by Lamb, Wally
He smiles at me. Doesn’t speak at first. And when he finally does, he says what he said to me the last time we were at this beach, when we stopped in the middle of that run we took. “I love you, Dad.”
I reach over and take his hand in mine. Squeeze it. “I love you, too.”
“Fuckin’ hot out here, huh?” he says. “Now that the sun’s out?” Shielding my eyes, I look up at the sky. When did the sun come out? Before? Just now? I hadn’t even noticed. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s cool off.”
And without another word, he gets up, stands over me, and lifts me onto my useless puppet’s legs. Scoops me up in his strong arms and walks us toward the glittering water. Blinking back tears, holding on to Andrew’s tattooed shoulder, I gaze at the horizon. Together—father and son, the atheist and the believer, we enter the churning, mysterious sea.
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Gratitude
I’m enormously grateful to my wise and thoughtful editor, Terry Karten, and my genial and gracious literary agent, Kassie Evashevski, for their help and guidance in helping me to make this a better book.
My appreciation also extends to the following writers whose critical feedback was important to the development of this story: Denise Abercrombie, Doug Anderson, Jon Anderson, Bruce Cohen, Susan Cole, Janet Dauphin, Doug Hood, Careen Jennings, Leslie Johnson, T. C. Karmel, Pam Lewis, Sari Rosenblatt, Amanda Smith, Ellen Zahl, and the women of the York Correctional Institution writing group.
Warm thanks to painters and educators Joseph Gualtieri and Mary Ann Hall for their guidance and inspiration with regard to all things artistic.
This story was informed in part by a devastating 1963 flood that occurred in my hometown of Norwich, Connecticut. For their connection to and generous sharing of information about that tragedy, I am grateful to the following: Tony Orsini, Tom Moody, Jim Moody, Sean Moody, Tony Longo, Norah Kaszuba, Frances and Dick Buckley, Dennis Riley, Bill Zeitz, and the good folks of D’Elia’s Bakery.
Thanks to the following who shared their time and information on a variety of subjects, or who connected me to people who informed aspects of this story: Steven Dauer, Laura Durand, Mary Kay Kelleher, Fran Kornacki, Ron Smith, Kraig Pickel, and Melody Knight Leary.
A nod of appreciation to my faithful office assistants, Amanda Smith and Joe Darda, and for their guidance and moral support, Justin Manchester, Charley Correll, Mark Hand, and Hilda “Prosperine” Belcher. As always, thanks to my good and faithful friend Ethel Mantzaris.
The publication of a novel requires teamwork, and I salute the Harper team, the best in the business, especially Michael Morrison, Jonathan Burnham, Kathy Schneider, Leslie Cohen, Tina Andreadis, Lydia Weaver, Leah Wasielewski, Milan Bozic, Fritz Metsch, Sarah Odell, Shelly Perron, Kate Walker, and the entire sales crew.
Special thanks to my bride of the past thirty-five years and the love of my life, Christine Lamb.
Finally, it is my sincere hope that this novel honors the lives and acknowledges the untimely deaths of Ellis Ruley (1882–1959) and Margaret “Honey” Moody (1938–1963).
Suggestions for further reading:
Thomas R. Moody, Jr.’s A Swift and Deadly Maelstrom: The Great Norwich Flood of 1963, A Survivor’s Story (Bloomington, IN: XLibris, 2013).
Glenn Robert Smith and Robert Kenner’s Discovering Ellis Ruley: The Story of an American Outsider Artist (New York: Crown, 1993).
A Note from Wally Lamb
The deaths by gunfire of children and their teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, occurred as I was readying this novel for publication. I invite readers who are so inclined to join me in my response to this unfathomable tragedy by contributing to one or both of the following. Thank you.
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: www.bradycampaign.org
National Alliance on Mental Illness: www.nami.org
About the Author
WALLY LAMB is the author of four previous novels, including the New York Times and national bestseller The Hour I First Believed and Wishin’ and Hopin’, a bestselling novella. His first two works of fiction, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both number one New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut where he has been a volunteer facilitator for fifteen years. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine. The Lambs are the parents of three sons.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Credits
An excerpt from “Girl Skipping Rope” was previously published in Ploughshares, Winter 2011–2012, Issue 37.4.
“Ghost of a Chance.” Copyright © 1993, 1967, 1963 by Adrienne Rich, from Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Cover painting © Thanassi
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WE ARE WATER. Copyright © 2013 by Wally Lamb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-194102-3
EPub Edition November 2013 ISBN 9780062199027
Version 02212014
13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
For Chris,
a happier 1964.
And for my sisters (DNA-wise and otherwise)—
Vita, Gail, Ethel
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1 Flight
Chapter 2 French
Chapter 3 Confession
Chapter 4 Zhenya
Chapter 5 Meatloaf
Chapter 6 Drama
Chapter 7 Noël
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Suggestion For Charitable Giving
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
1
Flight
The year I was a fifth-grade student at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School, our teacher, Sister Dymphna, had a nervous breakdown in front of our class. To this day I can hear Sister’s screams and see her flailing attempts to shoo away the circling Prince of Darkness. I am, today, what most people would consider a responsible citizen. I have an advanced degree in Film Studies, a tenured professorship, and an eco-friendly Prius. I vote, volunteer at the soup kitchen, compost, floss. A divorced dad, I remain on good terms with my ex-wife and have a close and loving relationship with our twenty-six-year-old daughter. That said, my conscience and I have unfinished business. What follows is both my confession and my act of contrition. Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It was I who, on that long-ago day, triggered Sister’s meltdown. For this and all the sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.
Lyndon Johnson
was president back then, Cassius Clay was the heavyweight champ, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo were newly famous. Our family had a claim to fame, too. Well, two claims, actually. No, three. My mother had recently been notified that her recipe, “Shepherd’s Pie Italiano,” had catapulted her into the finals of that year’s Pillsbury Bake-Off in the “main meal” category and she was going to be on television. I was going to be on TV, too—a guest, along with my fellow Junior Midshipmen on a local program, Channel 3’s The Ranger Andy Show. So there were those two things, plus the fact that our third cousin on my father’s side was a celebrity.
At the lunch counter my family ran inside the New London bus station, we displayed three posters of our famous relative that if, say, you were a customer enjoying your jelly doughnut or your baked Virginia ham on rye, you could, by swiveling your stool from left to right, follow the arc of our cousin’s career. The black-and-white poster on the wall behind the cash register showed her in mouse ears and a short-sleeved sweater, the letters A-N-N-E-T-T-E spelled out across her flat front. In the poster taped to the front of the Frigidaire, she’d acquired secondary sex characteristics and moved on from TV to the movies, specifically Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog, in which she had third billing behind Fred MacMurray and a half-human, half-canine Tommy Kirk. Poster number three, positioned over the fryolator and polka-dotted with grease spots, depicted our cousin in living color. Transistor radio to her ear, she wore a tower of teased hair and a white two-piece bathing suit, the top of which played peek-a-boo with what our dishwasher and part-time grill cook, Chino Molinaro, referred to as her “bodacious bazoom-booms.” Alongside Frankie Avalon, Annette had by then become the lead actress of such films as Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, her celluloid star having ascended as her bra cup size worked its way through the alphabet. That’s something that is much clearer to me today than it was when I was in fifth grade. Still, even back then, poster number three had already begun to set something atwitch in me, south of my navel and north of my knees.
I’m not making excuses here, but Sister Dymphna’s emotional state was already fragile before that October afternoon, a scant six or seven weeks into the 1964–65 school year. My older sisters, Simone and Frances, had both survived tours of duty with “Dymphie,” who, faculty-wise, was widely recognized as St. Aloysius G’s weakest link. In Simone’s year, she had yanked a kid’s glasses off his face and snapped them in half. In Frances’s year, she had turned her chair from her students to the blackboard and, elbows against the chalk tray, indulged in a crying jag that lasted all the way to the three o’clock bell. (Frances, who would later become a teacher, took it upon herself to stand and announce to her peers, “Class dismissed!”) Sister Dymphna was thought of as moody rather than mentally ill—“high-strung” during her manic episodes, “down in the dumps” during her depressive ones. The latter mood swing was the preferred one, my sisters had assured me. When Dymphie got riled up, a heavy dictionary or a hooked blackboard pointer could become a dangerous weapon. But when she was depressed, she’d wheel the projector down from the office, thread it, and show movies while she sat slack-jawed and slumped at her desk, oblivious to bad behavior.
On the day Sister went crazy in front of us, she’d been mopey since morning prayers. We were therefore watching a double feature: before lunch, The Bells of St. Mary’s with Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby in nun’s habit and priest’s cassock, and after lunch, The Miracle of Marcelino, a film about a pious homeless boy who is adopted by a community of monks. Lonny Flood and I hatched our plan in the cafeteria during what I guess you could call intermission.
Not unlike radio’s Casey Kasem, Sister Dymphna rated my classmates and me each week from first to last based on our grades. She published a list at the far left of the blackboard and seated us accordingly, her smartest pupils in the first row from left to right, the academically middling students in the middle, and the slowest kids stuck in the back by the clanging radiators. Rosalie Twerski and I were, respectively and perennially, numbers one and two. My friend Lonny Flood usually found himself in the back row, often next to Franz Duzio. Lonny was both the tallest kid in our class and the oldest: a twelve-year-old double detainee whose sideburns and chin fuzz would become, by Easter vacation, shave-worthy. Conversely, I was the shortest and scrawniest fifth grader, counting boys and girls—a ten-year-old who, to my mortification, could have passed for seven. To make matters worse, with my big black eyes, up-slanting eyebrows, and mop of dark, curly hair, I bore a striking resemblance to Dondi, the adorable little Italian war orphan in the comic strips. On numerous occasions when I was down at the lunch counter, some new arrival would enter the bus depot, sit at a stool, and stare at me for a few seconds. We all knew what was coming next. “Say, you know who that kid kind of looks like?”
“Dondi!” Pop, Ma, Chino, and whichever of my sisters had drawn waitress duty that day would say it simultaneously.
Looking like a lovable little cartoon character was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it made me vulnerable to my sisters’ ridicule. On the other hand, my resemblance to Dondi—hey, even I had to concede that I was adorable—would frequently afford me the presumption of innocence when, more often than not, I was guilty. If, for example, Lonny Flood and I had stood shoulder to shoulder in some junior police lineup, I would most likely be the first suspect eliminated and Lonny the one fingered. “It’s him!” the eyewitness might announce, pointing at Lonny, who kept a foil-wrapped Trojan hidden in the change pocket of his Man from U.N.C.L.E. wallet and who claimed to know the dirty words of the song “Louie, Louie.”
And who, in fact, had brought the pocketful of BBs to school that day. Lonny and I conspired over half-pints of fruit punch and the lunch room’s “turkey à la king with savory buttered rice.” That said, neither of us had targeted the winged vermin that, an hour later, would cause such havoc and send Sister Dymphna on a temporary trip to “the funny farm.” No, our intended victim, whose guts Lonny and I both hated, was the aforementioned Rosalie Twerski.
Rosalie was pig-tailed, hairy-legged, and insufferably obsequious—the kind of kid who, two minutes before the dismissal bell, might raise her hand and ask, should the teacher have miraculously forgotten to assign a page of arithmetic problems or a dozen Can You Answer These? questions from our social studies book, “Do we have any homework tonight, Sister?” As I’ve mentioned, Rosalie’s position at the top of the academic heap was a virtual lock, but nevertheless she was forever foraging for extra credit points she didn’t really need. Her family was rich, or, as my mother used to put it, “la di da.” The Twerskis’ house on White Birch Boulevard had columns in front and a trampoline and a Shetland pony out back. Instead of clomping off the bus or hoofing it like the rest of us, Rosalie arrived at school every morning in her mother’s maroon Chrysler Newport. Each year, she returned from Christmas vacation a week later than the rest of us, with a Florida tan and a bucket of stinky show-and-tell seashells that we had to pass from person to person during science. Her father owned a printing company, Twerski Impressions, which made Rosalie the recipient of an endless supply of the cardboard she was forever converting into the extra credit posters and placards with which our classroom was festooned. Suck-up that she was, she specialized in visual aids that lent themselves to the nuns’ two favorite subjects, grammar and religion. In one such poster, the parts of speech were anthropomorphized: the active verb did push-ups, the passive verb sat and snoozed, the interjection slapped its hands against its cheeks, exclaiming, “Oh!” In another poster, cartoon letters “A” and “I” held hands like best friends or boyfriend and girlfriend. Said letter “A,” “When two vowels go a-walking, the first one usually does the talking.” “That’s true,” letter “I” agreed. “But remember, it’s I before E, except after C!!”
On our first day in Sister Dymphna’s class, Rosalie had arrived locked and loaded with a poster titled Mortal Sinners: Burning in Hell or Headed There! Below the Magic-Markered headline, s
he had scissored and glued magazine pictures of the damned and, beneath their images, had identified the transgressions that had cast them into Satan’s lair: Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby (murder), Marilyn Monroe (suicide), Nikita Khrushchev (Communist), Rudi Gernreich (invented the topless bathing suit). Sister Dymphna loved Rosalie immediately and installed her as line leader, office courier, and our class’s ambassador to the diocese-wide United Nations Day. So you couldn’t really blame Lonny and me for putting BBs in our mouths and straws between our lips that afternoon as Sister, engulfed by a melancholy so profound that, as The Miracle of Marcelino unspooled, she did not even register that Pauline Papelbon was eating State Line potato chips right out of the bag, or that Monte Montoya and Susan Ekizian were playing Hangman instead of watching the movie, or that I had surreptitiously moved my seat to the back of the room for better positioning. By a prior agreement, Lonny and I had agreed to aim for the back of Rosalie’s neck.
“Ow! Who did that?” she shouted when Lonny’s very first BB hit its target dead-on. Heads swiveled from Marcelino to Rosalie, and then to Sister Dymphna, who seemed not to have heard a thing. Lonny fired again, but this BB flew past Rosalie’s left shoulder and ricocheted against the blackboard. His next one whizzed over her head and hit the movie screen. I somehow managed to inhale my first BB rather than propelling it forward, but coughed it right back up again—luckily, since the Heimlich maneuver had yet to be invented. On the screen, saintly little Marcelino was weeping for the poor. With my tongue, I repositioned the regurgitated BB, took a deep intake of breath, and raised my straw in preparation of a forward thrust. That’s when it caught my eye: the little black blob nestled against the left side of the public address box.
