The Memory of Water

by Karen White

  When we came down the steps, Diana wasn’t there, but Quinn was. He sat on the sofa in the front parlor with a stack of paintings leaning against the coffee table in front of him. After Diana’s cryptic words in the greenhouse the day before about a painting, Quinn had only responded that he would show me later and explain everything then. I assumed this was later.

  He stood as we entered the room. He smiled at me briefly before turning his attention to his son. Regardless of all the butterflies in my stomach that his smile had somehow managed to let loose, it was nothing compared to the warm feelings engendered by his constant regard and devotion to his son.

  Quinn knelt in front of Gil. “Are you all set to go with your mama and aunt Marnie?”

  Gil nodded.

  “If you have any questions or worries, Aunt Marnie will be there.” Quinn glanced at Gil’s ever-present sketchbook. “And I’m glad you’re taking that. You can always write something down if you need to tell Aunt Marnie something.”

  Gil nodded again, chewing on his lower lip. It was full and rounded like his father’s, the only thing in his face that didn’t come directly from his mother. I fleetingly wondered about the vagaries of genetics and the possibility of what other components from Quinn had been wired into his son.

  “Good,” Quinn said as he stood and ruffled Gil’s hair again.

  I walked toward the stack of paintings, disappointed that they had been placed against the sofa face-first so that I couldn’t see them. “What are these?”

  His face was taut, carefully devoid of all expression, as if he were afraid to give anything away. “I said that I would show you, remember?”

  He picked up the first painting and walked over to one of the dark rectangles on the wall before flipping it over and hanging it on the nail that already protruded from the plaster.

  Slowly, I moved toward the painting, my breath hovering somewhere between my chest and my mouth. “Oh” was all I could say as I stared at the Diana and Marnie I had once known long ago: two little girls in pigtails on the beach gathering shells. The small Diana was as fair as her sister was dark, but their profiles, turned toward each other, were like two halves of the same face.

  Without saying anything, Quinn picked up each picture and began hanging them in the spots where they belonged, each frame fitting into its designated slot like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Slowly, I walked around the perimeter of the room studying each painting, and it almost felt as if I were dying and being shown parts of my past life. But instead of a movie, my life had been relegated to oils and watercolors and forced to fit inside rectangular frames.

  The next painting was of an older Diana and Marnie, barefoot and wearing cutoff jeans and T-shirts knotted about the waist. They were on the dock crabbing, their backs to each other and holding their poles on opposite ends of the dock. Both wore their hair loose, like dark and blond halos dancing around their heads. Again their faces were in profile: two sides of the same coin.

  There was a painting of us sitting in the rocking chairs on the front porch and another of us down on the beach digging for clams; there was even one of Diana with an easel while I sat on the grass, looking toward the ocean. In all of them only half of each face was visible, and even I began to believe that neither girl was whole without the other.

  As I continued around the room, I saw the first individual portraits. It was as if the artist had seen that as we got older, she and the subject began growing apart. The first one I noticed was me on my Sunfish. You could see the tip of Diana’s yellow one on the edge of the picture, but it was easily overlooked in the painting that overwhelmed the viewer with the bright colors of the boat, my bathing suit, the unrelenting blue sky, and the rolling aqua of the ocean’s waves.

  There was even a self-portrait of Diana in her studio as she stood painting on an unseen canvas propped on her easel, the chaos of her studio depicted honestly in the background of the painting. I looked from one to the other, astonished; even in these paintings, only the sides of our faces were visible.

  I had to swallow several times before I found my voice. “Where did these come from?”

  Quinn selected the last portrait from the pile. “From Diana’s studio. She’d taken them off these walls when she heard you were returning. I convinced her to let me rehang them.”

  “You convinced her?”

  He gave a quick glance toward Gil, who was sitting on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, pretending not to listen. “Let’s just say that I made her believe that hanging these pictures here would directly influence my decision to allow Gil to go with her on her next visit to see her friend.”

  “But we had a deal! You’d already decided to let him go.”

  He smiled that disturbing half smile again. “She didn’t know that.”

  I was about to say something when he lifted the painting in his hand and affixed it to its spot on the wall. I lost my breath again as I stared at a portrait similar to the one I’d seen in the store window in McClellanville. This was a scene from the marina, with the shrimp boats packed tightly together at the dock during the off season. But the sky was an ominous gray with red streaks bleeding through the fat clumps of cloud. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Almost as an afterthought, a figure had been painted into the corner opposite the shrimp boats. Her back was to the viewer, but it was unmistakably me and I was looking off into the distance at where a boat in full sail appeared to be sailing off into the darkening sky.

  I shivered and turned away from its awful beauty and found Quinn looking intently at me. “What do you think?” he asked quietly.

  “Diana’s an incredible artist,” I said. “I’ve always known that, of course. It’s just…”

  I spun around the room, taking in the myriad sizes and scenes like a person looking into a kaleidoscope waiting for the jumbled colored shapes to form a picture. It was then that I realized that each one of these framed portraits was not so much about me and the years of my girlhood; they were about Diana’s perspective of me. The first paintings had been of us together as children, and then several more as we grew older. But the constant was that we were always together. The first portrait of me in which I appeared alone, I was sitting on the dock and staring out toward the water. Once again, I was only seen in profile, but I was completely alone. And when you looked at my expression, there was something in my face that spoke of loss and infinite grief. I would have been about twelve in the portrait—about the same age I had been when our mother drowned.

  I continued studying all the portraits while Quinn sat down next to Gil, his arm around his small shoulders. In the following portraits on the wall, I continued to be alone but my figure became smaller and smaller as if in the artist’s eye I had been moving farther and farther away from her, until I could be relegated to a small space of her canvas—gone, yet hovering always in the corner of her consciousness.

  I faced the couch, noticing the huge blank rectangle on the wall. “Where’s this one?”

  Quinn’s face remained closed. “She can’t find it, so she thinks she might have sold it.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “What was it of?”

  “You,” he said simply.

  I glanced around the room one more time. “Yes, I suppose it would have to have been.” It was odd staring at myself in every incarnation of my childhood and girlhood. And as I looked at the ones of Diana and of me, my heart tightened as it does when I think about something important I lost and don’t ever expect to find again. I felt the unmistakable urge to cry.

  Quinn stood and I turned to face the picture of Diana and me collecting seashells so he couldn’t see my face.

  “These are her most valuable works. You wouldn’t believe the calls we get from dealers, but she’s made it clear that she’ll never sell them.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and the sudden warmth there drew me to him until my head was pressed against his chest. “She started painting these right after you left, before I’d even met her. She’d so
ld quite a few before she decided that they weren’t for sale anymore.”

  I looked up at him, warmth and understanding meeting my gaze. “She once told me that your leaving felt like a defection to her—almost as if you’d been playing a game of chess and you’d picked up all your pieces and gone home.”

  I pressed my forehead against his collarbone, reassured by the firm, warm presence of him. “But she didn’t even like me anymore. She changed after Mama’s death, and things got worse and worse after that. It was like she was another person, always accusing me of being blind, of not seeing things the way they really were. And when I tried to apologize”—I stopped to swallow the lump that had lodged itself in my throat—“it made her even more angry. I never expected this,” I said, straightening and sweeping my arms out to indicate the vast array of my sister’s talent and memories splayed across four walls. Except for the one glaring omission over the sofa.

  “You certainly didn’t waste any time.”

  The three of us turned to see Diana as she came down the stairs, her hair combed discreetly back in a low ponytail, and wearing a modest skirt and buttoned-up cream cashmere sweater with low-heeled pumps. If I hadn’t intimately known every article of clothing that I had brought with me from Arizona, I would have sworn that she’d stolen everything she wore from my closet.

  Quinn slowly moved away from me. “I told you that I was going to rehang them all, so this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.”

  Diana’s lips were pale as if she were pressing them too tightly together as she moved into the room and stood by Gil on the sofa.

  “They’re beautiful, Diana. Truly beautiful.” I wasn’t lying; they really were her best work. But everything else that needed to be said hovered between us like a persistent ghost.

  “I know,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I doubt I’ll ever paint like that again.”

  Neither Quinn nor I said anything as she turned to Gil. “Are you ready to go?”

  He nodded. For a moment I thought that Diana might offer him her hand, and felt relief when she didn’t.

  “Let’s go then,” she said, and led the way out the door. “We’ll be back by five,” she called over her shoulder to Quinn.

  I hesitated for a moment, unwilling to leave my rediscovered childhood and sister, whom I had once loved the most. I turned around to look at the portrait of the two girls on the rocking chairs for one quick glance before heading out the door behind Gil, letting the screen door shut softly behind me.

  Diana

  I didn’t know that my hands were shaking until I tried to open the car door. I had to give it three tries before I was able to pull the handle out far enough to release it. I went immediately to the passenger’s side, not wanting to get into an argument in front of Gil with Marnie about driving.

  It took me a few moments to realize that we weren’t moving. I looked over at Marnie, who was busy looking at me.

  “Where am I going?” she asked.

  “North Charleston. Just take Highway Seventeen and go over the Cooper River Bridge. I’ll give you directions once we get there.”

  She nodded and pulled the car onto the gravel drive. As happy as I was that Gil was with me, and that he had come willingly, I settled down uncomfortably for the forty-five-minute trip. I had never wanted Marnie to see those paintings. The first one I had done, the painting of Marnie and me as little girls collecting shells on the beach, had been started in a blind panic the day Marnie had left for college in Arizona. I started painting, and soon found that I couldn’t stop. I painted day and night, giving up food and sleep just so I could paint. It soothed my grief like an ointment to a wound, and I felt neither fatigue nor hunger as long as I was painting.

  It was my grandfather who realized I was having my first manic episode. He’d had plenty of experience with recognizing the signs, after all. He committed me to a hospital where I could be treated, and left me there for a month. He visited daily, bringing me books and magazines and even smuggling in Twinkies. But he would not bring me my paints and brushes, and I wouldn’t let him talk about Marnie. I felt that by putting her in oil on canvas, I had exorcised her from my head and heart. And for a long time after I was released, I came to believe that to be true.

  Of course, being a Maitland, I should have realized that sooner or later my sister would come back to haunt me. And she did, just not in the way anyone would have expected.

  “What’s your friend’s name? I’d like to know what to call her when I meet her.” Marnie’s voice broke into my thoughts.

  “You’re not going to meet her, so don’t worry about it.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t we going to the nursing home to see her now?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t want to meet you. Only Gil.” Even I cringed at the harshness of my own words. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that she’s a bit of a recluse and doesn’t really like to meet strangers. She only wants to meet Gil because she’s heard so much about him and likes the pictures I’ve been bringing in to show her.” I glanced back at Gil and gave him a smile. He didn’t smile back, but he didn’t look terrified, either, so that was a definite improvement.

  “Is that why you’re dressed that way?” There was the trace of a smile in her voice.

  “You mean like you?”

  I watched her chew on her inside cheek. She’d been doing that since she was about four years old and had been told by our grandfather to bite her tongue before she said anything she would regret later. Her cheek was as good as she could manage at the time, and it stuck.

  Without looking at me, she said, “No. Just like you but with more fashion sense. I’m glad you’ve finally realized that cutoff jeans really aren’t for every occasion.”

  “Touché,” I said under my breath, grudgingly admiring the way she’d learned to stand up for herself. “She just thinks that everybody’s a little too wild these days and appreciates a conservative demeanor. That’s why Gil’s in khakis and a button-down shirt, too.”

  She nodded. “That’ll show her.”

  “Yes, it will.”

  “But she doesn’t know Gil, so technically he’s a stranger, too.”

  I closed my eyes, wishing that she would just stop talking. “Not really. I’ve been telling her about Gil for almost a year. She knows everything about him. She knows about the Maitland curse, too.”

  She looked at me, startled. “Why would you even tell her such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “You mean because Mama thought it was true.”

  I turned away from her and concentrated on the bleached gray asphalt of the highway. “Because maybe it really is.”

  She shook her head and was silent for a moment. “I brought her a book….”

  “Great. I’ll make sure I give it to her and say it’s from you.” I continued to stare out my window.

  “It’s Pat Conroy’s latest. It just came out last week, so I wouldn’t think she’s already read it. I assumed she’s from the Lowcountry and would enjoy it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, she is.” I closed my eyes, trying to signal to her that I was tired of talking.

  “Those paintings…”

  I kept my eyes closed, hoping she’d stop.

  “Quinn said you started doing them right after I left. Before your first episode.”

  She was quiet for a long time and I thought she was finished. Finally she said, “I’m sorry, Diana. I’m so very sorry. As inadequate as that word is, it’s all I have to give to you for playing any part in…”

  I wanted to fill in “my craziness,” but I kept quiet, my eyelids closed against the light and Marnie’s discerning gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice heavy with tears and containing more hurt and pain than could be held within the boundaries of the ocean’s floor.

  It’s too late, I wanted to say, but she wouldn’t know what I was talking about. She’d think it had to do with the paintings and how I went a
little crazy when she abandoned me. But the one thing she should be sorry for she’d never know, and I had every intention of carrying that knowledge to my grave.

  I continued to pretend to be asleep as Marnie drove. I heard her swallow before she spoke to Gil, and I felt a flash of warmth where my heart had once been. Marnie was the one who’d always been concerned about others’ feelings, and even now, despite her own mood, she didn’t want Gil to be left out.

  “Do you want to hear a story?” she asked.

  I pictured Gil rolling his eyes. He was getting to be that age where stories weren’t cool anymore, but he still loved to hear them. My father, when he was around and before he disappeared from our lives for good, had been a great storyteller. There had been nothing Marnie and I had loved better as little girls than curling up in his lap and listening to his silly stories. It was the only way he knew how to communicate with us, and for a while, it was enough.

  But as we grew older, and our mother grew less predictable, the stories grew fewer and fewer. And then one day, he was just gone, and I never really knew to miss him except when I was in need of a lap to curl up into and listen to a story.

  “This is a story about soldiers in the last great war,” Marnie continued, and I moved my face toward the window so she couldn’t see my smile. This one had been my favorite.

  “Well, the hero of our story is a young man by the name of Peter Parts who wanted to join the Army. But even though he was brave, strong, and smart, there was no recruiting station that would have anything to do with him. And it took him a whole year of trying before some nice sergeant pulled him aside and let him know the truth. You know what that was, Gil?”

  I pictured Gil shrugging and Marnie glancing in the rearview mirror. “Well, it was on account of nobody wanting to have Private Parts in their regiment.”

  I heard the distinct sound of a snort coming from the backseat, and it took all the strength I had not to turn around and to continue feigning sleep. That one sound had been the first I’d heard out of my son’s mouth in almost six months, and I felt as I had when he was a baby and had taken his first step.