there’s a leak somewhere (chapter 28)

(image courtesy NIcky Reynolds)

For those who have not been following along, this is chapter 28 of my novel, What Would Water Do, which was inspired by the birth of my second daughter and Kate Chopin’s Awakening, a story about a woman torn between her own desires and what society expects from her.

To start at the beginning, click here and scroll down.

Almost as an afterthought and before she can stop herself, Drew picks up the phone and dials her father. He answers on the sixth ring.

“Hi, it’s me.” She’s fresh from the shower, sitting at Katherine Lillien’s well-lit mirror, inspecting her pores in a retractable magnifying mirror. “How is everything?”

“Oh, you know. Just the same.” She can see it all without closing her eyes: the dark corners of the garage furred with cobwebs, the metal shelves stacked with mildewed boxes, his tools hanging in their outlined spots on the pegboard, humid air thick with dust and turpentine and gasoline and him, perched on the worktable stool in his graying undershirt and boxers like a pale, spindly spider. “Actually, I’m going through some old boxes.”

“That’s good. Out with the old, in with the new.” She’s waiting for him to ask so she can tell him about her plans for the day, how she will attend the premiere of the film she wrote, red carpet and all, how she will see her name listed in the writing credits, but he always gets to talk first in their conversations, he’s the father, after all, there’s that unspoken hierarchy of importance, so she asks, “Find anything good?”

“Just a bunch of old junk.”

“It probably seemed important when it went into the box. Why else would you have saved it?”

“Oh, you know, storage is just the place where treasures turn to junk. Time has a funny effect on things. It makes everything insignificant.”

“Well, aren’t you the philosopher.” In the mirror, Drew examines her freshly-waxed brows, her skin almost unnaturally buffed and polished by Mae’s team of experts. Mae had insisted and Drew has to admire the improvement. She can hardly recognize herself. “So what else is new? How’s the weather?”

“I found a bunch of your mother’s things.”

For twenty years, he has never mentioned Drew’s mother on his own volition. Her face in the mirror is blank with shock. “What? What did you say?”

“I found some of old papers, old clothes. A couple of pictures. Covered in mildew.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“I threw them away. I guess there’s a leak somewhere. I saved the pictures that weren’t ruined and there’s a necklace for you.”

“You couldn’t.” Drew imagines her mother’s face, a face she can only remember from photographs, lying at the bottom of the trash can. “How could you?”

“It was time. Long overdue.”

“How can you even say that?” She wants to reach through the phone and slap him. She chokes through the lump clotted matter in her throat. “After all these years you don’t speak a word about her, you hide every trace so it’s like she never existed, and you force me to pretend. My whole life I walked around trying to pretend her away. I was sad and alone and had nobody to talk to and now suddenly you don’t care, it’s all behind you? What about me?” The words rise hot and thick in her throat. “Did you ever even try to find her or did you just sink into your useless, selfish pit of self-pity? No, don’t tell me. I don’t care. No wonder she left you. To find something better. I did it too. I’m just like her. I couldn’t stand it a minute longer.” Drew is standing at the mirror, watching the scary rictus of her mouth spitting words, her face red and swollen, ruined. “From now on, your feelings don’t fucking matter. I’m going to find her, even if it takes every penny of the money I’ve earned. I’ll hire the best private eye I can find.”

He coughs for awhile and then says, “Drew, there’s something I need to say. It was never the right time before.”

“Oh no you don’t. You don’t get to stay silent all these years and then just spew out whatever you want to. I have a big thing tonight. For my movie. The script I wrote, remember? And you’re not going to take that away from me, too. You’ve said enough.”

“Wait. Your mother killed herself.”

She holds the phone away from her ears. She can’t breathe. The bulbs around the mirror are blindingly bright. She stares at the glowing filaments until it rises up from her stomach in a wail. “Why? Why? Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t lie. I never told you she left us.” His voice is infuriatingly steady. “I just couldn’t tell you she was dead. I didn’t want you to be sad. You assumed she had left, and I never corrected you. You made up your own stories; you were always good at that. I guess I thought it might be better for you if you thought she was out there somewhere, watching you, trying to find you.”

Drew closes her eyes. The lights are still there, white holes burned on the back of her eyelids.

“I found her in the bath. She used my razor. That’s why I couldn’t shave for so long. She looked like a movie star with her face done up and her hair piled up in a fancy hairdo. Like when she wore the red dress only it was the water, the water was so red it was almost black and it didn’t look real and I thought it was a joke at first, because she was always so dramatic, she always threatened but it was always a joke when she said it, you know? Like, ‘one of these days you’ll find me dangling from the chandelier; what will the neighbors think? Ha, ha.‘ She had lit a candle but it had melted down the edge of the tub. It was just like one of her old movies. The note was in there with her but we couldn’t read it. I guess it slipped in. We didn’t….”

That’s when Drew put the phone down and backed out of the room.