The Weight of Water (29 page)

“I believe they are safe in Portsmouth. Perhaps in a tavern even as we speak,” I said. “Not minding at all their fate.”

“Oh,” she said quickly, “I think my Evan would mind. He would not like to sleep without me.”

My Evan.

She reached out a hand from the covers and began to stroke my cheek with her fingers. “Oh, Maren,” she said, “you are so watchful
over us all.”

I did not know what she meant by that. My breath was suddenly tight in my chest from the touch of her fingers. I wanted to
throw her hand off and turn my back to her, but I was rigid with embarrassment. I was glad that it was dark, for I knew that
I must be highly colored in my face. To be truthful, her touch was tender, as a mother might stroke a child, but I could not
appreciate this kindness just then. Anethe began to smooth my forehead, to run her fingers through the hair just underneath
my cap.

“Anethe,” I whispered, meaning to tell her to stop.

She moved her body closer, and wrapped her hands around my arm, laying her forehead on my shoulder.

“Do you and John?” she asked, in a sort of muffled voice. “Is it the same?”

“Is what the same?” I asked.

“Do you not miss him at this moment? All the attentions?”

“The attentions,” I repeated.

She looked up at me. “Sometimes it is so hard for me to sit in the kitchen until it is proper to go up to bed. Do you know?”
and she moved herself still closer to me so that her length was all against my own. “Oooh,” she said. “Your feet are freezing.
Here, let me warm them,” and she began, with the smooth sole of her foot, to massage the top of my own. “Do you know,” she
said again, “I have never told anyone this, and I hope you will not be shocked, but Evan and I were lovers before we were
married. Do you think that was very wrong? Were you and John?”

I did not know what to say to her or which question to answer first, as I was distracted by the movement of her foot, which
had begun to travel up and down the shin of my right leg.

“I no longer know what is right or wrong anymore,” I said.

Her body was a great deal warmer than my own, and this warmth was not unpleasant, though I remained stiff with discomfort,
as I had never been physically close with anyone except my brother Evan and my husband. I had certainly never been physically
close with a female, and the sensation was an odd one. But, as will happen with a child who is in need of comfort and who
gradually relaxes his limbs in the continuous embrace of the mother, I began to be calmed by Anethe, and to experience this
peace as pleasurable, and, briefly to allow myself to breathe a bit more regularly. I cannot explain this to the reader. It
is, I think, a decision the body makes before the heart or the head, the sort of decision I had known with John, when, without
any mental participation, my body had seemed to respond in the proper ways to his advances. In truth, as Anethe laid her head
on my chest and began to stroke the skin of my throat, I felt myself wanting to turn ever so slightly toward my brother’s
wife and to put my arm around her, and perhaps, in this way, return something of the affection and tenderness she was showing
to me.

“Do you do it every night?” she asked, and I heard then a kind of schoolgirlish embarrassment in her own voice.

“Yes,” I whispered, and I was shocked at my own admission. I wanted to add that it was not my doing, not my doing at all,
but she giggled then, now very much like a girl, and said, to my surprise, “Turn over.”

I hesitated, but she gently pushed my shoulder, and persisted with this urging, so that finally I did as I was told, putting
my back to her, and not understanding what this was for. She lifted herself up onto her elbow and said, close to my ear, “Take
up your nightgown.”

I could not move.

“I want to rub your back,” she explained, “and I cannot do it properly through the cloth.” She pushed the covers down and
began slightly to tug at the skirt of my nightgown with her hand, and I, though somewhat fearful of the consequences, began
to wrestle with the gown and to pull the hem up to my shoulders. I held the bunched cloth to my bosom as I had done once at
the doctor’s office in Portsmouth when I had had the pleurisy. But shortly I felt the warmth of being attended to, and I surrendered
myself to this attention.

Anethe began then to stroke my skin with an exquisite lightness and delicacy, from the top of my spine to my waist, from one
side of my back to the other, all around in the most delightful swirls, so that I was immediately, without any reservations,
put into a swoon of such all-encompassing proportions that I could not, in those moments, for any reason, have denied myself
this touch. It was a sensation I had not experienced in many years. Indeed, I cannot remember, ever in my adult life, being
the recipient of such pleasure, so much so that had she stopped before I had had my fill, I would have begged her to continue,
would have promised her anything if only she would again touch my skin with her silken fingers. But she did not stop for some
time, and I remember having the thought, during that experience, that she must be a very generous lover, and then realizing,
when I was nearly in a dream state myself, that her hand had trailed off and that she had fallen asleep, for she began to
snore lightly. And hearing her asleep, and not wishing to wake her, and also not wanting the trance I had fallen into to be
broken, I did not move or cover myself, but drifted into a deep sleep while the moon set, for I remember being confused and
struggling for sense when I heard my dog, Ringe, barking through the wall.

What a swimming up is there from the bath of a sensuous dream to the conscious world, from a dream one struggles desperately
not to abandon to the frigid shock of a startled voice in the darkness. Ringe barked with loud, sudden yips. I raised my arms
up from the bed before I was even fully awake. I thought that Karen was stumbling about in an attempt to go to the privy,
and that she had woken Ringe, who normally slept with me. I was about to call out to her with some irritation to be quiet
and go back to bed and to send my dog into the bedroom, when I heard her say, in the clearest possible voice, “My God, what
have you done?”

It was all so much simpler, so much simpler, than I said.

I sat up in my bed and saw that my sister was standing at the open door of the bedroom and that to my great embarrassment,
the bedclothes were still at the foot of the bed, and that most of my naked body was exposed. I hastily pulled the cloth of
my nightdress down to my feet.

I can remember the awful surprise in Karen’s face, and, even now, the horror of her mouth folded in upon itself, sputtering
words to me in a voice that had become more metallic, more grating with the years, and the way the words issued from that
black hole of a mouth.

“First our Evan and now Anethe!” she shouted. “How can you have done this? How can you have done this to such a sweet and
innocent woman?”

“No, Karen…,” I said.

But my sister, in an instant, had progressed from shock to moral righteousness. “You are shameless and have always been so,”
she went on in that terrible voice, “and I shall tell our Evan and John also when they return, and you will be banished from
this household as I should have done to you many years ago, when I knew from the very beginning you were an unnatural creature.”

“Karen, stop,” I said. “You don’t know what you say.”

“Oh, but I do know what I say! You have borne an unnatural love for our brother since your childhood, and he has fought to
be free of you, and now that he is married, you have thought to have him by having his wife, and I have caught you out in
the most heinous of sins, Maren, the most heinous of sins.”

Beside me, Anethe struggled to waken. She lifted herself up upon one elbow and looked from me to Karen. “What is it?” she
asked groggily.

Karen shook her head furiously back and forth, back and forth. “I have never loved you, Maren, I have never loved you. I have
not even liked you, and that is the truth. And I think it is true also that our Evan has found you selfish and self-dramatic,
and that he grew so tired of you he was glad when you went away. And now you are grown old, Maren, old and fat, and I see
that your own husband does not really love, nor does he trust you, for you would do anything to get what you want, and now,
rebuffed, you have committed the worst possible of sins, a sin of corruption, and have chosen to steal your brother’s wife,
and seduce her in the most shameful manner.”

No one can say with any certainty, unless he has lived through such an experience, how he will react when rage overtakes the
body and the mind. The anger is so swift and so piercing, an attack of all the senses, like a sudden bite on the hand, that
I am not surprised that grown men may commit acts they forever regret. I sat, in a stiffened posture on the bed, seconds passing
before I could move, listening to the outrageous litany against me which I knew that Anethe was being forced to hear as well,
and the beating of my heart against my breastbone became so insistent and so loud that I knew I must silence Karen or surely
I would die.

I pushed myself from my bed, and Karen, observing me, and coward that she was and always had been, backed away from me and
into the kitchen. At first she put her hand to her mouth, as if she might actually be frightened, but then she took her hand
away and began to sneer at me most scornfully.

“Look at you in your silly nightdress,” she said, “grown fat and ugly in your middle age. Do you imagine you can scare me?”
She turned her back to me, perhaps to further show her scorn by dismissing me. She bent over her trunk and opened it, and
took up a great armful of linens. Or perhaps she was looking for something. I have never known.

I put my hands on the back of a chair and gripped that chair-back so hard my knuckles whitened.

Karen staggered two or three steps under the blows from the chair and, twisting around, turned towards me, held out her arms
and dropped the linens on the floor. I am not sure if she did this in entreaty or if she meant only to protect herself. A
small exclamation escaped me, as I stood there with the chair in my hands.

Karen stumbled into my bedroom and fell upon the floor, weakly scrabbling against the painted wood like a strange and grotesque
insect. I think that Anethe may have gotten out of the bed and taken a step backwards toward the wall. If she spoke, I do
not remember what she said. The weight of the wood caused the chair to swing from my arms so that it fell upon the bed. I
took hold of Karen’s feet and began to pull her back into the kitchen, as I did not want this sordid quarrel to sully Anethe.
The skirt of Karen’s nightgown raised itself up to her waist, and I remember being quite appalled at the white of her scrawny
legs.

I write now of a moment in time that cannot be retrieved, that took me to a place from which there was never any hope of return.
It all seemed at the time to happen very quickly, somewhere within a white rage in my head. To retell these events is exceedingly
painful for me now, and I will doubtless horrify the reader, but because my desire is to unburden myself and to seek forgiveness
before I pass on, I must, I fear, ask the reader’s patience just a moment longer.

When Karen was across the threshold, I moved to the door, shut it and put a slat through the latch so that there would be
only myself and my sister in the kitchen. I think that Karen may have struggled to stand upright, and then fallen or been
thrown against the door, for there was a small shudder against the wood, and it must have been then that Anethe, on the other
side of the door, pushed our bed against it. I heard Karen cry out my name.

I would not have harmed Anethe. I would not. But I heard, through the wall, the sound of the window being opened. Anethe would
have run to the beach. Anethe would have called for help, alerted someone on Appledore or Star, and that person would have
rowed across the harbor and come up to the house and found myself and Karen. And then what would I have done? And where could
I go? For Karen, possibly, was dying already.

In truth, the axe was for Karen.

But when I picked up the axe on the front stoop, I found I was growing increasingly concerned about Anethe. Therefore I did
not return just then to the kitchen, but stepped into the entry way and put on the rubber boots, and went outside again and
kept moving, around to the side of the house, where the window was. I remember that Ringe was barking loudly at my feet, and
I think that Karen was crying. I don’t believe that Anethe ever said a word.

She was standing just outside the window, her feet in the snow up to the hem of her nightgown. I was thinking that her feet
must be frozen. Her mouth was open, and she was looking at me, and as I say, no sound emerged from her. She held a hand out
to me, one hand, as though reaching across a wide divide, as though asking for me, so that I, too, might lay my hand over
that great expanse and help her to safety. And as I stood there, gazing upon her fingers, looking at the fearful expression
in my brother’s wife’s face, I remembered the tenderness of her touch of just hours ago, and so I did extend my hand, but
I did not reach her. She did not move, and neither then could I.

It is a vision I have long tried to erase, the axe in the air. Also as well the sight of blood soaking the nightgown and the
snow.

On more than one occasion, I have waited for the sunrise. The sky lightens just a shade, promising an easy dawn, but then
one waits interminably for the first real shadows, the first real light.

I had to leave the boots back at the house, in keeping with the first and hasty suggestions of a story, and as a consequence,
I had cut my feet on the ice. I could no longer feel them, however, as they had gone numb during the night. I held my dog,
Ringe, for warmth, and I think that if I had not done so, I would have frozen entirely.

During those awful hours in the sea cave, I wept and cried out and battered my head back against the rock until it bled. I
bit my hand and my arm. I huddled in my hiding place and wished that the rising tide might come in to my cave and wash me
out to sea. I relived every moment of the horrors that had occurred that night, including the worst moments of all, which
were those of cold, calculated thought and of arranging facts to suit the story I must invent. I could not bear the sight
of Karen’s body, and so I dragged her into the northeast apartment and left her in the bedroom. And also, just before I fled
the house, I found I did not like to think of Anethe in the snow, and so I hauled her inside the cottage.