The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  “I could go back inside and ask that woman,” Roy said. “She might know what we’re looking for.”

  She might, thought Wendy. She might know exactly where East Pomeroy was, or used to be; she might even know the place where their father had once lived. But Wendy couldn’t bear to face her again. “No,” she said. “We can find it.”

  And so they drove north to the gate Win picked, and they found it without any trouble and parked the car and started walking. But they hadn’t counted on the unmarked trails or the deer paths that crossed them or the exuberant undergrowth, and they hadn’t expected the hills and streams and ridges that weren’t on their useless map, and they hadn’t realized just how exhausted they really were. Within minutes, they were seriously lost.

  Wendy’s shoulder ached from her bag, although she’d crammed the loot from the Thruway plaza beneath the seat. Win strode next to her, trying to look as if he knew where they were headed. She was sure they had strayed from the main path some time ago, and that the tiny overgrown trail they were following had been made by deer or dogs. Behind them, Delia was drooping and dragging her feet and sticking close to Roy. Lise trailed all of them and complained about her shoes, which were pinching.

  “We ought to be heading to our left,” Win said. “The water has to be to the left of us.”

  “I know,” Wendy said. But every time the path looped to the left it bent right again a few yards later. They seemed to be traveling along the outlines of a knot, and she was sure they’d crossed their own tracks several times. She was hot and tired and thirsty and had nothing useful in her bag. A huge bird, a hawk or a heron, rose from a tree with a whir that made Delia shriek.

  “See?” Win said. “See how he’s heading left? He’s heading for the water.”

  “So?” Wendy said. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  Win gave her a disgusted look. “We should have gotten a better map. We should have asked that woman for some help.”

  Wendy could see no point in telling him how that woman had frightened her. “You want to go back?”

  “Too late now. But how about we break our own trail for a while? If we cut through here, I know we’ll hit the water.” Win plunged into the tangle of dogwood and witch hazel to their left.

  Roy drew up to Wendy. “Where’s he going?” he asked. The hairs on his arms lay in smooth, soft lines.

  “He’s sure the reservoir’s over there,” Wendy said, forcing herself to meet Roy’s eyes. She felt herself begin to blush.

  “You think?” Roy said, but then Lise caught up with them and said, “I’m not going in there,” and Wendy snapped, “Fine. Stay here,” and stomped after her brother, pushing aside the branches and vines and no longer caring who was behind her. None of this would have happened, she thought, if Lise hadn’t been so obnoxious in the car. And if Delia hadn’t been so afraid of Lise, and if she’d had the sense to flaunt Roy instead of trying to hide him—the ground was dry, and the path Win was making was not so difficult after all. Branches whipped at her knees and thighs, but her shoulders and head were clear. Behind her she could hear Roy urging Delia on, and all she could think was that they were truly lost, the kind of lost where they would not be able to retrace their steps and where their only hope was to stumble forward into what they longed to find.

  Win marched ahead of her, sticking grimly to his chosen direction. Christine’s comment last night had stung him, Wendy knew, and so had her own behavior; he was so afraid of failing to act, or of acting as strangely as the women around him, that he was unwilling to admit to the confusion and fear she knew he felt.

  They came out on a trail as smooth and wide as a sidewalk. The trail led to a wider dirt road; the road led to a clearing and split around a large wedge of grass. Craters lined the sides of the fork, and Win stopped and said, “Cellar holes. Look.”

  The holes were edged with bricks and draped with ivy and vinca and raspberry canes. Lise came up behind them and said, “We’re here? About time.” Then she plopped down on the grass and took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Roy sat down as well, and before Wendy could move to join him, Delia threw herself down and rested her head in his lap.

  “We’re still friends,” Delia said in response to Lise’s frown. From the look on Lise’s face, and from Delia’s disregard of it, Wendy knew the charade she’d acted out with Roy was over. Delia must have realized that Lise couldn’t do anything more to her than tell their parents, and that their parents were too distracted to care. Or perhaps she’d sensed the troubled current flowing between Wendy and Roy. Delia smiled at Roy and teased him quietly. But there was no mistaking the confident way she touched his arm.

  Mine, that touch said, and Wendy convinced herself that Delia deserved him. Roy gazed over Delia’s head at Wendy and stroked Delia’s hair quite deliberately. Wendy felt that he did this not to be mean but to let her know where they stood. Which was nowhere, she thought, with a kind of calm despair; they were more than friends, less than lovers, connected through Delia and almost family. They were drawn to each other and weren’t going to do anything about it. She couldn’t imagine living with the wild surge of feeling that had filled her in the car. Then she couldn’t imagine living without it. Grunkie, she thought, had cut that part of his life out like a wart. She had no idea what an abbey looked like, but she imagined a group of vaguely churchlike buildings surrounded by a wall. In the wall was a gate that closed at night, shutting everything murky and dubious outside.

  She looked away from Roy and Delia to find Win peering at a small brass plaque set in the grass. “This was the Pomeroy Common,” he called. “Maybe this is the place.”

  Their father, Wendy remembered, had said the cabin stood in East Pomeroy, and she wondered if he’d made some sort of mistake. But this land was low, and she’d had the impression that the land they were searching for lay along a ridge. And also there was no one here. But a ridge rose south of them, low and rolling, past the tall grass beyond the cellar holes, and the sky behind it had the glow and spaciousness of sky over water. Wendy pointed this out to Win.

  “They could be up there,” she said. “The reservoir’s probably just beyond that ridge, and maybe there’s some other way in that we missed completely, and that Mom and Grunkie and Dad and Uncle Henry took.”

  Win studied the map. “There’s a gate below us they might have taken,” he said.

  What was wrong, Wendy realized, was that the land they were searching for shouldn’t have been inside any of the gates. The gates marked the boundary of the reservoir’s watershed, and it didn’t seem likely that her grandparents could have had a cabin inside that line. From the corner of her eye she saw Delia drape an arm around Roy’s neck. Lise stood up suddenly and strode over to Wendy and Win and flicked the map with her thumb. Her face was pinched and drawn.

  “So where are they?” Lise said. “All this way, and they’re not even here … are we just going to sit around all day?”

  Lise was jealous, Wendy realized. She’d been jealous of her and Roy when she’d thought they were together, and now she was more jealous of Delia and Roy and upset at what she must have sensed of the conspiracy to fool her, and she was so lonely her only comfort was her sharp tongue. In the car last night, she’d complained about her mother—how, now that Kitty was losing the house and moving into Lise’s apartment complex, she was all over Lise all the time and leaned on her for company and comfort. It wasn’t fair, Lise had said. Her mother was counting on her too much because she couldn’t count on Henry at all, and it wasn’t fair.

  But no one had listened to her. Delia had been drinking vodka and telling jokes and humming songs, and Roy had been listening to Delia, and Win had been asleep and Wendy had been so absorbed in the pleasure of sitting next to Roy that they had all ignored Lise, acknowledging her comments only enough to tell her she worried too much. Which she did, Wendy saw, but no more than she did herself, and anyway they both had reason to worry. She couldn’t remember how and when she and Win
and Delia had begun to band against Lise, but she knew they’d started long ago, even before their parents had shattered their lives. She wondered now if they’d shunned Lise because she was nasty, or if Lise had grown nasty because they’d shut her out.

  “We think they might be on that ridge over there,” she said to Lise, trying to speak gently and kindly. They had everything in common, she thought. Neither of them had Roy. “Or maybe just beyond it. They can’t be far.”

  “Fine,” Lise snapped. “Let’s go. I swear, if I get my hands on my father …” She walked off, all by herself, through the waving grass.

  26

  BRENDAN SAID, SEVERAL TIMES, THAT HE WANTED TO SEE THE dam first, but Henry, with the enthusiastic backing of Marcus, overrode him. The dam would keep, Henry said. Although of course he wanted to see it, too, and they would see it, later—but the morning was so beautiful, perfect for walking, and he was so full of energy, and Marcus had said that if they went by the Visitors’ Center they might be stuck there for a while. “And anyway,” Henry said, “I want to see the place where I was born.”

  The words cloaked his real longing in a reasonable disguise, and Brendan was unable, as Henry had known he would be, to resist him. Henry hardly felt guilty about this at all. He’d done everything else that his uncle had wanted this whole long trip, and he could see no reason not to give in to the fierce excitement that gripped him.

  “We’ll be there in half an hour,” Marcus promised. As they set off, pulling away from the shady square and heading east and north around the base of the reservoir, Henry was filled with a sense of well-being. He’d slept—not a lot, but enough—and he’d eaten and had his coffee; the sun cast a buttery light on the land. When he gazed in the rearview mirror he saw, not the battered face he’d been wearing for the past six months, but the face he’d had before his crash. The lines around his eyes only pointed up their sparkle. His hair wasn’t gray but only attractively streaked; his complexion was rosy, not florid. He saw a man in the prime of life—young, still quite young, full of vigor and optimism. He’d gotten his uncle here safely and had had the great good fortune to meet a man who’d known his father. And although breakfast had dented his slim bankroll he still had twenty-two dollars left, which was almost enough to get them back home. He felt sure he could persuade Marcus to lend them a little more.

  Brendan was silent in the back of the van and Bongo was asleep, but Marcus, sitting next to Henry, kept up a nonstop flow of chatter and directions.

  “Take a left here. Then a right, at that light. This used to be farmland here, where those brown buildings are—they make computers in there. All these businessmen have moved here from the city the past couple of years, and you wouldn’t believe the prices they’re paying for houses.”

  Henry’s heart leapt at that. An influx of wealthy executives, a rising real estate market—if his uncle’s land had any view at all and even reasonable access, anything he did there would mint money. The land would come to him clean and unencumbered, the way the farm had in Coreopsis. But this time he’d know what to do with it.

  “Turn left here,” Marcus said, and then he started talking about the years before the dam was built and how, even before the acts authorizing construction had passed through the legislature, men from Boston had invaded the area.

  “They were the slick ones, they were, and you can’t tell me they didn’t plan every step of it. We didn’t have phones or electric then, and most of the roads weren’t paved, and most of the farmers weren’t doing so well and neither were the mills. Those men were like vultures—they smelled the weakness. They came sniffing around, sniffing out the greedy men and the failures and the widows, and they spread rumors that the dam was coming and that land values were going to crash.”

  Marcus’s voice rose a little and he plucked at the loose skin on his neck. “‘Sell now,’ they said, and they offered a premium to the first ones who did. Pots of money, more than some could resist. Then they went to the neighbors and said, ‘See, so-and-so sold already for a good price. We can’t offer quite as much now, but it’s still a lot, more than you’ll get if you wait.’ They offered each round of sellers less, and pretty soon people panicked—and the diehards, the ones who’d held out until the rumors became a sure thing, they threatened them with eminent domain.”

  He pursed his lips and made a disgusted noise. “What can you do with men like that? ‘We can take it anyway,’ they said. ‘And we will.’ And they did. People like my parents, and your grandparents—they held out so long they got almost nothing.”

  Henry listened with half an ear, but Marcus’s story seemed impossibly distant, like a fairy tale set in a time Henry couldn’t imagine. The fact was—his daughters and Kitty had often accused him of this, and he’d had to admit they were right—the fact was that, despite his ability to imagine alternate lives for himself in places he’d never been, he couldn’t imagine a scene without himself in it.

  He tried to picture the valley during the 1920s, but he could see only flappers and gangsters, images from movies, nothing that squared with Marcus’s tales or with what his parents and grandparents had told him. And he couldn’t help thinking that those men from Boston had only been doing their jobs. He’d used the same tactics himself, on a smaller scale—in his glory days, when his developments had sold out immediately and the people who moved in were young and had small children and were thrilled with their homes, he had sometimes acted secretly to piece together his parcels of land.

  He had never looked at land that was already advertised for sale. Instead, his talent had been to cruise the countryside in a mood as relaxed as a trance, waiting for the flash that would tell him here, here, here. A certain combination of topography and location would flash in the sun like a mirror, and he’d look at the land and see himself reflected in it. Then he’d start the slow, secret process of tracking down the various owners, and after that the even more secret process of finding out what those owners might want or need. And of course he’d approached those people one by one, cutting them out of the herd, and of course he’d offered large sums to the early sellers and then smaller sums to the later ones. How else could he have assembled his tracts at a reasonable price? Those men from Boston had only been canny, and he blamed his grandparents’ bitterness on their inability to see what was coming and get out early.

  He interrupted Marcus midsentence to say, “But you all knew it was coming—why didn’t you just get the best price you could and go somewhere else?”

  “Because this was our home,” Brendan said acidly from behind Henry’s head. “Our families had been here for generations. Our lives weren’t for sale.”

  “That’s right,” Marcus said, and he gave Henry an odd look. “What do you do for a living, anyway?”

  Henry stiffened, waiting for his uncle to say something scathing about his real estate career. Marcus seemed old-fashioned, one of those stiff types who disapproved of development on principle, and Henry was anxious not to alienate him. When Brendan said nothing, Henry said, “I’m working in a corrugated-box factory these days, running a die-cutter.”

  To his surprise, Marcus broke into a huge smile. “Isn’t that something, now. Used to be, there was a big box factory in Pomeroy that your father worked at in the winter. When they moved it to Athol, after the building started, he commuted out there. It’s nice to think you’re following after him.”

  “I didn’t know I was.” Henry looked in the rearview mirror and caught Brendan’s gaze; Brendan dropped his eyes, leaving Henry to wonder why he’d never mentioned this. Then he wondered what else Marcus knew that Brendan didn’t, or hadn’t seen fit to mention.

  They drove along the base of a long, low hill and crossed a river that was, Marcus said, one of the three that fed the reservoir. On the other side of the river was a quiet town that seemed very old. Henry turned where Marcus told him to, and the road, already small, narrowed further and became frost-heaved and rocky.

  “You want to take a rig
ht at this fork,” Marcus said. “Then you’ll have to be careful—the last stretch is dirt.”

  Marcus knew about the place where his father had worked, Henry thought. Perhaps he knew more than that. “What happened to my father during the war?” he asked. “Did he ever say?”

  “You must have heard that story before.”

  “Not from you. You knew him.” Henry saw Brendan lean forward in his chair, as if to catch Marcus’s words, and he remembered how Brendan had lain in the parlor in Coreopsis, telling him stories about the war in China. Those tales had come from the same time and the same war but a different place; although Henry had clung to them, they had never done more than circle around his father’s war.

  “I was with him,” Marcus said. “But it’s a long story.”

  “Tell me,” Henry said.

  Marcus drew his arms together in his lap. “War stories,” he said sourly. “I hate war stories.” But then he stretched his arms out on his knees and gazed into his open palms, as if the words Henry wanted were written there.

  “Nothing went right for us,” he began. His voice was distant and cold, and Henry saw that the skin inside Marcus’s elbows was as crinkled and fragile as Brendan’s. He checked his own arms quickly; the skin was creased but firm.

  “We’d both joined the National Guard before Pearl Harbor, and our unit got called up in March of ’42. They shipped us over to Oahu for training, and to serve as part of the base defense force. We didn’t see combat until November of ’43, when they shipped us over to the Gilbert Islands. A place called Makin.”

  “I remember that name,” Henry said. “I used to have a map—” But before he could say another word, Marcus rushed ahead as if he couldn’t stop.

  “We didn’t know what we were doing,” said Marcus. “And our officers were as green as us. We outnumbered the Japs there ten to one and they didn’t have any heavy guns, but we didn’t know that—we got pinned down by a handful of snipers screaming curses at us and tossing lit firecrackers and yelling from the trees. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t sleep. We thought there were thousands of them. Some of us got so scared we fired into the dark, just to be shooting at something, and then the Japs would see where we were and start firing back at us. So we’d try to stay calm, but then a couple more guys would get hysterical and give away our positions again, and then the Japs would sneak up and pounce on our foxholes.” Marcus paused for a deep, shaky breath.