The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  They want not to hear what happened but to repeat their versions of what they want to have happened. In some of the versions, the encounter with the police cruiser at the 7-Eleven has turned into something just short of a shoot-out, with Brendan defying the officer from the van as the nephew roars out of the parking lot. In others, the Home’s quiet search has turned into a statewide manhunt. There are versions in which Brendan meets a beautiful waitress who takes him home for the night, and others in which he and his nephew sleep in the fields like tramps.

  “He went back to his family’s land,” say the men. “He made his way back home.”

  The administrator has told them that Brendan died in his sleep. Peacefully, painlessly, they’ve been told. At his childhood home. Buried near his family. And so the men, who don’t know that his body has never been found, nor that his childhood home is long gone, accept the official version of Brendan’s end and embroider the rest of the journey instead. They crowd more and more details into each telling, although no one could have accomplished so much in so little time. They tell stories of meals in lovely restaurants and dancing girls in bars, offer scenes in a boat and in the mountains and in several different hotels. There are evil bikers whom Brendan confronts, a reunion with a long-lost brother, a contest involving three questions and a knife. And yet in all these tales, no matter how fantastic, there is always this kernel of fact: the trip is always Brendan’s idea, Brendan always the instigator. Bitter and hard to swallow, but true. Wiloma has had to let go of the idea that Henry kidnapped him.

  Waldo brought her that news first, before she was in any shape to hear it. “It’s not like you think,” he said on the shore of the reservoir. He and Henry had emerged from the trees together, after it was too late for them to help. She had raised her hand to strike Henry’s face and Waldo had caught her arm.

  “Brendan talked him into it,” Waldo said then. “He took the keys to the van and told Henry they were allowed to borrow it. Henry just did what Brendan asked. He just drove.”

  “I just drove,” Henry repeated.

  He stared at the water, stupid and stunned; he looked at her and said, “He fell in?” When she nodded, he sprinted for the van. Running away again, she thought, and so she was amazed when he returned a few minutes later with a tangle of colored silk ties. Days later, he told her he’d rescued them from Kitty’s closet at the start of his trip; the girls had given them to him, he said, and he didn’t want Kitty to throw them out.

  But that day on the shore they seemed to have come from nowhere. Henry knotted the ties in a useless rope, not looking at her or his daughters, not looking at the water, watching his hands and knotting, knotting, until Win finally rowed Marcus back to land. Afterward, after that bleak, lost sequence of hours punctuated by policemen and divers and wailing sirens, Waldo told her that Henry sat the whole long afternoon with his hands tangled in the ties.

  She can’t remember this. She remembers Wendy, dripping wet, emerging from the water. She remembers Waldo leaving and then coming back with strangers in uniforms, Win sitting so close that she could smell his hair, Lise and Delia clinging to Roy. She can’t believe Henry was left by himself except for the few minutes Waldo could spare him. But Waldo says this is what happened. He says Henry only drove, only did as Brendan asked. He says the only words Henry said that afternoon were, “I can’t swim. I never learned how.” Should she believe what Waldo says? The tales the old men tell her are based, in part, on the smooth story Waldo told the administrator: lots of omissions, no lies. Waldo’s version of Henry’s words probably reflects the same unconscious adjustments.

  The men have no tales for her today; many of their rooms are empty. But upstairs, on Brendan’s old floor, she finds Parker valiant in red plaid, rolling his wheelchair back and forth as he impatiently waits for her.

  “I want to show you something,” he says, tapping the face of his watch. The box through which he speaks reduces his voice to a raspy squawk. “But we have to go now. Can you take me down to the library for a little while?”

  Wiloma has things to do at home and knows she ought to get going, but she has made a rule for herself since she saw Brendan slip below the water: on her weekly visits here, she tries to do whatever the old men ask. She doesn’t give them advice; she doesn’t try to change their lives. If they want liquor or cigarettes or chocolates wrapped in foil, she brings them and never says a word about what’s healthy or not. Parker’s color is bad today; he’d be better off in bed. When he says, “Can we go?” she nods and says, “Yes.”

  Down the corridors, down the elevator, out into the green basement hall—she can just make out Roxanne through the window in the door to the whirlpool room, massaging the legs of a man whose face is hidden. Strange sounds emerge through the open library door down the hall. “Wa-ka-wa-kee,” Wiloma hears, or something like that. A woman’s voice, clear and passionate. “Wy-a-wee-no, ko-tay-nu.”

  “Latin?” she asks Parker. She steers his wheelchair around an empty florist’s carton sprouting frills of green tissue. “Is that Latin? Or is it Greek?”

  “Neither,” he rasps. “That’s the prayer group in there—that woman’s received the gift of the spirit. But listen to the rest.”

  As the woman’s voice rises and then fades, another voice comes from a hidden comer. A man’s voice, cracked and worn, says, “Let us offer up a healing prayer for the soul of our brother Brendan, who departed this earth six months ago today.”

  “That’s Ben,” Parker says. “He promised us all he’d do this.”

  “You knew about this? Don’t you want to go in?”

  “I’d rather listen from out here. Those prayer people make me nervous.”

  Ben’s voice cracks but then steadies again. “O Lord,” he says, “we ask you to be gentle with the soul of our beloved brother, who underwent many trials on his journey to you. We ask you to forgive him his small trespasses, and to welcome him into the peace of your presence. Although we could not be present at the burial of his body, we join together today in praying for the repose of his soul.”

  There is a rustle inside, and then a murmur. When Wiloma cranes her head around the doorframe, she sees that all Brendan’s friends have somehow produced white sprays of freesia from their pajamas and robes. The long stems sprout paired buds near their bases and open flowers at their tips. Kevin, leaning against his walker, seems to have caught his stems in the zipper of his warm-up jacket. The blossoms jut out from his stomach as if they have grown there. Wallace, propped up next to Kevin, leans over and tugs the flowers free.

  “Praise the Lord,” Ben sings out, and the men with the flowers repeat this after him. The outsiders, the prayer-group members who have come to lead the service, shuffle about uneasily. It is clear that the old men have caught them by surprise. “Praise his works, his ways, his days,” Ben says. A minute of silence follows, and then the men, perhaps responding to a signal from Ben that Wiloma can’t see, toss their flowers all at once toward the center of the room. The arched stems hang in the air for a minute and then fall onto the table awaiting them. When they land, Wiloma releases the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  The flowers remind her of the story Christine told her when she came back from the reservoir. When she limped home, grieving and lost, Christine said she’d performed a Healing Ceremony that morning in Brendan’s absence. She’d recited the passage from the Manual, she said, and burned the mistletoe in a porcelain bowl. As she was mixing the ashes with birch extract and powdered minerals, she saw a flash signaling Brendan’s successful passage into the Light.

  “And there was a smell,” she told Wiloma. “A little like andromeda—you know those waxy white flowers on the shrub out back?”

  The andromeda near the kitchen window was in bloom on the day that Brendan died, and Wiloma suspects that Christine only smelled the fragrance through the screens. This is the woman, after all, who lied about the children: Wiloma hasn’t forgiven her for that, and they haven’t seen
each other since that night. But still, Wiloma can’t account for the flash Christine saw, any more than she can now account for the soft fragrance filling the library. Freesias are deeply scented, she knows; perhaps the fragrance is only natural. But it is deeper and stronger than she would expect from a handful of blossoms, and it carries to her the conviction that Brendan’s Spirit is finally safe.

  That night, when Wiloma goes home, she tries to explain to her son what she saw: “The men at St. Benedict’s had a sort of memorial service for Grunkie today. They ordered a box of flowers from somewhere and each of them held a few stems. When they offered them up at the end of their prayer, it was like …” She looks at Win’s face, which is closed and suspicious, and she reels her words back. “It was nice,” she says lamely.

  Win might as well be in another country; since Wendy’s disappearance he has spent most of his time at school and the rest frantically assembling information he has gathered from colleges in California. If he could go farther, Wiloma knows, he would; if he knew how, he’d keep running across the water. If he could figure out a way to enter college early, he’d do that, too. Meanwhile he waits for his freedom so palpably, and with such fear that he’ll never get it, that Wiloma feels forced to behave in front of him.

  She knows that, despite his longings, he won’t leave until he thinks she’s all right. Much of her energy, these days, goes into convincing him that she is. She does much less with the Church. She never brings Church people home. She makes real dinners for him and watches TV with him at night, instead of reading pamphlets in her room. But still he is thin and tense and very unhappy, and although he hardly ever mentions Wendy, she knows that he misses his sister and resents her for leaving him here alone. When Wiloma looks at him, she is haunted by her last days in Coreopsis, alone with Da after Henry had fled. She wants more than anything that Win should not feel trapped in the same way. Christmas is still several days away, but she decides to give him his best gift early.

  “I got a job,” she tells him. “A real one. I’m starting right after New Year’s Day.”

  “You did? Not with the Church?”

  “At St. Benedict’s,” she says. The relief spreading over his face is so visible that it stings. “I’ve been spending so much time there I thought I might as well make it official. They hired me as an aide.”

  Win’s face falls a bit. “The money. They can’t be paying you very much …”

  “It’s enough. Your father’s going to pick up your tuition when you’re ready, and he’s willing to help out with the mortgage here—it’s enough, it’s more than I’ve had. I’ll be fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  The knowledge that she finally has a job brightens Win’s mood considerably. He starts to tell her about Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA, flashing photos from college brochures and telling her about the soccer scholarships he may get if he plays well next season. She listens as attentively as if his plans were not almost wholly the result of his need to run away from her.

  The house seems very silent when she finally lies down in bed. She hears the babble of the prayer group and the gentle whisper of the flowers soaring through the air; she sees Brendan, as she does each night, slipping through the water as Henry tries to save him with a web of good intentions. She tries to picture Wendy slipping out the door, but all she can see is her slim back, turned away from everyone on the day of Delia’s wedding. A slim back in a dull green dress; she left the dress behind along with all her other clothes.

  “Mom,” said the note Wendy left on the refrigerator. “I’ve gone on a trip. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll be fine.”

  During all of July and the first weeks of August, Wendy hardly ever left the house. She had lost her museum job—some business about a few missing dolls, some irregularity Wiloma never got straight—and she paced around like a restless cat. Waiting, Wiloma had thought. For college to start, for the summer to end. Grieving over Brendan, perhaps; maybe worried about her. But at the wedding the look on Wendy’s face had warned her that something else was also going on.

  “I’m fine,” Wendy writes, on postcards that do no more than tell Wiloma what part of the country her daughter has just passed through. The postcards come from Montana and Oregon and Wyoming and Idaho; Wendy writes that she has been waitressing and cleaning salmon and baling hay. Wiloma worries about her all the time, and yet part of her also feels a deep satisfaction at Wendy’s escape.

  When Wiloma finally falls asleep, she dreams of the day she graduated from high school in Coreopsis. She dreams that she took her diploma in one hand, her suitcase in the other, and walked boldly out of the building and into the world.

  31

  IF WENDY WERE SLEEPING SHE MIGHT DREAM OF HER MOTHER, but she’s still wide-awake. For months now she’s been hitchhiking from place to place, keeping the Rocky Mountains between herself and her old life. Keeping odd hours, shedding old ways. Kalispell, Dillon, Coeur d’Alene; she’s drawn to small cities and towns contracted to their cores, fading and failing places where the only inhabitants are people who’ve always lived there and haven’t yet run away.

  The edges of these cities and towns are abrupt, and between them lies more space than she ever imagined. The sky is so enormous that sometimes, as she waits for a ride for the better part of a day on a road that stretches from nowhere to nowhere for miles, she can see mountains—Cascades, Tetons, Absarokas—floating in the distance like a promise. Everything seems promising here, even the men who pick her up in their cars and trucks and warn her that she ought to be more careful. They look nothing like the men she knew at home. They remind her how easily she could be hurt, but none of them have hurt her. When they ask her where she’s from, she makes up stories.

  “Michigan,” she says. “Just outside Lansing.” Or San Diego, Arizona, Baton Rouge. In bars she tells similar stories to the men with whom she dances, and once in a while—on four occasions now—she has let a man bring her home. Twice, when she found work and a man she liked in the same town, she has shared a roof for a couple of weeks. She has yet to want anyone as fiercely as she wanted Roy, but she has almost stopped hearing the echo of Christine’s voice.

  Tonight she’s in a bar just outside Spokane, watching couples dance to a raucous band. Stephen, the out-of-work carpenter sitting next to her, was leaning against the wall when she first walked in. One of his legs was bent, the sole of his work boot pressed against the paneling. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his jeans, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled halfway up his forearms. He was staring moodily at the spinning dancers, tapping his earthbound foot to the beat, and when she strolled up and asked him to dance, he said yes immediately. On the dance floor he led her firmly through a two-step, which she’d begun to learn in other towns in other states. His open palm, pressed against her back, was dry and strong.

  After the dance he smiled down at her and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “No,” she said, and she touched his bare forearm. “Would you like a beer?”

  For a minute she thought she might lose him, that she’d moved too quickly or misjudged the loneliness and longing she thought she saw on his face, but then he smiled and shrugged and said, “You surely can.” Now they’re sitting knee to knee on a pair of stools at one end of the bar. He started buying, after the first round; a pitcher of beer sits between them and she keeps his glass filled. He was married once, he tells her. He is twenty-eight. His two little girls are in Boise with their mother.

  When he mentions his daughters his face clouds, and Wendy does something she has learned to do in the past few months, which almost always works. “Do you have any pictures?” she asks.

  He reaches for his wallet. Inside, in plastic sleeves, are stiff school portraits of a gap-toothed girl with blond hair and glasses and an older girl with a brown ponytail. “The little one’s Dora. She’s in first grade this year. Nancy’s in third.”

  “The
y’re gorgeous. Beautiful girls.”

  He smiles at her then, smiles at the pictures, smiles back at her. “So are you,” he says lightly.

  She lowers her eyes. She knows she isn’t beautiful; she is only young. As young as her mother was when she met Wendy’s father; younger than Sarah was when Wendy’s father fell in love with her; younger, even, than the women her uncle used to chase. When she thinks of how nearly she missed understanding what this gives her, she closes her eyes for a second and then sips at her beer. The beer flowers inside her, loosening her joints and her brain.

  Stephen slips the wallet back into his pocket. “Where are you from?” he asks. One finger lightly strokes the soft flesh below her elbow.

  “Here and there. I’ve been traveling for a while.” Below the bar his knee just touches her thigh, and soon he is telling her about the cabin he has in the woods twenty miles away. How snug it is when it snows; how his woodstove heats the whole place; how beautiful it is at dawn.

  “I love it up there,” he says. “If I didn’t have that place, I’d go crazy.”

  “You’re lucky. Having a place like that.” The dim light shadows his face, carving it into hollows and planes. In the morning it may only turn out to be another face, but right now it is everything she thinks she wants.

  “What about you?” he says. “Where are you staying?”

  “I don’t know. I just got into town this afternoon.” She gives him the slow smile she has learned only recently, and his hand tightens on her arm. She knows he believes he’s been hit by luck. For a second they hover on that fine edge from which the evening may fall either way, and Wendy thinks of all the times since Delia’s wedding when she’s been similarly poised.

  The wedding was held in a rented garden at the art museum: very pretty, very subdued. Lise—not Wendy—was Delia’s maid of honor, and when Wendy kissed Delia and wished her luck, Delia looked at her feet. After the ceremony, Wendy wandered over to the pond by herself. The ducks that dotted the sleek surface were feeding on something invisible, upending themselves so abruptly that their heads turned without transition into fat, pointed tails. The sight transfixed her, and she found herself muttering, “Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails,” like a gambler gone mad with a quarter. Her mother’s life, Delia’s life. The life her great-grandparents had led more than half a century ago. She could choose, she saw. She could live any way she wanted or in several different ways, carving her life into sharp, separate parts the way her great-uncle had. Massachusetts, China, Manitoba; Coreopsis and then St. Benedict’s. He had moved a lot for someone meant to be bound to a single place. She moved from the pond to the hedge to the gate, from the gate to her house to the road.