The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  She glanced over at Roy, who was staring out the window. “I’m not ignoring you. You’re worried about the girls. You’re part of this.”

  Roy drew his eyes back from the window. “That’s right,” he said. “I am.”

  Then Win looked at Wendy and Delia and said, “We’re not part of anything. Don’t you get it? If we let ourselves get caught up in this, then we’re acting just like them—we have to stay out of this. Just stand by.”

  Christine said, “Yes? Like you did when your mother was sick? Did you find that helpful?”

  Win paled beneath his tan and Wendy caught her breath. That was cruel, she thought. We were children then. We did the best we could.

  “Why don’t you do something?” Lise said. “If you’re so smart.”

  “Because I am not allowed to intervene,” Christine said. “Except in matters of the Spirit. I can listen. I can counsel. I can heal. Nothing more. And anyway, my concern isn’t with your parents, except as their actions affect your great-uncle. My concern is with him.”

  For a minute they all sat silently. Roy rubbed his thumb along the back of Wendy’s chair, causing a tiny vibration that Wendy felt in her flesh. Lise crossed her legs and plucked at her stockings. Delia pouted. Win rose, opened the refrigerator, and started pawing through the white sacks Christine had deposited there. “Lily buds,” he said, reading the labels. “Poppy seeds. Horseradish root. Cattail tubers. What do you do with this stuff?”

  “Same thing I do with the mistletoe,” Christine said, laying a hand on the bundle that was now missing a branch. “Release the Spirit from the flesh. Connect it to the great Spirit that animates the earth.”

  “We could call the police,” Lise said, her sharp face brightening. “Have you arrested for practicing medicine without a license.”

  “We’re an official, tax-exempt church,” Christine said. “And I’m an official Church representative, and the Healing is an official Church ceremony. We’re completely legitimate—why can’t you accept that I’m here to help?”

  Wendy fingered her stolen twig. The leaves felt smooth and soft and gently sticky; the berries were hard and cool. Her uncle’s salvation, if Christine was to be believed, was lying right here in her hand. She thought of all the people who’d tried to rescue her when her mother had been sick, teachers and neighbors and friends’ parents who’d held out their hands and tried to help. But all along she’d known that the salvations being offered were not her salvation, that whatever she needed was beyond their ability to give. Christine couldn’t help them, and her twigs and powders couldn’t help Grunkie. But perhaps there was something she and Win and her cousins could do themselves.

  An idea had been forming in her mind while Lise and Christine spoke, and in the pause that followed, it rose to Wendy’s lips and escaped like a bubble. “We ought to go after them.”

  “You could do that,” Christine said. “If you chose. You’re old enough to know your own mind.”

  The others turned to look at Wendy, and Wendy focused on them and tuned out Christine. “Mom and Dad can’t do anything together,” she said. “You know how they trip each other up. Even if they find Grunkie and Uncle Henry, Mom will mess up anything Dad figures out, and Dad won’t be able to get Mom to agree to do anything.”

  Delia, after a guilty look at Lise, chimed in, “And our father’s out of his mind. Honest to God—he’s dangerous. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I know he can’t take care of Grunkie the way Grunkie needs. I’m not saying we should bring Grunkie back here—but at least if we could find them, we could maybe keep Dad from getting arrested. Or worse—what if he smacks up the van the way he smacked up his car?”

  “Except,” Win said dryly, “except that you don’t know where any of them are.”

  “But we do,” Wendy said. “You saw those maps Dad showed us—he was all excited about that land.”

  “What land?” Lise asked.

  “This land in Massachusetts, where Grunkie grew up. He told your father and my mother he was leaving each of them half of it, and your father got all excited about it, or at least that’s what my mother says, and then my father got all excited, too—he showed us these maps of the reservoir the land’s on, or under or near or something, and then …”

  Rumors, lies, and speculations, she thought as her voice trailed away. She knew those; they were what fueled half her waking hours. She told herself she was not falling under their spell but combating them actively. If she found her family and herded them home she’d be doing something real, which might reverse the events her mother’s phone call had set in motion. She might be able to unwind the day and set them all back to the place where they’d been before.

  “But we don’t have the maps,” Win said.

  “But I remember,” Wendy said. “Sort of. Don’t you? All we have to do is head for the reservoir. We could find it on a road map, and once we were there we could figure out the rest.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Win said.

  “Completely,” Lise agreed.

  But Christine was smiling at her broadly. “What an intelligent young woman you are,” she said, and Wendy’s skin prickled in warning. “You’d be doing your mother a favor if you could help her out, keep your father from interfering—and you’d be helping your great-uncle, too. I need to see him very soon.”

  “This is my idea,” Wendy said. “We’re not going because of you.” She turned to Delia. “Would you come with me?”

  “I guess.” Delia looked at her sister nervously. “You can’t go by yourself. Maybe Roy …”

  “I’ll drive,” Roy said. “If you have to go, we’ll take my car. You’ve had too much to drink.”

  “If you think you’re taking off at this hour with these two girls …,” Lise said.

  “You can come,” Roy said mildly. “If you want.”

  “I’m not staying here alone,” Win said. He tilted his head toward Christine. “Not with her.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Christine said. “Keep an eye on things.”

  She smiled at Wendy again, but Wendy ignored her. This wasn’t Christine’s idea, it had nothing to do with her. They weren’t going after Grunkie just to bring him back to Christine. They were going, she thought, because their parents were children; because they were confused and lost and destructive and incapable of caring for themselves. They were so busy chasing after a past they couldn’t recover that they couldn’t see what was happening right in front of their eyes. Somewhere, she knew, her mother was sitting next to her father and pretending they were still married—wishing, dreaming. Undoing everything she’d spent four years working through. Somewhere her uncle Henry was trying to fix his life by tunneling back to the years before he’d wrecked it.

  They’d always been that way—she and Win had known that for years, and now Lise and Delia knew it too. Their parents weren’t like other parents because they had no parents of their own. Sometimes, when she and Win had been living with their father, she had tried to imagine growing up without her parents, in the care of two people as old as Grunkie. Sometimes she tried to imagine the moment her mother had once described, when strangers had come for her and Henry and said, “Come with us. Your parents have been in an accident.” Then, for brief stretches, she’d been able to understand her mother’s quirks.

  Their parents needed looking after, and watching over, and she and Win and Lise and Delia were going to rescue them and bring them home. This time it wouldn’t turn out the way it had when she and Win were children. They were adults now, capable and smart. They could fix whatever it was that had gone wrong, and when they were done they could put the past behind them and move on.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “If we’re going. They’re hours ahead of us.” She went into the living room and grabbed her flipflops, a light jacket, and the big embroidered bag. The dolls looked forlorn, propped against the pizza boxes, and at the last minute she took them with her as well.

  21

  SOMEONE
HAD WANTED THE RESTAURANT TO LOOK OLD. THE outside was clothed in the same white concrete as the sporting goods store and the discount outlet, but inside someone had paneled the walls with barn boards and installed ceiling fans and a long, scarred wooden bar with brass footrails. The tables were round and sturdy and the chairs were soft; the pink glass of the sconces cast a kind light on the middle-aged crowd. Wiloma had had two margaritas already, although she hadn’t had more than a glass of wine in years. And after the long, dark drive, and the excitement of finding the park at the reservoir’s southern tip, and then the disappointment of discovering that the Visitors’ Center was closed until ten on Sunday morning, the drinks had hit her like a hammer.

  She and Waldo had arrived too late for a real dinner; their waitress, no older than Wendy, had offered them a snack menu composed almost entirely of batter-fried foods. Fried onion rings, fried zucchini, fried mushrooms and mozzarella sticks—the potato skins had seemed like the safest bet, but the orange cheese stuck to her teeth like gum and left a waxy film on her tongue. She looked across the table to Waldo and he said, “Another?” Before she could stop him, he’d ordered a new round of drinks.

  He was at home here, Wiloma saw, at ease with the waitresses, familiar with the crowd and the food. She wondered if Sarah often brought him to places like this. He touched her hand lightly and said, “Those skins okay? I’m sorry we couldn’t get something more substantial.”

  “They’re fine. It’s nice here.” And it was pleasant enough, especially now that the drinks had made her so relaxed. Her feet and fingers tingled. Her face felt warm. And Waldo had been kind all night, even before they’d finally found this place. At the park, when they’d driven up the narrow road and found the gates closed in front of the Visitors’ Center, with the Ronan Dam shining huge and dim in the moonlight just beyond the building, he had patted her shoulder while she wept.

  The sight of the dam had broken through the discipline of her detoxification and made her remember all the Sunday mornings her father had taken her and Henry and her mother there. It had made her remember him—how he’d cried when he’d first seen her and nearly crushed her in his arms. She had been almost four when he came home from the war, and she’d never heard his voice before or seen more than a picture of him. He’d been a stranger, thin and pale and hoarse, his skin splotched and scarred. He slept beside her mother, in the warm hollow that had always been hers, and she had been moved to a cot in Henry’s room. At first he’d hardly talked at all. But slowly, as they got used to each other, he’d begun to take them on walks around the edges of the reservoir. They’d explored the peninsula that stretched around their home; he’d pointed out the roads that ended in water, the cellar holes, the crumbling stone walls. Later, after he bought a car, they’d driven to the north tip and the narrow western finger, and then finally to the base where the dam rose up. That had become the place they’d visited most often. For three years, until the accident, that had been the place where she’d begun to know the stranger who was her father.

  There had been no park then, no paved lots or neat signs or picnic tables: only the one road to the dam, which was closed to the public, and a handful of trails winding through woods and weeds. The trail Wiloma’s father always took them on led to a knoll quite close to the dam. They had sat there on an old blanket and gazed at the long, low mass holding back the water.

  “I watched them build that,” her father used to say. “It’s just dirt inside the facings: packed dirt. That’s all that’s holding the water in.” He’d pointed to the islands dotting the water and said, “Mt. Washburn. Mt. Doubleday. Those used to be hills—we used to climb them.” Then he’d launched into stories about the drowned towns. Winsor, Stillwater, Pomeroy, Nipmuck; where he used to live. The tiny branch of the railroad that had run north and south through the valley, following the Paradise River and stopping every few miles. On and on he’d gone, using words she couldn’t understand, describing sights she couldn’t imagine—she’d been five, and then six and then seven, and it was all she could do to get used to his presence.

  She’d loved the water, which sparkled and danced and was full of fish and harbored long-legged herons and ospreys, but she thought of the dam as a monster. Men were buried in it, her father said. Men who’d died working on it. There were fish who’d been sucked up by the huge hydraulic pumps and laid down in the silt, snails and weeds and clams and tools and lost gloves and toads. After he showed her the cemetery, just beyond the dam, where the dead people from the lost towns had been reburied, she had nightmares in which she saw the dam as a dragon, devouring everything and then wedging itself across the river’s mouth.

  She’d forgotten all that until she saw the dam again. In the moonlight, the dam had looked clean and pale and benign, but she had bent over the dash of Waldo’s car and cried.

  “What is it?” Waldo had asked. “Is this where your house used to be?”

  “No,” she’d managed to tell him. “Not here—it’s miles north of here, this is only the dam. This is just where I thought we’d start looking.”

  “Do you think your uncle’s here?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know—he could be anywhere.”

  “We’ll find him in the morning.” Waldo had been sweet and soothing; he’d given her his handkerchief and then had taken charge of finding them places to eat and stay. A little motel lay just down the road from a restaurant he liked the looks of, and he’d driven up to it and checked out the rooms and taken two in the back, where it was quiet. She hadn’t had to do anything. He hadn’t asked her what she wanted or what she thought; he had taken the rooms, brought back the keys, driven them to the restaurant and steered her in, ordered their drinks. He had listened patiently to her choked tales of childhood. Now he sat tipped back in his chair a bit, with his legs crossed and his shirt collar open and his jacket unbuttoned. His left hand, resting on the arm on his chair, tapped in time to the music playing in the background.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. “Feeling better?”

  “Much.” She had been so calm when they started their trip, and the trip had been so pleasant and civilized, that the upswelling of emotion she’d felt at the dam had caught her by surprise. She hadn’t cried like that in years, and certainly not in front of Waldo. But she felt calmer now, numbed by the noise and the alcohol.

  The music pulsing through the restaurant had gentled and slowed, and she saw that some people had risen and were dancing in a small cleared area near the bar. Waldo said, “Would you like to?” and she said, “What?”

  “Dance.” He gestured at the spinning couples. “We used to be pretty good.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t danced in years.”

  He rose and took her hand and helped her up. “Come on. We’ll dance a little and then we’ll call it a day. Things will sort themselves out in the morning.”

  Her legs were floating, disjointed. He held up his left hand and she folded her right hand into it and placed her other on his shoulder, against his jacket. His right palm pressed firmly between her shoulder blades, steering her among the other couples. Her feet followed his as if they had eyes, remembering the hundreds of times they’d danced together. Weddings, parties, anniversaries—they had always danced well together, or at least they had whenever they weren’t fighting. He led firmly, without hesitation, and when she wasn’t angry at him she had always loved letting her body relax and follow his.

  He pulled her a little closer and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. His neck was still as heavy and muscular as it had been when they’d first met, and the same smell still rose from the skin pressed next to her nose—a mixture of soap (Dial soap, which she’d long since banished from her house after being haunted by visions of Waldo every time she stepped in the bathroom) and after-shave and starch from his shirt collar and the underlying tang that was purely him. When she moved her cheek up she found that his skin was scratchy; his beard was heavy and he’d always needed another shave in the evenings, b
efore they went out. He said, with his lips right next to hers, “You feel exactly the same.” She said, “You smell the same. It’s so strange.”

  They danced for half an hour, drawing closer until they were pressed together like teenagers at a prom, and when Waldo finally said, “Shall we go back?” she could answer him only in a whisper.

  Outside, in the parking lot, she stumbled over the curb and Waldo wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Tired,” she murmured. “A little drunk. I hardly ever drink anymore.” They drove to the motel in silence and walked around to the back, to the two rooms Waldo had taken side by side. “Well,” he said as they stood before her door. “Who would’ve expected this to be so nice?”

  He bent down—this man who had fathered her children, beside whom she’d slept for fifteen years—and he kissed her. He might have meant no more than a gentle, friendly kiss, good night, sleep tight; he might have meant no more than to be kind and reassuring; but her mind was lost at the dam, at the bottom of that pool of water or in the depths of the glasses she’d drained, and she kissed him back without thinking, the way she had when his kisses had been a question before they got into bed at night. She kissed him back yes and touched his neck, and he ran his hand down her back and over her hips, and they stood in the lighted doorway necking like kids.

  She forgot about Sarah and Courteney. She forgot her dislike of him, and all her suspicions—that he had driven her here, that he was being so kind, only because he wanted a crack at the land that Brendan had promised her. She heard herself say, in a husky voice, “This is crazy, standing out here like this.” She heard him answer, “Let’s go inside.” She watched his free hand fumble with the key in the oversize lock, but it was only when they moved inside her darkened room and he held the side of her head in his hand that she realized what she was doing. If they fell into bed, into their old, practiced embrace, she would never be able to let him go again.