The Water Wars

by Cameron Stracher

  “What’s the most important thing we can do to protect our weather?” Mrs. D. asked.

  “Guard the earth and sky,” we answered in unison.

  Mrs. Delfina smiled. Her teeth were large and white and looked nearly perfect. In fact, I knew they were not real. I had seen her once, in the bathroom, with her teeth on the side of the sink, her open mouth hollow and empty. Teeth were the first thing that went bad, and most shakers had to make do with fake ones. Mrs. D. was lucky she could afford them. There were plenty who could not.

  When we finished morning lessons, there was lunch, which we ate in the cafeteria. The school had stopped providing hot lunch several years ago. Now most kids brought lunch from home. I traded my Cheesios to another girl for an extra soy milk. Nearby a group of boys tossed packs of dried veggies at each other. I looked around for Will, but I didn’t see him. I drank the first milk, and then the second, and still I was thirsty. But there would be no more until dinner, so I forced my lips shut and tried to think about something else.

  During recess some of the younger kids went outside, even though the school forbade it. There weren’t enough teachers to prevent them, and they snuck out through the cafeteria doors. I sat near a window with my screen and watched them kick a small ball around in the dust. When they came back inside, they were sweaty and dirty and laughing. One boy started coughing, and the others made fun of him, holding their hands over their mouths and whooping. The first boy looked as if he might start crying, and I nearly stood up to tell the others to stop. But then the bell rang; school resumed, and the rest of the day passed quickly. More lessons in weather, then water management and conservation, then math.

  After school I stayed late for water team. I got to work with the seniors, because I was tall for my age, and our supervisor thought I was older. I helped one girl clear the drains where the morning dew trickled into the catch basins. We found a dead snake, which made the girl shriek. I lifted it by its tail and tossed it into the garbage. Dead things never bothered me. Once they were dead, I figured, they couldn’t harm anyone.

  Afterward I waited for Will. He was leader of a team working with the condensers on the roof. It was tricky climbing the pitted walls where the ladders had cracked and split, but Will was nimble and quick and found footholds when others could not. I saw him walking from the traps near the recycling barrels with his head high and several other children following him. He pretended not to notice, but I could tell that he was proud to be in charge.

  We didn’t talk much on the ride back home. School was exhausting even though very little got done. Will’s shoulders drooped and his head lolled toward the window as if he couldn’t hold it up. As for me, I felt like there was cotton in my head. Although the ride was noisy and bumpy, we both fell asleep somewhere before home.

  The driver woke us at our stop. We staggered from the bus and trudged along the sandy path to our building. There was no shade, and the sun on our heads was like a dull, throbbing drum. Our building was nearly a kilometer from the main road, and the walk left us coated in a gray, sooty dust. When we arrived at the entrance, Will punched in the code for the security gate, and I pushed it open.

  Our father was waiting for us by the front door to our apartment. It was always a surprise to see how much he had aged in the last year. The lines around his eyes and mouth had deepened, and his cheeks sunk where once they stretched. He was always slim, but he seemed thinner—almost gaunt. His black hair was now flecked with gray, and the hazel in his eyes was closer to brown than green. I kissed him hello, and he smiled slightly.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  “How was school?” he asked.

  I made up a story about being asked to lead the class in a prayer, and this made him happy. Although not religious, he liked to tell us there was some higher purpose to life that would eventually be revealed. This was something he had started talking about only in the last year—only since our mother had gotten sick.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  I said I wasn’t, although I hadn’t eaten since before noon. Will just ignored him and headed for the back bedroom. I looked at my father and shrugged, then followed Will.

  Since the headaches had crippled her, our mother spent nearly every day in her room, emerging only to use the bathroom. It was impossible for her to rise in the morning or to tolerate sunlight. All the shades were drawn and the lights turned low. There was something in the air that smelled like mint, and the ventilation system that cycled it made the room sweet and pungent. It was part of the medicine the doctors prescribed, but I suspected it was nothing more than perfume. Medicine was expensive and in short supply, and most doctors were fakes anyway.

  Our mother seemed shrunken on the bed, the pillows like giant beanbags behind her. Her eyes were closed, and I could barely see the rest of her face above the big blanket that covered her body. Our father stepped into the room behind Will. He appeared to be waiting for someone to speak, but Will just stood quietly as if he were weighing something.

  I couldn’t bear the silence. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “We just got home from school.”

  Our mother opened her eyes. “Hello, Vera.” Her voice sounded as if it had emerged from a great depth.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “The light. It hurts my eyes.”

  “Should I shut it off?” Our mother waved weakly, which could have been yes or no.

  “It’s not the light,” said Will. “It’s the water.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the water,” said our father.

  “She needs fresh water,” said Will. He was moving quickly now toward her table, grabbing the bottles of various sizes beside her, trying to hold them all in his hands, knocking them against each other.

  “Will, please,” said our mother.

  “You have to drink some clean water!”

  “You’ll break them!” warned our father.

  But Will emptied the bottles as if they were filled with poison, spraying liquid through the air. His hands flailed above his head as he emptied their contents in a frenzy of fury and frustration. One bottle slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor, pink liquid oozing between shards of glass. He looked as if he might smash another and raised his arms to throw it.

  Our father grabbed him and pulled him down, but Will continued to struggle. Although our father was heavier, he was a few centimeters shorter than Will, and I worried Will would hurt him.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” I cried.

  “Will?” our mother asked.

  But Will couldn’t answer. He was sobbing on the floor.

  CHAPTER 3

  Maybe it was the water. Maybe it was the air. Maybe it was the earth itself. Whatever the cause, people were sick, and not just our mother. In our building, eight adults had been to the hospital in the last month alone. Most of them were not old, and two were young enough to still live with their parents. At school kids were always absent with colds or coughs, and even I had a sore throat for most of the winter. Will complained of aches in his muscles, which our father treated with warm compresses and synaspirin. It seemed like there was always an ambulette parked in front of our building or racing down the street.

  The teachers taught us to cover our mouths when we coughed and to wash our hands. Germs were spread by contact, they said, and children were always touching things. But Will said germs were in the air, carried by the wind. We couldn’t help breathing them, eating them. That’s supposedly why the school had venti-units. But the units actually made things worse, because they trapped germs and blew them around. Shakers thought they were cleaning the air, but really they were dirtying it.

  “They’re making us sick,” Will insisted.

  We were in the back of the old electric car, driving with our father to the water distribution center. The car whined and lurched on the potholed road. Our father had forgotten to plug it in before the power grid switched off the previous night, and the battery was nearly drained.

 
“It doesn’t work that way,” said our father. “No one can make you sick.”

  “If someone sneezes on you, they can make you sick,” I said.

  “This is different,” our father said. “Will blames the Water Authority for making your mother sick.”

  “Did they?” I asked.

  “Of course not!”

  “How do you know?” Will demanded.

  The car stalled and stopped. Our father muttered a curse under his breath. He thought we couldn’t hear him. He placed both hands on the wheel and turned around to face us.

  “First of all, the Water Authority is not a person,” he explained. “If they made anyone sick, there would be reports about it—news texts, public hearings. People would notice.”

  “Will noticed,” I pointed out.

  “Second,” said our father, ignoring me, “the Water Authority takes care of us. They don’t make us sick.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  Our father sighed. “I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for all of us. But your mother is getting good medicine, and the doctors say she can get better. She just needs rest.”

  “She won’t get better,” said Will.

  “Will!” I said.

  “She won’t, Vera. She’s sick. As long as she keeps drinking their water, she’s going to stay sick.”

  “So what should she do? Stop drinking?”

  “We should take her someplace where the water is clean.”

  “Basin?”

  “Basin’s no better.”

  “What about us? Shouldn’t we stop drinking the water?”

  Will nodded. “We’ll get sick too before long.”

  “Stop that talk!” said our father, interrupting us. “We’re not going anywhere. This is our home.” The car suddenly lurched forward, throwing us against our seats. “Now I want you to quit it, Will,” our father said. “Your mother is going to get better. She will.”

  Normally Will wouldn’t quiet down so easily. Even if he was wrong, he spoke with such conviction that it seemed he must be right. In those days, when we argued, I usually gave in before he did. Everyone did. He had the kind of intensity that made adults look to him as a leader and had kids currying his favor.

  But Will didn’t respond, and our father drove the rest of the way in silence.

  When we arrived at the center, I grabbed a free cart while our father and Will unloaded the empty bottles. The center was crowded with other families picking up their weekly supply, and we stopped to chat with people we knew. The Jarviks lived in our apartment complex, and their son Tyler was in Will’s class. Tyler was a skinny boy with acne who coughed frequently and picked at the scabs on his face. Will didn’t like him, but he pretended to, just to be polite. I felt sorry for Tyler, because he never had enough to drink at lunchtime and was always begging other kids to trade him water or syn-juice for the hard soy crackers his mother packed in his lunch box. But the crackers were stale and crumbly, and he rarely found a taker.

  A man was selling coupons from a ration book, and I suggested we buy a pack. Our father said we had enough water for the week and didn’t need any more coupons. This wasn’t exactly true. We weren’t as thirsty as Tyler, but we never had enough water either. For weeks the only work my father had was part-time—repairing hoses for a small business that did a decent trade in used rubber parts. He made barely enough money to pay for a nurse to check in on my mother. But I didn’t want to disagree with him—not after his disagreement with Will—and I knew he really meant we couldn’t afford more water. Everyone wanted more water; they just couldn’t pay for it.

  There was plenty of water for sale at the driller’s market downtown; but here, in the distribution center, the only water was rationed, government-issued, in familiar blue and white bottles. It wasn’t “real” water, Will explained, but desalinated water. This meant it came from the ocean and was processed in a giant factory where all the minerals were removed and chemicals added so it was fit for drinking. The bottles didn’t disclose their origin, but you could tell the water was desalinated because it felt slippery on the tongue and had a tangy aftertaste—like licking a burnt match. After a long, dry summer, the Water Authority imported extra bottles of seawater in trade with the Great Coast for building materials like limestone and granite.

  We waited in line behind a family of seven whose cart was stacked high with bottles. Our father had only four coupons, so we purchased only two bottles. I was already thirsty and planning how I could fill my canteen from the fountain at school when the monitors weren’t watching. In a pinch I could drink tap water, but that could really make a person sick. The hospitals wouldn’t even treat a patient who drank tap water; they claimed it was a “self-inflicted” injury. It had happened to one of our neighbors, and he lost forty pounds and never fully recovered. If our mother was being poisoned, we were all being poisoned. We had to drink something. A person could go without food for a month, but dehydration could kill within days. This was why we bought water at the distribution center rather than on the black market or even from the drillers. It was the least likely to kill us.

  After buying water our father took us to buy some new clothes. He complained we grew so fast that nothing fit for longer than six months. Will went through shoes like rags. I tore holes in the knees of my pants. Although our father exaggerated, it wasn’t far from the truth. It took two chemo washes to remove the dirt from my jeans, and even Will’s best shoes had holes in the soles.

  I loved shopping. When my mother was well, we would spend hours going through the racks, fingering the dresses and blouses she loved to wear. Her favorite color was green, which she said redheads weren’t supposed to wear, but I always thought the clothes she picked looked beautiful on her. She would throw together an old top with a forgotten skirt, and suddenly she looked as if she had spent the whole day getting ready. It was a skill I couldn’t copy, hard as I tried. The same clothes that looked glamorous with her red hair looked drab with my dark brown bangs, and my small nose made everything I wore seem too childlike.

  I needed new jeans, but I also needed tops and a new pair of shoes. My shirts were too short, and my toes were scrunched. But I didn’t say anything to my father, because I saw the way he looked when he fingered the price tags on the outfits I handed him. “Do you really need three?” he asked. I shook my head and pulled my favorite from the bunch—a floral print top with green swirling patterns that reminded me of clouds. It was made from a synthetic fiber called cattan that felt slightly oily to the touch. “This one,” I said. I told myself that one outfit was better than none. As for the shoes, I would just have to keep squeezing my feet into the ones I had.

  Will picked a new pair of jeans. Our father took Will’s pants and my top to the cash register where he paid with his credit chip.

  Then it was back to the car for our last stop of the day: the grocery store.

  Our father could cook almost anything with nothing. Even when our mother was well, our father did most of the cooking. Now as we roamed the aisles, he fingered the synth-fruit and quasi-vocados, checking for ripeness and disease. “How do you feel about guacamole?” he asked.

  We felt great about guacamole—which gave me an idea.

  “Kai loves Mexican food,” I said, though I had no clue if this were true.

  “Kai? The boy in the limousine?” our father asked.

  “He’s lonely.”

  “His parents would never let him visit for dinner.”

  “We could text them our certificates.”

  “Even so, he doesn’t need fake food.”

  “He might want a home-cooked meal,” Will piped up, coming to my aid.

  Our father considered this. None of us could remember the last time we had guests at our apartment. The three of us ate quickly at our small table, often in silence, the gloom of illness like a shroud. Loneliness was something we understood, even in a crowd.

  Soon we were grabbing the ingredients for a Mexican feast off t
he half-empty shelves at the store: a package of synth-tortillas, another package of chips, a bottle of salsa made with three percent real tomatoes, and a bag of soy cheese. Our father even bought a six-pack of Beer-o, which he claimed was almost as good as the real thing, although Will made a face behind his back like he was gagging. I pushed the cart while our father inspected items on the shelves, reading their ingredients and hefting them in his hands as if he could discern the harmful chemicals simply by weighing them.

  This was our happy father, the one I remembered from the days when our mother would take us shopping, singing songs about to-may-toes and to-mah-toes that always made us laugh. Our mother had been the silly one, but since she had become sick, there was very little silliness in our house.

  “It’s a lot of food for four, and even more for three,” said our father. “Let’s hope he can make it.”

  In the parking lot, the car started right away, and our father let Will drive home. He leaned into the steering wheel, grasping it with both hands, while our father kept one hand close to the emergency brake. The sun was low in the sky, and for once it looked warm rather than desolate. Even the fake flowers in the window boxes outside our building looked brighter, as if they had bloomed in our absence. We coasted onto the entrance road, and Will executed a perfect turn into the garage.

  While our father mashed quasi-vocados in the kitchen and Will rehydrated the beans, I tried to reach Kai on the wireless using the ID he had given me. But after fifteen minutes without a signal, I gave up in frustration.

  Kai lived only three kilometers from our building—a quick ride in the car or on my pedicycle—but at first my father didn’t want to hear about it.

  “At this hour who knows who’s on the road?” he said.

  “I’ll text you as soon as I get there.”

  “You just said the wireless isn’t working.”

  “It probably works at Kai’s.”

  We went back and forth for a while, but eventually my father gave in, as I knew he would. I could tell he was excited about a visitor—especially someone wealthy and mysterious—and now that he was making all this food, someone had to eat it.