gets really upset every time I try to get a look.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said as I stroked the dog’s side with one hand while gently squeezing the top of the injured leg, slowly moving down to the paw. “There are some dogs who undergo a complete personality change when they’re hurt. And that includes literally biting the hand that feeds them. If you’ve been with a woman in labor, you’ll understand what I mean.”

  I laughed at my own analogy, but Trey looked at me blankly.

  “Guess you had to have been there,” I said.

  “Yeah, guess so. So what’s wrong with my dog?”

  I held up the large wooden shard that had been stuck beneath the outer layer of the dog’s paw and easy enough to remove with my bare hand. It had been a simple matter of distraction. “You were right. Just a splinter.”

  “Holy crap. How the hell did you do that?”

  “Lots of practice, believe me. And I have the scars to prove it.” I gave the wound a swipe with an antiseptic cloth, then scratched the dog behind his large, pointed ears.

  Trey laughed. “Well, thanks, Doc. How much do I owe you?”

  I waved a hand in dismissal. “Don’t worry about it. Glad I could help.” I reached over the receptionist’s desk, to where Vickie kept the dog treats, and pulled a large rawhide bone out of the basket. “Can he have this?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  I gave the bone to the dog and waited for Trey to say his goodbyes and leave me to my paperwork. Instead, he folded his arms across his chest and said, “I heard that your sister-in-law is back in town.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Marnie? Yeah, she’s here for a visit. And that would be my ex-sister-in-law.”

  Trey nodded. “Yeah, I knew that. But I can’t say I ever expected to see Marnie here visiting with her sister.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “It’s just that they didn’t really get along. Not after their mama died, anyway.”

  I watched Tahoe settle down with his bone, working his teeth into the hardened leather, and I quickly forgot about my paperwork. “You knew them back then?”

  He gave what I could only describe as a smirk. “Everybody knew the Maitland girls.”

  My expression must have registered with him because he quickly sobered. “That’s not what I meant, Doc. I’ve known them since we were running around in diapers.”

  “Really?” I asked, my curiosity piqued. “So you grew up with them.”

  “Yep. My family lived next door to them until they went to go live with their grandpa.” He looked at me as if wondering if he should go on, and when I didn’t say anything, he continued. “They had a lot of freedom growing up, because of their parents being what they used to call free spirits. Not a lot of rules, you know? Their mama never married their dad on account of her not wanting her girls to have a last name other than Maitland. Said it would make the Maitland curse easier to find them.” He shook his head. “You know how they say there’s a thin line between genius and craziness? Well, that was their mama. Real famous painter, you know—they even have a few of her paintings in a museum up north—but crazy as a jaybird.”

  I had a fleeting thought that I should stop this conversation now. During my years of marriage, I had tried to pry any information about her family from Diana, but she had a way of avoiding the questions entirely or distracting me with sex. I had honored her privacy by never talking about her family with anybody else. But I was no longer married to her, and I found my need to know more hadn’t diminished. Maybe it was because of Gil that I became determined now to find the answers. To what I wasn’t sure, but the whole Maitland legacy was like a puzzle to me, and I had finally found myself on the verge of discovering where the first pieces fit.

  “So you knew them both pretty well.”

  The dog let out a loud burp and continued to chew. Trey nodded. “It was hard not to. They were pretty much allowed to roam freely as soon as they could walk. The town sort of adopted them, and all the mothers joined in to feed them and make sure they had clean clothes. I remember my own mama packing their lunches and giving them to me to take to school. But I didn’t mind. They were beautiful girls, you know?”

  I nodded, not yet ready to interrupt him, although I’d begun to think that our conversation had begun to sound more like gossip.

  “Yeah, they were gorgeous. As they got older, all the guys sort of drooled over them. They couldn’t have been more different in how they looked—one so blond and one so dark. But, boy, were they wild.”

  That got my attention. I was still trying to reconcile the school-marmish Marnie with the word “wild” when I asked, “You mean Diana was wild. Marnie just doesn’t…seem the type.”

  He laughed. “Let me tell you, she’s a Maitland through and through. She was a litt
le more subtle about it than Diana, but there were times…” He shook his head with a smile but didn’t continue as if he’d suddenly remembered that he was speaking out loud. “And you could definitely see it when she was out in a sailboat. Nobody wanted to be on a boat with her because she scared everybody shitless. The saying around here was that she won all those trophies not from being so skilled but from sheer fearlessness.”

  He lifted his chin at me. “Hey, you were married to Diana. Shouldn’t you already know all of this?”

  I shook my head. “She never talked to me about it. All I knew was that their dad walked out of their lives when they were still little, and that they were raised by their grandfather after their mother drowned. I only just found out about the night she died. That she took the girls out in the boat during a storm.”

  Trey bent down to stroke the dog’s neck. “I don’t think anybody here will ever forget that night. What a tragedy. Miz Maitland had been seeing her doctor for a while and things had become pretty normal—for them, anyway. But for some reason she must have stopped and nobody knew until that night when she flipped out and decided to take a midnight sail in inclement weather.”

  He straightened and looked at me, his brown eyes darkened with memories. “Their grandpa, well, that was the first time I ever saw a grown man cry. I’d always been scared of him, I guess on account of him being our pastor and me not always following the straight and narrow, if you know what I mean.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Anyway, he came down to the Village and was banging on doors hoping to find those girls, but it didn’t take long to figure out that the Highfalutin was missing and so were all three Maitlands. The coast guard was called and everything. They didn’t find Diana and Marnie until the next morning.”

  “It was called the Highfalutin?” I felt sick for a moment, remembering Marnie’s face when I’d told her the name of the boat and all the odd looks I received down at the marina when I’d first christened her. I found myself imagining the young girls they had once been, adrift on an angry ocean at night and watching their mother swept away by the storm. A cold, wet hand seemed to grip me and I grabbed the desk behind me to keep my hands from shaking. “And their mother?”

  “They figured she went down with the boat. Nice sailboat, too. They only found a few pieces of it—including the parts that the girls had managed to cling on to. That’s not so unusual in that kind of a storm, though. Any parts left after the waves got to it would have been pushed way out to sea. Same with Miz Maitland. Nobody really ever expected to find a body, but they searched for weeks before finally giving up. There’s a marker for her in the Presbyterian cemetery.”

  I felt stupid and incompetent all at the same time, realizing how much Diana had kept from me. But I blamed myself for my ignorance. Maybe my own grief had made me impervious to the suffering of others. And maybe that was why Diana had married me.

  I felt disoriented, as if I’d stepped on an escalator that had stopped moving. I held out my hand. “Thanks for stopping by, Trey. Give me a call if he continues to favor that paw.”

  “Thanks, Doc. But one more thing.” His expression mirrored the feeling of dread growing in my gut. “Tell Diana she should stay away from the wharf at night. Makes people nervous.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said, as if I were aware of my ex-wife’s nocturnal wanderings. I shook his hand and said goodbye, then thought about how one could be married to a person for years and never really know them at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  Man’s best friends and worst enemies are fire, wind, and rain.

  —OLD IRISH PROVERB

  Gil

  Last spring, before Mama got sick, she bought me a baby orange tree. She took me with her to pick it up, and then I helped her carry it to the highest part of Grandpa’s property—the place where you can see the marsh and the ocean at the same time. This was the spot where the first Maitlands lived in a small house while the big house was being built. It burned down at the same time the big house did, and sometimes, when the wind is blowing out to the ocean, I think I can smell smoke.

  I held the tree and its burlap root ball while Mama dug a hole with her shovel. She was feeling better, she said, and she wanted to remember it by planting a tree on that spot. When she was done, she wiped her dirty hands on her white pants but didn’t seem to notice. Then she put both palms on my cheeks, and I had to remind myself not to back away. I wasn’t used to her touching me, and it was like I was testing the temperature of the ocean by diving in headfirst.

  Mama put her forehead against mine. “Gil, you might be too young to understand this now. But I just have this feeling…” She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes. I wanted to ask her what she was feeling, but I was pretty sure that I already knew. The tree and her bringing me here were a beginning, but they felt like an ending, too. Sort of like being on a sailboat and sailing close to the wind when it suddenly changes. Your sails go slack and you start floundering until you can figure out the new direction of the wind. Or you could just sit there and go nowhere. I looked in Mama’s face and felt sorry for her. Even with her medicine, I could see that she couldn’t always tell which way the wind was blowing.

  She began to tug on my ear like she used to do when I was a baby, but it seemed as if she didn’t even know she was doing it. “Maybe later, when you’re older and this makes more sense to you, you’ll remember what I said. Okay?”

  I nodded, not understanding at all.

  “I know I haven’t been the best mother to you, Gil. And I want you to know that it’s always been because of me. It has nothing to do with you.” Her mouth turned up in a little smile. “You’re a sweet, smart, handsome and talented boy—the kind of son any mother or father would want.”

  Her hands went to my shoulders, holding tight as if she were afraid I’d run away.

  “But sometimes…” She closed her eyes again, as if trying to remember what she was trying to say. “You see, we’re all born with holes in our lives, and we spend our years on this earth trying to fill them. My art has filled in most of them, and for a while, your father did.” She kissed my cheek and smiled into my eyes, which look so much like hers. “And you, too, Gil. I know you might not believe me, but you have filled my life in so many ways.” Tears started dripping down her face, and I began to worry that this might be the beginning of one of her episodes. My dad had told me how to watch for them but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to think that she had finally decided to become my mother, the way my friends had mothers. And I wondered if that had been the hole I was born with. The hole a mother was meant to fill and why inside of me it was so empty.

  She sat back and smiled even though she was still crying. “Every time you look at this tree, I want you to see how strong it is in the wind, how it bends so it won’t break. And how it grows stronger each year even though the wind blows and the rain pours down. I want you to think of what I just said every time you come here—especially times when I’m not around. To remind you that you’re a Maitland—and that neither fire, rain, or wind has ever succeeded in destroying us. I wanted this tree planted where that first little house burned down to remind you of that.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “And keep your mind straight and focused when you feel it pulling you in directions you don’t want to go.”

  I didn’t really understand, but it wasn’t often that Mama would spend time with me, so I went along with it. I kept hoping that she was going to say that it marked a new beginning, and that she and my dad were going to try to work things out. But she didn’t say anything about that at all. We stayed there for a long time, looking at the water and letting the wind hit our faces.

  It reminded me of sailing but I knew I couldn’t say that to her. I wasn’t ever allowed to talk about sailing with Mama. I didn’t know why, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with all those sailing trophies that nobody dusted or talked about. Once she caught me after I’d pulled them all off the shelf to look at them, and she’d
gone a little crazy. When she’d calmed down, she told me something that my grandmother—the one who drowned long before I had been born—had told her. She said that ghosts weren’t always people who came back after they were supposed to be dead. Sometimes, ghosts are just shadows of old memories that come back to haunt you just like any dead person. And that was why she didn’t want me near the trophies. Because old memories are supposed to be left buried, and making them come alive would be like raising the dead.

  We sat there with my little orange tree looking lonely with nothing but scrubby bushes and grass to keep it company, with the sun moving the shadows around us, and I suddenly wanted to paint a picture of my mother. I wanted to paint her with her ghosts, to show her that I saw them, too. The medicine wasn’t making them go away, but maybe if she knew she wasn’t alone with them, we could both make her better.

  I never got a chance to paint that picture. It was only a few days after we’d planted the tree that I was reading on the floor in my great-grandpa’s study and Mama was going through the papers in his desk. I’d heard her arguing with my dad about insurance and putting Grandpa in a nursing home, and I figured her going through his stuff had something to do with that.

  The room went very quiet and I couldn’t hear the shuffling of papers anymore. For a minute I thought Mama had left and forgotten I was in there. I sat up, and when I saw her face, she looked like Richie Kobylt did when my dad and I took him out on our boat and he got seasick.

  She fell into the desk chair and the paper she’d been holding in her hand dropped to the floor. She stared at it but didn’t pick it up. Her breathing sounded like she had run for a mile, and I started to get worried. I stood and walked toward her at the same time the other part of me wanted to run and get my dad. I stopped in front of her, the toe of my sneaker almost touching the piece of paper she’d dropped on the rug.

  Slowly, she lifted her eyes to mine and I froze. I had a flashback to the time I’d stood up on my dad’s sailboat at the wrong time and the boom caught me in the forehead. I was lucky I hadn’t cracked my skull, but all I could remember was the fear of seeing it swing toward me, and there was nothing I could do to avoid the danger. That was how I felt then, looking into my mother’s eyes. And at the same time, I remembered what she’d said about ghosts being the shadows of old memories.