Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“What?” her mother said sharply, and Wendy lifted her head from the desk and moved the receiver toward her mouth.

“Nothing.” She brought the dolls up from her lap and laid them down on the desk. “I was just saying it’s such a nice day, maybe Uncle Henry took Grunkie out for a picnic.” Every day will be like this, she thought. Once Mom gets Grunkie home.

“You know what’s going on with him,” her mother said. “Grunkie hasn’t had any appetite in weeks.”

Wendy had forgotten that. But there was surely some reasonable explanation for his absence, something different from her mother’s wild theories. “Maybe he just wanted some sun.” She looked into the open box at her feet and saw lead soldiers tangled in wigs made of human hair, kidskin hands splayed across wooden legs. She wondered who had packed the boxes so carelessly.

“Maybe,” her mother said. “You’re probably right. They’ll show up in an hour or two and won’t know what all the fuss was about.”

“Uncle Henry’s okay. He’s back on his feet, he’s got a job.”

“He does,” her mother agreed. “And so do you — you’ve got things to do and here I’m bothering you with this.”

Wendy turned the calico dolls facedown on her desk. Her mother always turned to her when she had these lapses of pessimism; she spun her fantasies and let Wendy calm her down, and then she apologized until she’d convinced herself she hadn’t thought her dark thoughts. But this was the first time she’d called Wendy at work. Wendy wondered if her mother would call her at college. She’d imagined herself cut off completely, except for occasional visits home. She hadn’t considered how the phone lines might bind her and her mother like an umbilical cord.

Her mother grew quiet, seemingly reassured. “I have to go now,” Wendy said. “I have to get back to work.”

“Okay,” her mother said. “I’ll see you for supper. I’m sure this will all work out. But it’s just, you know — I’d feel better if the administrator hadn’t said that thing about how Grunkie was down in the room where the keys to the vans are kept, and how he sent the janitor off to fix a whirlpool that wasn’t broken. And then how when the janitor came back, Grunkie was gone and later he noticed that so was this set of keys — do you suppose Henry forced him somehow?”

“What?” Wendy said. “Did you tell me that before?”

“I don’t know. Weren’t you listening?”

“I was,” Wendy said. “I am.” She cut her mother off before she could tie up another half hour. “Don’t worry. I’m sure everything’s fine. I’m going to hang up now.”

Afterward she couldn’t concentrate on her work. The kidnapping idea was crazy, she knew, but that bit about Grunkie and the keys to the van, the bit her mother had dropped so late, so casually — that sounded real, and for the first time she wondered if Grunkie might actually be gone. She felt a brief buzz of elation at the idea that Grunkie had slipped through her mother’s hands, and in so doing guaranteed her own freedom as well. Then she began to wonder what might have happened to him, and how her mother might respond to the loss of him, and if her own desire not to have him at home had somehow caused his disappearance. Think a thought and you make it true, her mother had warned her time and again, and certainly she had wished fiercely enough for her great-uncle not to join them. But that was her mother’s twisted thinking, not her own, and she pushed it aside.

Her mother had said that Grunkie was eager to come to them and be Healed, but she knew that couldn’t be right: he thought the Church of the New Reason was beyond contempt. He couldn’t be Healed in the way her mother had because he didn’t accept the same things. And so perhaps he’d fled?

She thought she was considering these possibilities calmly, but when she looked at her hands she saw that each one still held a doll and that the dolls were dancing frantically on the desk. This family, she thought. When am I going to be free?

After she and Win had gone back to live with their mother, their father had told her to call him anytime. “I’m here to help,” he’d said. “If something comes up you can’t handle alone.” She hadn’t called him often; she had feared that if she asked for help he might take them back. But a handful of times, when she’d been overwhelmed, she’d called and he’d helped her deal with the real problems and dispel the imaginary ones. She called his office now and told him everything, expecting him to laugh and sympathize and dismiss this the way he’d dismissed her mother’s other strange imaginings. But he listened to her in silence, and when he spoke his voice was very grave.

“They’re gone? Both of them?”

“Well, that’s what Mom said the man from St. Benedict’s said. But you know Mom, she thinks everyone’s conspiring against her. And Uncle Henry would never—”

“Damn,” her father said. “Damn, damn, damn — I bet I know just where they’ve gone. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. I’ve got to run.”

He hung up, and Wendy stared at the phone as if it had suddenly sprouted fangs and a forked tongue.

IN THE FIELDS THAT STRETCHED ALONG THE HIGHWAY, CORN WAS growing, and clover and grass, and purple loosestrife in the hollows. There were red-winged blackbirds perched on fence posts and skimming over the fields, and hawks — Henry saw five of them in as many miles — standing in the trees. Normally he saw nothing when he drove; he drove too fast, he always had, and while his hands steered, he plotted and daydreamed and schemed. He’d always done his best thinking on the road, his mind focused by the humming wheels and the blur of passing scenery. He’d never had Brendan sitting behind him, commenting on everything that passed.

“Look at that hawk!” Brendan said. “What a beauty! To your left, Henry, over there — see where the blackbirds are clustered in the cattails? Woodchuck, in that dip; woodpecker — no, sapsucker; look at that hill, at those trees on the top, those birches; those are juncoes; are those goats? Look, there’s the exit for Phelps. We’re so close to Coreopsis … Henry?”

“What?” Brendan, back there pointing and naming next to the sleeping dog, made Henry aware of the flowers and trees and hills and clouds. The sights made him aware of his hands, his hands made him aware of the van; his awareness made him wary of the trucks roaring past, which had never bothered him before. His old car, the one the bank had repossessed, had been low and slinky and fast. This van sat so high that the truck winds rattled it, and he overcompensated, veering from right to left. When Brendan pointed out another hawk, chasing a mole through the cropped stubble at the base of the trees, Henry lifted his foot from the gas while he looked. The car behind him honked and passed him angrily.

“Let’s get off at the next exit,” Brendan said. “We’re so close to Coreopsis, it’s hardly out of our way at all. I want to see what you did.”

“You don’t,” Henry said. “It’s such a mess — I don’t want you to see it.”

“I do,” Brendan said. His voice was firm and carried the force of an order. Henry, who had already bent his day toward his uncle’s wishes in such an unexpected fashion, bowed and bent a little more.

He paid the toll and turned left on the narrow road that led to Coreopsis. They were forty miles from Rochester and hardly more than that from Syracuse; an easy hour’s commute from either city. He had made the trip a hundred times and it puzzled him, still, that his potential customers had found it too long. He drove past Kriner’s farm, past the fenced fields dotted with cows and the ring where Cory Kriner taught pigtailed girls how to ride. He drove past the van Normans’ dairy farm, past the fields of turnips and corn, into the village of Coreopsis with its red-brick Presbyterian church and the white town hall and the beauty parlor and the string of failing stores, and then he drove out the other side and turned left onto a smaller road and left again onto one still smaller. He stopped at the huge red-and-white sign announcing the failure of his pride.