The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

But before Marcus could answer, Henry opened the door and stood before them with his hands full of paper sacks. “Hello?” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “This—” Brendan said, but it was all so complicated, how could he ever explain? Years ago, his abbot had told him that there were no true coincidences. There were lesser plans and greater plans, plans that might influence only the comets or a pair of paramecia. But every conjunction of events or people had a purpose, however small. Why had Marcus been sitting just there, feeding the pigeons just then?

  Marcus shot out his hand and took over. “Marcus O’Brian,” he said to Henry. “I was sitting here feeding the birds and I noticed Brendan watching me, so I came over to make a little conversation. And wouldn’t you know, it’s the damnedest thing. Brendan and I knew each other when we were boys.”

  “You’re kidding,” Henry said.

  “No,” Marcus said. “It’s true.” His hand still hung in the air, waiting for Henry to grasp it. “Brendan and his brother and I used to play together.”

  Henry’s face paled. “You knew my father?”

  Marcus looked at Brendan, who nodded. “This is Henry. My nephew.”

  “You’re Frankie’s boy?”

  Henry grasped Marcus’s hand. “I am.”

  “But we’ve met. You wouldn’t remember, you were so little—your father and I were in the service together, and I visited him and your mother a few times after we came home, before … didn’t you have a sister? A little girl, curly brown hair?”

  “Wiloma,” Henry said. “You saw Wiloma.”

  Brendan leaned his head back and wished he were not so tired. Henry seemed to feel all the excitement at meeting Marcus that he should have felt himself, that he would have felt if his head had not grown so heavy that even his brace could hardly hold it up. The coincidence didn’t seem to bother Henry at all. What kind of mind did he have? Brendan wondered. He had come to St. Benedict’s for a routine visit, agreed to an unexpected trip, accepted the improbable gift of a van without a question. Now he accepted the appearance of this stranger who was no stranger equally easily. And yet it meant something that Marcus was here. It had to mean something.

  Brendan let Marcus chatter on, filling Henry in on the details of how his family had known theirs, how he and Frank junior had done this and that, and how he remembered the very night Henry’s mother and father had gotten engaged at the Farewell Ball. Brendan thought how he’d missed all of that. He’d been in the abbey when Marcus and Frank junior had been in high school; he’d been on his way to China during the Farewell Ball and had heard about it only years later, from his parents. He had never known Henry’s mother, and it was strange to think that Marcus knew more of Henry’s family than he did himself.

  His throat was dry and sore. Quietly, interrupting the flow of talk, he said, “Henry? Did you happen to get some coffee?”

  Henry looked down at the paper sacks. “Of course. I’m sorry.” He dug out a steaming cup and offered it to Brendan. “You want something to eat? I didn’t have much money left, but I got us some fried-egg sandwiches and a couple of Danish.”

  “Nothing for me,” Brendan said.

  “Marcus?”

  “I’d take one of those egg sandwiches. If you’ve got no use for it.”

  Bongo sat up and drooled and whined as Marcus and Henry unwrapped their sandwiches. “Why, the poor thing’s hungry,” Marcus said. He plucked the egg from his roll and looked at Henry. “Do you mind?”

  “I forgot,” Henry said, looking abashed. “We’ve been driving half the night. Go ahead.” Marcus tossed the egg to Bongo, who snapped it up and then wagged his tail so hard it thumped on the floor. Henry tossed him half a cheese Danish. “You lie down now,” he said. “That’s all you’re getting.” Bongo collapsed, licking his whiskers.

  Marcus bit into his empty roll. “So, what are you two doing here? Not that I’m not thrilled to see you.”

  Brendan’s left hand rose into the air and hung there for a minute before he was conscious of it. He was too tired to talk anymore. Henry spoke for both of them; to Brendan’s surprise, he spoke clearly and well.

  “Uncle Brendan never saw the reservoir,” he told Marcus. “He left before the dam was finished, even before they’d cleared most of the valley, and he wanted to see what it looks like now. And he wanted to show me the place where I was born. Da—my grandfather, you might have known him—”

  “Sure, I knew him. He was a fine man.”

  “Da had some land in East Pomeroy, outside the reservoir, that he gave to my father and Uncle Brendan—maybe you’ve seen it, if you visited my parents. We thought we’d go take a look at the part Uncle Brendan hung on to, if we can find it.”

  Marcus nodded. “That’s nice land. That’s a nice bit of woods.”

  Brendan raised his head. “You know it? Still? You know where it is?” It was meant, he thought. It was meant to be. He should have understood.

  “Of course I do,” Marcus said. “It’s my job.”

  “What job?” Henry said. “You have a job?”

  “Sure. I was just telling your uncle. I have a part-time job at the new reservoir Visitors’ Center. Nice park—you ought to see it. Nice building, nice people. These kids fresh out of college put together exhibits about the valley’s history, and what things were like before the reservoir, and I’m who they ask about the old times. I am the old times. They’ve dug up all these pictures and things and they want to know who the people were, and where the houses used to be, and … you know.” Marcus laughed. “I have a desk there, nameplate and all. Not bad for an old coot.”

  “But the land,” Brendan said. “My land?”

  “It hasn’t gone anywhere.” Marcus turned to Henry. “Of course the cabin where your folks lived—that’s been gone for years, someone bought that piece and logged it. But the chunk east of where the cabin used to be is still sitting there, untouched and as pretty as you please. I used to walk up there, wishing your father weren’t gone and wondering what happened to the rest of your family—no one ever heard from your grandparents after they moved. Your grandfather was so furious at the way things had turned out that he turned his back on everything here. And then you kids just vanished after the accident … oh, it’s nice up there. You ought to see it.”

  Henry’s face was radiant with enthusiasm and greed, and Brendan groaned to himself. The land was how he’d lured Henry here, and he did want Henry to see it; he wanted to see it himself. But that wasn’t all, or even most, of what he wanted. He wanted to see the water; he wanted, somehow, to see his lost home and his lost abbey. Henry said, “I know you’re busy—but is there any chance you could take us up there?”

  Before Marcus could answer, Brendan said, “We can find it ourselves. I’ll recognize the roads.”

  “But this would be so much easier,” Henry said.

  “But—” Brendan said. It was wrong, all wrong—he didn’t want to impose on Marcus, and he’d wanted to see the reservoir alone. He’d had to have Henry because he needed a driver, but to add Marcus as well, as some sort of guide—he might as well go on a tour. He said, “And anyway, we want to see the reservoir, too. There are some places I particularly want to visit.”

  “No problem,” Marcus said. “I’m supposed to go into work this morning and give a little talk to the Sunday tourists, but I’ll just call and cancel, tell them I met some old friends. Then we could drive up the east side. There’s a place near one of the gates, a little point where we can see the part of the reservoir that covers what used to be Pomeroy. It’s right near your family’s land—you can both see what you want.”

  Henry turned to Brendan. ‘“Wouldn’t that be great? Who would have thought this would work out so well?”

  He had no sense of curiosity at all, Brendan thought. No sense of wonder. For the first time since leaving St. Benedict’s, Brendan felt overwhelmed. He had bribed Henry without thinking of the consequences, borrowed the van without thinking who might be upset, directed their
way here without thinking what they might do when he arrived. He hadn’t allowed for coincidences that might not be coincidental.

  He closed his eyes and sighed and willed himself to accept whatever might come. This trip wasn’t in his hands anymore and perhaps it never had been. He imagined the van as a skin-covered curragh, the road as an ocean, Henry and Marcus as his guides, and Bongo as the long-legged hound who led the monks to food and water on the first island Brendan’s patron saint had found. He thought, I will see what they show me. I will go where they take me. He opened his eyes and said, “Wonderful. Lead on.”

  25

  THE WOMAN AT THE DESK INSIDE THE VISITORS’ CENTER WORE a light green blouse decorated with an embroidered patch. The patch reproduced the molded-plastic relief map mounted on the wall—green for the valleys, blue for the rivers, yellow for the hills—and as Wendy stood there, unable to think of what she wanted to say, her eyes wandered from the patch to the map and back. The woman seemed mildly pleasant, more or less patient. She touched the patch that had caught Wendy’s eye and said, “Pretty, isn’t it? It’s a reproduction of the valley topography before they built the reservoir.”

  “Pretty,” Wendy echoed faintly. Who were “they”? The patch made her head spin, as did the huge bumpy map and the displays and photographs lining the walls. There were pictures of men dwarfed by a half-built dam, trees stacked like bundled chopsticks, buildings being wheeled away on trailers. She thought of her own home vanishing by a similar sleight of hand, the house jacked up and moved and the weary yard sinking below a sheet of water that would cover all her past mistakes. For the first time since her mother’s phone call, she had a glimpse of why Grunkie might want to visit this place. The reservoir, she thought, had sliced a clean cut through his old life and set him free to live another. She would have given anything for a similar close to her past.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” the woman asked.

  Wendy opened her mouth, still not sure what she wanted to say. Before she could speak, Roy elbowed past her and said, “We’re looking for this land.”

  “What land would that be?”

  “My friends’ great-uncle,” Roy began, but Wendy pushed him aside, furious at his interference.

  “We’d like to go for a hike,” she said. Her voice was high and cracked, with a hysterical edge even she could hear. She hadn’t slept all night. The woman’s unblinking eyes reminded her of Christine, and every time she looked at Roy she thought of Christine’s words: that she took things, stole things, to make up for all she’d lost. Christine had been talking about Henry, but Wendy was sure the reproach had been directed at her.

  Everything, at that moment, reminded her of everything else. The maps on the wall reminded her of how badly she’d gotten everyone lost, after Lise had finally relinquished the wheel: she’d chosen the wrong road from.the snarl of highways intersecting west of Albany, and then, when she’d discovered her mistake just north of Troy, she’d chosen wrong again in her attempt to find a route to the Massachusetts Turnpike. While Roy and Lise and Delia slept and Win stared at the back of her head, dropping his lids each time she looked in the mirror and offering no help at all, she had wandered through the Berkshires until she’d stumbled onto the Turnpike by accident. At the exit for the reservoir, when she asked the tollbooth attendant for directions, she’d been so bewildered that she’d written the directions down carefully but somehow still written them down wrong. And so when Roy woke up and insisted on driving while she navigated, what should have been an easy half-hour end to their trip had turned into a two-hour exploration of Holyoke and Ware and a string of towns she had never wanted to see.

  The towns had all looked the same and the road never went in the right direction. Roy said nothing about what they’d done and seemed determined to act as if nothing had changed. He had set his jaw and looked straight ahead and driven as if he were working, never once looking directly at her, never once touching her. When she had let her hand drift down to his thigh, he had twitched away as if he’d been burned. And now, in this building that had taken them so long to reach, he seemed to think he should spill their secrets to this stranger.

  The woman looked from Roy to Wendy and back again, as if she were reading the tension between them. “Where would you like to hike?” she asked Wendy.

  Her voice placed invisible quotation marks around the word hike, and her gaze sharpened as she took in Delia and Lise and Win, who stumbled wearily behind Wendy and Roy. We look like delinquents, Wendy thought, running her tongue around her sour mouth. There was a certain pleasure in being so grubby that her clothes no longer acted as a disguise.

  “Along the east shore?” she said. “Sort of toward the north?”

  “North? It’s a big place ….”

  The woman’s face tightened when Lise plopped down on a chair and said, “This is ridiculous.” The woman took a flimsy, crudely drawn map of the reservoir from the stack before her and tossed it down in front of Wendy.

  “Here. Dotted lines are the hiking trails. Solid lines are the roads. Gates are marked with these small numbers—you can leave your car at any of them. No swimming. No fires. No hunting.”

  Lise sniffed and said, “Do we look like hunters?” which did not improve the situation. The woman’s growing disapproval of them hung in the air like an odor. The walls were lined with all the information they might need, but the woman didn’t offer any of it and Wendy was too worn out to ask. She realized, standing there, that they’d been crazy to come. Hurtling through the night in pursuit of their parents, hoping to find Grunkie on a bit of land along an enormous shoreline—Lise was right, it was ridiculous, and the way she’d acted with Roy was worse than that. The peculiar smile he’d given her when he’d opened his eyes had seemed so accepting, as if he believed that they’d both been lost in sleep and had committed only an unconscious bit of mischief, easily dismissed. The way he stood so coolly beside her now told her that he’d found a way to blame her for what they’d done.

  She thanked the woman, folded the map, and left, with the others trailing behind her. In the parking lot she smoothed the map over the hood of Roy’s car and stared at it. The lines swam in front of her eyes, and she might have given up right then if Roy had not dropped a hand on her shoulder and said, “Calm down. It’s going to be all right.” When she turned to him, she read a distant kindness in his eyes.

  “Let’s get focused here,” he said. “Let’s try and remember what we’re doing.”

  Win was standing apart from the rest of them, with his eyes fixed on Roy’s hand. “I’d really like to find my mother,” he said quietly. Wendy stepped aside and let Roy’s hand fall from her shoulder. “Sometimes she gets a little … disoriented, or something,” Win said.

  “That’s true,” Wendy said, relieved to think of her mother’s behavior, which was always worse than hers. In this way at least, her mother was reliable. “Especially when she’s around Uncle Henry.”

  “You’re sure you want to interfere?” Roy asked.

  She wasn’t sure, now, that she’d wanted anything more than to escape from Christine’s presence and sit next to Roy in the dark car, but she supposed that she and Win and Delia and Lise did want to interfere. They wanted to interfere with their parents’ strange behavior, which was galloping away with their lives. Their parents were careless with everything, with their own lives, with each other, with them. Lost in the little towns north of Troy, crossing and recrossing a narrow causeway suspended a few feet above a lake, it had come to her that Grunkie was really dying. Her mother and Christine could neither help nor hurt him much; her uncle, by keeping Grunkie out of their clutches, couldn’t save him from what counted. They were wasting what might be Grunkie’s last days, and as she thought of him tugged this way and that by his niece wanting to save his soul and his nephew wanting to save his land, her sense of purpose returned.

  She said to Roy, “Sometimes we have to interfere. Sometimes we’re the only ones who know wh
at’s going on.” Her mistake, she saw now, lay in calling her father. If she hadn’t been so lost in her own daydreams, and so jolted by the panic in her mother’s voice, she would have seen that she and Win could have driven their mother here themselves. No Lise, no Delia, no Roy. No mess.

  Delia sided with her immediately. “We have to help however we can,” she said, and although her face was pale from all she’d drunk, her silliness had vanished and her words were serious.

  “Okay,” Roy said. “So where are we going?”

  Wendy drew Win to her, but he pulled his arm away. “I saw you, you know,” he said angrily, as if she hadn’t been aware of his eyes throughout their whole long night. He maneuvered Wendy away from the others and turned his back to them. “I saw you and Roy. And I saw that stuff in your bag, that you ripped off at the plaza. What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “I don’t know.” She could feel herself unraveling, the loose ends of her old lives sticking out in all directions. She smoothed the panic from her voice. “Let’s just do this, okay?”

  Win still stared at her suspiciously, as if she were turning into their mother before his eyes.

  “I’m all right,” she told him. “Really.”

  “Really?” he said, and when she nodded they bent over the map together. The outlines of the reservoir were similar to what she remembered of the maps their father had shown them: an elongated mitten, with a narrow western branch stretching north like a thumb, a short lobe like a wrist in the south, and then a larger, wider, eastern branch. The spot their father had shown them lay, she thought, along the eastern branch and near the top. Either of the two points jutting into the water might be the point near Grunkie’s land.

  “East Pomeroy,” Win said. “Isn’t that what Dad said the town was called?”

  “I think,” Wendy said. “But those old names aren’t on here.”

  “We’ll just have to wing it,” Win said. “We’ll hike in, take a look around. If they’re not at the first gate we try, we’ll try another.”