Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

And yet she could picture Henry stealing into the Home, luring Brendan out, maybe drugging him or binding and gagging him, stuffing him into a stolen van. Henry was lost, he was past salvation. There was nothing he wouldn’t do.

The hardest thing she’d learned at the Healing Center was that she had to write Henry off. There are people, her teacher had said, so deeply corrupted that no human heart can save them. Only by divine intervention can the seeds of the Light take root in them. When she heard those words, she had thought about the way Henry had tricked her out of her share of the land in Coreopsis. She’d made her peace with that land by then; the auction after Da’s death had drawn the poison from it, like venom from a wound.

After the tractors and balers had vanished, and then the furniture and the dishes and the clothes and the books; after the house had been boarded up and she had moved and married Waldo, she had come to see that plot of land as a place like any other. Not just the spot where she’d mourned her parents’ deaths and grown up lonely and afraid, not just the spot where she’d nursed her grandfather through his last illness — but also a place, some acres of land. A pretty place, in fact; a spacious, rolling bit of country where she could picnic with her children.

She had learned to see the pond as a place where her children could swim, the hill as a place with a beautiful view. And then Henry had come to her, his hands bristling with papers and his mouth dripping honeyed words, just when she’d begun to worry about sending her children to college. A loan, he’d told her. The movement of a few words on paper, purely to satisfy the bank; if she let him hold the land in his name for just a few years, he promised he’d make both of them rich. Half of all the profits would flow to her, he’d said. He’d never said she risked losing everything.

And she had let him get away with that. She had put aside all his broken promises and let him fool her one more time. Her teacher had said, When someone does wrong and you excuse him without helping him confront the wrong deed, you only enable him to do more wrong. She’d turned a blind eye toward Henry’s deeds for years; he was all the family she had left except for Brendan. Only when it was too late had she learned to see how Henry had betrayed everyone. He’d left her alone in Coreopsis when their grandfather was dying. He’d turned on Waldo, with whom he’d once worked; he’d neglected Brendan until he was desperate, and he’d abandoned Kitty and his girls.

During her detoxification, her teacher had made her write Henry’s name in huge green letters on a piece of paper and list all Henry’s crimes below in red. Then he’d read the list back to her in his slow, careful voice. Did your brother do this? he’d asked after each item. And then, Did you permit it?

Yes, she’d answered, and yes. The list was appalling; the relief she’d felt when they’d burned it in the Crucible of Crimes had been immense. Henry’s deeds had turned to ashes. Since then she’d treated her brother as a stranger. She was polite to him, no more. When he wasn’t around she never thought of him.

But Henry hated her involvement with the Church, and her teachers had also told her that the enemies of the Church were resolute. She had talked to witnesses and read some of the testimonies. Misguided people, the sort who dread Moonies and Krishnas, had been known to mistake the Church of the New Reason for one of those evil cults and to hire deprogrammers to kidnap their family members and purge them of their new beliefs.

If she could picture Henry doing such a thing, did that make it possible? He might have gotten wind of her plans for Brendan and determined to disrupt them; there was nothing he wouldn’t do. She paced the kitchen and meditated silently for a while. Then she wondered guiltily if her inability to keep from imagining Henry engaged in horrible acts might not have caused those acts. Some thread of confusion in her longed for her teeth to fall apart so she could see her dentist; her teeth complied. Maybe a similar thread wanted Henry to act badly so he could be punished for his errors. Maybe she had somehow made him do it?

She directed her attention toward Brendan’s Spirit, hoping to locate him. When she found nothing but blankness she telephoned her daughter for advice.

AT THE HENRIETTA MCGOVERN MUSEUM, WENDY SAT SORTING dolls. Two huge cases of them stretched down the walls of the room, and at her feet lay another, uncataloged array. Farther down, and in all the rooms upstairs, more cases held lead soldiers, stuffed bears, cloth-bodied dolls with bisque hands and heads, rocking horses, dollhouses, board games, trains — a complete collection of nineteenth-century American toys, overwhelming in their profusion. The toys, as well as the books and china and furniture and costumes and pictures made from dead people’s hair, had all come from the jammed rooms of Henrietta McGovern’s mansion. She had lived to be ninety, Wendy knew; she had lived alone except for these objects. When she died, it had taken six people five years to sort what was worth keeping from what was not, and then another year to move the crates to the new museum building. Some of the collection had been shelved already, but the storerooms were still full of unopened boxes and each box was full of surprises. Wendy’s job, which she’d stumbled into almost by accident, was to sort through and label the contents of the boxes the assistant curator brought to her.

As she pulled dolls from the boxes, she fantasized about her escape. Fall would come, she thought, if she could just survive this summer; and then she’d enter college and be on her own at last. She’d have a room, a roommate, interesting classes. She could live any life she chose. In her closet at home, folded into a pile of sweaters, she had a huge sheet of paper on which she’d written all the rules by which she meant to live. She had a plan, a program, ready to kick into action the minute her real life began. She set aside a blond baby doll and then sank so deeply into her dreams that she hardly paid attention at first when her mother called and told her the news.

“Grunkie?” she said, when her mother’s words began to make sense. “Grunkie’s gone? How can he be gone?”

Then she heard the manic hum behind her mother’s words and realized what was going on. Her mother seldom allowed herself to worry these days, but when she did she pulled out all the stops and could build elaborate conspiracies from the slenderest of threads. The only way to manage her in one of these moods was to let her talk herself out.

He wasn’t gone, her mother hypothesized — he and Henry had taken a long walk, and the administrator was hysterical. Or he was gone, and Henry—“You know how your uncle’s been. He’s been unbalanced. He hasn’t been himself”—Henry had kidnapped him to keep him away from the neuro-nutritionist she’d engaged.

Wendy groaned. She’d taken a matched pair of rag dolls from her open box, a boy and a girl dressed in calico with bright button eyes and yellow yarn hair and red floss smiles. She rested these dolls in her lap, one on each thigh. Then she laid her forehead on the desk and placed the phone receiver next to her ear, with the mouthpiece pointed away from her. While her mother spun her theories, Wendy talked to the dolls.

“Blah -blah-blah-blah,” she whispered to them. “Blah- blah. Blah- blah.”

The dolls stared back and her mother rambled on. In her lap, Wendy danced the dolls to the rhythm of her mother’s words. “Foolish,” she whispered. That was one of the rules on the sheet of paper buried in her closet: I will not act foolishly.