Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

Henry nodded stiffly.

“You gonna let him bite us?”

Henry said nothing, so Brendan spoke. “Of course not,” he said, tugging steadily at Henry’s pants. “This used to be our place, but it isn’t anymore. We’re leaving now.”

The man nodded and cupped his hand around the back of Lonny’s neck. “If you could,” he said quietly. “If you would …”

Henry made a strangled noise and then bolted, leaving Brendan alone with the family. “I had a dog,” Lonny said softly. “In South Carolina, once. Where’d you get that chair?”

Brendan looked at him, unable to think of anything to say. At the Home, where everyone talked all the time, his words had turned into something frothy and useless and polite, a foam of social chatter that flowed from surface to surface and never cut deeper. He lifted his right hand and spoke to Lonny in the sign language he’d used in the abbey.

He rested his forefinger along his upper lip — the sign for black — and then pressed that and his middle finger together and touched his forehead with them in the sign for abbot. Black and abbot signed together like that stood for St. Benedict; he followed with the sign for house, joining the tops of both hands in a peak like a roof. St. Benedict’s Home, where his chair had come from. He felt a sudden rush of warmth in his hands, which hadn’t signed in years.

Lonny stretched his lips in what might have been a smile, and then he held out his right hand and touched his forefinger to his thumb. Brendan didn’t know what he meant, but he flashed back the sequence of signs that had once been his name: brother and A and help and cook and house; Brother Ambrose who works in the kitchen. Lonny said again, “I used to have a dog.” Brendan, having left his old name behind, turned and left the family to their lives.

He thought he might try to talk Henry into leaving his dog with Lonny, but Henry was crouched on the ground outside, with his face buried in the ruff of fur that stood out from Bongo’s neck. In that posture he looked hardly older than Lonny; he looked as if he might need Bongo more than Lonny did. When he raised his face, his skin looked weary and lined. “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “This was a bad idea. This place always makes me so crazy.”

“It was my idea to stop,” Brendan said gently. “I’m glad we came.” He’d expected rage from Henry, self-pity, destruction; not sorrow, not resignation; while Henry had not dealt with the family well, he’d done better than Brendan could have expected. For the first time he began to feel glad that Henry — Henry himself, not just any person with functioning limbs and a few free days — had been the agent of his escape. His bladder cramped again, and he longed for a bathroom and made the signs for shame and house without thinking.

Henry saw his movements, or maybe he only saw the plastic cup that lay on the ground between him and Brendan. He picked it up. “Here,” he said. Brendan turned his chair away from Henry, tugged open his fly, and let his urine flow out in a slow, painful stream. The relief was astonishing. He emptied the cup when he was done, shook it dry, and wedged it between his thigh and the arm of his chair, not knowing when he might need it again.

“What am I going to do?” Henry said. His voice was quiet and strained, without the brassy bounce and feint that had colored it for years. “Strangers sleeping here — the whole thing’s gone, it’s ruined. I lost it all.”

“You lost it a long time ago,” Brendan pointed out. “When you left. Do you want to get going?”

“I guess,” Henry said wearily. “I could use some lunch.”

“Me too,” Brendan lied. He hadn’t been able to eat for weeks without throwing up, and even the smell of food often made him sick. But he realized, now that he’d had some time to think, that they shouldn’t get back on the Thruway. They needed back roads, small roads, where the people who might be looking for them would never think to go. He remembered the route his bus had traveled, years ago, on his journey here from Rhode Island. “We don’t have much cash,” he said.

“No fooling,” said Henry.

“And the tolls from here to Massachusetts are bound to add up …”

“Shit,” Henry said. “I forgot about the tolls.”

“And we’re hungry, and we want some lunch, and I’d like to see some of the countryside. And we’ve still got most of the afternoon — why don’t we go the back way? It isn’t really any longer.”

The gloom lifted from Henry’s face. “We could take 5 and 20. I drove that once from Albany, when I was checking out some land.”

“We could eat wherever you want,” Brendan said. “We could stop by one of the lakes.”

“Better than staying here.” Henry buried his hand in Bongo’s ruff one last time and then started pushing Brendan’s chair toward the van. Brendan knew, without turning around, that Lonny stood at the window behind them, watching them leave.

LONNY AND HIS PARENTS STAYED IN HENRY’S MIND AS HE DROVE along the road threading the tips of the Finger Lakes together. That boy who’d looked like a wild thing, an otter or a mink; the silent woman; the man with the stick — they’d made him feel violated in some place the banks and the lawyers had missed, and yet he could see that Brendan was right. The house was theirs now, more than it had ever been his.

He drove quietly. He drove very fast. Brendan, if he was thinking about that family, kept his thoughts to himself, and Henry tugged his Red Wings cap down low and longed for the expensive sunglasses he’d broken in his car crash and hadn’t had the money to replace. The cap had a red mesh crown and a cheap plastic tag in the back, but the bill was wide and long and shaded his eyes. He’d purchased it years ago, at a baseball game to which he’d brought Lise and Delia and Wiloma’s kids. He couldn’t remember why he’d kept it, but he was glad that he’d had the foresight to take it from Kitty’s house. When they’d left Coreopsis, he’d plucked it from his box and stuck it on his head, longing for some form of disguise.

The cap, and his perch high in the van, made him feel like a truck driver. He pushed Lonny out of his mind and imagined himself in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, crossing the bleak flatlands of North Dakota. The cab was air-conditioned and roomy; in the space behind his seat was a narrow bed and on the bed rested the young woman he’d picked up on the highway west of Fargo. Her hair was the color of wheat. She was traveling alone. She said, “I wanted to get away. Don’t you ever feel like that? I wanted to leave my past behind me, forget everything I’d ever done and everyone who’d messed up my life. I just walked out and closed the door behind me.”

I did that, he wanted to say to her, but Brendan broke into his dreams and said, “You want to stop here? That diner looks okay.”

Henry focused his eyes, which had been seeing the road but no more, and let the girl dissolve. They were in Geneva; the diner was old and needed a coat of paint, and he couldn’t imagine why Brendan had chosen it but then couldn’t see anything better. He parked and lowered his uncle to the ground and maneuvered him inside the diner doors. They left Bongo locked in the van, howling mournfully at the traffic, and they settled themselves at a table by the window.

Henry pushed one of the chairs aside and rolled Brendan into place, but the arms of his wheelchair wouldn’t fit beneath the table. The waitress who brought them menus looked from Henry to Brendan and back again and then said, “This isn’t any good. You hang on a minute — I’ll fix you up.” The white plastic pin above her left breast read Mirella.