All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

  “You’re so angry, Alison.”

  She was silent for a moment, unaccustomed to the forthrightness of others. “Angrier than anyone else? Angrier than you?”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I suggest you get on top of it.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Being outspoken doesn’t always serve you well. It could hold you back.”

  Her voice trembled. “Is that so?”

  “Sometimes,” I advised, “it’s best to keep your opinions to yourself.”

  Blotches spread like a rash on her pale cheeks. “I’m not your daughter, you know!” She was glaring at me, around me, through me. “Did Maddy have to keep her opinions to herself?”

  “That,” I said, my voice returning slow and cold, “was a nasty thing to say.”

  Alison looked bewildered. “My mother kept her opinions to herself. See where it got her?”

  “Where did it get her?”

  “Stuck with my dad all those years. Miserable. Always will be.”

  “Does that mean you have to be?”

  The waiter appeared with his pad, but not before I had seen the tears standing in her eyes. Not knowing what else to do, we placed an order.

  “Besides,” said Alison, when he’d gone, “I thought that’s what you liked about me.”

  “What?”

  “That I speak my mind.”

  I was trying to take charge of my face.

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t,” she murmured. “You can’t take things back.”

  “No,” I said huskily. “But it has a way of making things happen.” All at once I was exhausted beyond any normal condition of the body. “Know what?” I waited for her to lift her eyes to mine. “I don’t know anything. I thought I did.”

  At passport control, we shuffled forward with the line, standing closer together than we would have a week before. She thanked me twice for taking her along; for Alison, that amounted to gushing. I said I should be thanking her. She didn’t ask me why. I wanted to follow her into the departure lounge and board the waiting plane. We reached the front of the line. In a hesitant, unfamiliar voice, she said: “What was Maddy like?”

  The officer beckoned us forward with a winding-up gesture.

  “Kind,” I said. “Funny. Talented. Everyone loved her.”

  “I could never be like that,” said Alison.

  “Me neither.”

  We embraced clumsily and she lifted her carry-on and hurried to the barrier. At the last minute, she turned around and waved with her boarding pass.

  I ran up, as close as I could get. “Do you want to come to the lake with us? Before Christmas?”

  She gave me the faintest of smiles. “I’ll think about it.”

  32

  My philosophy is do everything all at once. And find everything out all at once. Am I impatient? Maybe I am. Mom’s friend isn’t doing great. But getting back to the question I asked you before, why do you think my mother would be angry with you? Do you think you’ve had time to think about it? I would be really curious to know. As well as other things. Like where do you go on vacation and what do you play with your boys, and are they any good at art? Cloud’s got sharp teeth. She doesn’t mean to hurt me. Say hi! She’s waving her paw.

  The day Alison left, an email arrived from Antonio, wondering if I had time for a drink that evening. We met in a pub on Sicilian Avenue. I asked if he was free by any chance the next day, after my interview at the Hayward Gallery. It turned out he was, and the following day, and the day after that.

  We were together by five-thirty and parted by seven. We chose a different place each time, somewhere central. Small talk saw us to our seats, whereupon Antonio raised his finger to summon the waiter. He never struck up a conversation with staff; he did not have Robin’s affection for wageworkers, and besides, service had to be prompt. We were short on time.

  Once our drinks were ordered, I began talking about Maddy. I favored stories showing her spirit and determination. Fearless at three, poised at ten, learning to multiply and to dive, mothering her many friends. She’d been a favorite of the older girls, big sister to the little ones, and naturally at ease with adults. I had notebooks filled with the witty and touching things she said, of interest to no one but me. I wanted the whole of Maddy to exist in Antonio’s mind, and I wanted to give him a glimpse of what he would never have. He let me tell it in my own way, listening in alert silence, his eyes hardly leaving my face. My friends thought they were doing me a favor by not mentioning her. They thought talking about her would remind me of what had happened. Remind me! Antonio let me talk, and as I talked, I felt something that had been displaced was being put back where it belonged.

  Eventually we moved on to other subjects: aging parents, gentrification, Olympic stadiums, the chemistry of consciousness. We played the parts of two friends meeting for after-work drinks. I learned again to read his moods, his facial expressions, and his pauses. We started with Maddy and ended with Maddy. We grew increasingly confessional just before it was time to part. I carried my laptop in my bag and the memory stick with her animation on it in my wallet, but the moment never seemed right.

  At the Royal Festival Hall bar, I told him about Jack. “Not every boy would have taken that on.”

  “No,” said Antonio.

  “Would you have fallen in love with a dying girl?”

  He smiled a little. “I see where Maddy gets it from.”

  “What?”

  “These questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like: Are you a loner? How does music work in the brain? Are you an atheist? Like what happens—” He stopped to give some change to a man shuffling between the tables.

  “What happens . . .” I prompted.

  “I said things I would never have said if I’d known.”

  “So what would you have told her if you’d known?” Maddy’s veiled references to her illness and her future had cut me deeply. Why hadn’t she been able to ask me those questions?

  “I’m not sure,” he said after a moment.

  “When she was around five, Maddy got very worried about death. Mine, mostly. I was putting her to bed one night. ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘you’re going to die before me! When I die, how will I find you?’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll find you.’ ”

  Antonio’s eyes were intense on my face.

  “I heard no more about it for a long time.”

  “My boys don’t talk about these things.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they do, Antonio. Just not to you.”

  He gave me a long sideways look.

  “When Maddy came home after having sex for the first time—”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’m her mother! I knew.”

  “But how?” He was genuinely puzzled.

  “She was clingy, and extra-concerned. I had this primitive feeling something had been taken away from me.” I paused. “And she wanted to know why you left. She’d never asked me so directly before.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I didn’t know. That you didn’t want to have a baby with me.”

  Antonio was frowning. “That’s not exactly—”

  “I said it was your loss.”

  “She didn’t know the whole story,” he said resentfully.

  “Maybe that’s why she wrote to you. Anyway, Maddy was lucky. Jack’s a genuinely nice boy. She gave him an out, but he stayed with her all the way.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Not like my first time. My first love left me for my best friend.”

  “Mine was a complete disaster!” said Antonio. “I could do nothing! She laughed at me.”

  We had exchanged these stories when we were courting, when everything that came before was recast as a warm-up for our own superior love. I sneaked a look at my watch. Ten minutes to seven.

  “Robin,” began Antonio. “He is your—fianc�
�? Boyfriend?”

  “Partner.”

  “Partner,” he repeated, as though he didn’t think much of the word.

  Robin seemed far away and incongruous, but I wanted nonetheless to sun myself in the idea of him. “He’s a master carpenter and a musician. Maddy was crazy about him.”

  “Was she?”

  “Robin took her to concerts.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  What else could he say? Robin at a Renwick concert, smiling tenderly at me over Maddy’s head. I forced the image away. “Maddy’s illness didn’t make me into a better person,” I said. “It made me into a tedious, monstrous person.”

  Antonio leaned across the table and positioned his face very close to mine. Grains of gold swam in his Maddy-gray eyes. He took his time studying all the parts of my face while appearing to be on the brink of a smile.

  “What?” I shrank away. “What are you looking at?”

  To my relief, he withdrew and hung his hand off the chair back. “I loved the conversations we used to have! Into the night. Remember, Eve? I miss that. Seeing you is like someone put a lost piece of my life back into my hands.”

  “I remember,” I said primly. My head felt weightless, full of light. I kept my eyes on him.

  “Time is such a strange thing. The years pass by and you don’t even see them go. Family life swallows you up. No one tells you . . .”

  “Tells you what?”

  His eyes lingered on mine. “Sometimes I think I went to sleep and woke up old.”

  “Well, I feel a hundred sometimes.”

  “With good reason. What you’ve been through!” After a decent pause he smiled. “You don’t look a hundred.”

  • • •

  In the café overlooking the Great Court of the British Museum, I confessed there were times after Maddy died when I tried to whittle her down.

  “Whittle?”

  “Diminish her importance. I’d say to myself: Sixteen years ago, I didn’t know Maddy. Sixteen years from now it won’t matter so much. Isn’t that a terrible thing to do?”

  “What else are you supposed to do?” he said softly.

  Tears sat in my eyes so often during these conversations that I no longer bothered to hide them. “Then I think further ahead, when there’s no one left who knew her. Will it matter that she died?”

  Antonio frowned and pulled in his chin. Finally he said: “I guess that’s why people invent God. A consciousness that remembers us forever.”

  Didn’t he know I had been through every possible angle, from the preposterous to the vaguely scientific to the refuge of the imagination? Each held a grain or two of solace. But none in the end was any use. Across the table my confessor and seducer, the father of my child, waited for me to speak, and I was looking through him to a land so hideously parched and impassable there was no point in putting a single foot down.

  “I don’t know if I can do it.” It dawned on me that, until this moment, I had believed the future was provisional, open to amendment.

  “Invent God? Who can? When you know what we know about the human brain—”

  “No!”

  He frowned. “What, then?”

  “Live the rest of my life without her.”

  He reached over and enclosed my hands in both of his. I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me. He held my gaze, or cast his eyes around the room as he spoke. He said she’d made use of the time she had, which is all anyone can do. He said she was gone, but in a way, she never would be. He said she got her spirit and her strength from me. He said these qualities were what had drawn him to me in the first place, and they would see me through. I let him hold my hands and talk. I let the passion behind his speech, his endearing syntax, his certainty that he knew what I was capable of, pour over me as though it were some essential life-giving liquid, and what did not soak in now could be stored up for later.

  • • •

  The last of these evenings took place at the PizzaExpress in Holborn, where we’d first met. Earlier than usual, twenty after six under the milk-bottle chandeliers, I began: “Why do you think Maddy never told you she was sick?”

  “Pride?” he said after a moment.

  “That’s a harsh word.”

  “I don’t always find the best words.” Antonio consulted the menu, though we never ate on these occasions, and tapped the table with it. “I don’t know. Maybe, as you say, she didn’t want me to feel sorry for her.”

  I had begun to appreciate Maddy’s refusal to do Antonio’s bidding, her courage in not letting him know she was ill. Well, are you going to tell your family about me?? It was her bargaining card. I decided her secrecy was a character strength, one that reflected well on how I had raised her.

  “At the beginning, she was pretty open about what was happening. But it was so long and so—unrelenting. I guess there came a time when talking didn’t help. She used to cry in the shower.”

  Blinking, he took this in.

  “Toward the end she didn’t want to see her friends. Or even Jack. She sent them away. But before that, all she really wanted to do was listen to music and make her animation.”

  “She got comfort from that?”

  It was my turn to study Antonio until he shifted in his chair and looked away. Without a word, I unzipped my bag and removed my laptop. I set it on the table, inserted the memory stick, opened “final final final,” positioned the screen between us, and pressed play.

  Maddy gazed out, in the presence of both of us at last. Our eyes briefly met, and returned to our daughter. Antonio’s eyes were fixed to the screen as Maddy’s had been during the march. Slowly her eyelids closed and the blanks appeared on her head, joining and spreading to consume all of the earth’s riches, and be consumed in turn by the seas, while her face underwent its terrible changes. I pressed stop. Antonio looked up. “Is that the end?”

  I nodded, closing the file into its folder. I had left it to providence or instinct or the wisdom of the moment to decide whether to show him the other ending. “It was played after the speeches during the march. Maddy was weak by then, but she got to see it on TV. The response was amazing. The applause. You should have seen her face. You should see your face.”

  His voice was muffled. “I’m knocked over. I’m so impressed. I wish—”

  “Don’t wish.”

  “She was courageous,” he said simply.

  “They want to use it again, you know, for the campaign. They’re asking me to release it. I might not. I might want to keep it private.”

  “Would Maddy want you to?”

  “How do I know!” After a minute, I said: “It’s complicated. Maybe the fact is, if she can’t be here, I want it all to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Catastrophe. Cities underwater. Everything destroyed.” He was silent. “I don’t really mean that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Only a little. Sometimes.”

  Antonio kept me in his gaze for a long moment, weighing something. “Do you know how it felt when you told me Maddy was dead?”

  We were free to touch each other within certain limits, arm or shoulder, for a second or two. Now I touched his wrist on the tabletop and left my hand there. My fingernails were blank. I had not painted them in months. “How?”

  “Like she had been brought to life again, and then killed in front of my eyes.”

  I withdrew my hand. Antonio sat back.

  “First I had the shock of Maddy writing to me. Then I grew a little bit fond of her. Then she stopped. Okay. She had second thoughts. Or maybe I said something wrong. But I was thinking no matter what, we would meet one day. And there you were”—he gazed around like a sleepwalker at the stainless steel ovens, the waiters striped like cartoon convicts—“in this place, actually, and I thought, Okay, Eve and I will find a way to know each other again. We have Maddy between us. And then—” He sliced the air.

  I bent my head. “I’m so sorry, Antonio. Really I am.”

 
“Did you do it on purpose, Eve?”

  “I should have told you before.”

  “Yes. You should have.” The way he shifted in his chair felt like a giant shrug, but his voice was soft. “We both have things to be sorry about.”

  “I guess that’s one thing that can’t happen to a woman. You can’t have a child out there you know nothing about. Even if you give your baby away, you know you’ve had one.”

  He was playing with the bud vase on the table. “I felt guilty about it for years. I used to be a good Catholic boy, you know. When you are raised the way I was raised, it is in your blood.” He paused. “That’s why I was angry with myself. For being stubborn. Driving you to . . . Or thinking I did.”

  “Is Erica a good Catholic?” I said, trying out an Alison-like version of myself.

  Antonio looked shocked. “Why are you asking that?”

  “I want to know about your family.”

  He crossed and recrossed his legs. “She is not a Catholic. She is not anything. She puts down Church of England on forms.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what they do here.” He continued with reluctance. “She’s a wonderful mother. Like you, I am sure. We’ve been twelve years together.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Before the boys, she worked for a publisher. She went back for a year after Oscar, but when Daniel was born, it was too much. She was too divided. She wanted to be home with them.”

  I turned sideways, resting my elbow on the chair back. “What’s it like, where you live? Stoke Newington, where I’m staying, feels like a village.”

  “London’s made out of villages. Blackheath is an old village too.”

  “This city’s so big,” I said.

  He smiled. “It’s home for me.”

  In Washington, Antonio had been the outsider and I the native. This had magnified me, no doubt, in his eyes. “Do you feel English now?”

  “Oh no. Of course not! Not if I was here for forty years. Erica and our friends, they are talking about their childhood, their teachers. I know about the dinner ladies. I know all about the eleven-plus.” I raised my brows. “This exam they used to give to kids to decide their future. The point is, I have nothing to say. I did not grow up here. I’m not going back to Spain,” he added. “That is for sure.”