Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“Did Kitty call St. Benedict’s?” she asked.

“No. She thought they had permission to take the van. I didn’t tell her anything different.”

Wiloma stared at the andromeda outside and mulled over a vision of Brendan and Henry at Kitty’s house. They had gone there at Brendan’s request, they had had tea; they were going to take a drive by the lake and then head back to the Home. Could that be true? she wondered. No. Henry was trying to keep Brendan away from her and the Church. She turned to Waldo, who was watching her closely.

“I don’t know why they went to Kitty’s,” she said carefully. “Some sort of detour, maybe. Or maybe they meant to confuse us. But I know they’re headed for Massachusetts. I can feel it. Henry’s so desperate, that’s just what he’d do. He ruined Da’s place in Coreopsis, and now he wants to ruin this.”

She paused. Waldo knew she’d been planning to bring Brendan home but he didn’t know why, and she wondered for a minute if she should tell him about Christine. She decided against it. Waldo said, “I think you’re right. Henry may have talked him into the trip somehow — he’s so greedy, he wants that land so bad. I know what he’s thinking. He wants your half, too.”

Not like you, she thought. Not much. She was aware that Waldo’s presence, and his apparent concern, had more to do with Brendan’s land than with worry over either her or Brendan. She didn’t care what happened to the land; it was only land, and no concern of hers. But she didn’t mind using it as a lever to move Waldo. “You think?” she said.

“I wouldn’t put it past him.”

And then Wiloma said what had come into her mind just that minute, which she recognized immediately as right. “I’m going to go after them. They’ve only got a couple of hours start, maybe less — I could be there in six or seven hours.”

“That’s crazy,” Waldo said, as she had known he would. “You’ll never find them. You don’t know where they’re headed, and you’ll have to stay overnight somewhere.”

“I’ll find them,” she said serenely. If I can think it, she told herself, it must be so. If I need help, help will appear. She looked at Waldo steadily, willing him to step into her silence and offer what was needed. Waldo said, “Hang on a minute. I think I have something in the car.”

He strode off, leaving her to think about her uncle. Brendan had meant nothing to her when she was a child; she would have sworn that on her parents’ graves, had she known where to find them. He’d been sick and crippled and useless and quiet, a bag of bones with a big head and wispy hair, another old person brought into a house already tilted so far toward old that Wiloma had felt like a fern struggling to grow in a forest of ancient oaks. Someone else to look after. Someone else to wait on. His hands had been covered with blue veins and his reminiscences of China had been as dull as Da’s reservoir tales. She couldn’t believe Henry had listened to him. She’d never believed Henry’s affection for him was sincere.

But then Gran had died, and Brendan had moved to St. Benedict’s, and Henry had run off with Kitty and left her alone with Da. And during Da’s long illness, when she’d been so isolated, she’d begun to realize how she’d leaned on her uncle without knowing it. The tray she’d fixed for him each afternoon, when she’d returned from the school where she still felt like an outsider — that had anchored her, given her a point around which her days had revolved. Herbal tea, three arrowroot biscuits, a teaspoonful of jam. While she helped him hold his cup and dab jam on his biscuits, he had asked her to describe her day to him.

He was bored, he said. He was stuck in the house and never saw anything. She’d be helping if she told him the details of her day: anything, any small stories. What the weather was like, what her teachers had said, what had happened on the bus. She had sighed but described these things dutifully, shaping each day’s events into anecdotes that filled an hour, always thinking she was doing him a favor and wishing she could spend that hour somewhere else, never understanding how much the knowledge that she had to pay attention enough to fill that hour had helped make her days bearable.

Only after her marriage and Wendy’s birth had she started to visit him at the nursing home. She’d gone out of a sense of duty, and from a desire to show off her child: Here, she’d wanted to say. Look at this. I did this. His hands were too twisted to hold Wendy properly, but he’d found a way to rest his elbows on his lap and bend his arms until he could cradle Wendy between his forearms and his chest. “She’s beautiful,” he’d said. “A regular princess. When your father was born, his eyes looked just like that.”

His pleasure had been so genuine that she’d begun to visit him regularly. Before long, she’d found herself storing up the events of her weeks to tell him each Sunday. He had listened to all her ups and downs — Win’s and Wendy’s childhood illnesses, money problems, broken plumbing; then Waldo’s defection, her own struggles, her salvation by the Church. He never passed judgment on anything. He was always glad to see her. He was the only person left in the world who could link her children to her dead parents, and it was impossible to let him go.

Waldo returned with a sheaf of maps; the same ones, she suspected, that he’d shown Wendy and Win. “Where would they go?” he asked. “If they were going someplace in particular.”

“Hard to say,” she answered. “The land Uncle Brendan told me about, where our cabin used to be — that’s outside the watershed altogether, it’s in a different town now. But there were some dirt roads that led from there into the reservoir lands, and there was a point that my mother used to bring me and Henry to.”

She paused; she hadn’t thought about this in years. “The East Pomeroy Common. Or what was left of it — a road lined with cellar holes, some old stone walls, paths that broke off at the water’s edge. The reservoir was almost filled by the time my father came back from the war, and he used to take me and Henry down there and try to get us to imagine what his village had looked like. Then he’d start drinking. Then he’d cry.”

Waldo touched her elbow with his hand. “How old were you?”

“Five,” she said. “Maybe six. Something like that.” His fingers sent sharp jets of warmth up her arms and she moved her elbow away.

“Is that a place your uncle would know?”

“I don’t think so. I remember Da telling me how they were just beginning to build the dam when Uncle Brendan left for China. He was gone for five or six years before they began to fill the reservoir. And then — I don’t know, this is so hard to piece together. We left after the accident, and then Uncle Brendan came back from China a few years later, but he didn’t come home — he went to Canada, to some other abbey there. I think that’s what he told us. I don’t think he ever saw the water.”

Waldo unrolled one of his maps. “Where are you talking about?”

Wiloma studied the long, mulberry-leaf shape of the reservoir, and then she brought her finger down on a point on the northeast shore. “Somewhere around here,” she said. “This point — you see how they have the old dirt roads still marked, and the gates leading into the state land? We used to go through one of them, maybe this one.” She traced a tentative path with her finger around a knob that dented the water’s boundary. “Here?” She hesitated and looked at the map again. The edges of the reservoir were so pocked with points and coves that she wasn’t sure she could tell one from another.

Waldo unrolled another map, slick and shiny and gray: some kind of photocopy. It was dated 1940, two years before her birth. “Does this help?” he said.