The Memory of Water

by Karen White

  Impatient with her timidity, I reached behind her and opened the window, then smiled to myself as I watched her shiver. “Take down your hair. I want to see it blowing in the breeze. I have it in my mind to paint you on a sailboat.”

  I watched as the color drained from her cheeks, and I felt the old tug of remorse. I softened my voice. “It’s how I remember you, Marnie.” I paused for a moment, taking in her hairstyle and dowdy clothes. “I couldn’t paint you any other way because I can only see the real you.”

  She clutched her blouse closed in front of her chest. “This is the real me now, Diana. I’ve changed. I’ve really changed. I’m not the girl you used to know. I started to change the night Mama died, and by the time I left here, the old Marnie was dead.”

  I knelt in front of her, looking into the eyes that used to ground me when I began to feel the shocks of lightning sparking in my head. I saw the eyes of the sister who looked to me for protection and who I had once loved most in the world. I did not want her to be dead. I could not allow her to be dead. And then I thought of Gil and knew that I needed the old Marnie now as much as I ever had.

  “No, Marnie. She’s still there. I see her. You can’t bury her because she’s not dead. So let me paint her. And maybe you’ll find that you’ll recognize her. That you’ll want to bring her back.”

  She stared at her fingers spread out in her lap, the fingers my mother used to say were too short to be an artist’s but that I used to think were capable of doing everything else. “I don’t think so. But do what you want. I’ve never been very good at fighting you.”

  I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that her resistance had always been the one thing that kept me in check regardless of how much I railed against her. But I stayed silent and rose to my feet to begin mixing my paints while my sister gently began to pull the pins from her hair, one by one.

  We didn’t speak for an hour, except for my monosyllabic commands to position her in a certain way or to move her head. She kept stealing furtive glances out the open window, where storm clouds had begun to gather. I felt a small thrill, wanting to capture the volatile sky and Marnie’s fear, as the wind began to gust through the window and push at her hair, reminding me of the way she had looked that night nearly sixteen years before.

  She eventually broke the silence, mostly, I assumed, to distract her from the weather outside the window. “Quinn said that you were planning on putting Grandpa in a nursing home.”

  I didn’t answer, but my brush remained frozen in place over the canvas.

  “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Years ago Grandpa insisted that I take out nursing home insurance for him just in case…in case I wasn’t able to care for him and you wouldn’t come home.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I would have. If he needed me, I would have come home.”

  “Yeah, well, we had nothing to go on, did we?”

  Her lips pursed and she took a deep breath. “So what made you decide that he needed more care?”

  I decided to be blunt, if only to stop her from probing further. “For the same reasons why he initially took out the insurance. Because I have no idea how my health will be from one day to the next, and I hadn’t heard from you in ten years. I needed to make sure that he would be taken care of. And, after my divorce, I didn’t think it fair to dump it all in Quinn’s lap.”

  A strong gust of wind pressed against the house, making it creak and groan like an old man.

  “So what made you change your mind?”

  I forced myself to remain calm. “I…got sick, and all of a sudden, what to do with Grandpa wasn’t a priority anymore.”

  She was scrutinizing me and I could no longer look at her. I made a great show of mixing my paints on the pallet, swirling colors together as if they were memories.

  “Quinn said it was sudden, that he had no idea why you had gone off your medication. Only that it coincided with your desire to put Grandpa in a home.” She paused. “Was it because of me? Because I wasn’t here to help you?”

  I didn’t answer, preferring her to think it was her fault than to guess at the truth. The back door slammed, and I knew it would be Quinn coming in from the greenhouse. I watched as Marnie glanced out the window, no doubt realizing the same thing.

  “He’s really great in bed,” I said, enjoying her discomfiture.

  I was rewarded by a deep blush on Marnie’s cheeks.

  “I don’t think of him that way.”

  “Sure, you do. He’s a good-looking man—and he’s single. As long as you don’t mind sloppy seconds.”

  Her eyes widened, but she surprised me by not blushing deeper. Instead, she said, “It didn’t seem to bother you when you were dating Trey Bonner.”

  I tried to hide my smile. “Touché,” I said, raising my brush to canvas to try to replicate this enigmatic woman my sister had become, while pretending to myself that blood was no thicker than water and that my heart was too full of hate to allow her back in.

  Quinn

  I was halfway up the stairs to go find Gil when I heard running footsteps coming down the stairs from the attic. I stopped in time to prevent being run over by Marnie. I reached out to grab her arms so she wouldn’t run into me and ended up with my body weight thrown forward, pressing her against the wall.

  “Are you all right?” She was, after all, running away from her sister’s studio, which made my imagination run wild.

  She nodded, still trying to catch her breath. “I’m fine. It’s just…well, one minute I was sitting there quietly and she was painting me, and the next minute she was throwing my shirt at me and telling me that the light was gone and I had to go. She practically threw me out of the room.”

  “That’s not really her, Marnie. You know that, right?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I know.”

  It was then that we both realized how close we were standing and that her shirt was wadded in a ball that she was clutching in front of her chest. I watched with interest as color flooded her cheeks as I backed away. I was about to make a comment to lighten the mood when I noticed her hair for the first time.

  It was lighter than I had thought, with bold streaks of sun-kissed strands sprinkled liberally through shoulder-length hair. It fell thick and wavy, not the straight hair I had imagined as I’d stared at the tight bun she always wore. Small curls had sprung up around her face to match the unruliness of the rest of her hair, and it appeared almost as if she’d been standing in the wind. Or on a sailboat. This last thought made a memory catch my breath, and I stepped back farther, allowing her to pass.

  I was rewarded with a quick flash of cleavage as she darted away from me, forgetting momentarily to cover up her bra with her shirt. I called her back before she’d made it to her room. “I was about to take Gil out crabbing since it looks like that storm is going to just blow right past us. Figured if I got him to spend some time near the water today, the next time we could get him out on the boat. Would you like to come with us?”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Sure. Just give me a few minutes to get changed.”

  “Don’t change a thing,” I said.

  She turned her face away from me but not before I saw her smile right before she closed her door.

  Gil and I were waiting on the porch when Marnie joined us. Instead of the bun, she’d compromised with a ponytail and she’d put on her walking shorts. Not ideal, but at least it was better than her schoolmarm skirts.

  “You forgot your shoes,” I said, looking at her small pale feet.

  She shook her head in mock discouragement and winked at Gil. “Just like a Yankee. You think you need shoes to go crabbing. Well, as any Lowcountry kid can tell you, you don’t need them. Unless you want the crabs to point and laugh.”

  Gil gave one of his soundless laughs as he eagerly kicked off his sneakers and socks. In defeat, I slid out of my Top-Siders and left them on the back porch steps.

  Marnie looked behind me. “Wher
e are the nets and lines?”

  I looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language.

  “You know, to catch the crabs?”

  “Oh, you mean the crab traps?”

  “You really are a Yankee, aren’t you?”

  “Yankee or no, a crab’s a crab. You stick the little trap into the water with a little treat and wait for him to go for the bait, and it’s crab soup for dinner.”

  She stared at me for a long time as if she couldn’t tell if I were joking or not. Finally, she asked, “You’ve never caught a crab, have you?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, no. But I figured you’d catch them the same way you catch lobsters.”

  “Um, no. Maybe Yankee crabs, but not those beautiful blue crabs we have here in the Lowcountry. So why don’t you go ahead and try it your way, and Gil and I will do it the right way.” She walked past me with her arm around Gil’s shoulders, steering him toward the shed in the back of the house. I listened to her chattering to Gil as they walked by, knowing that most of it was intended for me.

  “I think it’s a sin that a boy born in South Carolina has never been crabbing. Well, we’re going to put an end to that sacrilege right here and now, you hear? And if your father ever tries to tell you how to fish anything out of these waters, you call me first, okay? I don’t want the other kids laughing at my nephew.”

  She turned to face me and shouted, “Go find me some chicken necks. I figure you still have the ones from last night you’re planning to make soup out of, but we’re going to need them for crabbing.”

  I saluted her like a sailor would salute a captain, and headed inside to the kitchen. When we all met again at the back porch, I saw that Marnie and Gil each held scavenged dip nets and white rope lines weighted with lead sinkers and attached to long poles. Both looked old and dirty, but still usable. I held up the two chicken necks.

  She frowned. “They’re much better if you’ve left them outside for a couple of days to rot, but they’ll have to do for now.” She took them from me one at a time and attached them to the end of the lines with the sinkers. “We’re ready,” she said, picking up the nets and handing one to Gil. Turning her head back toward me, she said, “You can bring the chicken necks.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, picking up the poles and making sure the necks were held out as far as possible in front of me.

  I was encouraged when Gil decided to walk with me for most of the trip down to the dock before catching up to walk with Marnie. She’d told me that any structured lessons that she’d planned had fallen by the wayside. She’d found that simply spending time with Gil and talking with him had relaxed him and made him seem like any normal boy. He still wasn’t speaking, but he wasn’t disappearing into the shadows every time somebody walked near him, so I was calling it progress.

  It was also progress that enabled us to walk down to the dock with Gil at all. Marnie had taken him a few times already to sketch, gradually going farther and farther out onto the dock so that he was no longer skittish about it. As long as he didn’t have to actually get into the water.

  I had made a couple crab traps the day before, and Marnie was kind enough to walk past them without comment on our way to the end of the dock. I watched with admiration as she seemed to walk back in time the minute she’d shown up barefoot. Her walk had become more loose limbed and easy, and her accent became more pronounced the closer we got to the dock, and I had to force myself not to smile and alert her to the fact that I had noticed anything at all.

  Marnie grinned as she faced us. “All right, you two. This is a very simple operation. There’s really only two things that you have to remember. One.”

  She held up her first finger, which was a good thing because what she’d said sounded like “Wun,” and I hadn’t been exactly sure what she’d meant.

  “You have to make sure that your shadow doesn’t fall anywhere over the water near the bait, or those beautiful little swimmers will swim away so fast it’ll make your heads spin off your necks.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me as I struggled to keep from laughing.

  “Two,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at me, “you have to be patient. I know that patience isn’t a Yankee strong suit, so if you want, you can leave right now and we’ll meet you back at the house later with dinner.”

  “Oh,” I said, stretching and yawning loudly. “I think I can manage.”

  She nodded. “All right, then. Now listen closely so I don’t have to repeat myself.”

  We both watched as Gil sat down cross-legged on the dock and gave her his full attention.

  Marnie picked up one of the poles and dangled the chicken neck in front of us. “There’s a lot of extra line here, but don’t be tempted to use all of it at once. Just peel off enough to get your chicken neck out far enough but make sure that your line is tight. If you feel it jerking a bit, that means they’ve found their tasty snack and are eating.”

  Lowering her voice, she stepped a little closer to Gil. “This is where you come in. While they’re busy eating, that means they’re not paying a lot of attention to anything else. So very, very slowly, start pulling in the line.” She made an exaggerated pantomime of her movements, making Gil break out in a broad grin. “If you stop feeling that line jerking, then stop. That means they’ve gotten suspicious and have stopped eating. Wait a while for them to get comfortable nibbling, then start pulling again.

  “As you get them into shallower and shallower water, you have to be extra careful not to cast a shadow on the water over the bait, or your crabs will be history. Remember that they have six legs and can run in any direction, and I would take bets that one of the directions that they won’t be running in is toward your soup pot.”

  I’d stopped looking at Marnie and was now giving Gil my full attention. He was rapt, listening to Marnie’s voice, and I realized that somehow the schoolteacher in her had blended with the Lowcountry girl, making her irresistible to both Gil and myself. I listened to her accent and admired her bare toes and zinc-covered nose and saw for the first time what a wonderful teacher she probably was. I had never seen her on a sailboat, but if she approached sailing with the same intensity as teaching, I could only imagine the power of her presence and determination. Diana might have inherited her mother’s talent for art, but Marnie had harnessed the ability to seek out her strengths and find her passion there. Maybe it was because she was the second born, an intruder into the bond Diana had with her mother, that had made Marnie seek what lay inside her, rather than relying on what others expected of her. I looked at her with new eyes—eyes that saw the remarkable woman who probably had no idea how incredibly remarkable she was.

  Marnie continued. “When you get them to the real shallow water, where they’re close enough to the surface that you can see the crabs, that’s when you grab your dip net.” She picked one up and began stealthily creeping toward Gil, whose eyes were wide-open and whose smile was big enough to catch flies.

  “Very, very slowly, and making sure to keep the shadow of the net away from the feasting crabs, you raise your net and then wham—you swoop up your crabs, chicken neck and all.”

  She looked at Gil, whose eyebrows were creased in question. Marnie nodded at him as if she’d heard a verbal question, then said, “Then you hand the net to your daddy and let him take it from there. I’m assuming Yankee crabs are the same as Southern crabs and he’ll know what to do next. One can only hope that whatever he knows involves putting the crabs in buckets of salt water to keep them fresh until he’s ready to cook them.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I believe that the Southern crabs have better manners than their Northern counterparts. They actually leap from the net into my pot.”

  Marnie’s eyes sparkled, and if I ignored the white nose, I could see the attractive pink coloring of her skin under the hot South Carolina sun.

  “You two, go first,” she said, handing us each a pole with an attached chicken neck. “I’ll supervise.”

&n
bsp; She showed us where to go, Gil at the end of the dock on one side and me at the other. Then she sat down behind us, with her legs stretched out in front of her, and tilted her head back to catch the sun.

  I slowly lowered my chicken neck into the water, watching the bubbles rise up around it. I looked back at Marnie. “You’re going to get burned.”

  She didn’t even open her eyes. “Shh. You’ll scare away the crabs.”

  Being careful to keep my shadow off the water, I turned to look at Gil. He stood silently on the dock, looking down into the water and standing absolutely still. I studied him for a long moment, noticing how much he resembled his aunt. It was there in the stubborn chin and the angular shape of their shoulders, as if nothing could ever make them stoop. He caught me looking at him, and he smiled and I swallowed my breath. It was there, too, in his smile. Not like his mother’s, which was only ever a half smile turned inward. This was the wholehearted smile of a person who took joy from life, and searched hard for it when it seemed lost forever.

  “Lower,” said Marnie quietly, looking at me. “Your pole’s too high and the crabs can see it.” She pointed her chin at Gil. “They’re already tugging on his line, see? He’s definitely a Southerner, that boy.”

  “He’s smaller. It’s easier for him….”

  “Shh,” she said again, but a smile teased her lips.

  Finally, I felt the reassuring tug at the chicken neck but had to restrain myself from peering over. Marnie pointed to the grease spots that had risen to the top of the water. “That’s from the neck—and that’s the spot you’ll want to aim for when we get them to a little shallower water.”

  “Guess you’ve done this before, huh?” I’d meant it as a joke but quickly realized my mistake.

  A shadow seemed to fall across the sun, and I realized that it had only been in her eyes. “A few times,” she said with a sad smile. “A long time ago.”

  “Not with Diana, though, huh? She’s never even mentioned it or taught Gil.”

  “Out of all of us kids who would hang around on weekends and go crabbing, I was pretty good at it, but Diana was the best. She was the most patient, and always seemed to know the right moment to scoop with her net.” She squinted up at me, her hand on her forehead to block the sun. “She could stand absolutely still for hours, it seemed, and nothing would distract her. It was like she’d allow her mind to wander elsewhere, leaving only her body behind. It was one of those things that set her apart from the rest of us, and a lot of the other kids resented her for it.”