The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  “Called in a little while ago,” the man said. “He told me he’d run into an old friend, some guy he hadn’t seen since they were kids, and he was taking him up the east side to look at something. He’s not coming in.”

  “Too bad,” the woman said to Waldo. “Marcus knows everything about this area—he’s really quite fascinating. You’d enjoy him. He’s almost eighty, and he grew up in the valley himself. He’s one of our living resources.”

  Wiloma looked at Waldo. Almost eighty; almost Brendan’s age. Was it possible the old friend he’d met was Brendan? “You’ve been so helpful,” Waldo said. “Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You just enjoy yourself. Have a nice day.” The woman was flirting with Waldo, Wiloma saw, as if the two of them were alone. Waldo touched the woman’s hand and then began rolling up his maps. The woman pulled another, smaller map from a corner of her desk. “It’s easy to get where you want to go,” she said, indicating a route. “Just follow this.”

  “Thank you,” Waldo said again, and they left. Outside he turned to Wiloma and laughed. “Wasn’t she something?”

  “She gave you what you wanted.”

  “What we wanted. Who would have believed it would be this easy?”

  Off to the side, a few hundred feet away, the dam curved across the water like a huge sleeping snake. Wiloma couldn’t tear her eyes from it, and Waldo’s gaze followed hers. He said, “You want to take a look at that first? Before we head out?”

  She shuddered, remembering the feelings it had raised in her last night. She remembered, too, what Christine had said—I have to see your uncle as soon as possible —but she hung back from telling Waldo about Christine or about why she needed to get Brendan home so quickly. She said, “Let’s just get this over with. I want to get Uncle Brendan away from whatever craziness Henry’s got going, and the sooner we get that van back to the Home …”

  “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  The woman’s directions were perfect, accurate down to the last turn, but still Wiloma was surprised when they took the final fork and saw the van parked there on the dirt road. She caught her breath as they drove up and parked behind it, and she was conscious of feeling a little cheated, as if the search hadn’t taken long enough.

  “But they’re not here,” Waldo said. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s in the van.”

  They climbed out of the car and looked around. A trail entered the woods and ran up the hill, and Waldo looked at the map the woman had given them and said, “I think your uncle’s land is up there.”

  Wiloma looked into the trees. Her uncle’s land—and near it, touching it, must be her father’s land and the cabin in which she’d been born. She leaned back against the Saab, momentarily unable to breathe. She remembered this land, she remembered everything about it. The cabin sat high on the ridge back along its length, and in the winter the water had been visible through the leafless trees. A narrow path ran down from the ridge, through the flatter land to the shore, and where the shore jutted out in a small point there was an old wood dock on which she and her mother and Henry had sat. There were turtles under the dock. There were small silvery fish that swam in schools. In the woods there were violets and larger flowers her father had named for her when he’d come home: lady’s slippers, columbines. The trees were dotted with oval woodpecker holes.

  Waldo walked over and put his arm around her waist. “You okay?”

  She struggled to speak. “It’s just … It’s just …”

  “I know. It’s beautiful here. No matter what happens, you shouldn’t sell this. It’s your family’s home.”

  This surprised her so much that the tightness eased in her chest. “I know,” she said. “I know every inch of this place—I know just what it looks like up there. But I didn’t expect you to realize what it means to me.”

  He shrugged and picked at some mud that had dried on the car. “I’m not such an asshole. Not all the time.”

  “Why did you drive me here?”

  “You seemed like you needed some help,” he said, but then he dropped his eyes. “Okay, I was maybe a little interested in this place, what you and Henry were planning to do with it, and I was thinking maybe there was a way I could be a part of whatever you did. And also I was afraid maybe you’d want to give your share to that church of yours, and I wanted to keep you from doing anything foolish. The kids ought to get this someday, not some group of fanatics.”

  She let that last comment pass. “I’d never give this away. This is important.”

  “So was the place in Coreopsis,” Waldo said quietly.

  “I didn’t give that to anyone,” she snapped. “I let Henry use it. How was I supposed to know …” She sighed. “You’re right. That was a mistake.”

  “That’s all I wanted—to be sure you didn’t make another.”

  She moved away from his arm, fighting the urge to lean into him. “You don’t need to worry. I’m not as stupid as you think.” There were lines on the ground near the van, she saw—parallel lines like the tracks of snakes.

  “Look,” she said. They walked over and inspected the tracks, which led from the van to the gate and then vanished.

  “Brendan’s wheelchair?” Waldo asked.

  “Must be.” She patted her hair and tried to gather herself together. The entire secret to life, she remembered from her Manual, is not to be distracted. Focus on what’s important. “Let’s go.”

  But above them, in the distance, they heard whistling. Just a few notes, the fragments of a tune—loud, broken, cheerful. “What’s that?” Waldo said.

  Wiloma looked up and behind them. She couldn’t see anyone, but she would have known that whistle anywhere—that was Henry, who let out unconscious peeps and chirps when he was happy and thought he was alone. He had done that even as a little boy, when he’d been all she had to cling to.

  “Henry’s up there,” she told Waldo. “That’s his whistle. He must have Uncle Brendan with him.”

  “There’s no way. You couldn’t get a wheelchair up that path. And anyway, these have to be Brendan’s tracks.”

  “Maybe so. But that’s Henry up there.”

  Waldo looked up the hill and down the road. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go find Henry. You follow the wheelchair tracks and find your uncle. We’ll meet back here. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Wiloma said, although the idea of being separated dismayed her. She watched Waldo vanish into the trees, and then she turned down the road and walked past the gate.

  The road was rough, dotted with puddles and rocks. The snakelike tracks vanished and then reappeared and then vanished again. A flicker flew past with a whir of wings, and a flock of chickadees rose from a witch hazel at her approach. She walked quickly, intently, trying to focus on her uncle, and she was rewarded when she came around a curve. The trees thinned and then stopped abruptly at the edge of a clearing, and in the distance, where the clearing opened onto a pebbly bit of beach, she saw her uncle next to a man who was pushing a rowboat into the water. A dock stood nearby, and a shed next to a group of other boats. She supposed this was a place from which fishermen set out. A dog pranced between Brendan and the man putting in the boat, and she thought she recognized it as Bongo.

  She opened her mouth to call out to her uncle, but a noise distracted her. Behind her, from the ridge, she thought she heard voices calling, and she turned and ran her eyes along the trees. From this clearing—oh, she remembered this, remembered how she’d been able to look up from here and see the cabin winking through the forest—she could see the whole length of the ridge, angling back from the reservoir. She saw the trail carved along the top, and a flash of blue she knew to be Waldo’s shirt. That was Waldo yelling, calling her—or perhaps he was calling Henry. That flash of white, there, farther out along the ridge—was that Henry?

  She waved her arms over her head, hoping to attract the attention of one or both of them. She heard more shouting—Henry? Waldo?

  “ …
doing here?” she thought she heard, and then “What?” She strained her eyes and ears. That blue flash was Waldo, moving very quickly now, and the white flash standing still was Henry. And they were not, either of them, calling to her. They were shouting at each other.

  She closed her eyes for a second. “Idiot!” she heard.

  The word carried down the ridge and across the clearing to her, but she couldn’t tell who had yelled it and she turned her back on both men. They were hopeless, useless. She took three cleansing breaths and fixed her eyes on the place where her uncle sat. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The wheelchair was empty, outlined against the reservoir and the floating green islands, and from the point across the small cove to her left she thought she heard still other voices calling. The rowboat drifting away from the shore had two men in it, and a dog.

  28

  IT WASN’T EASY, GETTING INTO THE BOAT; AT FIRST, BRENDAN had thought they’d never manage it. Marcus had tugged Brendan out of his wheelchair easily enough—that was simple, that was only a guided fall—but the boat’s lip had seemed insurmountable until Marcus, his hands under Brendan’s armpits, had looked up and said, “Say—we have company. Maybe we can get that woman to help.”

  Brendan had recognized Wiloma emerging from the trees, and as he did, the vague wish he’d formed to set out on the water, the half-joking suggestion Marcus had made that they borrow one of the boats and go for a row, had crystallized into a fierce desire. He couldn’t imagine how Wiloma had followed him here, but he knew her presence meant the end of his adventure and he wasn’t ready to go back. Not to St. Benedict’s; not, particularly not, to whatever strange ceremonies Wiloma had planned at her house. He had seized the side of the boat in his hands and, with a strength he hadn’t had in years, hauled his torso in. Marcus, who acted as if this were a lark and they were still boys, had laughed and flopped Brendan’s legs over the side and then eased Brendan’s crumpled form onto the seat in the stern. Then he’d stepped in himself and pushed the boat away from the shore. At the last instant Bongo had slipped in, wet and dripping, and now he sat on the floor between Brendan and Marcus, his toenails scrabbling with each movement of the boat.

  “Where to?” Marcus asked. He rowed with small, hesitant strokes, the blades barely breaking the surface, but the water was so smooth and calm that they moved along quickly. Wiloma, on the shore, had broken into a run; she stopped near the empty wheelchair and called to Brendan and then, when he didn’t answer, turned and began shouting to someone on the ridge. Henry, Brendan supposed; they must have found each other.

  “That woman’s calling you,” Marcus said.

  “That’s my niece. Henry’s little sister.”

  “No.” Marcus squinted through his glasses. “Not Frankie’s little girl—what’s she doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We better go back.”

  “In a while,” Brendan said. “In a few minutes. Not yet.”

  He looked past Marcus, at the three islands closest to him. They were lined up in a jagged row, like the islands his patron saint had found on his voyage across the sea. The Island of Sheep, where the sheep were as big as cows and as white as clouds; the Paradise of Birds, where the trees were covered with talking birds instead of leaves; the Crystal Island, as clear as glass, pierced by a hole through which the curragh had slipped. There were birds thick around these islands, but no floating icebergs and no sheep, although Bongo sat gazing over his shoulder and looking as wise as the hound that had led the saint and his men to safety.

  He hadn’t expected the reservoir to be so beautiful. His father’s bitter stories had made him imagine it as shallow, weedy, and dark, shadowed by the mist of deception that he’d sensed for himself as a boy. One of the reasons he’d joined the Order was that he’d heard the monks gathered at night and prayed for the preservation of the valley. Politics had failed, he remembered, and so had pleas and complaints; the men from Boston had baffled his parents’ neighbors and confused them so badly that they argued over details when they met. But the monks within the enclosure walls had acted with one mind, which he’d wanted to join. He said to Marcus, “I can’t get my bearings. Those islands there—what were they?”

  “You know.” Marcus lifted his oars from the water and pointed. “That one on the left, there, that’s the top of what used to be Blueberry Hill. The one in the center’s the top of Hollaran Hill, and the big one on the right is what’s left of Mt. Pomeroy. Your parents’ place was in the gap between Blueberry Hill and Hollaran Hill—remember? We can row right over it.”

  They still weren’t very far from the shore; when Brendan turned he could see Wiloma clearly, and he thought he could even make out Henry in the distance, among the trees. Blueberry Hill, Hollaran Hill. What was Wiloma doing here? He supposed she had heard about the missing van and had grown anxious; she fussed over everything and always had. A fish jumped from the water near the boat and left an arc of glittering drops in the air. Bongo snapped his jaws at them.

  Brendan said, “Could you row us over toward the right a little? If we could head just to the left of Mt. Pomeroy …” The monastery had lain between Hollaran Hill and Mt. Pomeroy, in the rich land through which the Paradise River had run.

  “You’re the boss,” Marcus said. “What a day—isn’t this weather something?” He rowed a few strokes, facing the shore and the ridge while Brendan faced him and the islands. “Say, I think I see your nephew up there on the ridge. He’s an odd one, isn’t he? He doesn’t seem like his father at all.”

  “It was hard for him,” Brendan said quietly. “Being orphaned.” The war story Marcus had told had shaken him badly. In the van, bumping up the rutted dirt road, he’d seen the accident that had cost Henry his parents as he’d never seen it before.

  The inside of the old gray Plymouth is dark and quiet. Frank junior and Margaret haven’t spoken since they left the dance; Frankie, sodden with drink, picked a fight with two acquaintances and then stormed out to the car. Margaret wouldn’t have followed him if she’d had any other way to get home. But the hall was eleven miles from their cabin on the ridge and the rain was falling hard.

  She sits next to him silently, only saying, “Slow down. Please?” when he twice takes a curve too fast. She is wearing a white dress and thinking about the months to come, wondering how she will pull him out of this dark mood he can’t seem to shake. And Frankie—Frankie is thinking how much he’d like to close his eyes and rest. Just rest: neither plagued by nightmares nor haunted by his dead companions and his memories of what lies beneath the reservoir. He is only thinking, not planning, but his foot is heavy on the accelerator and when he heads into the last curve on Boughten Hill, Margaret shrieks and so startles him that his hands leap from the wheel. Even as the car stumbles over the edge of the road he is trying to find his way back.

  But that couldn’t be right, Frankie couldn’t have left the world like that. Marcus couldn’t have meant for him to infer that from the story he told. Marcus, he saw now, was meant to bring him to this place. And while he was glad Henry was up on the ridge, exploring his parents’ land, and even glad that Wiloma had found her way here, he could not, for the moment, concentrate on anything more than the boat’s slow movement toward the place where his abbey had been.

  He imagined the buildings still intact beneath the water, although he knew this wasn’t so; his father had told him that everything had been razed. But still he imagined that beneath the water lay the garden surrounded by the stonewalled cloister, the dormitories looking down on the garden, the stone chapel, the flowerbeds, the fields, and the high enclosure walls. His whole life seemed to lie there, in the silent community he’d had for a decade and had never been able to reconstruct. He saw, now, that his decision to leave the Order had really been formed when he’d left this place, and that the grim days in China had only served as his excuse.

  His faith in monastic life had broken during the nights when he and his brothers had pra
yed so fervently for the preservation of their valley that it seemed the whole place might take wing. Even Father Vincent had joined in, despite his warnings about the danger of praying for specifics. This was different, he’d said; although their prayers sounded like petitions, they were really appreciative worship of a beloved place. The sophistry of that argument had been evident to Brendan, but he’d pushed aside his qualms while they chanted the first lines of a dark psalm over and over again.

  Save me, O God, he remembered, for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dry: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. What could resist the power of all that prayer?

  Anything, he’d learned. Any group of men with a plan.

  He bowed his head and tried to pray again, and that was how the children saw him when they first came out on the shore. The cove that separated them from the point where Wiloma stood with her hand on Brendan’s chair was very narrow; no sooner had Wendy seen the chair and her mother than Win pointed toward the water and said, “Isn’t that Grunkie? In that boat?”

  “That’s Bongo!” Delia said. “That dog.”

  “But that isn’t Dad rowing,” said Lise.

  They were so tired and discouraged that they hadn’t spoken for more than an hour. The distance from the old square over the hill to the water had been deceptive, and they’d lost the trail entirely and had to wade through a bog tufted with club moss and sphagnum. Wendy had lost her bag in the bog; the strap had snagged on a jagged stump, throwing her to her knees. When she’d turned to disentangle her shoulder, Lise, who’d been following right on her heels, had stumbled and stepped on Wendy’s arm and then, in a motion so clumsy Wendy still couldn’t believe it, had leaned against the stump for balance and pushed the bag off and into a pool of water that seemed to have no bottom. They’d lost half an hour fishing about in the pool with sticks, but the bag was gone and so were Wendy’s wallet and the blank-eyed dolls.