The Water Cure(23)

‘Invocations for the damaged women, for their strength and peace,’ we say.

‘Love for our sisters and our home.

‘Good health for our mother.’ She presses her palm to her chest, for emphasis.

There are new ones now.

‘We pray for protection against the bodies of men.

‘We pray for the men’s good hearts, for good intentions.’

A glass bottle is produced. We line up in a row. Mother places a dropper on our tongues, one at a time, sweetness at the roofs of our mouths. She presses her thumb over the label so we can’t read it.

‘I can’t overstate the importance of keeping your distance from them,’ she tells us, but she has been wrong before and she could be wrong again, and there is no guilt in my heart tonight, for once.

I see him illuminated from some distance away, swimming backstroke in the glowing water. I moved without sound through the sleeping house, past the bedrooms of my sisters, my treacherous heart beating loud and true. We are too visible out here at the pool, yet still I slip in next to him. He sinks underwater and I do too, opening my eyes to watch. His cheeks are full of air and he lets it out in a stream of bubbles, light blue, his face pale and reflective in the strange light. I reach out and hold on to his forearms.

‘You!’ he says quietly when we are back at the surface, breaking apart.

‘You,’ I say back.

We wrap towels around our bodies and walk on to the sand, quickly, until the house recedes into the night. Near the rock pools at the end of the beach, Llew shakes out his own towel and lays it down for me. He indicates I should sit, and so I do. I am cold, stricken with adrenaline. He sits next to me, easily, puts his arm around me again. ‘Is this all right?’ he asks.

Yes, it is all right. I try not to think of toxins leaving his mouth like a cloud, of what happens next. There is still time to stop it, but my curiosity has taken me too far now. I am pink with blood, best at the exercises, my body taller and stronger than my siblings. The careful marks on my thighs are a protection that surely, surely, could hold here for a little while. The water ahead of us is flat and infinite; shards of light through the sky like a dropped glass. He kisses the side of my head, his mouth landing on my wet hair, the top of my ear.

Why do I suddenly want to cry? Is it because in one fell swoop everything I’ve ever wanted has fallen upon me? I clutch for his knee, some kind of contact I have control over. I want to hold everything in the world in my arms, hold the universe itself.

Is this all right? is asked again, becomes a refrain. He is exaggeratedly gentle with me. It occurs to me I could also be a new thing, to be handled with wariness.

I think about the women and the things they described, the things I had not been supposed to hear, and about the muscles lengthening in my legs when I run, my body in motion, arms bending, torso arced. The startling joy of that movement, uncomplicated.

I am embarrassed about my dirty fingernails, the tough heels of my feet. In the end though, in the dark and the wet salt air, it doesn’t matter.

My first thought in the silence afterwards is I have survived. Victory both small and large. My appetite for touch is whetted, but he has rolled on to his back in the sand and taken his hands off me.

When or if the men arrived, King implied it would mean our home burned to the ground, our blood spilled out on the shore, diluting in the water of the pool. I decide that our parents, in their love and fear for us, must have been mistaken. They grew too old. Their hearts were withered. It was not their fault. Compassion loosens in me as if I suddenly understand everything, benevolent, as if nothing bad could ever happen again.

Yet, back in my own bathroom, it turns out that the white cotton of my underwear is bloodied, and for a few minutes I am afraid that I am dying after all. It seems out of proportion to the pain, which is small but ignorable. There is nobody I can tell or ask, so I run through other symptoms in my head, examine the skin on the backs of my hands, the jelly of my eyes. Where he put his hands – collarbone, the tops of my arms, my cheek, briefly, though I could not meet his eyes – is unmarked. The bleeding soon stops and I tentatively declare myself safe for the moment, even if I am pale in the mirror.

Now I have intimacy, now intimacy is gone again, a damp weight of absence. And suddenly I am lonelier than ever before, a sharp hurt worse than actual pain. I replay the event in my head. I am thinking of every single act of his body, how even in the pain there was something needful and familiar, a slow piecing of myself together. My analysis is lacking; there are too many gaps. For a second I think about asking my sisters. But then I realize, with a deep and exhilarating terror, that I have gone beyond them here. I have a knowledge that they do not.

One thing I know for certain is that he is stronger than he has let on so far, a lot stronger than me. I was the strongest before, in that small window between King’s death and Llew’s arrival, the holiday without men. For a second, I am bereft.

It is only when I leave the bathroom and move to my bed that I discover something terrible is happening to Grace. Through the wall, the dying noises of an animal, a bird caught in the canopy. For a second I am afraid to go and see what the matter is, but then I remember that she is my sister, that her life is my life, and even though her door is closed and we allow each other those small privacies, guard them because Mother thinks them irrelevant, I push until it opens. My sister is sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, her body folded in on itself. The bedding is soaked, streaked with bright red. The baby is coming. She bares her teeth at me, and I know to run.