Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

“Fine day!” Brendan called again. His voice was eager and gay.

This woman’s windows were open already, and she was pleasant enough. As Henry watched, Brendan flapped his left arm beside his head in a gesture midway between a salute and a tic. His head was rigid in the brace that supported his weakened neck, and his white hair, grown too long, drifted downily around his skull. Henry told himself that he would not act hurt, he would not complain. He would only, gently, try to lead the conversation back to his uncle’s land.

“It is nice,” the woman called. “Are you having a good time out there?”

“Lovely!” Brendan said.

Henry sighed and walked over to the only person in his family still speaking to him.

BRENDAN, WHO HAD A PHYSICAL THERAPY SESSION EACH SATURDAY morning at ten, had urged Henry on several occasions to come a little later. “Sleep in,” he told his nephew. He would have preferred to savor the session by himself. “Relax. Come after lunch if you want.”

But Henry showed up tired and bleary-eyed each week, as if he were doing penance. He got off the bus looking pained and put-upon, and then he stood and stared disapprovingly while Brendan chatted at the corner with the passersby. Men poked their hands through the sunroofs and waved; women turned down their radios to say that their peonies were blooming. Children bounced in their seats and squealed hello when their mothers said, “Say good-morning to the nice man,” but Henry stood stiff and aloof, frowning until Brendan agreed to go inside.

He acts like I’m crazy, Brendan thought, as Henry wheeled him down the ramps and into the basement of St. Benedict’s Home. He knew he looked odd, especially since his last stroke — the left side of his face no longer moved as freely as his right, and his left arm was apt to wander. Lying in bed those first few days, unable to speak while his thoughts hummed at twice normal speed, he’d watched everyone act as if he’d lost his mind and not just his words.

Did he visit me then? Brendan thought. While I was lying there frozen? No. His speech was clear now, completely recovered, and his mind was as sharp as ever. His friends inside the Home and the people in the cars outside treated him as if he were fine. Only Henry continued to act as if he were senile. He seemed to be unable to tell the difference between Brendan’s condition and that of the blank-eyed men who strolled the halls in their pajamas, their minds erased despite their strongly pumping hearts.

Behind him Henry hummed an unfamiliar tune. Brendan poked at his ears with a finger but he still couldn’t make out the song. “What is that?” he said over his shoulder.

Henry gave a startled laugh and then turned the corner clumsily, bumping Brendan’s footrest against the wall. “I don’t know,” he said. “They play the radio all day where I’m working now, the same songs over and over again, three or four times an hour — they get stuck in my head.”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”

“It isn’t,” Henry agreed. He pushed open the door to the physical therapy room and wheeled Brendan inside, where Roxanne was waiting in the dim light thrown by the cones on the walls. Her hair shone smooth and golden, and she looked so young that Brendan was reminded of how he’d been in the Home almost as long as she’d been alive.

Roxanne unfolded a white sheet and held it up by the corners. She turned her head as Brendan wheeled himself behind it. “Would you like to take a little soak?” she asked Henry, as she did each time he appeared. “Keep your uncle company?”

Henry refused, as always. While Brendan undressed behind the sheltering sheet, Henry drew a plastic chair to the edge of the whirlpool and sat there uneasily, fully dressed.

Brendan took off the brace that straightened his neck. He handed Roxanne his clothes and then he grasped the sides of the sheet and pulled it around him, hiding his body from her eyes. Roxanne tucked the canvas sling beneath him, dropped the arms of his chair, swung him over the tiled lip, and lowered him into the water.

The sheet came with him, draped over his withered hips and twisted legs, shielding his genitals. He and Roxanne had argued over that sheet at first—“I see naked men all the time,” she’d said. “It’s no big deal.” Brendan had insisted that he keep the sheet in the water. She didn’t see naked ex-monks, he’d told her, men on whom no woman had ever gazed. That had silenced her. He’d learned over the years that any mention of his vocation embarrassed people into doing whatever he asked.

The sheet also hid him from Henry, whose eyes skittered like minnows over the flesh that Brendan exposed. The swollen, gnarled, splayed shapes that were Brendan’s hands and feet, the huge nodules on his elbows and knees, the scar tissue on his thin chest, the discolorations, the ropy veins, the wattles and wrinkles and creases and pleated folds and sores — he was unsightly, he knew. He’d shriveled up so much that his skin hung on him now like a suit made for two men, one of whom had already died.

Henry’s eyes settled on a point an inch or two above Brendan’s head. He seemed so disgusted by Brendan’s body, so irritated by Brendan’s awkward movements, that Brendan wondered why he bothered to visit at all. It was duty, Brendan supposed. Certainly that was more likely than love. But duty hadn’t called Henry here during all the years when he was thriving — until he’d fallen into trouble, he’d seldom shown up except on holidays. Now he came every week, and each time he looked at that spot in the air.

“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Roxanne said.

She winked at Brendan, and Brendan let himself think of the long massage she’d give him when she returned. Her hands would be warm; she’d warm the mineral oil. She’d start at his neck and work down to his toes, covering every inch of him except for the small area wrapped in his sheet. Her hands were remarkably strong for such a small woman, and the pleasure they brought him was indescribable.

“Soak,” Roxanne said. “Loosen up those joints.” Flecks of grass clung to the hems of her pants, as if she’d walked through a newly cut lawn on her way to work. She slipped out of the dim room, her feet silent in spongy-soled shoes.

Brendan would have liked to slip his ears underwater and lose himself in the silence, but he knew Henry would be offended. He sighed and settled himself more comfortably on the ledge, sliding down until the water reached his shoulders. “How’s work?” he asked.

“Horrible,” Henry said. He launched into the litany of complaints that would, Brendan knew, fill his soaking time and possibly even part of his massage. Brendan closed his eyes and inched over until his spine was centered in front of a whirlpool jet. “And then,” his nephew said, “he did, and then he said …” Henry moaned about the same things every week, but today his complaints seemed to have an extra, acid edge. He was miffed, Brendan saw, and he meant for Brendan to know it. Brendan smiled and said nothing and nodded occasionally. Henry’s mood might prove helpful, he thought, if only he could figure out how to propose his plan.

Next door, in the library, Brendan could hear the people in the prayer group singing a hymn. “Praise the Lord,” he heard, over the bubbling water and the drone of Henry’s voice. “Praise the Lord, all ye beasts and fishes.” There was no keeping that group away — they were based in Pittsford but descended once a month on the Home to hold a healing service. Half the Home’s residents were in with them now, holding hands and praying for their afflictions to be healed. One of the group’s leaders had visited Brendan earlier, offering to exorcise the evil spirits plaguing him.