The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  Now she watched her daughter frown and change the subject. “Soft,” Wendy said, as she sat down on the edge of the bed and tested the egg-crate mattress. “Sort of strange.”

  “How was your visit?” Wiloma asked.

  “Also strange,” Wendy said. Stranger than usual. Sarah made cassoulet—she said it had taken her two days and she was upset when Win didn’t like it. But it tasted a lot like baked beans to us. Win gave Courteney some of his, and Courteney threw it in the fireplace. Dad and Sarah got into an argument over some bills. Then after supper Dad took us into that den of his and started showing us maps of this place in Massachusetts. Some of them were topographic maps, those green ones with the lines. Then he had these old ones, not really old but copies of old ones, that he said he’d ordered from the Geological Survey people in Washington. He kept us in there looking at them for an hour.”

  Wiloma looked at her sharply. “What was that all about?”

  “Grunkie. I think. Dad showed us, on the old maps, this place where Grunkie used to live. And then he showed us the new ones, and how that place had been covered by a reservoir. He said there was a big hill or something at the edge of it that Grunkie still owns, and that you and Uncle Henry had been born there.”

  Wiloma stared at the armchair and tried to sort out what Waldo might be up to. She had mentioned the land to him casually, when he’d stopped by to drop off some papers just after her visit to her uncle. It had seemed like an interesting fact, a drop of oil to smooth their awkward conversation, but she’d known as soon as she mentioned it that she should have kept quiet. “Don’t you dare go giving that to the Church,” he’d said, as if he had any right to tell her what to do. “Don’t do anything with it until I have a chance to get it appraised.”

  She had shrugged off his comments, thinking them just another example of his reflexive attempts to meddle in her financial affairs. But she couldn’t imagine why he’d gathered those maps, or why he’d shown them to the children.

  “It was interesting,” Wendy said. “How come you never told us about that? This huge area, all these villages being drowned—isn’t that amazing? I mean it’s awful, in a way, but still …”

  “I never saw those places,” Wiloma said. Her stomach was beginning to ache. “The reservoir was filled before I was bom.”

  “Dad says Grunkie lived there, and that your grandparents had a farm there before they had the place in Coreopsis. It’s so amazing—do you think Grunkie remembers it?”

  “Of course he does,” Wiloma said. “He just doesn’t like to talk about it.” She didn’t either; she had heard the story so often during her childhood that she couldn’t stand to repeat it.

  “They stole it from us,” Da used to say. He’d held her and Henry captive for hours at the table in Coreopsis, telling and retelling his tales of the Paradise Valley as if he could bring his dead son back with his words or recover his lost life. She’d known, even then, that those tales were what kept him from functioning as any kind of surrogate father. “Those men in suits, those Boston men—it was Curley and his gang, all that Boston gang, they stole the ground out from under our feet.”

  On and on he’d gone, about the engineers and the politicians and the cover-ups and the lies; about the woods chopped down and the buildings razed and the bodies exhumed from the cemeteries. And then about what had happened to the twenty-five hundred people who’d been displaced at the height of the Depression—how some, such as Wiloma’s father, had migrated to the nearby towns on the boundary of the watershed, while others, such as he and his wife, had left Massachusetts altogether and wandered through western New York until they found someplace where they felt safe.

  “Someplace cheap enough,” Da had said. “Not just safe enough, cheap enough—those bastards hardly gave us any thing. Farms that had been in our families for generations, and what did they give us? Jack shit.”

  Wiloma had heard those tales so many times that she almost knew them by heart, but she never thought about them anymore. The detox team had pulled them out by the roots, disarmed them so they’d never haunt her again. When her uncle had mentioned the land, she’d been able to let the pictures he’d called up roll right past her.

  It’ll be yours when I go, he’d said. Yours and Henry’s. She’d smiled at him and ignored his words and focused her healing energies on his chest. And now Waldo had crept up behind her with this, using Wendy to prick her unprotected flank. He knew the kids came home and told her what went on at his house; sometimes he said things to them that he was afraid to say to her face, knowing the message would reach her. But she wasn’t sure what he thought he’d gain by prying at this part of her past.

  “I’ve got to go to work at noon,” Wendy said. “Want me to do anything before I go?”

  “Maybe clean up your room? I want the house to look nice for Grunkie tomorrow.”

  Wendy nodded and left. Below her, Wiloma heard Win humming. All day long his head bobbed to the signals of the Walkman his father had given him. He mowed the lawn with it clipped to the back of his pants and fell asleep at night with the tiny black pads still shooting messages into his brain. He was sixteen, he was going through a phase. He hummed with no sense that his humming was tuneless. Sometimes Wiloma dreamed of slipping one of her Life in the Spirit seminar tapes into his machine when he was asleep.

  She gathered herself together and visualized her list for the day. Vacuum the living room, she thought. Wash the windows. Buy groceries. Go to the dentist—she knew she shouldn’t, but a filling had fallen out and she couldn’t pray it back into place. Last night, while she’d been lecturing, her whole left jaw had ached. She had looked into the window behind her group and seen her face, twisted with pain, reflected back to her. Her mirrored image had so resembled her brother’s unhappy face that she’d thought for a minute that he was there.

  Don’t think about Henry, she ordered herself. Don’t think about Waldo. Don’t think about Uncle Brendan’s land.

  She pictured each of these thoughts as a virus, crystalline and threatening, and then she surrounded each virus with the clouds of red and green particles that were her mental antibodies. She saw each thought sink into darkness, rendered harmless by the healing powers of her mind.

  4

  FOR TWO WEEKS, WENDY AND WIN HAD BEEN HALFHEARTEDLY trying to get the yard back into some sort of shape for Grunkie, whose new room overlooked the entire unkempt length. Win had mowed the grass three times; she’d weeded the flowerbeds and trimmed the shrubs. Both of them had worked to move the matted drifts of old leaves toward the fence at the rear of the lot, and neither of them had said much about how furious they were. Another person to take care of, another person to whom they’d have to lie. The heap of leaves was already enormous.

  All that smiling, Wendy thought now, as she left her mother and bypassed her messy room and fled to the waiting pile of leaves. The pallid compliments she’d offered on Grunkie’s new room, the way she’d left the Church motto untouched when what she really wanted was to tear the linen in half and then scream at her mother, Don’t bring him here! Don’t we have enough trouble without him? Can’t you leave him alone? —her lies had made her face feel as stiff and deceitful as a Chinese mask.

  She seized the pitchfork with relief and attacked the compacted leaves on the ground. As she lofted them to the top of the pile, she heard Harmon Bayer working on the other side of the fence. Snip, she heard. Harmon was edging the grass along his neat beds of ivy. Snip, snip, snip, and then a sneeze, a snuffle, and a wheeze. Harmon had allergies and his breathing was almost as loud as the sound of his shears. She wished him swollen eyes and a streaming nose. Harmon had built the ugly six-foot barrier between their yards, where once there had been only a knee-high hedge as porous as a sieve. When the Silverstons had lived in Harmon’s house, Wendy and Win and the Silverston children had flowed through the hedge like water.

  Wendy paused and dropped her lower jaw and stretched her mouth until her face began to relax. Then she at
tacked the leaves again and tossed wads of them over her shoulder. She was rewarded with the pleasure of hearing the snips subside and the wheezes increase on the other side of the fence. Harmon, she knew, was acutely aware of her but would never acknowledge her presence. She whacked leaves against the boards and remembered how Harmon had bought the Silverstons’ house during her freshman year in high school, not long after her father had left them to marry Sarah and her mother had started flirting with bizarre religions.

  The yard had been beautiful up until then—a long row of roses trained on a trellis, smooth beds of myrtle around the silver maple, shrubs and ferns and rhododendrons and clumps of iris and daylilies. The lawn had stretched like a piece of velour from the flowerbeds back to the low hedge. Then her father had taken her and Win for a stroll by the lake and sliced their lives in two.

  They’d been walking. The wind had been blowing. The waves had rolled gently on brown sand scattered with roots and weeds. They’d been chatting about everyday things and then her father had said, “I have to tell you something important,” and had severed the sinew and bone of their lives so cleanly that she’d felt no pain at first. He’d gone on talking, heaping one sentence on another until his message was clear, but only weeks later, after he’d packed and moved and introduced them to Sarah, had she understood that the first words of his first sentence held the shape of the rest of her life.

  She bent down to pick the twigs and leaves from the myrtle on her side of the fence, thinking of that horrible time when her father had first left and her mother had drifted so far away. She and Win had turned wild almost overnight, drinking and smoking and slinking around as if they’d been possessed. They’d become expert at cheating and lying and hiding, and for a while they’d occupied themselves by setting fires. That stack of old wood by the lake, Wendy thought, remembering the pale, unstoppable flames. And then she remembered the clothes she and Win had stolen, and the notebooks and records and cigarettes, and the way everything they did had seemed to flow past their mother like smoke. They’d found her sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed one day, poring over a pamphlet that had come to her in the mail.

  “What is this?” Wendy remembered asking. She could still hear the words that signaled her mother’s seduction by the Church of the New Reason.

  “It’s a way to make sense of things,” her mother had said. “Nothing exists external to our Spirits. Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas. So if we change our ideas, we change the world—I’m working on changing my ideas. I’m reprogramming myself.”

  “But what’s the point?” Win had asked.

  “The point,” their mother had said, “is that there has to be something to life besides missing your father and raising you. I hate the way I feel. Our family’s falling apart. And there’s nothing I can do about any of it.”

  Wendy and Win had redoubled their efforts to be bad, as if this might somehow bring their mother back to earth. But the extent of her self-deception was amazing. They told her the teachers who sent home angry notes were insane, that the clothes that appeared in the absence of money were gifts, that it had been Wendy’s girlfriend’s mother who had pierced Wendy’s ears four times.

  When they lied about their crimes, their mother closed her eyes and said, “Fine. Whatever you say.” Then she retreated to her dark room, which was empty by then except for her bed and her new books. She vanished from their lives, and their father, preoccupied with his newly pregnant new wife, seemed to vanish as well. When their mother took off on three-day retreats with her fellow believers, Wendy and Win skipped school and filled the house with stray classmates, falling deeper and deeper into trouble that neither of them enjoyed.

  A few weeks after Courteney’s birth, their mother had come home early one day and found the garbage cans smoking with pillows they’d accidentally set on fire, and the upstairs bathroom window smashed, and a twelve-year-old friend of Win’s throwing up on the living room rug. She had gazed at the overflowing ashtrays, the soiled walls, the broken records, and half-filled cups, and then she’d smiled strangely and said, “This doesn’t exist.”

  She had walked out the door; Wendy and Win had found her, hours later, sitting against a tree in the woods at the end of their street. They’d had to help her back to the house. They’d had to watch helplessly when the two men from the Church arrived for the evening’s planning session and found Wiloma on the floor repeating, I have nothing. Nothing is mine. The men had made phone calls while Win and Wendy watched. They’d arranged for Wiloma to visit the Church’s Healing Center in Boston for a few months, and they’d offered to board Wendy and Win in the home of a local Church family while she was gone. Both men had eyebrows so pale and fine as to be almost invisible.

  Wendy had called her father then, not knowing where else to turn, and he’d taken them into the horrid house he’d built for Sarah. He’d been furious with Wiloma at first, blaming her for her weakness; then, as he began to discover all that Wendy and Win had done, furious with them. He missed nothing. He smelled smoke on their hands, beer on their breath, lies on their tongues. He told them that even if their mother got better, they couldn’t live with her again unless they straightened out. They had looked at each other and gone underground as smoothly as snakes.

  He was firm, not cruel, but they couldn’t bear living with him. All that attention, Wendy remembered, as the mound of leaves rose up to her waist. All those eyes. Sarah had monitored their meals and grades and friends, counting their clothes when she did the laundry and wanting to know where this blouse had come from, how Win had torn those pants. Waldo had named the baby Courteney, setting her off from the matched set of W names he’d found so charming the first time around. Courteney reminded Win and Wendy daily that they had no part in their father’s new life.

  They’d dreamed of escape almost constantly during the four months their mother was gone; they’d dreamed, too, that she was in danger and needed their help. They did whatever their father and Sarah asked, hoping to convince them that they’d changed. Win signed up for soccer league and let the shaved sides of his head grow out. Wendy wore the prissy clothes that Sarah bought her. They shed their dangerous friends and brought up their grades and prayed that their father would accept their offerings and fail to discern what churned inside them. When their mother returned from Boston, smooth-faced and clear-eyed and seemingly sane, they sat down with their father and told him they wanted to go home.

  “I want you to be happy,” he said. “I want you to live where you choose.” He made a show of being reluctant to let them go, and of acting hurt over their decision, but in the end he’d given in without much fuss. Wendy recalled how she and Win had both felt, secretly, that he’d let them go so easily because he wanted to be alone with his new family.

  “Remember,” he said when they left. “Any trouble and you’re coming back here.”

  And because of that threat, and because they felt so guilty over their role in their mother’s collapse, they’d kept up their good behavior even after they moved back. Which meant, thought Wendy now, pretending to accept the Church and pretending not to be embarrassed by her mother’s friends and by what her mother had become.

  Harmon Bayer, snipping away on the other side of the fence, didn’t have to pretend about anything; Wendy almost envied his easy, self-righteous rudeness. He had built a small deck off his back door the summer after he moved in and then found that he objected to the view from his newly raised seat. He objected to the ragged lawn behind Wendy’s house, which was full of weeds and seldom mowed. He objected to the trellis, which had shattered during a storm and never been repaired. He objected to the unraked leaves and the rusting lawn furniture, but most of all he objected to the people from the Church of the New Reason, who sometimes gathered at the house on weekend afternoons.

  Thin men in oversize shirts, overweight women in droopy skirts, all of them sitting cross-legged in the long grass and sipping herbal tea while they took turns reading passag
es from their Manual—it was shabby, Wendy thought. It was infuriating. Of course Harmon had objected. She objected herself, she hated it, but she never dared say a word to her mother. That was the price of peace, and she and Win paid it so their mother wouldn’t crack again and so they wouldn’t have to return to their father. But on the day the fence started going up, she had wanted to slip through what was left of the hedge and tell Harmon she understood how he wanted to wall them off.

  She wondered, now, if she’d made a mistake not saying anything to her mother. The lives she and Win had lived these last eighteen months had been as false as the lives they’d lived at their father’s, and the strain of trying to act like angels had told on both of them. They backslid, now and again; Wendy knew that Win had started drinking beer with his friends, and she’d stolen a few things she hadn’t meant to, when her hands had reached out as if they’d had minds of their own. So far, they’d successfully hidden these acts from their mother. Win did well in school now and appeared in photos in the local paper with his legs kicked high as he shot a soccer ball toward the goal. No one would guess that he’d once started small fires all over town. And she’d gotten into college and had a decent summer job, and if she could just manage not to be trapped by this thing with Grunkie, she’d be gone in three months.

  All was quiet on Harmon’s side of the fence. Wendy scrambled up the heap of leaves and peered over the boards. Harmon was gone, at least for a while; the grass he’d been clipping was so neat it looked like AstroTurf. She dropped back down and stretched full length in the pile of leaves, letting herself sink into them until she was almost buried. Tomorrow, when Grunkie arrived, everything was bound to change. A dying man in their spare room, with her mother bent on converting him—it made her queasy just to think of it. She liked her great-uncle and longed to spare him from her mother’s interference, but that was only part of the reason she dreaded his arrival. Buried below that was the fear that he might take months or years to die and that her mother wouldn’t be able to manage him alone. And below that was panic at the prospect of being trapped here, balancing her mother’s fragile equilibrium and her great-uncle’s desire for peace while her own life remained perpetually on hold.