The Water Cure(11)

‘You can let Sky drown the mouse,’ Mother tells me. ‘Or you can do it for her.’

Sky looks at me imploringly, but she doesn’t need to. I am already reaching for the box even though the idea of the small velvet body makes me want to cry, the thought of it moving in my hands. My sisters watch me mutely as I lift the lid.

‘Don’t let it get out,’ Mother tells me, but in one motion I cup it under the stomach, lift it out and drop it into the bucket of water. It flails valiantly but it is already exhausted. Soon it sinks and lies motionless, suspended. I feel the tears gather at the back of my throat. Sky mouths Thank you to me, water in her own eyes.

The next box holds a toad, leathery and stunned. I know Sky would be terrified of holding it but I have no such problems, stroking its squat body with one gloved finger, hoping that might be it. Mice are pests, spreaders of disease, enemies of our survival. Toads are not. But Mother gestures to what I now realize is kindling, next to the box of matches on the sand.

‘Mother, no,’ says Grace. ‘That’s too cruel.’

‘Life is cruel,’ Mother tells her. ‘If you girls can’t make difficult decisions for each other now, you’ll never be able to.’

I look down at the toad, its ugly skin. Its movements are slow, as if the warmth of my hands is comforting.

‘Mother,’ I say too. My mouth is dry.

‘If you won’t do it, your sister has to,’ Mother says.

‘Please, Mother, no!’ Sky says, on the verge of tears again. ‘Please don’t make either of us do it.’

‘I’ll touch it with my bare hands,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll drown it.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you getting sick. And it can swim. I wasn’t born yesterday.’ She looks to my sisters. ‘Get the fire lit, then.’

When the bonfire is ready, I crouch next to its small flames. Mother is looking at me, seeing if I will go through with it. I could let the toad go, hurl it down the beach. It might die then too, its body smashed and useless. My breathing is ragged.

‘If you can’t do it, give it to Sky,’ Mother says one last time. But I will not make my sister do this, and she knows it. I drop the toad into the fire and move back.

Almost instantly, Mother throws a bucket of water over the flames. The toad hops out, barely blackened.

‘You passed,’ Mother tells me. ‘Well done.’

Sky looks up at me, stricken with gratefulness. Our feelings pass between us like an electric charge. I accept them, absorb them, and then the weeping comes over me in a wave and I pull off the dirty gloves, put my hands to my face.





Grace, Lia, Sky


There are still days when Mother doesn’t get out of bed, though they are further apart now. On those days we know she is thinking of King, and we know that she is suffering from a thing called heartbreak that we have no comprehension of and probably never will. She tells us this not-knowing is a gift, like the life she managed to breathe into us, the life she has always protected so fiercely.

‘Can you not be grateful for that? Can you not thank me for that?’ she asks us from the bed, her blankets a smudge in the darkness as we stand in the doorway.

We say, ‘Yes, Mother. Thank you, Mother.’





Grace


‘Draw pictures of what the men have done to you,’ Mother told the damaged women. Lia, Sky and I were allowed to sit in on this kind of session, occasionally. ‘So you don’t have to let the words out.’ The mystery of it. I wanted to look at every page, but the women shielded their pads with their bodies as if the information were deadly.

They hunched over their paper, pencil and pens moving in wide arcs. It was a busy season. Seven or eight of the women were staying with us at that time, looking at us daughters with watery eyes across the breakfast table, or standing out at the edge of the forest with you and Mother, holding hands loosely, staring into the dark.

‘You can keep it abstract, if you want,’ Mother told them, benevolent. The varnish on her nails was chipped. She looked tired. She went from woman to woman as they drew, tapping their shoulder before she looked.

‘May I?’ she asked them, and then studied each page in turn.

Putting the things down on the paper was better than letting the words into the air, which would be tantamount to bringing the contamination with them. We didn’t see the pictures. One woman wept, tore a hole at the centre of the page. Another drew something in great detail and spent the rest of the afternoon rubbing it out carefully, centimetre by centimetre.

Later we were allowed to join them on the shore as the drawings were all burned, the women throwing matches and salt on the bonfire. You always kept your distance, surveying from the back. You must have wanted to look. The drawings were not things you had done, but the actions belonged to you the way the pain of the women belonged to us. Your body made you a traitor, despite everything. We stayed there until the tide came up and reached the ashes, turned them into sludge.





Lia


After years of them, I am used to sudden awakenings, to Mother’s hand clamped against my mouth. Always a drill for some unspecified event, the worst ever yet to come, always her dank vegetable breath and the white space of her eyes, blinking too fast. I go with her every time, even when my sisters refuse, feign too-deep sleep, charm her into letting them stay put. Being asked is enough for me, let alone the possibility that this time it could be real. Fear roiling in my stomach, and something else too, something close to hope. Every year the seasons become warmer and it is the earth telling me that change is coming, it is the air whispering, It will not always be so, and in the meantime this intimacy as I follow Mother down the stairs when nobody else will, the cool torchlight, for to be good is to be loved, I do believe this, and I have been good, I am always being good.