To Look For Water
Wendy Elizabeth Wallace


 
Here’s what I know.
 
The neighbors said it sounded like a pop, so quiet they went on watching TV.
 
Before he did it, he went to the store to buy cleaning supplies: detergent, paper towels, bleach.
 
Before he did it, he’d been drinking liters of vodka a day.  For months, the mouth of the garbage can gaped with empty liquor bottles.
 
My aunt was at the pharmacy when he did it.  She takes a lot of pills, only some of them legal, and hides them throughout her house, in case the DEA comes.  This is not entirely paranoia, because the DEA has sent her letters about the pills from India.  She bought them after visiting the young boy she’d been sending checks to for twelve years, checks for clothes and schoolbooks and vaccines.  She told me about how the whole village turned out to see her drive up in a cloud of dust, how the boy who is no longer a boy showed how he’d collected her letters and photographs and will take them to university with him.  She didn’t tell me where the pills came from.
 
He did it at the farthest edge of the yard, face to the fence.
 
Face to the fence, he was not looking towards the house, where a stuffed fish hangs.  My grandmother caught it, and broke the female record for largest catch.  My grandmother was proud of that fish, and her golf game, and her cocktail parties.  Not so much my aunt.
 
After, our family found a rehab center for my aunt.  We all did research, looked at different programs and the pictures of facilities on their websites, found a place in Ohio with a pool and yoga classes and people with strings of psychiatric qualifications after their names. We thought she would be safe here.
 
My aunt checked out the same day she checked in.  She said the facility was full of fat people and smokers and the Ohio mafia.  In the airport bar on the way back to Florida, she met a man who said she was doing the right thing, that grief meant you could say fuck everyone for a while and hide away.
 
I was afraid of what she’d do when she got back to her house with so many windows into the backyard, so many places she’d hidden her pills.
 
My husband and I meet her for lunch in a restaurant in Port St. Lucy.  It’s not a very good restaurant, and the windows are covered with a dark film that makes the sunny afternoon look like nighttime.  She is forty-five minutes late because she got lost and doesn’t know how to ask her phone to give her directions. I wish she’d let us pick her up.
 
She tells us she has a new roommate, and I think, Thank god, someone has moved in with her to watch over her.  “It’s a mouse,” she says, “and I want to kill it.”
 
She tells us she keeps bells tied to each door handle with yellow string (“Of course,” she says, as if we should have known this is the best color for warding off bad spirits), and she heard the bell ring, and turned, and said, “Honey?”  But it was a mouse, and it skittered under her bed.
 
My husband suggests poison.   There’s a kind, he says, that will kill the mouse, but first make it terribly thirsty, so it will leave the house to look for water, and die far away.
 
In my mind, my aunt’s partner and the mouse become the same, trying to get as far away from the house as they can, panting desperately, ready for the end.
 
I get up to go to the bathroom, and tuck myself into a stall.  I read the posters on the door to get myself to stop crying.  Tuesday 2 for 1 Margaritas.  Wednesday Half-Priced Appetizers.  Local Live Music on Thursday.
 
My aunt orders Ahi tuna because my husband and I do, and then realizes it comes almost rare, and eats only the white edges.  She asks for a box for the rest, so she can take it home and cook it the rest of the way.  “I cook for myself.  I’ve been eating salads and sandwiches now,” she tells us.  Not just drinking Muscle Milk, which she was doing for a while.  This is better.  She smiles, she laughs when we talk about my mother and how she used to inspect every present my aunt sent me, to make sure it wasn’t another movie with sex scenes (which my mom didn’t like) or pink things covered in sparkles (which I didn’t).
 
When I hug her goodbye, she feels stronger than I expect, her arms tight around me as if she might keep me in this spot, just the two of us, in the parking lot under the Florida sun I know she loves.
 
I’ll see you soon, I tell her.
 
Of course, she says.
 
I want this to be a promise.  I watch her pull away in his red truck.
 
 










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About the Author: 
Wendy Elizabeth Wallace grew up in Buffalo, New York, received an MFA in Fiction from Purdue University, and now lives in Connecticut. She is a co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal. Recently, she has become extremely mediocre at rock-climbing and quite respectable at hula-hooping. You can find more of Wendy’s writing in The Carolina Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Two Hawks Quarterly, and her desk.

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