The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  5

  ROXANNE’S HANDS SLIPPED GENTLY OVER THE BONES OF BRENDAN'S left wrist, moved with long strokes up his forearm to his elbow, cradled the distorted joint, and then sailed along his upper arm and tapped and squeezed the shoulder blade under the fragile skin. When she paused at the back of Brendan’s neck, aligning her thumbs on his spine while her fingers embraced his weakened neck, Henry feared he might faint.

  Her hands were glossy with oil. Her nails were short and rounded. Through her white pants and her short white smock, Henry could see the outlines of her underwear. When she pushed the heels of her hands against Brendan’s shoulder, the flesh rose and gathered in bloodless peaks. Henry narrowed his eyes and shifted on his seat. As Roxanne moved from Brendan’s neck to his right wrist and then wrapped his arm in her hands, Henry imagined his own arm encircled and caressed.

  He felt the thumbs moving up the skin of his forearm, the fingers approaching the sensitive armpit, the first touch on his rib cage. He felt her breath on the back of his head. He felt the tips of her nails against his earlobe, their quick run down his neck, the pressure of the mound at the base of her thumb against his spine. And then, most delightfully (he had lost sight of Brendan completely, no longer saw his ruined flesh, no longer remembered that Brendan was in the room or that he, Henry, was not lying beneath Roxanne but sitting with crossed legs on a hard plastic chair), he felt Roxanne’s legs on him, her whole length pressed against his back. He imagined the feel of her breasts. He imagined how she might take her hand and grasp him, gently ….

  “How’s that feel?” she asked, and Henry opened his eyes and drew a breath he knew she heard. She was talking to Brendan, not to him. She was working gently over Brendan’s painful kidneys, lifting up the heels of her hand and using only her fingertips.

  Brendan mumbled, “It feels okay,” but he kept his eyes tightly closed and Henry wondered what he was thinking. On Hiva Oa, Henry imagined, Roxanne’s slender figure would be incandescent in bands of pale green and her feet would sink in the sand until her toes were buried. He could spin scenes around her golden hair and pale hands, the way that, when he’d been at his peak, he could envision neighborhoods rising from the featureless countryside. She was lovely, and he couldn’t keep his mind off her, and he couldn’t talk to his uncle while she was around.

  Roxanne began telling Brendan about her old job. She used to work at the baths in Saratoga Springs, she said. In the summer, half her clients had been Hasidic women from Brooklyn, who came to take the waters. They had arthritis, she told Brendan, that would make his seem like a joke; the lack of food in the Polish and German camps had done obscene things to their joints. They came every day, sometimes twice a day, and lay in the hot, effervescent water groaning with relief. Later, when she rubbed their twisted bones, they told her stories. She had heard things, she said, that she couldn’t have imagined. She had heard things she’d never forget.

  Brendan nodded thoughtfully at Roxanne’s tale and told her—not for the first time, Henry knew—about his stay in the Japanese internment camp in China. Henry closed his ears; he’d heard that story before. He studied Roxanne’s fingers, which continued to work while Brendan spoke. Roxanne moved her hands down to Brendan’s legs and Henry’s thighs tingled. He tried to think of other things—of his upcoming court date, of the money he owed his wife, Kitty, and could not possibly pay; of the fact that Kitty would have to leave their house very soon. Roxanne raised Brendan gently until he was sitting up on the white-draped table. Then, after averting her eyes while Brendan struggled into his pants, she transferred him to his wheelchair. She looked at Henry directly for the first time that morning.

  “Would you help him finish dressing?” she said. “Would that be okay? I’m running late this morning.”

  Henry nodded, unable to say a word. She had strong, shapely arms and legs, and when she turned the lilt and tilt of her walk reminded him of his mother. When she’d heard that his father was returning from the war, she had shed her hunched posture and unclenched her hands and danced with Henry and Wiloma in the kitchen of their cabin. She had balanced Wiloma, who couldn’t have been more than four, on her feet, so that Wiloma’s toes rested on her own insteps and Wiloma’s hands were clasped about her knees, and then she had danced as lightly as if she were not lifting Wiloma’s weight with every step. On the night of the accident, when the gray Plymouth had sailed off the curve of Boughten Hill and into the ravine below, she had been wearing a dress as white as Roxanne’s smock. White shoes, coral earrings, a coral belt and purse. There had been a frill around her neckline, Henry remembered—some sort of ruffle or flounce that fluttered when she moved. The coffin had been closed at the funeral and he’d never seen that dress again.

  Henry knelt and eased his uncle’s socks onto his twisted feet. “I can do that,” Brendan said, and his voice was so crisp that Henry winced.

  “I know,” Henry said. “I was trying to help.” All morning he’d failed to work the conversation around to the land, and now he realized that there was no point to this anyway. He had no money, no credit, no way to develop it. His uncle would hold on to the land as long as he lived, and Henry would go on visiting him each week. Since his own accident, when he’d felt his car lift off the ground so that he had, before the tree greeted him, flown the way his parents had, he’d felt a powerful need to cling to this last connection to them.

  Brendan’s left foot sat in his hand like a broken basket. The big toe, huge and distorted, splayed almost perpendicularly across the others, which rose up, curled back on themselves, and formed a knot. The arch humped up sharply, the heel spread swollen and callused; a lump larger than an ankle marred the back. Henry eased on the other sock and then the terry-cloth slippers. He tried not to watch Brendan’s hands, as useless as paws, struggling with his shirt. The shirt closed with Velcro squares, which Brendan thumped into place.

  “You should try a massage,” Brendan said. “Really. It feels pretty good.”

  His left hand flailed at his neck brace, and Henry bent over and fastened it properly. “Maybe next time,” Henry said. The weekend stretched before him, bleak and unpromising. He had forty dollars to carry him through to next Friday and nothing in his checking account. The bank had snipped his credit cards to bits.

  He stood behind the chair, released the brakes, and began wheeling Brendan out of the room and along the halls. Near the recreation center Brendan said, “There may not be a next time.”

  “What?” Henry said. “Why not?”

  “Because Wiloma’s planning to take me home with her. Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to set me up in her spare room and bombard me with positive thoughts until I’m cured.”

  “She didn’t tell me,” Henry said, thinking of the way Wiloma had averted her face last night on the far side of the storefront window. “She didn’t even ask me what I thought. But it’s not like she ever tells me anything.”

  They passed a man in another wheelchair, sitting perfectly still with his chin mashed against his collarbone and his hands drawn up over his heart. The hall smelled faintly of urine and disinfectant. “Would you rather stay here?” Henry asked. “Would you rather have the chemo?”

  “Of course not. But that doesn’t mean I want Wiloma’s heathen healers all over me. They’re not even Christians, never mind not being Catholic—as far as I can tell, they think they’re all part of some amorphous spirit. Like the cells in a big sponge, or something. I can’t believe she believes in that.”

  Near the solarium, along the hall that led to Brendan’s room, Henry stopped at the niche in front of the picture window. “So what do you want?” he asked.

  Below them the park stretched rolling and green, and a wedding party decked out in shades of lavender posed in front of some shrubs. A very large woman, perhaps the mother of the bride, shouted something Henry couldn’t hear at the driver of the limousine. Brendan’s left arm drifted up from his chair and hung in the air for a minute.

  “What I want?�
� he said. “What do I want?” His hand drifted back down to his lap, and then he said, “I want to go to Massachusetts. I want you to drive us there, so I can show you the land I’m leaving you and Wiloma. I want to see the reservoir. I want to see where your parents lived.”

  For a second, Henry saw the cabin in which he’d spent his first nine years. He saw the rough pine paneling and the wood-burning stove; he saw his mother bent over the kitchen table, snipping war reports from newspapers and magazines. He saw the map of the Pacific she kept on the wall and the pins dotting the islands where battles had raged, with and without his father: New Guinea, Makin, Eniwetok, Saipan. He heard his mother’s voice telling him how he’d leapt in her womb during the 1938 hurricane, which had started on the same day Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and so been ignored by almost everyone. Calamitous days, she’d told him. I carried you through calamitous days. His spirits soared with his uncle’s request and then promptly crashed.

  “How can I take you?” he asked. “You know I don’t have a car.”

  Brendan stared out the window and flapped his arm tensely in the air. “We could get one. Those vans in the parking lot, the ones with the wheelchair lifts—we’re allowed to borrow them.”

  “Come on,” Henry said. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m serious,” Brendan said. “I could go talk to the administrator, sign one out, get the keys—it’s as easy as that. I could sign one out for the weekend, we wouldn’t even have to tell anyone where we were going ….”

  “Really?” Henry thought of a smooth road, a few days of freedom, the pleasure of knowing that his uncle trusted him, even if no one else in his family did. Then he remembered that he didn’t have a license. The police had handcuffed him after the accident, once they’d pried him out of the car and decided he wasn’t hurt. They’d hauled him to jail and made him appear in court in his dirty clothes, and then they’d taken his license away. “I’d do it,” he said glumly. “I’d love to. But I can’t. They suspended my license.”

  Brendan spun around so Henry could see his face. “Fine. Worry about a piece of paper. Maybe once I get to Wiloma’s, I can talk Waldo into taking me. He’d be interested in seeing that land, I bet—I bet he can talk Wiloma into letting him do something with her half.”

  Henry’s stomach knotted. “Waldo knows about the land?”

  “I imagine,” Brendan said coolly. “I imagine Wiloma told him. You know she can’t keep anything to herself.”

  Henry could just imagine what Waldo would do. He’d pry that land away from Wiloma somehow; he’d always been able to manipulate her. And then he’d cover it with pretentious houses on three-acre lots, all of them looking exactly the same although they were supposed to be unique. Which was not at all what he had in mind himself; he had big ideas. A vacation complex complete with tennis courts and a health club and cross-country skiing trails, condominiums tucked in the trees, tax credits and depreciation allowances. The units would be small but elegant, energy efficient, cunningly designed. That was the difference, he thought, between a developer and a builder like Waldo: a developer had vision, a developer could see. And if he could see it, he could figure out how to finance it. If he could explain it to Brendan, he could get Brendan to go along.

  “Forget about it,” Brendan said. He spun his chair around again, so that Henry was looking at the back of his head. “I can make my own arrangements.”

  “No,” Henry said. “I’ll take you. What could happen? We’ll drive slowly, no one will stop us. Are you sure you can get us a van?”

  “Wait here. I’ll be back with the keys.”

  Before Henry could stop him, before he could even catch his breath, Brendan rolled down the hall toward the elevator.

  6

  FROM THE “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” OF THE PARADISE VALLEY Daily Transcript:

  February 12, 1922

  Dear Sirs:

  The report of the Metropolitan Water Commission is deeply disturbing, recommending as it does “the construction of a great reservoir in the Paradise River Valley, and of tunnels sufficient to transport said water to the Metropolitan area.”

  At the town meetings of Pomeroy, Winsor, Stillwater, and Nipmuck, funds have been approved to hire legal counsel to represent our interests in Boston. These men, as well as our elected representatives, have spoken strongly at the hearings held both in Boston and here. But I note with some distress that many of their comments have addressed practical details of the plan. Selectman C. J. Wheeler presented a request that any land required for the proposed reservoir be taken by purchase, rather than by eminent domain. Representative Hallman argues that the land assessment procedures are poorly described in the proposed bill. X. J. Swanson, counsel representing the businesses of Pomeroy, expressed his concerns that delay over a final decision has been detrimental to commerce in the valley. All excellent points—but are these well-meaning men, in their efforts to safeguard our economic interests, truly expressing our desires?

  Is not our deepest desire that there should be no reservoir? Does it matter how our property is assessed, how we are paid for it, or when we are told that we must leave—when we do not want to leave? Has not the grinding pressure imposed on us by the Commission worn down our resolute opposition and caused us to think only how we might best profit from this situation, when it is the situation itself that we must resist?

  We must keep in mind that this group of engineers and politicians from Boston have one ambition only: to invade our valley, to destroy our towns, to trample on our rights as citizens. Compromise with such blind aggression is untenable.

  Frank B. Auberon, Sr.

  Pomeroy

  Part II One Old Man Vanished

  7

  BRENDAN THOUGHT HE HEARD SIRENS, IN THE PARKING LOT, before they’d even left the grounds; at the spotlight where, sitting high in the van, he overlooked his patch of sidewalk; on West Street, as they finally rolled away from the Home. He expected police cars, motorcycles, announcements on the radio—because of course the Home had no policy of loaning out its vans, and he could not believe that Henry had believed him.

  All week he’d been wondering how he might approach Henry. He’d planned a campaign of pity and guilt: The end is near, my boy. Would you deny a dying old man his last, modest wish? Something along the lines of that, which would twist Henry’s ears with shame. But in his desire to see the valley once more, in his mad passion to gaze at the water beneath which his first abbey lay, he had forgotten that Henry no longer had a car. His heart had almost stopped when Henry had reminded him. Then he’d looked out the window and seen the vans and plucked his scheme from the air like an unripened quince. It was weak, there was nothing behind it. It depended on luck and on his last-minute appeal to Henry’s greed and need to master Waldo.

  He had not seen the administrator. He had not spoken to anyone. He had wheeled himself into the basement room where the janitors kept their tools and their coffeepot and the pegboard on which hung the keys to the vans, and then he had directed Fred Johannson, who sat drowsing in his chair, to the whirlpool in the other wing. It sounded funny, he’d said. Like it might be overflowing. Fred had lumbered off and Brendan had leaned up against the board and knocked down the keys marked “Medical Transport Van No. 1.” A minute’s work, except that the keys had fallen to the table and Brendan’s hands had banged against them like hooves. He had thought of the way the dogs they’d kept at the abbey had scooped up bones, pressing the pads of their paws clumsily together. No fingers, no thumbs; he had scooped up the keys in a similar fashion and dropped them into his lap.

  He had wheeled himself back to Henry as fast as his chair could carry him, and then he had tried to look calm and unworried as Henry dawdled over the closets and drawers and gathered together the scraps of clothing Brendan needed. “Not in the suitcase,” he’d told Henry sharply. “Use that plastic bag.” They’d slipped through the halls, out the door, and into the parking lot, and he’d prayed that anyone looking out the windows
might think they were going for a walk, that the row of oaks shielding the vans would conceal them, that the van would start, that the lift would work, that no one would run shouting after them as they drove away.

  He hadn’t prayed so much in years. Consciously, guiltily, he had employed what his abbot used to call linear prayer. Prayer that moved the way things move in the world: point to point, step by step, effects following causes and building into a plan—his abbot had spoken of that as something to shed, to be replaced by the deep prayer that sank wordlessly into the mystery of the world. “We have been given everything,” his abbot had said. “But we fail to understand that. Deep prayer is the way we recognize that we already have what we seek.”

  But deep prayer wouldn’t get him a van or set him on the road, and so he’d resorted to the kind of prayers made by old women bowed before banks of candles. Pleas, promises, bargains—they were undignified, almost sordid. They were hardly any better than Wiloma’s superstitious rituals, and yet for the moment they appeared to have worked.

  In part, he knew, they’d worked because he’d laid the ground for his disappearance. He hadn’t known when he was going, but he’d spent the week saying good-bye to his companions. “My niece is taking me home for a visit,” he’d said—which, until a few hours ago, might easily have been true. He’d said good-bye to Ben and to Charlie and to Kevin; to Judson, who hadn’t recognized him or anyone else in thirteen years, but who had once played gin rummy with him every day; to Parker, who rasped his words through an electronic box in his throat. He hadn’t managed a farewell to Roxanne, which he regretted, but he had let go of the rest of the Home.