The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  Near Jackson’s garage, he dreamed of his nights in the Chinese wilderness. He dreamed of his silent trips. He dreamed of the days, in Manitoba and Rhode Island, when his hands had reached out for a belt or a sleeve and his mouth had moved, words had come out, but his companions had lowered their eyes as if he didn’t exist. They’d looked through him as if he were dead. And they’d been right, he should have died and joined his martyred brothers. He’d had no business surviving. I am a brother to dragons, he dreamed. And a companion to owls. He was dead in his dream, a ghost in a misty cowl and robe.

  When he woke, it was very dark. Light spilled from the open garage, outlining Henry and Jackson; Jackson wiped his hands on a rag and lowered the hood of the van. “That ought to do it,” Brendan heard him say. English words, an upstate accent. Cool, calm, quiet. His brothers had been dead for forty years and China was half a world away; he was not a monk and hadn’t been for years. In the dim light his hands formed the signs for bitter and blessing.

  “That’s great,” Henry said. “Lucky you had the parts.”

  They came out to Brendan then, past the light and into the darkness, where Brendan could hardly tell them apart. Solid men with spreading stomachs and thick, sturdy legs, they seemed to have forged a friendship over their wrenches and belts and valves. Brendan felt more insubstantial than ever.

  “You guys hungry?” Jackson said. “I caught some bass this morning—I was going to throw them on the grill.”

  “That’d be great,” Henry said. He squatted down until his face was level with Brendan’s. “Are you awake? Would that be all right?”

  “Fine,” Brendan said. In his dream he had eaten no food—the yellow millet, the sorghum, the limp potatoes, had not crossed his lips, and he understood this to mean that he would not eat again. But he wanted to keep Henry happy and fed, and it was too late for them to drive any farther.

  “About the bill,” Henry said to Jackson.

  “Sixty-eight. That sound fair?”

  “More than fair.” Henry stroked the ridged surface around the dial of his heavy watch and then said, “Would you take this instead? We’re short of cash, but this is a Rolex, it’s worth a lot. It’s all we have.” He slipped it off his wrist and held it out.

  Jackson turned the gold band in the glow from the garage. “It’s a good one?”

  “The best,” Henry said. “It ought to run forever. Or you can sell it, if you want—you’ll get some decent cash for it.”

  Jackson slipped the watch into his shirt pocket. “Fair enough.”

  A watch for a van, Brendan thought; a bracelet and earrings for plums. He saw the plums float over the wall again, and the faces of the children who’d eaten them, and then all the faces of everyone he’d left behind.

  18

  THE SAAB WAS AS SPACIOUS AND SMOOTH AS AN OCEAN LINER: dim, private, silent except for the occasional clicks and squawks of the radar detector on the dash. Cool air flowed over Wiloma’s legs and lights gleamed behind the steering wheel. Waldo touched a button and music washed over them.

  “What is that?” Wiloma asked.

  “New CD player,” Waldo said. “Pretty sharp, isn’t it? I had it put in a few months ago.”

  “No, I mean the music—what is that?”

  “Jazz harp. Isn’t it something? Sarah turned me on to this guy—he’s German, he does things with a harp you’d never believe.”

  “Really,” Wiloma said. Sarah: the sort of woman who could interest her older husband in something as exotic as jazz on a harp. “It makes me feel old.”

  “The music?”

  Wiloma nodded. “You know. Harps used to be for symphonies, or for ladies in long dresses.”

  Waldo laughed. “I know what you mean. It seemed strange to me at first, but Sarah just thinks it’s wonderful.”

  “She’s young,” Wiloma said.

  “She is,” Waldo agreed. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about things that were important to me in high school, or when you and I were first married, or when our kids were kids, and I roll over to talk to her and I realize she won’t know what I mean. It’s hard to explain.”

  All that you want is made impossible by all that you want, Wiloma wanted to tell him. That was one of the first things her group leader had taught her at the Healing Center: that needs and desires excluded each other, fed each other, led to despair; that want followed want until your life reached a point where the several things you had to have were at war with one another. Wants are like lions, her teacher had said. They will tear you apart. Brendan, despite his dislike of her church, had admired that phrase when she’d first repeated it to him and claimed it was simply another version of what the Christian mystics had always taught. Everything we seek has already been given to us, he’d said. We only have to learn how to recognize it.

  “This is nice,” Waldo said. “Sitting here with you like this, not fighting. It’s relaxing.”

  “Is it?”

  “You know me.”

  And it was true, she thought. She did. They had known each other all through high school, although they hadn’t started dating until later, after Da and Gran had died. She knew his family and his disappointments. She knew how he’d fought against taking over his father’s building firm, and how hard he’d worked once he’d given in. He hadn’t always been the confident, successful man whom Sarah had married, and sometimes she wondered if he’d divorced her just to shed his years of struggle. Once he’d told her, in the midst of a fight, that it was no blessing living with someone who’d known him so long. You can’t forget, he’d shouted. You can’t forget a single damn thing.

  But she routinely forgot things now, she forgot them on purpose, and if he’d stop trying to pull her back to the past, she would never think about it. But he couldn’t seem to let a minute go by without jolting her memory. “Have you been out to Coreopsis?” he asked now, pointing out the streetlights of a new development twinkling just beyond the road. “Recently, I mean.”

  “No,” Wiloma told him. “I don’t want to see it.” The development slipped behind them, but not before she’d seen cars parked in front of the new homes, lights on in the new kitchens, everything Henry had hoped for Coreopsis and failed to make.

  “It’d kill you,” Waldo said. “I was out that way a few months ago, looking over a building site for a new client. I drove over to the farm just out of curiosity—Jesus. What a wreck.”

  You might have tried to save it, Wiloma thought, but she said nothing. Coreopsis Heights was error externalized, a knot of confusion and misplaced desire, and she had tried from the start to detach herself from it. The place was poisoned, she thought. Nothing good could rise from it. Even saying the name out loud was dangerous, but Waldo was too dense to notice.

  She looked over at her ex-husband’s smooth, pink face. Once, when they were newly married, he and Henry had worked on a project together and had been as close as brothers. But then they’d soured on each other as their tastes developed and their ambitions conflicted, and after the fight they’d had six years ago, they’d almost stopped speaking. They’d trapped her in the middle, each complaining about the other and neither able to see that, although Henry dreamed in broad strokes, a community rising from an empty field where no one had seen one before, and Waldo dreamed a house at a time, this window here, this set of doors, they were other wise as alike as peas. She was aware, some of the time, that she’d chosen Waldo in part because he so resembled Henry. She’d been aware of that since Brendan had pointed it out.

  They complemented each other perfectly but had been driven apart by what linked them: their constant desire to leave their signatures on the land. Me, my, mine, she thought. My house, my idea, my development, my success. Henry had never listened, not once, to Waldo’s pleas that he scale down Coreopsis Heights, build smaller houses, lay the place out in steps. When the project began to fail, Waldo had not bent an inch to save it. Henry had gone to Waldo, she knew, when the project began to coll
apse. Henry had begged for a loan. “I don’t have it,” Waldo had told her then. “If I could save it, I would—I know how much the place means to you. But I don’t have the cash.”

  She hadn’t been able to blame him for that—anyone could see that the project was doomed—but in her heart she blamed him for much else. For not stopping Henry in the first place, for not being the man she’d married. For falling in love with someone young.

  But she would not say an unpleasant word to him now; she had vowed, when she’d opened the door of this car, that they wouldn’t fight. She looked at herself in the small mirror embedded in the visor and said, “Do you think I should cut my hair?”

  “I don’t know. It looks okay. You could dye it, maybe.”

  She winced; her hair was very gray. “That seems so weird.”

  Waldo touched the transplanted plugs on his head. “Weird? This is weird—what do you think of this? Really, I mean.”

  “It looks good.” In the dim light it looked the way it had when he was young. She didn’t say how earlier, in the afternoon sun, she’d seen the plugs sticking out of his scalp like tiny trees.

  “I didn’t mind being bald,” Waldo said. “But it bothered Sarah.”

  Sarah again. “It’s hard. With someone so young. I met this man at a retreat last year, he was nine years younger than me ….”

  “You’ve been dating?”

  “Not really—he was just a friend. But I felt like something might happen between us, and for a few days I just went crazy. I was supposed to be meditating and leading some group sessions, but every free minute I was standing in front of the mirror, changing my clothes or fussing with my hair or trying different lipstick. All of a sudden I cared about how I looked. I cared a lot. And when he got involved with this twenty-five-year-old girl, I felt ridiculous. Really old.”

  The girl had been unremarkable, neither beautiful nor smart, but her flesh lay over her bones like butter and she looked the same in the mornings as she did at night. Wiloma had watched them move together with a pain that felt like panic, and at night, when she paced her room, she had known in her bones something that, when she’d been younger, had been pure abstraction: that when she was sixty, eighty, when her body had betrayed her completely and left her only raddled flesh, her heart and her desires would still be adolescent.

  You will always want the same things, her group leader had said, back before she’d felt the truth for herself. You’ll just stop being able to get them. The only cure is to break the cycle of wanting. She had shared that line with Brendan, one of the times he was pressing her to explain what made her church different and better than his. He’d laughed and retorted with something from one of his old saints. It is a hard matter to forgo that to which we are accustomed, he’d said. But it is harder to go against our own will. It was dark out now. She hoped he was safe. If she believed he was safe, he was.

  “Sometimes,” Waldo said, “when we’re at a party, I’ll turn and see Sarah talking to some young guy and I’ll get so jealous I’ll have to sit down. Sometimes it wears me out.”

  So why did you marry her? Wiloma thought. Why did you leave me for her? But these were old thoughts, the thoughts that had led her nowhere and almost cost her her children, and she put them out of her mind. On the dashboard the radar detector clucked and muttered and then cycled into its full warning hiss.

  Waldo’s eyes widened and he pressed his foot gently on the brake. They’d been doing eighty, Wiloma saw. Waldo always drove too fast. Seventy-five, seventy, sixty-five. “Don’t look around,” Waldo cautioned her. “Act like nothing’s happening, like we’re just talking. Now move your hand real slowly over here and unclip the detector and slip it under your seat.”

  She did as she was told, keeping her head and shoulders erect and facing forward. “Shit,” Waldo said. “If I get another speeding ticket this year I’m going to lose my license.”

  She slipped the box behind her feet, and as she did she saw the state trooper tucked under the overpass at the base of the hill. His headlights came on as they passed him, and Waldo stared straight ahead with both hands clenched on the wheel. “Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered. She felt a glee that surprised her, and a desire, even more surprising, for him to step on the gas and send them shooting into the night with sirens wailing behind them. When the trooper took off after a small car that sped from behind and then passed them, she felt both relieved and disappointed.

  Waldo took his right hand off the wheel and shook it several times. “That was close.”

  “Pretty close,” she agreed. His face looked calm, and she was surprised when he pulled into the next rest stop and insisted on calling St. Benedict’s. “In case they’ve got any news,” he said, although she couldn’t imagine what would have changed since they’d set off. “And I want them to know we’re looking.”

  She wondered if what he really wanted to do was to catch his breath away from her. He wedged himself into a phone booth, one hand crushed to his free ear to block out the cars roaring by. When he returned, he said, “It’s just what you thought.”

  “They’re back?” Brendan was safe, then. Her worries hadn’t harmed him. “We were wrong?”

  “We were right,” Waldo said impatiently. “I talked to one of the administrator’s assistants, and I told her you thought your uncle was headed for Massachusetts. And she got all excited—she said they’d sent one of the orderlies around Brendan’s floor, asking everyone if they’d seen or heard anything, and one of the old guys said he’d overheard Brendan talking to someone in the hall. She said this guy said Brendan said, ‘I want to go to Massachusetts. I want to see the reservoir,’ but that he hadn’t thought much about it because they all talk like that all the time, about the places they want to visit and can’t.”

  “Except this is different,” Wiloma said. Although the trip couldn’t have been Brendan’s idea—he might have said something wistful, thinking nothing would ever come of it, but it would have been Henry who had leapt on the words, stolen the van, engineered the details. Henry had pushed their uncle, Henry was behind this. But the men Brendan had left behind wouldn’t know that.

  Wiloma could imagine them sitting up in bed as the news spread, wheeling themselves into clusters near windows, laughing and whispering and already turning Brendan’s flight into legend. Misinterpreting his departure, the way she’d misinterpreted his arrival in Coreopsis so many years ago. When Gran had told her that Brendan was coming to them, she’d pictured another version of her father. He’d left his Order, Gran had said. He was coming home. For the week between that announcement and his arrival, Wiloma had felt as if her father had risen from the dead. Her uncle was coming to rescue her, she’d thought. But all he’d ever been able to do was listen.

  The men in the Home, she knew, would be dreaming just as fruitlessly. Someone, she could hear him already, would be claiming he’d known about the plan all along. Someone else would be claiming to have helped. “I saw him,” someone else would say. “I saw him take the keys.” They were men who went years without visitors, who never got mail, who were starved for something to break their boredom. She couldn’t blame them for seeing in Brendan all their own frustrated hopes, but it was wrong to let them think he was something he was not. He’s not a hero, she wanted to say sternly to those men. He didn’t choose. He was pushed. And, she might have added, even if he had chosen, he had made the wrong choice. A hero would put himself into her hands and let his Healing take place. Surrender, he used to tell her. In surrender is salvation. He had been on the verge of surrendering himself to her when Henry had interfered.

  Waldo eased them back into the river of eastbound traffic. “I told her it meant something.”

  Wiloma’s attention snapped back from her vision of the deluded old men. “You didn’t … ?” If he’d been shaken before, the phone call had calmed him down. Already he was speeding again.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “She asked me where I thought they were headed, and I said I wasn
’t sure, it could be a lot of places, we were just going to take a little drive and check some of them out. She wanted me to give her some idea, so she could maybe alert the police, and I said I couldn’t but that I’d call her as soon as we had any news.”

  “They called the police?”

  “Just the local ones, so far.” Waldo looked at her curiously. “You knew that—you told me that cruiser in Irondequoit called in about the van.”

  “I forgot,” she said faintly. She had also, she suddenly realized, forgotten to call Christine and tell her Brendan’s arrival would be delayed. “Don’t call them again,” she said. “Please? Don’t call anyone. There are so many people involved already, I can’t keep everything straight … we can do this ourselves.”

  “He’s your uncle. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Whatever you want, she thought sourly. Not for me, but in the hopes of getting that land. His words were kind but he avoided her eyes, and already she half-regretted bringing him along. If he’d had the sense to stay married to her, her half of it would have been half his. Automatically, just like that. It would have fallen into his hands. She hoped that thought had crossed his mind; she hoped he realized all that he’d lost.