All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

“I only recently found out you were writing to her.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Antonio. “I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

  “Can you imagine what it was like to find out after she was gone? Never to have the chance to talk to her about it?”

  “I wanted her to tell you,” he said. “I stopped writing for a while, to give her a chance to tell you.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “And you started again. Maybe you were happy to leave me out of it.”

  “You’ve seen the letters,” he said. “She was very stubborn.”

  “She thought it was only fair if you told your family about her.”

  “I wanted her to tell you,” he repeated.

  “Well, good for you! And did you tell your wife about Maddy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet. Were you going to?”

  “I wanted to see you first.”

  “Are you going to now?”

  “I am thinking about it.”

  “You’re thinking about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what exactly are you thinking?”

  He pulled a face that once would have made me laugh. He always tried to humor his way out of a tight spot.

  “Did you want a private relationship with Maddy? Just the two of you?”

  “No, Eve . . .”

  “It’s easy to impress a young person. With her fantasies of what a father is. When she’s never had one.”

  I remembered well that skeptical retraction of the chin, the indulgent frown. “You’re so angry,” said Antonio quietly. “Who wouldn’t be? The fact is,” he went on, spacing his words, “Maddy’s the one who wrote to me. She was the one deciding who knew and who didn’t know.”

  I let my voice go soft. “I’m glad for Maddy’s sake she got to know you before she died. I truly am. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “You are?” said Antonio. “Oh, I wish she had told me she was sick!”

  “What difference would it have made?”

  His eyes watered again. “I don’t know. The questions she asked me! Did I think there was life after death! I thought they were just the usual teenage questions. I would have answered in a different way. It seems like such a . . . brave thing to do. Write to me but hide the most important thing.”

  “The most important thing?”

  “Such a thing,” he said hastily.

  “She was very proud. The last thing she wanted was for people to feel sorry for her. She went ballistic if she thought someone was being nice to her just because she had cancer. She longed for a father. It was a shadow over her, growing up.”

  “Eve,” he said. “You have to remember—”

  “Maybe she wanted to make sure you didn’t pity her. Or maybe,” I said, “it was her way of getting even.”

  He leaned forward until I could see the amber light in his Maddy-gray eyes.

  “I thought there was plenty of time. I thought she stopped writing because she had second thoughts. Or I had offended her somehow. Or she told you, and you didn’t like it. I had no idea. I was only guessing.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It got to me, you know. She got to me.”

  “You have your own children.”

  “I don’t have a daughter.”

  “You thought you’d borrow mine?”

  He held my gaze for a long moment, his lips gathered into an expression I couldn’t read. He squinted at the ceiling. “Are those milk bottles?”

  “This place used to be a dairy.” I pointed to the metal plaque. “I memorized that while I was waiting. Ask me anything.”

  Eyes on the light fixture, he said: “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, you know. If you want the truth, Eve, I thought one day we would all meet. When Maddy was older. Remember, it was a shock for me, the first time she wrote.”

  “Oh, was it?”

  “Erica knew nothing.”

  The casual way he inserted her name in our conversation stung me. “You know,” I said slowly, “there’s something I’m not getting here. People find each other these days. Maddy was planning to contact you when she was eighteen. When I could be sure she really wanted to.”

  He was staring at me.

  “What?” I snapped. “You knew you had a child out there. You could have found us first.” I understood then that for the whole of Maddy’s life I had been waiting for Antonio to find us.

  In a voice hoarse with wonder, he said: “But I thought you were getting rid of it!”

  “It?”

  “Her,” he said humbly.

  “Never! I never wanted an abortion!” The women at the nearest table glanced our way. I lowered my voice to a hiss: “I told you that.”

  His face was darkening slowly. “Yes, I know, but you changed your mind. That’s what you told me,” he said. “When you left.”

  What could I do but shake my head?

  “You did, Eve!” His face was distorted, strange. “I kept calling you up, many times.”

  “Once.”

  “Lots of times! I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’re saying this! I left messages on the machine. I went by your apartment looking for you. I left notes.”

  “I’d gone to stay with my parents. I was sick of talking about it. What was the point? You’d made your position clear.”

  He studied me for a moment, before casting his eyes down. In a low, reluctant voice, he said: “I think I kind of froze. You know? I was so sure I did not want to become a father. It was not in my”—he smiled unhappily—“life plan. At that time I was obsessed with keeping to my plan. But after you left that day, I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” An idea was forming in my mind, so hideous that I banished it immediately.

  “Afraid I had talked you into it. Or that you would do it to spite me.” His face threatened to crumple again. “I really didn’t know what I wanted. But I didn’t want to get rid of it just like that. I knew I had no right to force anything on you. Either way.”

  Stubborn as he could be, Antonio was also respectful. That’s why he’d backed off when Maddy stopped writing.

  “I was thinking all kinds of things,” he went on. “If I had been maybe too closed and too certain. But at the end I had to give it up. You did not want to see me. It was very painful.” In a low flat voice he added: “I was in love with you, you know.” I said nothing and he hurried on. “But I guess the part of me that wanted to get on with my career and not look to the left or to the right—that part was happy to give up.”

  I sat in stupefied silence. What had I said to Antonio?

  “What you mean is, you don’t want to have a child with me.” I waited for him to touch or contradict me.

  He might have reached for me. He might have tried to touch me. He might have said other things that were lost to me now. No copy was kept of the past and what had gone on there. It was possible I had said something else, something cold and desperate and calculated to wound. Something I did not mean.

  “So why should I want your baby?”

  Or: “What makes you think I’m going to keep your baby?”

  Or even: “I want a baby, Antonio, but I don’t want yours.”

  He was playing with the saltshaker, capsizing and righting it in his long, lean fingers. His hands used to cover my face and slide apart so he could kiss me. The dark red privacy, the thrill of exposure. Being so much taller, he had to lean down to do it. I never experienced our difference in height as inequality; rather, it was a gap that had to be crossed, intensifying what passed between us. The tipping of the saltshaker was maddening. I needed stillness. I needed to think. I needed to think and I could not bear to think, because alive in the room with us and coursing like a toxin through me was a monstrous idea: I had deprived Maddy of a father.

  That potent and useless construction: could have. I could have answered Antonio’s phone calls. I could have tolerated his misgivings. Shocked and temporarily cold-hearted, he coul
d have been given time; he could have been persuaded. If Antonio could have been persuaded, then Antonio and I could have stayed together. If Antonio and I had stayed together, then Antonio would have been Maddy’s father. I could not look at him or speak. I hated him for the chance I had taken with our lives and, when I finally met his eyes, I hated the knowledge in them that was curdling into pity.

  “Eve,” said Antonio urgently, touching my wrist where it lay on the table, inert and stunned like me. “Forget it. What happened happened. We have to leave it. Just leave it behind. I blame myself.” He smiled the ghost of Maddy’s mischievous smile. “You can too if you want.”

  30

  Is a worldview the same as a paradigm? Miss Sedge says we have to start seeing human beings as just one small part of everything living on the surface of the earth. Do you think another scientific revolution could discover the afterlife exists and maybe even God (though as I said, I think there could be an afterlife without God)? You said it’s the ridiculous ideas that can lead to discoveries. According to Miss Sedge, if you go the straight route, you get an answer you already know, but if you go the crooked back way, you get something new. She tried it out on Jack and me and we came up with the idea for the animation. I guess that’s art, not science. But maybe it works the same way.

  I’ve been so busy. I’m making this animated film. Jack’s helping me on the practical side. I started out doing it for the march, but now I’m doing it mainly for myself. You make a drawing and change it hundreds of times, taking pictures as you go with this software that joins them together. I’m also making a secret animation nobody knows about. It’s really hard to do, but I love it. I want to be an artist if I could do this all day.

  No one was in the hallway or the kitchen. I slipped to my room on the carpeted stairs and curled up on the bedspread, longing for Maddy. I had been in contact with her, but only where she smiled at me through his lips and watched me from his eyes. Jewel-like pictures hung at different levels above Philippa’s ivory-painted furniture; a lighter circle on the wallpaper showed where the clock had been. On my first night I had taken it down and stuffed it in a drawer. I never could sleep in a room with a ticking clock.

  I rolled on my back, laughed out loud, knew myself to be incurably alone, did not give in to tears. Could the word misunderstanding account for what had happened between us? I blame myself. You can too if you want. Thanks, Antonio. The carved rose from which the light fixture hung had been painted so many times it had no distinct edges. Slowly it spun out the new alternative worlds. Little Maddy and her brothers skipped around us, tugging on their father’s hands . . . Teenage Maddy and her sisters formed a huddle, giggling at us, their parents, the happy outcasts . . .

  I found my phone and summoned Robin’s voice into my ear.

  “Oh, hello, Ducks.”

  “Sounds like you’re around the corner. Where do you get that from, again?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That name you call me.”

  “The Rubber Duck Regatta. Cincinnati’s big claim to fame. Other than myself, of course.”

  “Oh, I remember. So, what are you up to?”

  “This and that,” said Robin gnomically. “This and that.”

  “Like what?” I heard a piano playing. “What is it, four there?”

  “Something like that. Listen. It’s the Shostakovich. Second movement.”

  Even before Maddy grew hungry for music, Robin had opened his world up to me, persuading me of the grace in what seemed ungainly or incomplete. He held his phone near the speaker. The melody sleepwalked into the beat: two against three, four against three . . .

  “My favorite part,” I said.

  “I’m learning to play it. Want to hear?” Scraping, rustling . . . the passage came into my ear again, more distant, from the real piano this time. In Robin’s hands it was not yet fluent but just as haunting. It was odd to picture him there, in our cute, functional house, where the ceilings were low, the doorknobs round, and the open-plan kitchen was built with the needs of large appliances in mind. From here, the house seemed like a temporary structure that could easily be dismantled.

  “Wow, Robin. Are you learning it for me?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Aren’t you working today?”

  “No.” He sounded buoyant. “I’m going to the lake tonight.”

  “Again?”

  “I’m on a roll with the room.”

  “It must be freezing up there.”

  “Not too bad. Anyway, I have the space heater.”

  I offered details about my interviews, London buses and London weather, my odd companion and my gracious host. Into one of the pauses that developed between us, I said: “I met Antonio today.”

  I knew from his silence he was taken aback. “Why didn’t you say?” The question had an edge to it and he waited before continuing. “Did you tell him about Maddy?”

  “He was shocked.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “He was crying.”

  The mention of strong emotion silenced Robin again. Then: “Did he get to know Maddy well enough for that? Or was it just the idea of her?”

  “Both, I guess. Not the kind of thing you can ask someone right off the bat. It was bizarre seeing him, Robin. Not what I expected at all.”

  Our words had become points ringed with unspoken thoughts.

  “Well, what did you expect?”

  “I didn’t expect him to look so much like Maddy.”

  I am slim in the way of small-framed women. Maddy had been slim in Antonio’s way. When seated, they folded their long legs to one side. Standing, they possessed a natural authority. My fine hair fits my head like a cap. Antonio’s hair, like hers, had ripple and spring to it. His gray eyes were hers too, and the way he used them—up for thought, down for evasion, sideways for humor or embarrassment, while his fingers fiddled childishly with whatever came to hand. He spoke at length in a neutral tone, and then all at once he turned his gaze on me as if to say, I’m telling you this, right here, right now, and you have to listen. That was pure Maddy. If Maddy had inherited my lips, they behaved in a wry, twisty Antonio way. Families who grow up together get used to this mirroring; I imagine they hardly notice it. I had found myself unable to take my eyes off Antonio. When I’d known him before, his features had belonged to him. Now he was a variation of Maddy.

  “But what was it like seeing him again?” Robin pressed. “For you, I mean.”

  “It was like she was there and not there at the same time.”

  “Evie . . .” he murmured, giving up on any real answers. I thought how ordinary my name sounded when he used it. “You’re brave to put yourself through this. I hope it helps . . . settle things for you. I really do.”

  “So do I. Sorry!” I said in a rush. “I have to go. Someone’s knocking. Catch you later.”

  “Do what you have to do, Ducks . . . But don’t get too drawn into it.”

  “Into what? I won’t. Have fun at the lake. Robin?” I called, anxious now that he was going. “Be neighborly. I haven’t met the husband or kids, but Norma’s really nice.”

  “I know,” he said. “I ran into her last week. Reception’s crap up there. Text you from the car.”

  In the doorway stood Philippa, the English equivalent of Claire. Stout and unadorned, with depths of no-nonsense resolve under her warmth.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I sneaked in.”

  She peered more closely. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Oh, I have.” I smiled. “It’s been a long day. I’m exhausted.”

  “Of course you are,” she said comfortably. “How people can fling themselves around the planet and then be expected to function . . . I should get an early night if I were you.”

  Another kind of person would have replied: “No, that’s not it. It is not jet lag. Let me tell you what it is,” and sat Philippa down on the flowered wing chair, and made use of her
intelligence and her easy sympathy. I could not muster the energy to account for myself to anyone. I let her bring me Earl Grey tea on a tray, and gently she latched the door behind her as if I were already asleep. I raised the sash window. Heat from the radiator clashed with the inrush of cold air. Mist haloed the streetlamps. The houses opposite were closed for the night. In their bay windows, long lines of light leaked between the shutters. I lowered the window and found my phone.

  Met A thanks largely to yr encouragement. Bizarre! Interesting. Difficult. Might meet again. Details later.

  I undressed, sat up in bed, and wrapped my hands around the warm cup. The life of the senses was all I could rely on. Who was Norma? Someone partial to the color yellow who had a kayak and two sons, one of whom was autistic. Something of Norma’s freckled, tactful presence had accompanied me to the restaurant to meet Antonio and was in the room with me now. Had it not been for her, I wouldn’t be on this quest halfway around the world, having to live with what I found out. I didn’t know whether to thank her or not. How much would I tell Norma? How much would I tell Robin, for that matter?

  My phone pinged. Oh wow. Well done. Getting the bigger picture? Electricity down last week. Workmen cut through cable. In the doghouse with neighbors . . . Sigh.

  I would reply tomorrow. Strange I had never met Tanner. He seemed to leave her to oversee the remodeling. Was everything as it should be there? Where was Tanner when Norma was arguing with workmen and managing the children? The amused affection with which she spoke of him could be a cover-up. If there’s one thing women are adept at, it’s covering up.

  The fact was, I was thankful Norma wasn’t here, Robin was at the lake, Alison was with her aunt in Norwich, Philippa had gone downstairs and would not be coming up again. The encounter with Antonio clamored to be shared. But sharing would put it in its place. I did not want to put Antonio in his place. Or rather: What exactly was his place?

  When we parted, he had bent and kissed me on both cheeks. Drawn though I was to the center of his face, I dutifully turned my head and received these tokens of decorum. We’d agreed to meet the following week. Our long-ago selves were still intact, caught together in their web of space and time. Or so I believed. But whatever safeguards the past also makes it unreachable.