All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

  For the smallest movement, I had to plan the beginning, middle, and end, and then draw all the steps in between, taking shots as I went along. The program gives you a ghost image of the last frame to help you line up the next one. “Onion skinning,” it’s called. I came to love the words. Onion skinning. Project windows. Time lines. I got good at guessing how much to erase at once and where to draw in the new position. You had to do lots of stages even just to get the eyes to open. Thirty-six frames for three seconds of movement!

  Once I had done the erasing and redrawing for a particular change, I couldn’t insert another stage. If it was wrong, I had to start over. I made some pretty hilarious mistakes, like shutting one eye before the other so she looked like she was winking. I found out the hard way you can’t make the tiniest change here without making the tiniest change there. You have to work on the whole thing at once.

  The biggest lesson I learned, and the one that it took a while to get used to, was that you have to give up the real drawing in order to make the animation. You have to make each mark as if it’s the most important thing in the world, and then you have to cover it up and never see it again for the sake of something that seems alive but isn’t really, it’s just a mirage. But a beautiful one. The drawing you can hold in your hands is ruined. My head hurt thinking about it.

  The best thing was, I could do whatever I wanted. Speed it up, slow it down, open the eyes, close the eyes, populate the head, clear the head, add a whole new sequence if I felt like it. I hummed and sang while I worked. And when did you first get interested in animation, Miss Wakefield? Call me Madeleine. Oh, it was years ago, when I had some time on my hands. Did you ever think you would become one of the most famous artists of your generation? Never! Not in a million years . . .

  My mother’s step on the stairs. Silence. That was her listening outside my door.

  “Come i-innn!” I called, extra-brightly to hide my frustration. If I got interrupted, I might leave my thumb in the shot, and a retake was not so easy because you had to reverse all the changes.

  “Working again?” My mother threw a hungry glance at my copy stand but came no closer. She set down the tray with her latest snack idea—scrambled egg on rye toast. Slice of avocado on the side, carved into the shape of a sleeping cat.

  “Thanks, Mama.” With a pang, I watched her tug my bedspread and round up the wastebaskets. “The sketchbook was a great idea. I love drawing.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  Her eyes traveled over the pictures pinned to my wall. Luckily I was working on the ones for the campaign, not the private ones. Even so, my skin prickled all over, like in those dreams where you find yourself in the school cafeteria with no clothes on. Maybe she knew about the other animation I was doing. She’d always known everything about me. Even things I didn’t know myself.

  “I could help you with your drawing,” said my mother. “If you ever need a second opinion. Just say.”

  Sharper pang. “Sure, Mom.” She hugged me from behind and kissed the top of my head. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She seemed in good spirits, considering. No wobbly voice. No staring into that too-bright light. My mother was happy I had something to do. Art is her thing, after all. She doesn’t do it much anymore, but she looks at it and teaches people about it, and some of that must have rubbed off on me. I don’t think it came from Antonio.

  Almost time to change the paper. With all the erasing and redrawing, you get rips and smudges and the surface becomes a lot more interesting. Eventually it gets so interesting you can’t use it anymore. Then you start again with a clean, boring sheet.

  Wherever my mother was, in the laundry room or the kitchen or tapping on her computer in the study, there were these invisible strings running from her to me. I could feel them tugging. Here I am. If you need anything. Please need something I can give you. She knew I was up here making an animation but she would never ask to see it, no matter how much she wanted to. If she asked, I would show her. I might even show her the other one someday. If I thought she could stand it.

  Hi Antonio,

  Me again. How are you?

  Did I tell you I have a boyfriend named Jack? He is almost as tall as you, and he’s already got his driver’s license. Science is his favorite subject. He has that kind of a mind. Since I met him, I have gotten more interested in how things work. Like how the heart pumps the blood around and how many complicated reactions are going on all the time to keep everything on track. Did you know that your heart beats 100,000 times a day!!! I don’t even like to think about that.

  I used to draw a lot and I’ve started drawing again. Jack and I are making an animation for the campaign. It’s going to be cool.

  Maddy

  Maddy,

  Yes, the more you learn about the natural world, the more miraculous it seems. Did you know that the odds against any particular person with that person’s exact genetic makeup being born are astronomical?

  Boyfriend! That’s great. I hope he’s good to you . . . I didn’t have a girlfriend until older than you. Eighteen, I think. I was very nervous with the girls. I remember feeling excited about the future but also incredibly scared.

  Oscar likes football and wall climbing. The younger one, Daniel, is the artistic one. He has always loved to draw too—cartoons mostly. We go camping together in the summer holiday, and we usually go for two weeks to Spain.

  I would love to see your drawings one day, if you ever want to show me, and your animation. I’m not even sure how you make an animation. Maybe you can explain it to me.

  Antonio

  21

  Dr. Osterley is always telling me to live as normal a life as I can, and at the end of June my mother let Jack and me drive up to the lake house, just the two of us, in his father’s Nissan. He’d passed his test the minute he turned sixteen. Me, I’m going to learn when I have more time. My mother insisted on being a passenger with him a few times before she said we could go. Even so, she had to lecture him on the evils of speed, the stupidity of other drivers, and the tendency of the teenage brain to downplay danger. I could see her point. After all she’d been through, to lose me in a car crash would be really annoying.

  “You’re a great kid,” she said to Jack on the morning we left. “But you have to remember your frontal lobes are not fully developed.”

  “My what?”

  “Your frontal lobes.”

  Jack laughed. “There’s nothing wrong with my lobes! Way above average, these lobes.” When we were small, he liked my mother because of the games she played with us, and he liked her now for the same reason.

  “I have no doubt,” said my mother, “yours are more highly developed than most. The same goes for Maddy. But you are sixteen. Your brain is a work in progress.”

  “Everyone’s brain is a work in progress.”

  “I’ve got a book if you want to read about it.”

  Jack shot me a grin. “Your mother’s got books on everything.”

  By now, it was plain that Jack and I were sleeping together. He even stayed over one night, and my mother let him stay in my room. She appeared surprisingly cool about this, though I was pretty sure she hadn’t told Grandma. Aren’t mothers supposed to object, on principle?

  The trip seemed longer than usual, and the fields and barns were like fields and barns in a dream because I was in a car alone with Jack, driving to the lake. I kept reaching over and pressing his leg, and he put his hand snug over mine, until after a minute I said, “Two hands on the wheel,” and he took his back.

  I slammed the car door when we arrived and breathed in the spicy Tawasentha air. “Have you ever smelled ferns like that?”

  Jack climbed out and stood there, sniffing respectfully. I was proud to be in possession of the key to the house. The flimsy lock in the doorknob would not keep out anyone who decided to get in. But no one ever did. Tawasentha Lake was one of the safest places
in the universe. Not that I was safe anywhere. The door jammed as usual and then crashed open all at once and we were met by a whole other set of smells, including mouse droppings, mildew, and air freshener, cinnamon flavor.

  “Wow, nice,” said Jack, though we were in the mudroom, where all he could see were light switches and a bench for taking off your shoes. Despite my new rights to his body, the sight of Jack in the mudroom, tossing the car keys and catching them in a sideways swipe with his strong fingers, made me shy. The house was empty. No one was coming. Nothing stood in our way.

  “Remember to call your mom,” said Jack.

  My stomach turned over when I heard her voice on the phone. She was in one of her playful moods. “How many speeding tickets did he get?”

  “Jack’s a good driver,” I said. “You’d be impressed. What’s Robin up to?”

  “Just got a big commission.”

  “What for?”

  “A corner unit. It’s hideous, apparently. Have you been down to the lake?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Go on. Enjoy yourselves.”

  “Mama?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  When I’d hung up, Jack reached for me and I burrowed my face into his neck, trying my best to relax. I had spent every summer at the lake house since I could remember. I was as much at home there as at my real house. My child self was at the window looking in at Jack and me hugging, and she was feeling a little left out. For her sake, I pulled away, leaving small placating kisses on his face.

  Jack followed me to the utility room. I turned on the electricity and showed him the back bedrooms, leaving the living room for last. The front windows were so huge, the lake might as well have been right inside the house. This time I was the one who reached for him. It was easier to relax when there was something to pay attention to outside of ourselves.

  “Want to go down to the dock?”

  “Can we eat something first?” said Jack. “I’m starving.”

  We made peanut butter sandwiches and ate them at the kitchen counter.

  He waved his sandwich at the hall ceiling. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, there’s a pull-down ladder. It goes up to the attic.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Just attic stuff. It was going to be a playroom, but Mom never got around to having it converted. Robin says he’s going to.”

  “You don’t need a playroom anymore,” Jack pointed out.

  “No, but it could be some other kind of room. I always wanted a secret place up in the trees.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “I doubt it’ll ever get done.”

  After our snack, we went down to the dock. The air was warm. We settled in the green chairs. I was glad we had arrived at that time in the evening when there was still plenty of daylight left and the lake was turning into a calmer, more secret version of itself. Jack was quieter than usual, looking out at the water as if he were alone.

  “Do you think,” I asked him, “I would be the same person if I hadn’t grown up with this lake?”

  “You couldn’t know without rewinding your life and doing it again. I didn’t grow up with a lake.”

  “And you survived.”

  “You just have to guess,” said Jack.

  “My guess,” I said, “is that after all these years the lake is inside of me. Not as in—cut me open and find a lake.”

  “No.”

  Out in the middle, a dark bar drifted on the silvery surface. I knew what that felt like. You laid your paddle across the canoe and stopped trying to steer or control it, or wonder which way to head next. Let the water decide.

  “Do you know what it’s like here in the winter?”

  “Awesome, I bet.”

  “It is so, so beautiful. You should hear the sound the lake makes. It’s the most unbelievable sound. Like this enormous thing, like an airplane, is under the water trying to turn over.”

  “Is it the ice cracking?”

  “Not cracking. I don’t think it’s cracking. Shifting, maybe? Or trying to break away from the shore?” I knew it would be impossible to impress on Jack the sound made by the frozen lake. You had to hear it for yourself. “Next winter you have to come up.”

  “Sure,” said Jack. “Let’s.” A bird went by, so high it didn’t make a sound.

  “Do you ever pretend,” I said, “that you’re looking at yourself from outer space?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “Or else looking at yourself from the point of view of something under a microscope?”

  “A thought experiment, you mean?”

  “Well, from outer space we are just this slime on the surface of the earth. And to, say, an atom, we are these irrelevant giants.”

  We held hands between the chairs, watching the lake turn different shades of violet and black. After a while, without looking at me, Jack said:

  “Maddy?”

  “What.”

  “Do they ever tell you exactly what’s going on?”

  “With my treatments, you mean?”

  “Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “We have to be optimistic,” I said, copying my mother.

  “I was just wondering.” High up, a piece of moon was showing through, not yet brighter than the sky. “Did you know,” he said, changing the subject, “that all the water in the world is all there will ever be?”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Meaning that water is constantly turning from one state into another. Ninety-seven percent is in the oceans. Only three percent is fresh. There’s surface water, there’s ground water underneath, there’s what’s stored in ice and snow and in the air—”

  “In the air?”

  He made his lips a circle and blew. “Breath is mostly water. We’re made out of water. But the thing is, there’s a fixed amount. It can’t be added to or taken away. It just changes into another form.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “We drink the same water the dinosaurs did.”

  “Okay. So when the earth heats up four degrees,” I said, “and the ice caps melt and the trees and animals die, the water in them eventually ends up in the oceans?”

  “And the air.”

  I thought for a minute. “Is that comforting? I don’t know if that’s very comforting.”

  “It is, in a way. In the long run.”

  The lake looked strange all of a sudden, as though the trees had turned to liquid and the water to rock. I wanted to smash its shiny surface. I did an experimental hoot, like you do to test an echo, and something took the sound away from me and stretched it out into a scream. Every awful thing that had ever happened to me, everything I was furious with or desperate about, got sucked into the scream, and it got louder and louder like a siren getting closer and closer, until it filled the sky, scaring even me.

  “What the—!” shouted Jack.

  “Sorry,” I said cheerfully. Let him think that screaming at the lake was something we did all the time, just for fun.

  He was staring at me, not sure whether to laugh.

  “You know what, Jack? I could end up raining on you. Or in your bathwater.”

  “Maddy . . .”

  “Coming out of your faucets. I could end up in your coffee. Not that you would know it was me.”

  “Anything is possible,” he said in a weak voice.

  “Or maybe you would know.”

  We were silent for a long time.

  “Jack?” I said at last.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to still be somewhere.”

  His retort was instant. “They can do amazing things. They know so much these days! Don’t talk like that, Maddy. Please.”

  I noticed that the more worked up Jack got, the calmer I became. Maybe there was only a certain amount of fear to go around, so we took turns holding it.

  “Just say it does happen. Just say. Wouldn’t it be sad if you and I never talked about it?”
>
  I had never seen him look so scared.

  “Jack?” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why do you want to be with me?”

  His eyes opened to the whites. “Don’t you think we’re good together?”

  “Of course I do! Obviously.”

  “All right, well.” He made as if to pout.

  “Is it because I’m sick?”

  “No!”

  “You have a thing for sick girls?” He looked so affronted I poked him in the arm. “Just say it, Jack! It doesn’t matter. Don’t think too much. You always think too much!”

  He stared at me as though I had uttered some profound, prizewinning thing. “That’s just the point! I do think too much. I can’t help it. I like people who think. Most kids are hung up on sports or looks or being popular. It all seems so trivial.”

  “And I’m not trivial.”

  “No . . .” His voice went low and teasing. “You’re definitely not trivial . . .”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re deep . . .” He tipped his head sideways between the chairs and kissed me lingeringly to let me know he liked me for much more than my lack of triviality, which, by the way, was not only the result of a random thing that went wrong in my immune system. But I wasn’t going to give in yet. I made him look at me.

  “Listen, Jack. In the future? If I’m not here?”

  “Yeah?” He was ready to fight again.

  “Anything good happens to you?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me.”

  Jack looked as if he might burst out laughing or crying, and couldn’t decide which. We went up to the house, arms around each other.