Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“I wasn’t here.” Brendan had tried to sit up, but his back had been as frozen as his hips and his hands and his knees. He’d never been so debilitated, before or since, and he’d been useless, flat on his back, a mass of nodules and pain. “I was in China,” he said. “I went there before your parents even met each other. I was still there when they were killed. We couldn’t get mail. I didn’t know.”

Henry had treated that excuse with the contempt it deserved; he’d stared steadily out of his narrow eyes and then walked away. I didn’t know, Brendan thought now: and that was true. But he also knew he might not have responded differently even if he’d heard the news. He’d renounced his family, renounced the world, left all he’d loved behind so he could lose himself in what had seemed, then, like a higher love. And if his brother lost his way, if his brother’s children were orphaned and forced to live with grandparents too old and bitter to care for them properly, had that been his concern?

It had, he thought. Or it should have been. He and Henry had felt their way, after that bad beginning, toward a tentative friendship that hung on Brendan’s reminiscences of his childhood with Frank junior. Henry had been starved for news of his father, grateful for the scraps that Brendan could give; later, he’d become interested in Brendan’s China tales and how those fit in with what he knew of his father’s war. Henry’s bedroom walls, Brendan remembered, had been covered with maps of the Pacific. There were pins stuck into the islands on which Frank junior had fought.

The strained, pained boy of Brendan’s memory bore almost no resemblance to the clumsy man who galloped across the mud tugging Bongo by a length of blackened rope. Henry’s eyes were blank, his cheeks were flushed. Brendan couldn’t imagine what went on inside him. He never talked about his mother; long ago, when he married Kitty, he’d stopped talking about his father as well.

“Sorry,” Henry said. “Bongo stole our lunch. You want to see the inside of this place? It’s one of my favorites, it’s almost done. You can almost see how it was supposed to look.”

A plywood ramp led from the driveway up the missing steps to the door. “Sure,” Brendan said, thinking it couldn’t matter. His parents’ house was gone and nothing could bring it back. Nothing could bring back the childish Henry whom Brendan had grown to love, or the young Wiloma either — they were grown now, past grown, they were middle-aged. He realized with a shock that both of them were older now than he’d been when he’d first come here. They were old, and he was ancient. His kidneys twinged and his bladder cramped.

Henry tied Bongo to a concrete block and said, “Stay. You can’t come in. Your feet are too dirty.”

He spoke as if the dog understood him. “This is the kitchen,” he said, giving Brendan’s chair a push that bumped him over the threshold. Behind them, Bongo barked. “We were going to have slate-blue Italian tiles on the floor, and more on the backdrop below the cupboards. Gray countertops, black appliances, recessed lighting …”

Brendan tried to imagine it, but all he could see was plywood and Spackle and tape. In the old kitchen, in the old house, his mother had kept her own mother’s dishes in a glass-fronted case. “The dining room,” Henry said, wheeling Brendan on. “Aren’t those windows great?” They were tall and narrow and pointed, like windows in a church; they were crisscrossed with masking tape and dotted with decals, which carved the view into kaleidoscopic shapes. The old house had had a bay window, full of dusty geraniums. Brendan’s bladder cramped again as Henry bent and peeled back some brown paper and exposed the half-laid wooden floor.

“Is there a bathroom down here?” Brendan asked.

“Two,” Henry said, missing the point completely. “A full bath in the guest suite and a powder room here.” He flung open a small door and pointed out the mango-colored fixtures and the mirror framed in mock bamboo. Brendan eyed the toilet, which was low, oval, and padded on its cover and seat. It bore no resemblance to the toilets at St. Benedict’s, nor to any toilet he’d ever seen.

“Does it work?” Brendan asked. Henry, who was stroking the sink, turned and looked at him blankly.

“What?” Henry said, and then his brain — where does he go? Brendan wondered. When he drifts away like that? — seemed to snap back into focus. “Oh,” he said. “You have to go? The water’s not connected — you could just go outside. There’s no one around.”

Brendan made a face and kicked his heels against his foot-rests. “Oh,” Henry said again. “Right. What if I found you a jar or something? Could you use that?”

Brendan nodded, humiliated; he hadn’t considered the details of being away from the aides at the Home. They had routines there, for washing him and transferring him into and out of his chair, for helping him to relieve himself so that they could all pretend nothing was happening. Drapes, discreet containers, averted heads. He followed Henry through the dining room, the living room, back through the kitchen, into the hall. They found nothing.

“Shit,” Henry muttered. “You’d think there’d be a paint bucket, or something …” He threw open another door, into the wing he called the guest suite, and then he froze so suddenly that Brendan ran into the backs of his legs. “What the fuck?” Henry said. Outside Bongo barked on and on.

Brendan craned his head around Henry’s hips. On the floor, in the corner, lay a nest of flattened cardboard boxes and paint-spattered tarpaulins. Three people crouched there on a sheet of blue plastic: a man, a woman, and a boy. The boy was gnawing his thumb and had pressed himself against the man’s side. The woman looked at the floor; the man stared at Henry and Brendan and then slowly raised his right arm and brandished a length of two-by-four.

“Don’t come any closer,” he warned.

“The hell,” Henry said. “I built this place — what do you think you’re doing here?”

“You don’t live here,” the man said sternly. “Do you.”

“No,” Henry sputtered. “But …”

Brendan reached out and grasped a fold of Henry’s pants, restraining him. The family, if it was a family, seemed to have been here for some time. A few clothes were stacked in a corner, along with a handful of dishes, a jug of water, a basin, and a pack of cigarettes. A cluster of black-eyed Susans stood in a jar.

“Well, we do,” the man said. The woman reached for the jar of flowers and slid them silently behind her. The man said, “That camp where they put the other berry pickers is such a dump. And this place was abandoned, so we claimed it. You have a problem with that?”

Brendan kept hold of Henry’s pants; he could feel Henry tensing himself to say or do something unforgivable. He craned his head to the side and spoke before Henry had a chance. “You pick berries?” He’d picked berries himself, at the abbey. They’d made them into jam. “Strawberries?”

“All berries,” the man said warily. He lowered his arm and looked around Henry to Brendan. “Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Also peaches when it comes to their time, and then apples. Then we move south for the Georgia harvest, then we hit the oranges in Florida.” He paused. “What happened to your legs?”

“Arthritis,” Brendan said. “How long have you been doing this?”

“A while,” the man said. “Suellen and me hooked up nine years ago. Then Lonny came. Can you walk at all?”

“No,” Brendan said. The boy had raised his head at the sound of his name and now Brendan saw his eyes. They were distant, troubled, guarded; they looked the way Henry’s had, when Brendan had first met him in the vanished parlor. “Mister,” Lonny said, “is that your dog outside?” Bongo’s howls rose to a frenzied pitch.