At my open window, with Danny beside me, I count the days.

  Continue reading for an excerpt from

  We Are Water

  Available Now

  We Are Water is a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy, from Wally Lamb, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True.

  After 27 years of marriage and three children, Annie Oh—wife, mother, outsider artist—has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her success. They plan to wed in the Oh family’s hometown of Three Rivers in Connecticut. But the wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora’s Box of toxic secrets—dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs’ lives.

  We Are Water is a layered portrait of marriage, family, and the inexorable need for understanding and connection, told in the alternating voices of the Ohs—nonconformist, Anna; her ex-husband, Orion, a psychologist; Ariane, the do-gooder daughter, and her twin, Andrew, the rebellious only son; and free-spirited Marissa, the youngest. It is also a portrait of modern America, exploring issues of class, changing social mores, the legacy of racial violence, and the nature of creativity and art.

  With humor and compassion, Wally Lamb brilliantly captures the essence of human experience and the ways in which we search for love and meaning in our lives.

  Excerpt from We Are Water

  Chapter one

  Annie Oh

  viveca’s wedding dress has a name: Gaia. It’s lovely. Layers of sea green silk chiffon, cap sleeves, an empire waist, an asymmetrical A-line skirt with the suggestion of a train. I forget the designer’s name; Ianni something. He’s someone Viveca knows from the Hellenic Fashion Designers Association. It arrived at the apartment from Athens yesterday, and Minnie has pressed it and hung it on the door of Viveca’s closet.

  Gaia: I Googled it yesterday after Viveca’s dress arrived and wrote down what it said on an index card. It’s on the bureau. I pick it up and read.

  After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth and the everlasting foundation of the Olympian gods. She was first the mother of Uranus, the ancient Greek embodiment of heaven, and later his sexual mate. Among their children were the mountains, the seas, the Cyclopes, and the Hundred-Handed giants who aided Zeus in his successful battle against the Titans, whom Gaia had also birthed.

  Chaos, incest, monsters, warring siblings: it’s a strange name for a wedding dress.

  The three Vera Wang dresses Viveca had sent over for me to consider were delivered yesterday, too. (Vera is one of Viveca’s clients at the gallery.) There’s an ivory-colored dress, another that has a tinge of pink, a third that’s pearl gray. Minnie spread them across the bed in the guest bedroom, but after she went home, I carried them into our bedroom and hung them to the left of the Gaia. This morning when I woke up, they scared me. I thought for a split second that four women were standing over by the closet. Four brides—one in gorgeous green, three in off-white.

  Viveca is abroad still. She went to Athens a week ago for a fitting but then decided to stay several more days to visit with an elderly aunt (her father’s surviving sister) and to finalize the details for our wedding trip to Mykonos. She called me from there last night. “Sweetheart, it’s the land of enchantment here. Have you looked at the pictures I e-mailed you?” I said I hadn’t—that I’d been more in the studio than at the apartment for the last several days, which was a lie. “Well, do,” she said. “Not that photographs can really capture it. In daylight, the Aegean is just dazzling, and at sunset it turns a beautiful cobalt blue. And the villa I’ve rented? Anna, it’s to die for! It sits high on a hill above town and there’s a panoramic view of the harbor and some of the other islands in the archipelago. The floors are white marble from a quarry in Paros, and there’s an oval pool, an indoor fountain, a terrace that looks out on a grape arbor that’s unbelievably lush and lovely.” Why a pool if the sea is right there? I wonder. “The houses here are sun bleached to the most pristine white, Anna, and there are hibiscus growing along the south side of the villa that, against that whiteness, are the most intense red you could ever imagine. I just can’t wait to share it all with you. You’ll see. This place is an artist’s dream.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” I said. “For an artist who’s interested in capturing what’s pretty and picturesque. I’m not.”

  “I know that, Anna. It’s what drew me to your work from the start.”

  “It?” I said. “What’s ‘it’?”

  There was a long pause before she answered me. “Well, it’s like I was telling that couple that bought those two pieces from your Pandora series. Your work looks people in the eye. It comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. But this will be a vacation, sweetheart. You work so hard. Mykonos is my gift to you, Anna. My gift to us. Four weeks surrounded by what’s lovely and life affirming at the start of our married life. Don’t we deserve that?”

  The room went blurry with my tears. “I miss you,” I said.

  “I miss you, too, Anna. I miss you, too.”

  It’s not that I don’t want to be with her in Mykonos. But four whole weeks? In all the years I’ve been at it, I’ve never been away from my work that long. Well, to be fair, she’ll be away from her work, too. “It’s not a very savvy business decision,” she said when she told me she’d rented the villa for the entire month of October. “People will have awakened from their Hamptons comas by then, reengaged with the city, and be ready to buy. But I said to myself, ‘Viveca, the hell with commerce for once! Seize the day!’ I smiled and nodded when she said that, swallowing back my ambivalence instead of voicing it.

  You do that for someone you love, right? Keep your mouth shut instead of opening it. Bend on the things that are bendable. This wedding, for instance. It’s Viveca who wants to make our union “official.” And where we’ll be married: I’ve had to bend on that, too. Okay, fine. I get it. Connecticut has legalized gay marriage and New York hasn’t. But why not book a place in some pretty little Gold Coast town closer to the city? Cos Cob or Darien? Why the town where Orion and I raised our kids? She’d wanted to surprise me, she said. Well, she’d achieved her objective, but it’s . . . awkward. It’s uncomfortable.

  Okay then, Annie. If you have misgivings, why go through with it? Why not tell her you’ve had second thoughts? . . . I look up, look around our well-appointed apartment, and I see a part of the answer hanging on the wall in the hallway: the framed poster announcing the opening of my first show at viveca c. The headline, annie oh: a shock to the system!, and beneath it, the full-color photo of my sculpture Birthings: the row of headless mannequins, their bloody legs spread wide, their wombs expelling serial killers. Speck, Bundy, Gacy. Monsters all.

  My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable: she’d put it better than I ever could have. It’s one of the reasons why I love Viveca. The fact that she not only promotes my work and sells it at prices I couldn’t have imagined, but that she also gets it. And yes, her apartment is as lovely as she is, and our lovemaking feels satisfying and safe. But for me that may be the foundation of our intimacy: the fact that she understands what my work attempts to do.

  Orion never did. But then again, why would he have? I’d been so guarded all those years. A twenty-seven-year marriage of guardedness, based on nothing more than the fact that he was a man and, therefore, not to be trusted with the worst of my secrets.

  But come on, Annie. You haven’t told Viveca your secrets either. Why is that? Because you’re afraid she might change her mind? Stop taking care of you? Be honest. Your own mother dies in the flood that night. Then your father drinks himself out of your life. And your foster parents were just stop-gaps. They fed you, clothed you, but never loved you. You wanted the real thing. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Orion and Viveca are the same age? That both your ex-husband and your wife-to-be are seven years older than you?

  No, that’s irrelevant. . . . Or is it? Is that the real reason why you married him? Why you’re marrying her? Because Little Orphan Annie still needs someone to take care of her?

  I need to stop this. Stop being so hard on myself. I love Viveca. And I loved Orion, too. . . . But why? Because he had taken me under his wing? Because for the first time in my life, intimacy with a man was enjoyable? Safe? Maybe not as safe as it feels with Viveca, or as wild as it had been with Priscilla. But pleasurable enough. And very pleasurable for him. It made me a little envious, sometimes. The intensity of his . . .

  No. I wanted to give him pleasure. But his pleasure had a price.

  No, that’s not fair. It had been a joint decision. I had stopped using my diaphragm because we both wanted a child. But when my pregnancy became a fact instead of a desire, I was suddenly seized with fear. What if I wasn’t up to the job of motherhood? What if I miscarried again like I had that time when I was seventeen? I had never told Orion about my first pregnancy, and I held off for a week or more before I told him about this one. The night I finally did tell him, Orion promised me that he was going to be the best father he could—the opposite of his own absentee father. We cried together, and I let him assume that mine were happy tears, the same as his. They weren’t. But little by little my fear subsided, and I began to feel happy. Excited. Until I had that ultrasound. When I learned we were having twins, I got scared all over again. And when, in the delivery room, it looked like we might lose Andrew, I was terrified. . . .

  Still, I loved being a mother. Loved them both as soon as I laid eyes on them, and more and more in the weeks that followed. Until then, I hadn’t understood how profound love could be.

  Not that having two of them wasn’t challenging. Demanding of everything I had to give and then some. While Orion was away at work all day, I was home changing diapers, feeding them, grabbing ten-minute naps whenever—miraculously, rarely—their sleeping sched ules coincided. And true to his word, Orion was a devoted father. When he’d get home from the college and see them, his face would light up. He’d bathe them, walk with one of them in each of his arms, rock them until they’d both gone down for the night. Part of the night, anyway. Andrew was a colicky baby, and it would drive me crazy when he’d cry and wake up his sister. And then Ariane would start crying, too. Our marriage suffered for that first year or so. Orion would come home tired from dealing with his patients and give whatever energy he had left to the twins. I resented that he didn’t have much left for me. But I didn’t have much left for him, either. Double the work, double the mess. Carting both of them to the pediatrician’s when one of them was sick. And then going back there the following week when Andrew came down with what Ariane was just getting over. Sitting in that waiting room with those other mothers—the ones with singletons who were always making lunch dates. Playdates. They’d ooh and ah over my two but never invite me to join them. Not that I even wanted to, but why hadn’t they ever asked? They always acted so confident, those moms. It was as if everyone but me had read some book about how to be a good mother. . . .

  But I had read the books. Consulted Dr. Spock so often that the binding cracked in half and the pages started falling out. But I had no mother of my own to rely on the way those other women did. Those grandmothers who could spell their daughters. Babysit for them, advise them. . . .

  Still, I could have had that kind of help. How many times had Orion’s mother volunteered to drive up from Pennsylvania and help out? Maria was retired by then, available. She kept offering. It’s just that she acted so goddamned superior! Made me feel even more insecure. When I got that breast infection? Said I was thinking of bottle-feeding the babies because I was in such pain? She just looked at me—stared at me like how could I be so selfish? And then, without even asking me, she had that woman from the La Leche League call and talk me out of it.

  Because she wanted what was best for her grandchildren. . . .

  And she always knew what was best. Right? Not me, their own mother. She never said as much, but I got the message. Her son had made a mistake, had married beneath himself. He should have stayed with what’s-her-name.

  You remember her name, Annie. How could you forget when Maria was always bringing her up to him? “Thea’s gotten a fellowship, Thea’s gotten her book taken.” Thea this, Thea that, like I wasn’t even standing there. So no, I didn’t want her help or her advice. Who was she to pity me?

  But you showed her, didn’t you? Didn’t even go to her funeral. Hey, I couldn’t go. Both of the twins had come down with the chicken pox. What was I supposed to do—leave them with a sitter?

  Except I did leave them with one. I had just started making my art. I wanted to be down there working on it, not upstairs with two sick kids. So I hired that Mrs. Dunkel to watch them. . . . He was down there in Pennsylvania for almost three weeks! Sitting with Maria at the hospital. Calling me with the daily reports. “I don’t think it’s going to be long now. She seems to be going downhill fast.” And then, in the next phone call, it would be, “She was better today. Awake, alert. I fed her some pudding, and she managed to eat about half of it.” The twins were running fevers, crying, clinging to me. But I was supposed to celebrate because she had had a few bites of pudding? And okay, Maria was his mother. But I was his wife, the mother of his kids. We needed him, too. I was going out of my mind.

  But that was no excuse. I shouldn’t have hit him even if he wouldn’t stop scratching his chicken pox. I’d tell Ariane to stop, and she would. But not Andrew. So I slapped him on his tush, harder than I meant to. At first he just looked at me, shocked, and then he cried and cried. I was so scared. What kind of a mother hit her child that hard? It left a mark. But by the next day, it faded. If I had let him keep scratching, he would have had scars for the rest of his life.

  And what was Orion supposed to do? He couldn’t abandon his mother, no matter how long she lingered. But when she finally did die, there were the arrangements to make, the funeral, cleaning out her condo for resale. . . . And that babysitter hadn’t worked out anyway. How could I concentrate on my work when they were up there crying, calling for me, banging on the basement door?

  But I did not boycott Maria’s funeral. I stayed home with our sick kids. And then he tells me that Thea flew in to pay her respects. That the two of them went out to dinner after the ser vices. And I started wondering about how else she might have comforted him. . . .

  Okay, Annie, you were insecure, even if, deep down, you knew he wouldn’t cheat on you. But then when he finally gets everything squared away down there in Harrisburg, he pulls into the driveway and walks in the door like the returning hero. “Daddy! Daddy’s home! Give us a pony ride, Daddy. Read us a bedtime story.” He shows up again, they’re over the worst of their chicken pox, and suddenly I’m irrelevant. The fun parent was back. The good cop. Who cares about Mommy now that Daddy’s back? And I resented that. Held on to that resentment until we landed in couples counseling.

  Because he didn’t value my work. That’s why we were having trouble. Because everything was about his work, and mine didn’t count. I was just supposed to be home with the kids all day, at their beck and call, and then grab an hour or two after they were finally down for the night, when I was too exhausted to tap into my creativity. Half the time I’d be down there, trying to work on something, and I’d fall asleep. He’d have to come down, wake me up, and lead me upstairs to bed.

  But boy, I balked at that marriage counseling idea. I thought the deck would be stacked. Me versus two psychologists. I was afraid she was going to tell me to give up my art. But instead Suzanne validated what I was doing. Helped Orion to see that my work mattered, too. And she helped me to realize the extent of his grieving for his mother. “Now that my mother has passed, it’s like we’re both orphans,” he said, trying hard to hold back his tears. “I mean, I was the result of my mother’s affair with a married man. A Chinese man who wouldn’t leave his Chinese wife for his Italian girlfriend, and then . . . took a powder. Just goddamned disappeared.” He had never said much about his father’s absence from his life, and until then I’d assumed he just accepted it. “The only thing I ever got from him was his last name,” he said. “And it’s different. I know it is. I had my mother a hell of a lot longer than you had yours, but . . .” He broke down in sobs then, and I ached as I witnessed the pain he was in. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder. Pulled tissues from the box on the table and handed them to him. Watched him wipe his eyes, blow his nose. For the next several seconds, none of us spoke. Suzanne kept looking at me. Waiting for me to say something. And in the middle of that uncomfortable silence, I almost risked telling him my truths. My secrets were on the tip of my tongue. But then Suzanne glanced at her clock and said we had to wind up. That we’d gone a little bit over and her two o’clock would be waiting.

  I don’t know. Maybe if we had kept going to those sessions, I would have told him. But we didn’t. Things were better between Orion and me—more like they’d been in the beginning. The closeness, the way he could get me to laugh. Like that time he took me to Boston—Haymarket Square—and taught me how to slurp oysters from the half-shell. Took me that first time to the Gardner Museum. . . . And being a mom had started getting a little easier by then. The twins were growing out of the “terrible twos.” They had begun to amuse each other, catching bugs out in the backyard or going down to the stream out back to capture tadpoles and crayfish. That bond they’d developed gave me a reprieve. I could sit near them. Keep an eye on them while I was sketching out new ideas for pieces I wanted to make. And thanks to those counseling sessions, Orion had become more supportive of what I was doing. What I was trying to do. He began spelling me on the weekends so that I could do my work, go on my hunts for new materials. When I won that “best in show” prize? It was Orion who had urged me to enter the competition.