The car stalled and stopped. Our father muttered a curse under his breath. He thought we couldn’t hear him. He placed both hands on the wheel and turned around to face us.
“First of all, the Water Authority is not a person,” he explained. “If they made anyone sick, there would be reports about it—news texts, public hearings. People would notice.”
“Will noticed,” I pointed out.
“Second,” said our father, ignoring me, “the Water Authority takes care of us. They don’t make us sick.”
“Maybe it was an accident.”
Our father sighed. “I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for all of us. But your mother is getting good medicine, and the doctors say she can get better. She just needs rest.”
“She won’t get better,” said Will.
“Will!” I said.
“She won’t, Vera. She’s sick. As long as she keeps drinking their water, she’s going to stay sick.”
“So what should she do? Stop drinking?”
“We should take her someplace where the water is clean.”
“Basin?”
“Basin’s no better.”
“What about us? Shouldn’t we stop drinking the water?”
Will nodded. “We’ll get sick too before long.”
“Stop that talk!” said our father, interrupting us. “We’re not going anywhere. This is our home.” The car suddenly lurched forward, throwing us against our seats. “Now I want you to quit it, Will,” our father said. “Your mother is going to get better. She will.”
Normally Will wouldn’t quiet down so easily. Even if he was wrong, he spoke with such conviction that it seemed he must be right. In those days, when we argued, I usually gave in before he did. Everyone did. He had the kind of intensity that made adults look to him as a leader and had kids currying his favor.
But Will didn’t respond, and our father drove the rest of the way in silence.
When we arrived at the center, I grabbed a free cart while our father and Will unloaded the empty bottles. The center was crowded with other families picking up their weekly supply, and we stopped to chat with people we knew. The Jarviks lived in our apartment complex, and their son Tyler was in Will’s class. Tyler was a skinny boy with acne who coughed frequently and picked at the scabs on his face. Will didn’t like him, but he pretended to, just to be polite. I felt sorry for Tyler, because he never had enough to drink at lunchtime and was always begging other kids to trade him water or syn-juice for the hard soy crackers his mother packed in his lunch box. But the crackers were stale and crumbly, and he rarely found a taker.
A man was selling coupons from a ration book, and I suggested we buy a pack. Our father said we had enough water for the week and didn’t need any more coupons. This wasn’t exactly true. We weren’t as thirsty as Tyler, but we never had enough water either. For weeks the only work my father had was part-time—repairing hoses for a small business that did a decent trade in used rubber parts. He made barely enough money to pay for a nurse to check in on my mother. But I didn’t want to disagree with him—not after his disagreement with Will—and I knew he really meant we couldn’t afford more water. Everyone wanted more water; they just couldn’t pay for it.
There was plenty of water for sale at the driller’s market downtown; but here, in the distribution center, the only water was rationed, government-issued, in familiar blue and white bottles. It wasn’t “real” water, Will explained, but desalinated water. This meant it came from the ocean and was processed in a giant factory where all the minerals were removed and chemicals added so it was fit for drinking. The bottles didn’t disclose their origin, but you could tell the water was desalinated because it felt slippery on the tongue and had a tangy aftertaste—like licking a burnt match. After a long, dry summer, the Water Authority imported extra bottles of seawater in trade with the Great Coast for building materials like limestone and granite.