The Taste of Water
When Henry Daubigne realized his water had regained flavor he hadn’t held down a meal in three days and he had a fever of 103˚. At the age of 82, he was beginning to fear the worst. Peppery and prone to outburst–his family, for the most part, left him alone. The little ones peered underneath the doorframe from time to time, then ran away giggling. But he barely noticed. Thinking beyond the world outside of his own pestiferous body was nearly impossible, as it so tediously reminded him of its disintegration. His aches were thorough and all-encompassing, rooted in each joint and reaching deep into his marrow. And somehow he felt brittle and dry as if he could crack like an eggshell at the slightest touch. Anything beyond sipping the water his grandson left by his bedside was a chore.
The cool water cascaded across his cracked lips and over his dry, white tongue. Suddenly, Henry was yanked by his tastebuds back to the early days of his marriage to the evening of his twentieth birthday, when his wife Loraine attempted to bake his favorite delicacy, blackberry danishes, for the first and only time.
They came out all wrong.
The pastry dough, traditionally thin and as fragile as a snowflake was as thick and flavorless as an uncooked pie crust. The tar-like preserve on the inside was bitter, the blackberries unripened and piping with seeds. Henry was filled with adoration for his young wife, despite the gooey mess on his plate. So, together, they suffered through every danish. They sat across from one another at their thick oak table, eating the dessert with a masquerade of enthusiasm. The abysmal taste in their mouths was so preoccupying that they could think of little else, their conversation was monosyllabic, with their limited commentary adeptly toeing the line between compliments and pure lies. “Oh darling, I can tell this pastry must have taken a lot of effort,” Henry remarked, his jaw aching with the effort to chew. At least twenty seeds lodged along his gum line, causing him quite a bit of discomfort. His tongue desperately darted around within his mouth, attempting to clear them away. “Mmmm,” she nodded, across the table from him, her eyebrows raised in pained concentration before uttering a forced noise of enjoyment and gulping an entire flute of champagne. Soon after, Henry reached one bite too bitter and raw for his face not to contort in discomfort. Ashamed of his negative reaction, and fearing disappointing his beautiful young wife, he choked down the bit of danish as discretely as possible, following it with a large gulp of water. When he looked up she was staring at him across the table. Her face also contorted, though not in agony, as he had been a moment before, but in an attempt to hold down a laugh. It erupted out of her, loud and cloddish, like a hen taken by surprise. It was a sound so far from ladylike and so blissfully out of character that Henry erupted too. Soon they were crying on the floor with laughter. Their cheeks were stained with tears, clearing the taste of dough and blackberries out of their mouths with the sweet taste of each other’s lips.
It had been so many years since he had tasted anything resembling those sour danishes, and many more years since Loraine was taken by the earth. He had been happy once, loved. He could not let go of that feeling, that taste. Therefore, Henry could not stop drinking the water. He let it rush in him. It felt as if his sickbed evaporated, the years shed away. It formed a small waterfall out of the corners of his mouth and below his bottom lip and pooled in the dimple of his concave chest. He drank in hot pursuit of an escape. But that birthday evening, those feelings eluded him in the bottom of his glass. So he took up his quest again, this time in the pitcher on his bedside table. His joints creaked with the effort of lifting it to drink, but he found it was not there either, and the taste of those sour danishes in his mouth was waning fast. He had not had enough. He dragged himself out of bed, his swollen belly sloshing on the hardwood floor under his linen nightshirt, then army-crawled to his filled bathtub, where he drank the murky bathwater as a pig would out of a trough. He drank with increased fervor and desperation, half of his head submerged at a time, mouth wide under the surface—he gulped.
When she came back the second time, the first glimpse he caught of her in his mind’s eye was her beautiful curled hair, the color of freshly made caramel. Then she came back to him in waves, deep impressions of the details he had clung to over the years as his memories faded. He recalled his intimate knowledge of the shadows that gathered in her collarbone each evening. Then he could feel the delicate sag of skin that appeared above her belly button after she had recovered from giving birth to their five children. Her bouquet of scents came in next–warmed pencil shavings and lavender when she came in from doing laundry in the spring. He could taste the tang of her. Then finally, he caught sight of the one caramel curl that always seemed to fall between her eyes. Her delicate wrist shooed the ringlet away as she would a housefly. He craved her details deeply. The water was bringing her back. The water made her real.
He drank his way toward her into confusion and a brutal headache. Then, his whole body ballooned. At first glance a passerby may have assumed there was some large fish on the floor, seeking the distant ocean. But no one passed by. After a half-hour, his knees gave out from under him. Still, he drank, pausing only to vomit–his body’s last desperate plea to desist. But the call for caution was nothing compared to the appetite of his starved soul. Instead, he was beside himself with pain that he had lost his only shot at retrieving his wife. He needed more to bring his sweet Loraine back. He continued to drink.
By that time he was able to resurrect entire memories in increasing detail–like echoes in reverse. The heat of an old argument warmed his age-spotted skin. What had started out as some petty confusion over how many chairs to have at the Thanksgiving table had degenerated into a chaotic review of disagreements and resentments long archived and stowed away within them. He laughed at it now, how their anger with one another had somehow passed undetected by their guests, despite the bitter glares they cast at one another across the table. How, after everyone had left, they had taken up arms again, only to end up in a torrid of sheets and a smattering of tiny bruises as they worked out their fury, without words, in their marriage bed. He wove his way through his own archives until he was once more cradling her frigid foot in his lap, numb with sorrow, desperately trying to massage the heat out of her feverish head and distribute it throughout her once colorful and buoyant body. But this time he abandoned his grief for the joy of her. With his inventory complete, Henry simply turned it over in his mind and began again at their beginning, when they were just two children, barely able to walk, playing together by the stream while the women of the town gathered together to wash. He remembered how transfixed he had been, even then, by the delicate curve of her upper lip. The feeling of the smooth stones in his uncalloused hands as they threw rocks into the ebbing waters.
When eventually his eldest son, Christophe, came into check on his father, he found Henry passed out on the bathroom floor, the tub overturned, in a pool of water—twitching like a goldfish, with a smile on his face.
Henry spent the rest of his days laughing across the table with his long-deceased wife, making love to her as if she were on earth once more. Cherishing the curve of her body alongside his own, the musk of her plaited hair on her pillow, how it smelled like warm, cut hay and the bright sun. He could bask in her scent for eternity, and gladly, having missed it for so long. He passed a few days later, of what would become known as cerebral edema. Although if you asked him he would argue that he greeted death with a soul finally satiated after thirsting so long.