The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  “Don’t come any closer,” he warned.

  “The hell,” Henry said. “I built this place—what do you think you’re doing here?”

  “You don’t live here,” the man said sternly. “Do you.”

  “No,” Henry sputtered. “But …”

  Brendan reached out and grasped a fold of Henry’s pants, restraining him. The family, if it was a family, seemed to have been here for some time. A few clothes were stacked in a corner, along with a handful of dishes, a jug of water, a basin, and a pack of cigarettes. A cluster of black-eyed Susans stood in a jar.

  “Well, we do,” the man said. The woman reached for the jar of flowers and slid them silently behind her. The man said, “That camp where they put the other berry pickers is such a dump. And this place was abandoned, so we claimed it. You have a problem with that?”

  Brendan kept hold of Henry’s pants; he could feel Henry tensing himself to say or do something unforgivable. He craned his head to the side and spoke before Henry had a chance. “You pick berries?” He’d picked berries himself, at the abbey. They’d made them into jam. “Strawberries?”

  “All berries,” the man said warily. He lowered his arm and looked around Henry to Brendan. “Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Also peaches when it comes to their time, and then apples. Then we move south for the Georgia harvest, then we hit the oranges in Florida.” He paused. “What happened to your legs?”

  “Arthritis,” Brendan said. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A while,” the man said. “Suellen and me hooked up nine years ago. Then Lonny came. Can you walk at all?”

  “No,” Brendan said. The boy had raised his head at the sound of his name and now Brendan saw his eyes. They were distant, troubled, guarded; they looked the way Henry’s had, when Brendan had first met him in the vanished parlor. “Mister,” Lonny said, “is that your dog outside?” Bongo’s howls rose to a frenzied pitch.

  Henry nodded stiffly.

  “You gonna let him bite us?”

  Henry said nothing, so Brendan spoke. “Of course not,” he said, tugging steadily at Henry’s pants. “This used to be our place, but it isn’t anymore. We’re leaving now.”

  The man nodded and cupped his hand around the back of Lonny’s neck. “If you could,” he said quietly. “If you would …”

  Henry made a strangled noise and then bolted, leaving Brendan alone with the family. “I had a dog,” Lonny said softly. “In South Carolina, once. Where’d you get that chair?”

  Brendan looked at him, unable to think of anything to say. At the Home, where everyone talked all the time, his words had turned into something frothy and useless and polite, a foam of social chatter that flowed from surface to surface and never cut deeper. He lifted his right hand and spoke to Lonny in the sign language he’d used in the abbey.

  He rested his forefinger along his upper lip—the sign for black —and then pressed that and his middle finger together and touched his forehead with them in the sign for abbot. Black and abbot signed together like that stood for St. Benedict; he followed with the sign for house, joining the tops of both hands in a peak like a roof. St. Benedict’s Home, where his chair had come from. He felt a sudden rush of warmth in his hands, which hadn’t signed in years.

  Lonny stretched his lips in what might have been a smile, and then he held out his right hand and touched his forefinger to his thumb. Brendan didn’t know what he meant, but he flashed back the sequence of signs that had once been his name: brother and A and help and cook and house; Brother Ambrose who works in the kitchen. Lonny said again, “I used to have a dog.” Brendan, having left his old name behind, turned and left the family to their lives.

  He thought he might try to talk Henry into leaving his dog with Lonny, but Henry was crouched on the ground outside, with his face buried in the ruff of fur that stood out from Bongo’s neck. In that posture he looked hardly older than Lonny; he looked as if he might need Bongo more than Lonny did. When he raised his face, his skin looked weary and lined. “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “This was a bad idea. This place always makes me so crazy.”

  “It was my idea to stop,” Brendan said gently. “I’m glad we came.” He’d expected rage from Henry, self-pity, destruction; not sorrow, not resignation; while Henry had not dealt with the family well, he’d done better than Brendan could have expected. For the first time he began to feel glad that Henry—Henry himself, not just any person with functioning limbs and a few free days—had been the agent of his escape. His bladder cramped again, and he longed for a bathroom and made the signs for shame and house without thinking.

  Henry saw his movements, or maybe he only saw the plastic cup that lay on the ground between him and Brendan. He picked it up. “Here,” he said. Brendan turned his chair away from Henry, tugged open his fly, and let his urine flow out in a slow, painful stream. The relief was astonishing. He emptied the cup when he was done, shook it dry, and wedged it between his thigh and the arm of his chair, not knowing when he might need it again.

  “What am I going to do?” Henry said. His voice was quiet and strained, without the brassy bounce and feint that had colored it for years. “Strangers sleeping here—the whole thing’s gone, it’s ruined. I lost it all.”

  “You lost it a long time ago,” Brendan pointed out. “When you left. Do you want to get going?”

  “I guess,” Henry said wearily. “I could use some lunch.”

  “Me too,” Brendan lied. He hadn’t been able to eat for weeks without throwing up, and even the smell of food often made him sick. But he realized, now that he’d had some time to think, that they shouldn’t get back on the Thruway. They needed back roads, small roads, where the people who might be looking for them would never think to go. He remembered the route his bus had traveled, years ago, on his journey here from Rhode Island. “We don’t have much cash,” he said.

  “No fooling,” said Henry.

  “And the tolls from here to Massachusetts are bound to add up …”

  “Shit,” Henry said. “I forgot about the tolls.”

  “And we’re hungry, and we want some lunch, and I’d like to see some of the countryside. And we’ve still got most of the afternoon—why don’t we go the back way? It isn’t really any longer.”

  The gloom lifted from Henry’s face. “We could take 5 and 20. I drove that once from Albany, when I was checking out some land.”

  “We could eat wherever you want,” Brendan said. “We could stop by one of the lakes.”

  “Better than staying here.” Henry buried his hand in Bongo’s ruff one last time and then started pushing Brendan’s chair toward the van. Brendan knew, without turning around, that Lonny stood at the window behind them, watching them leave.

  13

  LONNY AND HIS PARENTS STAYED IN HENRY’S MIND AS HE DROVE along the road threading the tips of the Finger Lakes together. That boy who’d looked like a wild thing, an otter or a mink; the silent woman; the man with the stick—they’d made him feel violated in some place the banks and the lawyers had missed, and yet he could see that Brendan was right. The house was theirs now, more than it had ever been his.

  He drove quietly. He drove very fast. Brendan, if he was thinking about that family, kept his thoughts to himself, and Henry tugged his Red Wings cap down low and longed for the expensive sunglasses he’d broken in his car crash and hadn’t had the money to replace. The cap had a red mesh crown and a cheap plastic tag in the back, but the bill was wide and long and shaded his eyes. He’d purchased it years ago, at a baseball game to which he’d brought Lise and Delia and Wiloma’s kids. He couldn’t remember why he’d kept it, but he was glad that he’d had the foresight to take it from Kitty’s house. When they’d left Coreopsis, he’d plucked it from his box and stuck it on his head, longing for some form of disguise.

  The cap, and his perch high in the van, made him feel like a truck driver. He pushed Lonny out of his mind and imagined himself in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, cross
ing the bleak flatlands of North Dakota. The cab was air-conditioned and roomy; in the space behind his seat was a narrow bed and on the bed rested the young woman he’d picked up on the highway west of Fargo. Her hair was the color of wheat. She was traveling alone. She said, “I wanted to get away. Don’t you ever feel like that? I wanted to leave my past behind me, forget everything I’d ever done and everyone who’d messed up my life. I just walked out and closed the door behind me.”

  I did that, he wanted to say to her, but Brendan broke into his dreams and said, “You want to stop here? That diner looks okay.”

  Henry focused his eyes, which had been seeing the road but no more, and let the girl dissolve. They were in Geneva; the diner was old and needed a coat of paint, and he couldn’t imagine why Brendan had chosen it but then couldn’t see anything better. He parked and lowered his uncle to the ground and maneuvered him inside the diner doors. They left Bongo locked in the van, howling mournfully at the traffic, and they settled themselves at a table by the window.

  Henry pushed one of the chairs aside and rolled Brendan into place, but the arms of his wheelchair wouldn’t fit beneath the table. The waitress who brought them menus looked from Henry to Brendan and back again and then said, “This isn’t any good. You hang on a minute—I’ll fix you up.” The white plastic pin above her left breast read Mirella.

  Henry studied her closely as she walked away. Her bottom was broad but solid, crowned by the bow of her apron; her stride was crisp, with a roll to it that sent smooth waves through her flesh. Two small rolls of fat formed a triangle above her round buttocks, and the rest of her seemed composed of similarly simple shapes. Cones, cylinders, hemispheres—even her hair was geometric, a mass of round red curls. Mirella, Henry said to himself. The name curled on his tongue.

  Mirella returned with a white metal tray that was dotted with yellow ducks. “I know this looks funny,” she said to Brendan. “But it works great on high chairs, and if we can just get it in here somehow …” The clips on the bottom of the tray didn’t quite fit the wheelchair’s arms, but she hammered on the tray with the heel of her hand until the clips spread and held. “There,” she said triumphantly. She moved Brendan’s water glass onto the tray and handed him his menu. “Isn’t that better?”

  “Very nice,” Brendan said dryly. The duck tray over his lap, the white neck brace, and the heavy glasses gave him the look of a sinister, overgrown child.

  “What can I get you?” Mirella asked.

  “Would you give us a minute?” Henry said. Brendan bared his teeth at her in a grimace that might have been a smile. She tucked her order pad into her apron and left.

  “You want to go someplace else?” Henry asked.

  Brendan shrugged and his left arm drifted above the tray. “Where? The same thing’s going to happen anyplace we go. But these ducks …” His hand thumped on the tray.

  “Forget about it,” Henry said. “Let’s just get something to eat.”

  For a minute they studied their menus in silence. Henry examined the prices carefully: grilled cheese? The hot dog special? He longed for pork chops, chicken, steak, but he kept his eyes resolutely on the sandwiches. Brendan leaned toward him and said, “Everything’s so expensive. Three fifty for a hamburger—what is this?”

  “It’s cheap,” Henry said, and then he studied his uncle’s face. “When’s the last time you ate out?”

  “ ’Sixty-seven. Maybe ’sixty-eight? When the old director was around, they took some of us on a field trip to the lake. Augie Furlong had a stroke there, just after we had lunch, and they never took us out again. Coffee cost a quarter then.”

  “Different world,” Henry said. He tried to imagine what his own life would have been like if he hadn’t eaten out since 1968. Cheaper, certainly—Kitty had hardly cooked a meal once she’d started full-time at the radio station, and for years they’d eaten out or ordered in almost every night. He still missed the elaborate meals she’d cooked during their first years together. Pot roast, creamed chicken, pork loin stuffed with prunes. She liked to cook then, she said she enjoyed it. When he’d come home from work, he’d walked in the door and found the table set with place mats and flowers, the girls scrubbed and dressed in clean clothes, Kitty bearing covered dishes that sent out delicious smells. All that had vanished years ago; what had drawn him to Anita, and to the women before her, had been at least in part the food.

  His stomach rumbled and he settled on the hot dog special. Brendan said, “I’ll just have some pie.”

  Mirella came and took their order and vanished again. She had lovely calves, Henry saw, sturdy and full but tapering to shapely ankles. He stared at his hands and imagined a life with her. She’d live in a trailer nearby, on a nice bit of land overlooking Seneca Lake. The hard-packed dirt outside her door would be dotted with bicycles and plastic bats and beheaded dolls; she’d have two children, or maybe three, and at least one would still be in diapers. Inside, the trailer smelled of soap and ammonia and sugar cookies, but although the place was crowded with belongings and beings—a dog, Henry thought, some company for Bongo; two fish in a bowl, a parakeet—it was clean and warm. In her room she had a water bed that rolled when Henry stretched out on it, and at night, after the children slept, she came to him and untied her apron and slipped her uniform up and off, disarranging her curls. Her feet were sore and he rubbed them and then set them gently down. Then he kissed her ankles, which were very fine. Then he kissed her calves. The dogs barked at the moon outside, the children dreamed of rubber rafts on the lake, the fish spun languidly in their small container. He kissed her knees and ran his hands along her hips. Her thighs were as white as her knees and they welcomed him, and afterward she walked naked to the kitchen and made them sandwiches.

  Pickles? Kitty used to ask him, back when she’d fixed sandwiches for both of them after a romp in bed. Do you want whole wheat or rye?

  When Mirella arrived with their plates, Henry managed to brush her arm with his hand. Her smile made him blush and pay attention to his hot dogs. They were grilled, he saw, not boiled, and they tasted good. But then anything would have tasted good after the food in the box factory’s cafeteria. He’d been eating there every day because the food was cheap and he couldn’t drive anyplace else. Rubbery cold cuts sweating moisture, falsely bright vegetables in yellow sauce, everything frozen and sealed in secret films, salty, processed, micro-waved. The young men he worked with said it tasted fine to them.

  Brendan’s pie sat untouched before him. “You don’t want that?” Henry said. His hot dogs were already gone; he could have eaten several more if only they hadn’t been so pinched for money.

  “I can’t cut it,” Brendan said levelly. “My hands.”

  Henry flushed and bent over his uncle’s plate, dissecting the pie into bite-sized chunks. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “You don’t, much,” Brendan said. “Do you? You’re always wandering off somewhere.”

  “Lots on my mind.”

  Henry held a forkful of pie to Brendan’s mouth, but Brendan took it from him. “I can feed myself. I just can’t cut.”

  “Sorry,” Henry said again. The fork in Brendan’s fist made its wavering, halting way to Brendan’s mouth. Brendan licked a tiny bit of filling from the edge and then lowered his hand to his chest. “Canned apples,” he said thoughtfully. He seemed to be chewing that bit of filling, actually mashing the drop around in his mouth before struggling to swallow it. The brace hid his Adam’s apple, but Henry could see the muscles working under his chin.

  Brendan lowered the fork to the tray and then below it, into his lap. He fixed Henry’s eyes with his and said, “Remember the food your grandmother used to cook? When I was a novice, I used to dream about her roast pork and her steak and onions and her tomatoes fried in bacon grease. I was so hungry there, at first. All of us were.”

  Brendan’s hands had been moving quietly as he spoke; Henry hadn’t seen him swallow anything, but somehow
half the pie was gone. Henry thought of the dreams he had of Kitty’s food, the nights he’d wandered around the kitchen while she was off at work or at a meeting. The refrigerator had been full of food and so had all the cupboards, but he hadn’t known how to cook any of it and he’d prowled helplessly, salivating, longing for someone to transform those vegetables and cool slabs of meat and containers of cream and butter and stock into something edible. Sometimes Lise or Delia had taken pity on him and made him dinner, but more often they’d shown him the stove, the pots and pans and cookbooks and said, “Here’s everything you need.” They didn’t seem to understand that he could do nothing with those tools.

  “Why did you leave home?” he asked his uncle. He did remember Gran’s food; she’d been a good cook, although not as good as his mother. “Why did you go in?” He couldn’t imagine why anyone would go to a place with no food, no freedom, no women.

  “When we were kids,” Brendan said, “your father and I used to walk over the ridge near our place and watch the monks working in the fields below us. All those men in long robes, planting and hoeing, never saying anything—I liked the quiet, I think. I liked the peace. And sometimes we’d stand outside the enclosure walls and listen to them chanting in choir, and I loved that. After the first time I visited there, something happened to me—I can’t explain it. I just knew it was where I wanted to be. Your father thought I was crazy. But your grandmother was pleased. She would have liked a priest in the family, but this was close enough.”

  “That’s hard to imagine. Her being pleased about anything.”

  “You only knew her after,” Brendan said quietly. “Losing your father really broke her. And to have that come on top of losing her home and all her friends and everyone she’d ever known—she wasn’t sad like that when I was growing up. Neither was your grandfather.”