All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

  “For the march. Next week, remember? We’ve got the portable toilets lined up. We’ve got the marshals trained. Fences, everything.” Jack’s smile squinted his eyes, giving him a look of good-humored know-how. I loved that about his face. “Your animation will go on before the speeches. Miss Sedge is totally cool. I can’t wait . . .” He was happier than I’d seen him in a long time. “I just wish . . .” he began, bending down to pet Cloud, and instead of finishing his sentence he took off his shoes and came over and climbed onto the bed. I welcomed him in, though my instinct was to shrink away. He was nestling against me, pressing his leg protectively over mine, when without a second’s warning even to turn my head, I threw up.

  Jack leapt to his feet and was laughing and plucking Kleenex from the box in handfuls when my mother came in. I started crying harder than I cried when Dr. O gave us the news. I didn’t care who saw. Enough is enough. He would get used to it and he would get over it. While my mother changed the sheets, Jack went out to take off his stinking shirt, and I never let him back in.

  • • •

  Hospice nurses were like ghosts coming and going, tugging me gently around, putting straws to my lips and pillows between my knees and fiddling with my chest port. One said “upsy-daisy” when she turned me over, one had chapped hands, one spoke like Lisa Simpson, but there was no getting to know them. I had to just let it happen. Breathing was easier if I didn’t think about it. Grandma and Grandpa and Robin were nearby, but I guess at a time like this you need one person, and that person was my mother, my amazing, incredible, irreplaceable mother. I couldn’t have gotten through one day of this without her, even though I never knew what her face would be like when she came into the room, or what I could and could not afford to say. I couldn’t say: Being a kid was the best part. It was worth it for that. I couldn’t say: You’ll have to tell Antonio. I couldn’t say: Wow. Can you believe this is what my whole life was leading up to? Because I think my mother was still holding out for good news. My mother did not know how to stop fighting. Maybe mothers never do.

  • • •

  Grandpa. Mom and Grandma. Robin and Mom. They appeared above me, one by one or two together, against fields of swaying stems or with melting edges, and they departed just as suddenly as the pain returned. Every time, it took me by surprise. Who would want to do this to me? Because my body was no longer divided into parts where pain could be confined, it bullied and burned its way through to where I really lived.

  “Has she had her twelve o’clock?”

  “Now.”

  “Turn it on.”

  The black screen lit up, filling the room with images and noise.

  “Where’s Jack?” I asked in my new thick voice.

  “Out there in the crowd.”

  “I want to see him. Will I see him?”

  “Keep watching. You might.”

  I could hear my mother was telling me a white lie. It was all white lies now. The people were colored particles, thousands of them, moving like a huge, slow liquid in the space between the buildings. I was hypnotized by the patterns the liquid made flowing forward. Jump to a stage, with faces below, waiting. The screen back of the stage came to life.

  “Look,” said Grandma. “Is that it?”

  My mother was behind me on the bed, holding me up.

  “That’s it,” said Grandpa.

  “An animation by Madeleine Wakefield,” my mother read off the screen, her arms snug around me, her voice vibrating through my back.

  My face appeared, towering over the people on the stage, and then filling up our television screen.

  “Who’s that?” I said. “Who did that?” The gigantic pencil-drawn me was so familiar, every line and smudge of it, but it seemed as though someone older and smarter than me had made it.

  My mother swapped a glance with Robin. “That’s you, Maddy.”

  “That’s your animation,” he said soothingly.

  “I know it is.”

  I’d been half-asleep, drifting and bobbing along with the crowd, but now I was wide awake. There was my head. There were my lips, smiling mysteriously because I knew something no one else knew. There was the earth on top of my skull, with its miniature cities and mountains and trees, and there were my eyes closing in slow motion like I was entering a dream.

  Gaps opened up on the surface of the earth. Only a few patches to begin with, nothing too alarming. But it was like Robin’s E natural, that first note of doubt. Gradually the gaps got bigger and ran together, gobbling everything in their way, and at the same time my face below started to crumble. That was the statue coming in. Gouge into the wet paint, let it dry, draw over the ridges. When the whole earth was bare and the beautiful forests and lakes and streets and schools were gone, the sea rose across the earth and blotted everything out.

  The clapping went on and on, in our dining room and on the television, and it bubbled into every corner of my heart, swelling it to twice its normal size. They knew. They saw. All because of this thing that I’d made. I was out in plain sight with everyone bearing me up, but at the same time I was disappearing into my unreachable self, the place where no one could ever find me. I knew then that if there was no point in hoping for what I really wanted, I could always hope for something else.

  Hi Maddy,

  Have I said something to annoy or upset you? I really hope not. But if I have, my sincere apologies. I’m so glad you contacted me. Just say if you don’t want me to write anymore. That is absolutely fine. I understand.

  All the very best

  Antonio

  Dear Maddy,

  As I have not heard from you in seven weeks—nearly eight—I can only think that you have decided not to write to me for now. Did I put you off when I suggested we might meet one day? Anything like that would be entirely up to you. I won’t write again until I hear from you. Please know I will be so happy any time you want to get in touch.

  Love from

  Antonio

  Eve

  26

  When I put the idea to Alison, she slouched down on the office sofa and tried to talk me out of it.

  “People don’t just do things. Why do you want me to come with you?”

  “Most people would give anything for a trip like this.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  “I know that.”

  “Take Melissa. It would be a great opportunity for her.”

  “I’m not taking Melissa. She doesn’t even like art.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Has she ever defended it from a lunatic with a gun?”

  In the end Alison said yes. It was arranged that we would stay in the home of Philippa, an educator I’d met years ago at a conference. Once the interview contacts had been made and the flights booked, I felt as though some brake had been released and the train I was on was lurching slowly forward. Robin and I started making love again early in the morning when we were only half-awake. It hurt me to see the leap of surprise in his eyes when I reached for him, to hear the softness in his voice when we lay together. Did I give myself away? Could he tell that in the part of me that was not already occupied by Maddy, I was hollowing out a space for someone else?

  As November approached, I took the encounters that came my way as signs.

  While driving near the high school I spotted Fiona and Vicky on the sidewalk with a girl I didn’t know. Fiona was balanced on one leg demonstrating a ballet position, her pale hair curved around her face in a new way. She wobbled and fell theatrically into the arms of the other girl, and Vicky raised her head from her phone at the right moment to laugh.

  Fiona had always been my favorite of Maddy’s friends, an imp as a child, tart and quirky as she grew. Vicky’s more self-sufficient bearing came, I thought, from her large Italian family: she didn’t need any more adults in her life. Yet it was Vicky who treated me in the most natural way after Maddy died, not distant at all but warm and solicitous and Catholic in her instinct for ritual and ceremony, weepi
ng openly and speaking of Maddy as though she were in another room. The girls came to see me a number of times after the service, and then their visits dropped off, as their visits had dropped off even before Maddy turned them away.

  Her refusal had grieved and bewildered them. I tried to soften it, to explain that she was drawing away from everyone and everything. Two days before she died, Fiona and Vicky showed up with a homemade banner—We love you, Maddy!!!—mounted on stakes they insisted on hammering into the lawn under the dining room window. “Do you think she can see it from here?” They conferred, yanked up the sign, rehammered it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them. By that time Maddy was barely conscious.

  In the seconds it took to slow down and decide not to stop, I saw them clearly: two young women who would always hold pieces of Maddy, but who had accrued a year of extra life and moved on.

  A week after the sighting of Fiona and Vicky, Jack and Glenda Sedge came to see me. An unlikely pair, Jack in his sweatshirt, Glenda in her tan coat, they followed me to the living room and settled on the couch. I sat opposite. I had last seen Jack in May, when he returned some drawings of Maddy’s. Six months is a long time in the body of an almost-eighteen-year-old. He had bulked out in the chest, cut his hair, lost his pimples, and started to shave. Maddy would never know this composed young man.

  “You’ve grown, Jack.”

  “I’m taller than my dad now.”

  “I didn’t mean your height.”

  He flashed me his shy grin. “How are you?” He looked at his hands: a normal question with impossible answers.

  “Fine.”

  He glanced up, relieved.

  “We all miss Maddy,” said Glenda Sedge in the gravelly voice that the cruel among her pupils no doubt taunted her for. “So much. You’ve been in my thoughts these months.” Her brown eyes sought mine. I blinked away my customary response to uninvited warmth. Maddy too had been buoyed up by that voice and that smile.

  “As you know, there was a huge response to Maddy’s animation, even from people who didn’t know the whole story.”

  “The clip went viral online,” said Jack. “One week it was trending top ten on YouTube. We took it down,” he added.

  “At least she got to see it projected on the day,” I said. “She heard the applause.”

  Maddy had been sleeping a lot by that time. We nudged her from her dream to watch the march live on television, pointing out the size of the crowds and taking turns to read the signs out loud: No Oil in Our Soil May the Facts Be with You. There’s No Planet B. She listened with an inward-looking smile. At one o’clock the speeches were streamed from a stage on Third Street. The last speaker introduced the animation with the words we had agreed on, and the screen at the back of the stage crackled to life. Maddy had been medicated and was resting her weightless self against me, her shoulders made of something flimsier than bone, her eyes in their shadows fastened to the television screen. As the applause went on and on, the joy on her face was something to behold.

  “She went downhill so quickly after that,” I said to Glenda. “I guess the whole thing went out of our minds.”

  “The idea of someone with so little time left not only pouring herself into a campaign, but making a film of such power. I don’t have the words. The reason we’re here,” she continued smoothly, as if she had practiced this part, “is to see if we might use Maddy’s animation again. It could be just as powerful now—”

  “Now that she’s gone?”

  “If not more so,” said Glenda Sedge. “There’s the next publicity drive. There’s the blog. There are events coming up.”

  They were both having trouble meeting my eye, whether out of respect for my silence or because I unnerved them. Jack leaned forward, his forearms resting on his parted knees, hands loosely linked between them. There was a new authority in the way he sat, and in the man’s watch he wore low on his wrist.

  After the vomiting incident, I’d had to tell Jack that Maddy couldn’t see him anymore. Couldn’t, I stressed, not didn’t want to. There was no point in being as blunt as she was. It was too awful for them both, she said. What boy in his right mind wanted to be around this? She would send him away before he decided to stop coming. He would thank her one day.

  But Jack did not give up easily. The doorbell rang and he faced me on the porch, hands thrust in his pockets, head at an awkward angle, lips set in a grimace to fend off tears.

  “Maddy’s sleeping a lot,” I told him gently. “She’s asleep now.”

  “Can I come back when she wakes up?”

  “Next time,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Another time.”

  He turned up again the following day, and again I told him Maddy was asleep. The third time, with a stubborn jut of his chin, he asked if he could come in. I took him to the study. We sat together in our mutual and solitary despair. A few feet away, on the other side of the stairs, Maddy was dozing. I had no right to go against her wishes. His gaze flitted across my shelves and filing cabinets, the alarming stacks of paper on desk and floor that I was unable to put in order or care about. I don’t think Jack had ever been in my study. They’d spent their time in Maddy’s room or the den.

  He was swallowing and blinking rapidly. This boy had loved her body, championed her art, kept her company in illness and relative health. She would haunt him for years to come. The fear on his face was my fear. I longed to seize Jack and hold him to me and be held, even as I fortified myself against him. I stood up, trembling.

  “Do you want to see her?”

  Dumbly he followed me to the dining room. Maddy was lying on her side, facing away from us. Her body hardly raised the covers. Now that treatments had stopped, her head on the pillow had new growth of soft furry brown, making it look even more tenderly skull-shaped.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  I never knew whether Jack woke Maddy up, or if he just sat watching her sleep. He appeared sometime later in the kitchen, completely dazed, thanked me, gave me a blind wordless hug, and rushed out.

  Jack and Glenda Sedge were waiting for me to speak.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s her legacy,” said Glenda.

  The hands in her lap were as still as her face: the eyes widely spaced, the long upper lip forbidding when she didn’t smile. I’d overheard Jack say that her students were her family. At least Maddy still existed for her. But was the film Maddy’s legacy? Who was to say what Maddy’s legacy was? Jack could be forgiven; he was young. Glenda Sedge was not, and she was a strong personality besides. Activists could be single-minded, obsessive, even. I knew Maddy had liked and respected her very much; but it was possible that, for her own reasons, the woman had persuaded Maddy to do what was needed for the campaign. This had not occurred to me at the time, so relieved had I been that she had companions and activities to throw herself into. I should have kept a closer watch.

  Jack ventured: “She worked so hard on that thing. I know she wanted people to see it. She wanted it to be part of the campaign . . . Maddy was a fantastic artist. Everyone said so. She did it all, you know. I just helped on the technical side.”

  In the long dreamlike months after Maddy died, Jack had come to visit me, I don’t know how many times. Through my delirium, I could see that being in our house was a compulsion and an agony for him. His face distorted horribly when he spoke of her. Now, nearly a year later, his gaze was clear, his features smooth and unmarked. Did he have a new girlfriend? Had he written Maddy into an adolescent myth of fate, sex, and death? I would never know and I shouldn’t mind. It was what healthy young people did. One day the story would elicit the tenderness of his future wife, and he would seem deeper and more alluring because of it.

  “She was very talented,” I said. “But you did it together. She needed you, Jack.” I saw in his eyes then a flicker of gratitude and concealed misery, a conduit briefly opened to the reservoir of his grief. The knowledge passed silently between us, mak
ing me glad, and guilty to feel glad, before he shifted his legs and the moment passed. But I knew without a doubt that Jack was a part of Maddy and one of her keepers, and so, in her own way, was Glenda Sedge.

  “It’s entirely up to you,” said Glenda. “You and what Maddy would have wanted.”

  Would have: that detested phrase. “I’m not sure. I’ll think about it.”

  • • •

  After they’d gone, I went straight up to Maddy’s room. Her laptop was on the floor of her closet. I plugged it in, powered it up, and entered the only password of hers that I knew. At least when it came to passwords, my daughter was predictable. Her desktop sprang to life with its rows of folders lined up on a cresting wave. Like me, Maddy preferred to have everything out where she could see it. I scanned the titles and opened the one called “Animation.” Inside were multiple files. I chose the one called “final final final” and barely paused before clicking on the play arrow.

  Maddy’s eyes were level and calm, her lips bunched in a half smile. I had not seen this image since the day of the march. I could feel her slight weight against me. Impossible to move or look away or press stop. Applause had given the film a triumphant close. Now it unrolled in eerie silence until the land was shorn of life and the stone face below had crumbled pits for eyes. Watching it had hardly been bearable then, and it was hardly bearable now, seated alone in her empty bedroom. Her knowingness and candor and flair cut straight to the part of me that would never recover.

  Before I could summon the energy to press pause, the image began to move. Was there more? There was more. The ruined face slowly smoothed itself into flesh and skin. The knobs of her eyelids opened. Jolt to the heart. Maddy was looking straight at me. Mama! Lips began to quiver. Help me! Eyes flared. Don’t mess with me! Brows gathered. All is lost! It took very little for supplication to turn to defiance and defiance to despair. At the eyes and mouth, where most of the changes took place, the pencil gradually tore through the paper until all the features vanished and there was only an empty shape where she had been.