All the Water in the World

by Karen Raney

  We were off the freeway, heading south toward Silver Spring. The lights of a winter evening wheeled past: streetlights, porch lights, flashing lights, green and pink neon lights: big, human versions of what I’d seen from the air.

  “It hasn’t snowed yet,” I said.

  “It’s been cold enough. Freezing or below freezing for a week.”

  “If it rained, it would snow.”

  “That’s one way of putting it, Ducks.”

  I allowed ten seconds of silence. “Robin, would you mind not calling me that?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve never liked it much. Sorry. Nothing against Cincinnati. It’s bizarre,” I said, eyes on the road, “changing worlds like this. Air travel has a lot to answer for.”

  He shot me a sympathetic glance; he was not one to take offense. “Did you ever stop to think that before the steam train, no one had traveled faster than on the back of a horse?”

  “Do horses go faster than clipper ships? Anyway, I don’t like it. It’s too sudden. I don’t know who I am.”

  He slowed and stopped at a crosswalk. “Tell me the best part of the trip. What you were saddest to leave.” Robin liked to ask for details in the form of lists. Three things I liked about my job. The worst vacation I’d ever had. My five favorite movies. He didn’t really rank experience like that; it was his way of opening up a conversation.

  “Just London,” I said, not playing along. “Everything about it.”

  “We’ll get you home and straight to bed.” As if sleep was the answer to changing worlds, to speaking in generalities, to whatever ailed us now.

  The car lurched to a stop. Robin’s arm shot out, though my seat belt had already stopped me. He raised an apologetic hand to the honkers behind. A large woman in slippers had stepped onto the crosswalk just as we were rolling forward. First testing it with her foot, she advanced like someone crossing a rope bridge over a ravine.

  “There should be a minimum speed on these crosswalks,” said Robin.

  “For the pedestrians, you mean?”

  “Drivers could hold up signs to say how long they’re willing to stop. Over Ninety Seconds, Can’t Make Any Promises!”

  “The Risk Is Yours.” I leaned over, laughing, and kissed Robin on the border between beard and cheek. I hadn’t realized just how much space Antonio took up, with his long coat and his top-flight career and his obliviousness to the asymmetry between us: my part in his life, his part in mine.

  At home I poured us both a sedative glass of wine and kept Cloud on my lap while Robin told me about his commissions, a lucrative built-in closet and a coffee table in the shape of California. I filled him in on the last interviews, my dizzy spell in the Tanks, and the opening, while the cat pushed her skull under my hand and the empty house bore down on me. I had left the country, I had come back, and still Maddy wasn’t here.

  I gave Antonio no special weight alongside the other stories. I drafted in a corporate vocabulary. Seeing Antonio had been “challenging” and “valuable”; we’d spoken several times; I had not met his new family, nor did I want to. Nothing I said was, strictly speaking, untrue. Cloud left me to see if there was anything in her bowl she didn’t know about, and I ran my hand along the crack at the straight-cut end of the table. The butterfly joint that bridged it was as smooth as a scar.

  Where had Robin gone? He was behind my chair, reaching his arms down the front of my body, casual as a parent preparing to pick up a child, careful not to touch anything personal. I knew his tactics. Drawing the space around an object renders the object more acutely. I turned to meet his lips, bare and warm in their furry surround, and upstairs I allowed myself to be undressed, caressed, and cajoled into hunger of the kind that makes its own decisions, that kicks things off and kicks things away. We had not been together long enough for boredom to set in—tragedy had set in—and now it was Robin I wanted, our particular history and our private games; but what was happening was impossible to separate from Antonio. The force of that encounter had been trapped in me for days. It had to go somewhere.

  We lay together, Robin’s rib cage moving against mine. In an old film we would both be smoking. I kissed his hand and carefully replaced it on his chest. Pleasure held dangers, new ones all the time.

  “What are you thinking?”

  He gave me a postcoital smile. “I’m thinking how much I’ve missed you.” He eased his arm free and sat on the bed’s edge, looking down at me, his face in shadow. “I don’t mean when you were in London.”

  Watching his sinewy back and pale flanks recede to the bathroom, I glimpsed the tail end of an idea just before it slid out of sight.

  37

  You’d think a homecoming like that would have cheered me up. The next day Robin sought me out with tender high spirits, backing off when he saw what a terrible mood I was in. I unpacked, did three loads of laundry, made a pointless trip to the drugstore to get out of the house, and, when questioned, blamed it on jet lag. An hour and a half was taken up by a visit from my parents. No one asked me about Antonio. In our family, delicate subjects were only broached one-on-one. After they left, Robin and I drove to get a take-out pizza and ate it at the dining room table from the box.

  “Feeling any better?” asked Robin hopefully. “Have you landed?”

  “Now I have to turn around and pack for the lake. Do you think we could invite Alison up?”

  He folded the box in half. “Unless you want it to be just us?”

  “I felt bad she had to go back before me. She doesn’t have much of a family life. Mom and Dad won’t mind.”

  “Is it part of the transition?” he said, studying me across the table. “Settling back?”

  I shrugged. “Maddy loved Christmas.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t even remember Christmas last year. It’s completely wiped. It might help to have other people around. You’ve been up at the lake a lot,” I said. “Weren’t you lonely without me?”

  “Desperately. Did I tell you about the power outage?”

  “Norma did.”

  “Bad luck,” he said. “Being a newcomer, especially. Did not endear her to anyone.”

  “It endeared her to you.”

  He narrowed his eyes as if trying to bring me into focus.

  “You always go for the underdog,” I said.

  “Norma’s not an underdog.”

  “No,” I admitted. “She’s not. Did she stop by the house?”

  “She dropped in on all the south shore lots to explain. Grovel, actually. Everyone without lights got a bottle of wine.”

  “Boys at the grandparents?”

  “She had them with her. You can’t get mad at someone who has a cute kid on each hand.”

  “Did you get to see their house inside?”

  “Once.”

  “What’s it like? I never went in.”

  “Oh, it’s nice enough, but run-of-the-mill, wood-wise. Hollow doors. Click flooring. Very Home Depot for a high-end architect.”

  “Maybe her husband’s not really an architect.”

  “Oh well.” Robin grinned. “I say it’s great to see the rain forest being put to good use.”

  “Did she come over to ours?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Was it once or was it twice?”

  “A few times. I don’t remember.”

  “Why?” I persisted, feeling on my shoulder the symbolic restraining hand of my mother.

  “Why don’t I remember?”

  “Why did she come over?”

  He shrugged. “Being friendly, I guess.”

  To buy time, I ran my eyes over the hutch, an ugly fifties item of lacquered maple I had picked up at a garage sale. Robin regularly offered to replace it with something magnificent of his own making, but I took the view that not every piece of furniture in the house had to be tasteful. Besides, the top drawer of the hutch was where I always kept Maddy’s school photographs. On its uppermost shelf circulars, coupons, and ma
il accumulated in messy piles. Now these papers stood on end in a carved wood letter holder.

  I lifted it down, tipped out the papers, and turned it on its side to examine the design of overlapping ovals that Frank Lloyd Wright used for his chair backs and room screens. I had last admired this object with Maddy in the gift shop at Fallingwater.

  “I went while you were away,” said Robin. “I’d never seen it in winter before.”

  I felt as though I had strayed close to the edge of a great height. “And you brought this back for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was so sweet.” I returned the holder to its shelf and sat down. “And what was it like in winter?”

  “Magic. The falls were running but everything else was iced over. The stream had to force its way through the ice.”

  “I always said I wanted to see it in winter.”

  “We’ll go,” said Robin quickly. “You’ll love it. In winter the house looks even more a part of the mountain.”

  “Is it a mountain? I didn’t think it was a mountain.”

  “Hill,” said Robin.

  I smiled encouragingly. “Did you go by yourself?”

  He checked my eyes and made a rapid decision. “Norma went with me.”

  Blood surged to my head, blotting out Robin, the table, the room, all sense and decency. Images rushed at me as though they’d been waiting to be released. On bridges, over falls, in underground caverns he pulled her close, bent over her, and did the things he did to me with a passion born of craving and denial. Clever of her to send me away! But she’d only met him that day on the dock. Even so! Ways were always found where betrayal was concerned. The two of them writhed together, finding what they needed. Her eyes shut, her white throat exposed. All welcome snatched away. All help gone. No one for me, ever again. No place for me, ever again. Once more I felt the invisible hand on my shoulder, sensed rather than heard the voice that, when I was a young person, had enraged me so: Step carefully until you’re sure; things aren’t what they seem; impulsiveness does not always serve you well.

  “All these mysterious trips to the lake?” I sneered, turning my mother away and silencing her. “The mythical husband? The blackout!” The biggest insult of all was starting to sink in. “Fallingwater. Really, Robin? Really? Go ahead and fuck her. But don’t take her to Fallingwater. That’s mine. Mine and Maddy’s.”

  “Stop it, Eve. Stop for a minute! Listen—”

  Neither his astonishment nor his hurt seemed faked, but who could tell? His hand went out; his table was between us. I was standing by this time, my knuckles on the beautiful wood, ready to bolt from the room, the house, the planet, to be anywhere but here, and anyone but myself.

  “I bet you lay there afterward and talked about me.”

  His mouth was an ugly shape. “Seriously, Eve?”

  “Why not? She’s a basket case. She’s off the rails. Her life is over anyway.” I did not recognize my voice; at the same time it seemed more profoundly my own. “What a drag! You think I don’t know what a drag I am? What a colossal bore I am? What a great chance this was—”

  “Seriously?” he cut in, measured and cold.

  But there was no stopping me.

  “Say something! Tell me I’m wrong!” My voice sank. “Look at you. Sitting there lining up your excuses.”

  Robin’s arms were clamped to his chest. He was scanning my face as if he’d never seen it before. Is this how the end comes? Misdeeds on every side, a souvenir in the wrong place, fury in search of a worthwhile cause? Calamity breeds calamity. Another one could happen just like that, and no one would be much surprised, least of all me.

  “Go to London,” he jeered. “Go back to the lake. Go see your ex. Do what you have to do. I’ll be here. I’ll take whatever you dish out—” His scornful tone was so unlike him, and so closely matched my own, that I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. He swatted the air with the back of his hand. “I don’t know what you did over there. I can guess.”

  I found the table’s edge and held on to it to get the spinning room under control. I felt like someone coming out of a fever dream. “Nothing,” I said meekly.

  “Nothing!” He bit off the word. “I’m the one who did nothing! Not that I wasn’t tempted.”

  “I promise you—”

  A warning palm. Come no closer. “You know what the problem is, Eve? The problem is you.”

  Barely above a whisper, I said: “So am I wrong?”

  “You think you’re the only one who lost someone?” His arms locked again over his chest. “You think you’re the only one who misses her? It’s all about you. You’re incapable of seeing anyone else. You don’t care about anyone else. The problem is you.”

  I asked it again, as though an answer to this one question would fix everything: “So I’m wrong?”

  He gave me a look of such derision that it was hard to imagine he had ever loved me. I knew then without a doubt that whatever the truth was, whatever had happened or not happened in my absence, I was the one who was wrong, profoundly, grotesquely, irreversibly wrong. Loyalty to Robin had not stopped me from seducing Antonio. I had stopped because of Maddy. I had been prepared all along to sacrifice Robin, though in my arrogance I never believed it would be necessary. He was right. I was wrong. Wrong to the core, wrong at the cellular level, the kind of wrong that brought about disaster and ushered in ruin even as I protested my innocence. Maddy’s death had stripped off the veneer and exposed what was really there: cheap, second-rate, nasty.

  “Find a handyman,” said Robin. “Get yourself a babysitter. It’s not going to be me.” Sucking the air like someone about to weep, he quit the room without looking back and I did not dare try to stop him.

  • • •

  At three in the morning I awoke, aching and shivering. The sheet beside me was empty. He’d slept in the music room. When I went to the bathroom to vomit, flakes of snow were floating down the window, silver on one side, dark on the other. By their speed and size I could tell it was the kind of snowfall that sticks.

  For two days I could do nothing but lie flat and be sick. Reading was out of the question; so was watching television or listening to music. My body was not my own; it did what it had to do, and I took a grim pleasure in kneeling to hug the cold toilet bowl, in the stink and the release. No one ever talks about the pleasures of throwing up. Rose and Walter stayed away, not wanting to catch anything before the holidays. Cloud stood by me. Robin spoke of foreign germs and recirculated cabin air and brought me what I needed with the remoteness of a private nurse.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked on the third day, sitting up to drink tomato soup from a mug.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are we still going to the lake? Everyone’s counting on it.”

  The suspension of time and the absence of a follow-up conversation gave our fight a dreamlike quality. Whenever I saw Robin’s face I knew I hadn’t dreamt it. I went downstairs in my bathrobe; the letter holder was still on the top shelf of the hutch. The storm had stopped, but the Eastern Seaboard remained in the grip of a freeze, and the plow drifts along the roads were intact though increasingly filthy.

  “We have to,” he said at last, with great reluctance. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  I rushed to ingratiate myself: “I still like the beard . . .” But he was halfway to the door and either had not heard or chose not to turn around.

  38

  Packed snow could be as slick as ice, the difference being that on snow the tires had a chance of digging in and finding purchase. We turned left at the country store and started the climb up through the National Park.

  “Not too slippery, is it?”

  Robin tapped the brakes. “Fine for the moment.”

  I turned to smile at Alison, roly-poly in her gray ski jacket in the backseat. Black, gray, and white were the only colors she ever wore. She was scowl
ing out the window. Robin and I were putting on a good show, but surely she sensed the tension, and anyway, the ease that had developed between Alison and me in London would take time to re-create.

  “I’m glad you could come.” Just having her in the car was a small victory. Robin would indulge her; Rose and Walter would cheer her up.

  Alison always ignored pleasantries. “Will the lake be frozen solid?”

  I hid my smile. “It never freezes solid, that depth of water. Just the surface.”

  Irritably she asked: “Well, can you walk on it?”

  “We’ve got something called an auger to drill down and check how thick the ice is. We say six inches, minimum. Some people say four. If it’s blue ice.”

  “Blue ice is frozen shit,” said Alison, “that leaks out of airplanes.”

  “Blue ice,” said Robin, “is when the ice is compressed without a lot of air bubbles trapped in it. It’s stronger than white ice.”

  “Have you ever been to a lake in winter before?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I want to walk on it.”

  “Robin goes out on the ice no matter what.”

  “A lot of people say three is safe,” he said.

  “It depends on the conditions,” I told Alison.

  “I know that!” Robin said sharply. “I’m the country boy, remember?”

  Since our confrontation, he’d maintained the air of a wounded animal whose patience was not to be tested. He did not respond to my overtures and offered none of his own. My illness had left me scoured out and meek; I did not want to clarify what had gone on between us.

  “Sometimes the ice cracks under your foot,” I said.

  “There are thicker and thinner areas,” said Robin. “You can always jump to a stronger part of the ice.”

  “What he means is, he’s gotten away with it so far. He loves to scare us.”

  Long loaves of snow sat on the caretaker’s porch railings and a round one on each gate pillar. “We never used to come at Christmas,” I told Alison as we drove through. “When my father built the place, it wasn’t even winterized. The caretaker plows the shore road. We pay him to keep our driveway clear.” The roadside gullies were filled to the brim with snow, stippled by the stalks of dead ferns. Two big banks marked the turn into our lot. “This is it. We’re here!”