The Wrong Way for Water

The lettuce was dying and it was supposed to be Maya's fault, so Maya had a stake in this.

"It's just thirsty," she said. "It's been a hundred degrees for four days. We water it."

"We did water it," Soren said. He was crouched at the end of the row with his notebook open on his knee. "This morning. It got worse after."

"Then water it more."

"That's not how thirsty works." He chewed the end of his pencil. "You don't get more thirsty when you drink."

Maya looked at the lettuce. The outer leaves had gone limp and dark and faintly see-through, like wet paper. The inner ones were curling. She pressed one between two fingers and it had no spring in it at all.

"Granddad put something on it," she said. "Yesterday. From the shed."

They went to the shed. There was a yellow bag, torn open, half empty, sitting on the bench. Soren read the side of it out loud.

"Soil conditioner. Mineral salts." He stopped. "Salts."

"It's for plants," Maya said. "It says plant food basically."

"It says salts." He turned the bag. "He put salt on the dirt and then we put water on the salt."

Maya was already not listening. She walked back out to the row and crouched and put her whole hand flat on the soil. It was wet. Properly wet. She dug a finger down and the wet went all the way.

"There's plenty of water," she said. "The dirt's soaked. The plant's standing in water and it's drying out."

"That's the part that doesn't work," Soren said, sitting beside her. "Water's right there. The roots are right in it. Why won't they drink."

Neither of them said anything for a second. A cicada wound up somewhere and ran down.

"My cousin," Maya said slowly. "On the boat. He said the worst thing you can do is drink the ocean. When you're stranded. He said it's the thing that kills people who panic."

"Drinking water kills you."

"Drinking sea water. He said it pulls the water back out of you. Out of your own body." She frowned. "I thought he was making it sound dramatic."

Soren had stopped moving. "Say that again. The water comes out of you."

"Because the sea is saltier than you are. He said your insides try to even it out and the only way to even it out is to send your own water the wrong direction."

Soren looked at the lettuce. Then he looked at the soaked, salted dirt the lettuce was standing in.

"The dirt is the sea," he said.

"The dirt is the sea," Maya said.

They both leaned over the limp dark leaf at the same time.

"Okay," Soren said, fast now, talking with his hands. "A root is little bags of water. Cells. Each one has a skin."

"A membrane."

"And water can go through the skin. But not the salt. The salt's stuck on one side." He pressed his two palms together to make a wall. "So you've got plant water on this side and salty dirt water on that side, and the water just, it goes. Toward the salt."

"Why toward the salt, though." Maya wasn't doubting him. She wanted the bottom of it. "Why does it want the salt side."

"It doesn't want anything." Soren stared at his hands. "It's just, there's more room on the salt side. The salt's taking up spots. So less of the water's free over there. And water spreads out until it's the same everywhere. So it leaves the side where it's crowded with itself and goes to the side that's crowded with salt."

"Until it's even."

"Until it's even. Except it can never get even, because the salt's still salt. So it never stops pulling." He looked up. "It pulled the water out of the roots. Into the dirt. The plant's standing in water and bleeding water at the same time."

Maya sat down hard in the dirt.

"That's why drinking the sea is worse than drinking nothing," she said. "Nothing is just nothing. The sea actively reaches in."

"It reaches in," Soren said quietly, writing it. "It uses your own skin against you. Every cell. The water goes the wrong way through a door that's only supposed to open one direction."

Maya thought about every cell in her own arm, all of them little bags, all of them holding their water against the pull of whatever was outside. Holding it right now. The whole time. She had never once told them to.

"So how do we save the lettuce," she said.

"Same way you'd save the guy on the boat." Soren scrambled up. "You don't give him more salt. You make his outside less salty than his inside again. You flood it. Fresh water. Tons of it. Until the dirt isn't the sea anymore."

They didn't ask Granddad. They dragged the hose to the end of the row and Maya cranked it full open and they let it run, not a sprinkle, a flood, plain water pouring through the soil and out the low end of the bed in a brown stream, carrying the salt away with it, the whole row of dirt going from sea back to river while they stood there in the spray.

They ran it a long time. Longer than felt reasonable. The cicadas started up again.

By evening, when the heat let go and the light went orange, the smallest inner leaf of the nearest plant had lifted. Just one. It had been lying flat and now it was tilted up, the way a leaf is supposed to sit, holding its own water again because they'd finally let it.

Maya knelt and put her face level with it and watched it not move, and waited, and watched it slowly, slowly keep not falling back down.