The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  She drew back from him. She tried to smile, although she knew he couldn’t see her in the dark. She said, “You’re sweet, taking care of me like this—really. I appreciate it. But maybe we should get some sleep.” Her tongue was thick in her mouth.

  She heard Waldo take a deep breath and then laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “All that dancing—I got carried away. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  You were thinking of us, she wanted to say. The way we used to be, all the time we spent together—how could you give it all up? She said, “We’re both exhausted. Will you wake me early?”

  “Seven? We’ll have some breakfast and then we’ll take a look at the maps and start wherever you want.” He touched her hair and then he left.

  Wiloma undressed in the dark and then lay down carefully on the bed. When she closed her eyes the room began to spin. She sat up, her spine pressed against the headboard, and she turned on the reading lamp. Her body felt prickly, warm, oversensitive; next door, through the thin wall, she could hear Waldo moving around. He brushed his teeth. He dropped his shoes on the floor with a thump. She tried not to remember the slow, deliberate way he used to undress in their bedroom. She tried to tell herself she was glad she’d sent him away.

  She did some breathing exercises and then meditated for ten minutes. Body is a reflection of Spirit, she reminded herself. The body cannot desire what the Spirit does not want. Her Spirit did not desire Waldo, not at all; she and Waldo were totally unsuited. And the yearning she felt in her skin and bones was false, an artifact, a creation of the alcohol that had poisoned her system and of her exhaustion and fear. It was insignificant, nothing, and she was glad she’d had the sense to send him away.

  She was glad, and yet she could not sleep. She picked up the phone, thinking that she might, despite the lateness of the hour, check in with Wendy and make sure she and Win were all right, but when she dialed her number, a voice she couldn’t place right away answered, “White residence.”

  “Hello?” The voice clicked in her brain. “Christine? Is that you?”

  “Wiloma,” Christine said.

  Wiloma held the phone away from her and stared at it. Christine—what was she doing there? “I thought you were coming tomorrow. I’m sorry, I meant to call you earlier. There’s been a little problem with my uncle.”

  “I heard. Wendy told me all about his disappearance. But I know you’ll find him—you know how important it is that I start work with him immediately.”

  “I know,” Wiloma said. “We haven’t found any trace of him yet, but I think I know where he’s headed—with some luck I’ll find him tomorrow morning. I’ll have him home with you by dinnertime.”

  “Your husband’s with you?”

  “Ex-husband.”

  “Whatever. Don’t let him distract you—remember that he does not have the best interests of this Healing at heart.”

  With her words, Wiloma suddenly saw the evening’s events in a different light. Christine was right, she thought—Waldo had not come on this trip to help Brendan, nor had he held her out of desire or love. He wanted something, several somethings, and none of them were worthy. She would have to guard herself against confusion. He was sleeping already, in the room next to her; she thought she could hear his gentle snores. He was sleeping, and dreaming of Sarah and Courteney, and plotting the houses he hoped to convince her to let him build on Brendan’s land, and she’d been a fool to let his warm hands and the bewildering fragrance of his neck seduce her. She was here to find her uncle; nothing more.

  “I’m all set up here,” Christine said. “We’re ready to go. But you have to bring your uncle to me soon. We don’t have much time.”

  “Tomorrow,” Wiloma said, and she thought of her children. They couldn’t have been pleased to have Christine arrive unannounced. She hoped they had been polite. “May I talk to Wendy?” She wanted to hear her daughter’s voice, wanted to tell her what had happened—not about the restaurant, not in detail; not about Waldo’s warm hands or the dancing or the moment at the door, but just something, any thing: “We had a pleasant evening,” she might say. “Your father and I.”

  Christine said nothing. “Hello?” Wiloma said. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Would you put Wendy on?”

  “It’s terribly late,” Christine said after a brief hesitation. “The children are fine, but it’s so late—maybe it would be better to wait until tomorrow to talk to them.”

  Wiloma looked at her watch. It was late, it was quarter past one; it wouldn’t be fair to wake Wendy just for the comfort of hearing her voice. And Wendy and Win were safe, she knew, in Christine’s care—she hadn’t felt entirely comfortable leaving them alone, and Christine’s presence in the house reassured her. “It’s all right. I’ll talk to them tomorrow.”

  “That would be best.”

  “They’re all right? They must have been surprised to see you.”

  “They’re fine. They were a little startled, but you prepared them well. They’re nice children.”

  “They are,” Wiloma said.

  “How about you? Are you all right? You sound a little displaced. Disoriented.”

  “I’m fine,” Wiloma said. She felt a sudden yearning to confide in Christine, but she pushed it aside; Christine had enough to do, she had to focus on Brendan. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Christine said.

  Wiloma hung up and slept for a while, but her dreams were haunted by visions of Brendan, shrunken and writhing in pain, trying to die and unable to free his Spirit from his body. She woke drenched in a clammy sweat. I have to find him, she thought. I can’t let him die like Da. Then she lay in the darkness, unable to keep herself from reliving her grandfather’s last days.

  She’d been alone in the house with him, in Coreopsis: 1961, six weeks after her nineteenth birthday. Gran had died that March of a heart attack, and Brendan had left for St. Benedict’s; Henry had married Kitty and fled with her to Irondequoit. Her neighbors had been busy baling hay and her friends were working or off to college or newly married or pregnant or both; and she’d been trapped alone with Da in a house that smelled of death.

  The house had smelled of other things as well. It smelled of a refrigerator seldom cleaned, of food left out on countertops, of the damp spot below the sink where water dripped from a leaky pipe. It smelled of the mice that had drowned in the basement—that July had been wet, there’d been puddles down there—and of cat: Mimi had been fifteen, and sometimes she went on the furniture. It smelled of Da, who had lain in his bed all summer, wasted and incontinent, while the cancer that had first appeared as a lump in his armpit ate him away.

  She had dreaded Da’s death and feared that he would never die. Weeks went by when she spoke only to him, and to the doctor who came once a day to give him morphine. Henry had been so caught up with his new wife, his new life, that he hardly ever called, and when he did she could feel him straining not to hear her need for help. He was very busy, he said. He was starting his first development and finishing his first house. He was in love, he said; he could not leave Kitty even for a day; did she need any money? He sent handsome checks she didn’t need, and when she said she was frightened, he offered to hire a nurse.

  But Da slept most of the time, and he didn’t want a stranger in the house. When he woke his dreams spilled over into his conversations, and he spoke of the flock of birds he saw on the walls, of a lake where he’d once fished, of dirt, water, moss, rocks, clouds. He fell inward, behind his eyes, and he talked to Gran and to Wiloma’s dead father, and to Brendan, who was gone. There were bees, he said, in the ice that formed on their pond, and sometimes he moved his swollen hands on the sheets and said, “A reservoir?” in a voice still fresh with disbelief.

  He floated through his past like a leaf on the river, and while he dipped and swam Wiloma sat beside him and read. She sat next to the bed on which she’d arranged his limbs—he’d been big, but now he was nothing b
ut bones and knobs so dense it took two hands to lift them. She read to fend off the urge to flee and to keep at bay the scenes she saw: her own life, about to open up to her. The city where she might live, the children she might someday have—she saw the house locked, empty, gone, and the life she’d lived there finally done.

  On the night before Da died, when he said, “I want to go. I’m ready,” and then closed his eyes and waited, she saw the stone walls of their house tumbled and covered with grass. Da said, “Help me,” and she thought of placing a pillow over his face, releasing them both. She picked up the pillow and held it and then knew she couldn’t; he was in pain but he was still alive. She rubbed the brittle bones of his hands instead. Then she reached for the book on his table, which had lain there all along but which she’d never touched before. Words, she remembered thinking. Distraction. The book had been written by a British scientist and published in 1872, twenty years before Da was born: The Forms of Water in Clouds & Rivers, Ice & Glaciers, faded gilt words on a faded red spine.

  That night, while Da lay struggling to shed his body, she read the first few pages and learned again that water might be a gas or a liquid or a solid; clouds or steam or rain or breath, rivers or ice or snow. She had that book still, in a cedar chest in the attic. The title and long passages were still burned into her brain. You may notice in a ballroom, she read—oh, she remembered this, she remembered the words exactly—that as long as the door and windows are kept closed and the room remains hot, the air remains clear; but when the door or windows are opened a dimness is visible, caused by the precipitation to fog of the aqueous vapor of the lungs. If the weather be intensely cold the entrance of fresh air may even cause snow to fall.

  In the margin, surprising her, were words in Da’s spidery hand. I have not seen this, he’d written. But perhaps it snows more heavily over the reservoir than elsewhere? All the breath in all those drowned houses …

  He meant the Stillwater, Wiloma knew—the very place she’d seen tonight for the first time since childhood. An easy seven-hour drive, which she’d never made; the place Da had ranted and raved about and that her father had brooded over. Da had told his stories again and again while she and Henry sat trapped at the dining room table in Coreopsis, and the stories had been different from, but related to, the ones their father had told them on Sunday mornings. Six villages lay in that valley, Da had said; and he had been born there and Gran had come as a little girl, from Ireland; and he and Gran had married and had two boys and one had gone to China; and he couldn’t leave his farm to Wiloma’s father because it lay under the water; and the land was taken and leveled and burned. Of course she’d never made the drive, she’d always known what she’d find here. Graves, ashes, ruins, bones. Being back here was like losing her parents all over again.

  In the weeks before Da’s death, he had hardly ever recognized her. She’d been grateful for that—she did not want him, did not want anyone, to know the ways in which she touched him. For weeks she had rolled his body from side to side each day and changed the sheets beneath him. She’d washed and powdered and bandaged the sores on his shoulders and elbows and back; she’d passed a damp cloth over his nipples and crotch and the deep hollows above his collarbones. She’d taken his pulse, she’d taken his temperature, she’d cleaned his mouth and ears. But Da had slept through all that, or drifted in some state that was like sleep, only wilder, and she’d told herself he didn’t know whose hands touched him.

  On the night before his death, she read and dozed and tended to him and read. The sun rose and the cicadas began their August drone. From time to time she touched his head or raised him slightly or lowered him, trying to ease his labored breaths. In his dreamy state that wasn’t sleep he could follow her instructions: Lean forward, Da. Can you swallow this? The doctor had left pills for her to place under Da’s tongue, but sometimes the wedge-shaped hollow there was so dry that the pills wouldn’t dissolve. She lifted his tongue like a piece of cloth and dripped water onto the tablets, rain from her fingertips.

  Swallow, Da, she remembered saying. Can you swallow? He lay somewhere between sleep and death, already far away, and when she could pull her eyes away from him, she read. She skipped around in his book and read the bits he’d underlined, trying to find what had comforted him.

  What is the structure of the ice over which we skate in winter? she read. Quite as wonderful as the flowers of the snow. I have seen in water slowly freezing six-rayed ice stars formed, floating freely on the surface. Lake ice is built of such forms wonderfully interlaced.

  Da and Gran had brought her and Henry to Coreopsis in the winter, when the reservoir was frozen; she and Henry had come because they had no place else to go and stayed because they were children. A stream ran through their new place and fed the onions and corn and squash; rain fell and became confused with the rain that had fallen the night of the dance and the steam that rose from the cows in winter and the snow that fell and would not stop. The old pond, Da had written in his book, near the drawing of an ice flower. I pulled Brendan out the day he went through the ice.

  He and Gran had saved her and Henry just as surely, Wiloma thought, but they hadn’t been able to see it then. Exhausted, broken-tongued, they’d clung together at school, where their new classmates had treated them as if their misfortunes were contagious. But the farm had been so silent it had frozen them silent, too, and Da, so old even then, hadn’t been able to find the words to make them talk.

  Da breathed through his open mouth, the three teeth that had anchored his bottom plate standing dry and yellow, like stumps. “Tonight, maybe,” the doctor had whispered, when he’d visited at noon. He’d moved his stethoscope over Da’s back and said, “His lungs are filling. It won’t be long.” When he left, she’d moistened a cotton swab and rubbed it over Da’s lips and gums. He’d moved his tongue; he’d swallowed.

  You cannot study a snowflake profoundly without being led back by it step by step to the contribution of the sun, she read. It is thus throughout nature. All its parts are interdependent and the study of any one part completely would really involve the study of all. The words were engraved on her brain still—all the words she’d read those last two days. She had never been able to forget either them or the way Da had looked.

  At ten, that last night, he opened his eyes after rolling in pain for hours. He said, “Eileen! Watch out, you’ll tear your dress”—he’d been talking to Gran, Wiloma remembered, as if Gran were there in the room with them—but then he said, quite lucidly, “Wiloma. Am I going someplace after this? Will I know you’re all right? Will I see you?”

  This, when after Gran’s sudden death he’d begged to follow her. All his bark had vanished, all the flinty reserve that had made her hide her heart from him, and she looked into his cloudy eyes and lied. Or said what felt to her like a lie: “Yes,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” she said, thinking of the times, all through high school, when she’d dreamed of leaving Coreopsis. A hundred times she’d imagined taking her diploma, leaving the stage, setting aside her cap and gown, and picking up her suitcase. Taking a bus to anywhere, leaving that life for another. She tried to offer Da a similar version of comfort—not the one she would offer now that she had the Church, but the best she could manage then. “You have to have faith,” she said.

  He shuddered and she knew what was troubling him: he’d been raised a Catholic but had scorned his church since the reservoir had drowned it.

  “Not what the priests told you,” she said. “Just faith. That there’s something else, another place.”

  “What does it look like?”

  And she tried—she’d been so young then, so ignorant, it had been the best she could do—to invent something pleasing. “There’s a valley,” she said, and as she spoke she saw it clearly in her mind. Gran had told her and Henry a story when they’d first come to Coreopsis. A boat, a journey, a secret place. Talking animals. The land of the blessed, Gran had said.
The country of the young. Henry had sat on the chair beside them, rocking, waiting, and she had curled around Gran’s legs, listening to her tales.

  “There’s a tree,” she told her grandfather. “In the valley.” His lids were transparent and the veins in them branched like coral. She told him about the fields and flowers and streams, the animals grazing, the flocks of birds. How the sun shone all day, how it was never too hot or too cold; how at night it rained just enough for the plants and how fruit hung from the branches.

  “Are there people?” he asked.

  “Lots,” she said. “No one ever grows old there. No one ever dies.” He grasped her thumb with his finger and held on. “Gran is there,” she continued. “And my parents, and yours. It will feel like you’ve come home.”

  The words seemed to comfort him, and he fell back to sleep before she could say anything else. The stars moved; his fever rose. When she went to take his pulse, his arm felt cool and waxy, and she couldn’t find the flutter she’d counted with her fingers for so long. She brushed her hair from her ear and pressed her head to his chest—there was his heart, beating still, but muffled and much too fast.

  He coughed from time to time, wet gasps that cleared nothing. She understood that he would not wake again. She wished—she had wished then, and she wished it even more strongly now, had felt it more and more every year—that she’d held his hands and stretched the truth and said, “We were happy here. We loved our lives. We hardly missed our parents once we had you,” He had given them what he could, everything he had. Mimi jumped on his bed and crept among the pillows wedged beneath elbows, hips, and knees; pillows meant to take the place of flesh and keep bone from metal, bone from bone. Da’s head fell sideways, his neck so stiff she couldn’t move it back.