The Water Cure(41)

After dinner I open door after door, searching for my sisters. They are not in the lounge, not in their bedrooms, not in Mother’s room. Eventually I find Sky alone in one of the unused rooms a few doors down from mine, stretching in the light by the window. Her short hair is still a shock to me. She doesn’t seem like one of us any more, but then maybe I am the one who has changed irrevocably, has taken in the new love. Maybe we were never three branches of the same tree, three girls intertwined.

‘Where is Grace?’ I ask. Sky gestures at the closed en-suite door.

‘She’s taking a bath,’ she tells me. ‘Go on in, if you like.’

I knock at the door and Grace’s low voice tells me to enter. She is almost totally submerged, a fine froth of bubbles covering her entire body, beading her dark hair. It is cut short like Sky’s now, I can see as she moves up in the water, exposing her whole head. The curtains are closed. When I sit on the edge of the bath and dip my hand in the water, it is cold. Her toenails, breaking the surface, are painted cerise, like Mother’s were.

‘Sky painted them for me,’ Grace says when she sees me looking. ‘She’ll probably do yours, if you ask.’ She moves back under the water, sending it splashing up the side.

‘Your hair,’ I say uselessly, conscious of my own lying heavy down my back. Grace puts a hand to her head.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Sky was right. It’s a lot more comfortable like this.’ She points to the metal wastepaper bin in the corner. ‘It’s all in there. You can look at it if you want.’

I do not want.

‘The water’s cold,’ I tell her instead.

‘I prefer it that way,’ she says. ‘It’s too hot anyway.’ She fixes her eyes on me. ‘Have you noticed how much warmer the men have made it?’

‘It’s coincidence,’ I say weakly, not even believing myself. Water runs off my skin in the night like something doused. Mosquito bites rise behind my knees and ankles. I am weary, so weary, of moving this body around through the haze.

‘Bullshit,’ she says cheerfully. ‘It doesn’t matter, anyway. Not now. Let the whole world melt, for all the difference it will make. Let the whole thing fall apart.’ A little water trickles over the lip of the bath, pools on the tiles. She sinks her head under the milky surface and I watch anxiously until she rises up again with a deep breath, hair slicked against her scalp.

‘We’re not doing anything wrong,’ I tell her.

‘You’ve betrayed us,’ she says simply.

‘It’s not true,’ I say. I know that it is.

‘Lia,’ she says. ‘He is dangerous.’ She buries her head unexpectedly into her wet hands for a second but does not cry.

‘Don’t think you’re the only one suffering,’ Grace says, raising her face back to mine. She is so beautiful. Whatever she is feeling, it is not written upon her the way it is upon me. And I think, for a second, about the first time my father placed a sharp object in my hand. How using it made a deep and terrible sense, because my blood was even redder than my sisters’ blood. It ran thicker. My feelings were as physical, as measurable, as the pulse at my neck.

‘I’ve decided to forgive you, though,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I know you need my help.’

I cry at that. I do, I do.

‘First things first,’ she says. ‘Protect your body from now on.’

How, I ask, salt water running into my mouth.

She tells me I can add vinegar to my bath, bicarbonate of soda. I should salt the water at the very least, have it as hot as possible, hotter than is pleasant.

‘No more babies,’ she says. ‘They never came from the sea, of course.’

I stare at her. I realize what Llew was telling me earlier. I realize, finally, what she really means.

‘Do not ask me about that,’ she says, reading my thoughts. ‘Not ever.’

So I don’t. My hair, I ask instead, falling out where I pull at it. And my ears, and my eyes, and my heart.

‘Just don’t look too closely,’ she says. ‘Try to have less direct contact. Touch him through his clothes, if you must.’

I am stricken.

‘If you can’t, you can’t,’ she says, resigned. ‘You’re the one who will suffer most.’

Truce.

Shifting in the water, Grace seems to take me in as if for the first time, as if I had just walked in. She stares at my legs, and I pull the skirt of my dress down.

‘I often think that Mother and King were very cruel to you.’ She touches my hand with her own. ‘I wish things could have been different.’

Perhaps it is not too late. I ask her if we can go to Mother’s room, the three of us, and she appraises me from the water, drawing her knees up to her chest.

‘All right,’ she says, reaching a hand out to me. ‘Help me up.’

The skin of her fingertips is pruned and furrowed against my own. I hold out the towel for her to step into, notice the fragile ridge of her hipbones under her still-swollen stomach. We are weakening.

In Mother’s room we stand in front of the irons. The blank iron, shining and shameful.

‘Why don’t we pick again?’ I ask my sisters. ‘With Mother not here. Why don’t we just get the men to join us, pick with them?’ I look around at them, gauging support for the idea. ‘Or even just the three of us pick?’