Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“They’re back?” Brendan was safe, then. Her worries hadn’t harmed him. “We were wrong?”

“We were right,” Waldo said impatiently. “I talked to one of the administrator’s assistants, and I told her you thought your uncle was headed for Massachusetts. And she got all excited — she said they’d sent one of the orderlies around Brendan’s floor, asking everyone if they’d seen or heard anything, and one of the old guys said he’d overheard Brendan talking to someone in the hall. She said this guy said Brendan said, ‘I want to go to Massachusetts. I want to see the reservoir,’ but that he hadn’t thought much about it because they all talk like that all the time, about the places they want to visit and can’t.”

“Except this is different,” Wiloma said. Although the trip couldn’t have been Brendan’s idea — he might have said something wistful, thinking nothing would ever come of it, but it would have been Henry who had leapt on the words, stolen the van, engineered the details. Henry had pushed their uncle, Henry was behind this. But the men Brendan had left behind wouldn’t know that.

Wiloma could imagine them sitting up in bed as the news spread, wheeling themselves into clusters near windows, laughing and whispering and already turning Brendan’s flight into legend. Misinterpreting his departure, the way she’d misinterpreted his arrival in Coreopsis so many years ago. When Gran had told her that Brendan was coming to them, she’d pictured another version of her father. He’d left his Order, Gran had said. He was coming home. For the week between that announcement and his arrival, Wiloma had felt as if her father had risen from the dead. Her uncle was coming to rescue her, she’d thought. But all he’d ever been able to do was listen.

The men in the Home, she knew, would be dreaming just as fruitlessly. Someone, she could hear him already, would be claiming he’d known about the plan all along. Someone else would be claiming to have helped. “I saw him,” someone else would say. “I saw him take the keys.” They were men who went years without visitors, who never got mail, who were starved for something to break their boredom. She couldn’t blame them for seeing in Brendan all their own frustrated hopes, but it was wrong to let them think he was something he was not. He’s not a hero, she wanted to say sternly to those men. He didn’t choose. He was pushed. And, she might have added, even if he had chosen, he had made the wrong choice. A hero would put himself into her hands and let his Healing take place. Surrender, he used to tell her. In surrender is salvation. He had been on the verge of surrendering himself to her when Henry had interfered.

Waldo eased them back into the river of eastbound traffic. “I told her it meant something.”

Wiloma’s attention snapped back from her vision of the deluded old men. “You didn’t …?” If he’d been shaken before, the phone call had calmed him down. Already he was speeding again.

“I didn’t,” he said. “She asked me where I thought they were headed, and I said I wasn’t sure, it could be a lot of places, we were just going to take a little drive and check some of them out. She wanted me to give her some idea, so she could maybe alert the police, and I said I couldn’t but that I’d call her as soon as we had any news.”

“They called the police?”

“Just the local ones, so far.” Waldo looked at her curiously. “You knew that — you told me that cruiser in Irondequoit called in about the van.”

“I forgot,” she said faintly. She had also, she suddenly realized, forgotten to call Christine and tell her Brendan’s arrival would be delayed. “Don’t call them again,” she said. “Please? Don’t call anyone. There are so many people involved already, I can’t keep everything straight … we can do this ourselves.”

“He’s your uncle. I’ll do whatever you want.”

Whatever you want, she thought sourly. Not for me, but in the hopes of getting that land. His words were kind but he avoided her eyes, and already she half-regretted bringing him along. If he’d had the sense to stay married to her, her half of it would have been half his. Automatically, just like that. It would have fallen into his hands. She hoped that thought had crossed his mind; she hoped he realized all that he’d lost.

HENRY STRIPPED FILLETS FROM THE SKELETONS OF JACKSON’S fried fish, set the bones and heads aside, and cut the flesh into pieces for his uncle. He stood roasted corn on end and sliced the kernels from the cob. Then he sprinkled salt over everything and set the plate in Brendan’s lap before he bent to his own food. From the practiced ease with which Jackson had made it, he realized that Jackson cooked over this fire every day.

“Are you living out here?” Henry asked. “In your garage?” He regretted his question immediately.

“Pretty much.” Jackson wiped out the frying pan with a wad of newspaper. “But I used to have a house, just like everyone else. A green ranch on Town Line Road, past the insulator plant.”

Brendan, who’d been very quiet since waking from his nap, set down his untouched plate. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose it?” His face was so thin that his cheekbones stood out in the fire’s glow.

Jackson said, “What happened was—” but before he could start, Henry cleared his throat. The idea that Jackson could be living like this was horrifying; the last thing he wanted to do was to listen to Jackson’s story. It was bound to be long and sad, and he had no idea where he and Brendan were going or where they might find a place to stay. “Dinner was great,” he told Jackson. “We really appreciate it. But we ought to get going.”

Jackson set down the frying pan and strode into the garage. When he returned, he held a pile of old blankets. “Why don’t you camp here tonight? You can put these in your van — you ought to be pretty comfortable.”

Henry looked at Brendan, sure that he’d want to get on the road again, but Brendan answered for both of them. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “We could use a place to stay.”

“You’re sure?” Henry said. “You won’t be very comfortable.”

“I’ll be fine,” Brendan said, and Jackson said, “Stay. I could use the company.”

Henry gave up. This was Brendan’s trip, Brendan’s idea entirely, and if the old man wanted to sit in the damp night air and let the mosquitoes get him, that was fine. He was as tired as he’d ever been. Kitty, Coreopsis Heights, the diner, and then the breakdown — it was too much for one day, more than he could sort out. He longed to rest.

Brendan sat in his wheelchair, his hands flapping against the armrests from time to time. Bongo lay next to him and worried the fish heads that Henry had set aside. Henry lounged in one of the tattered chairs, and when Jackson’s three-legged cat slunk by he scooped her up. Jackson had said that her left front leg had been caught in a trap when she was a kitten. The vet had popped the stump from the shoulder joint and closed the wound, which had healed so smoothly she might have been born that way. Henry liked the way his hand passed from her neck to her flank without interruption.

Jackson said, “I’ve been living here since spring. My wife, she fell in love with a guy who works at the bowling alley. And she threw me out of the house, like our twenty-two years together didn’t mean squat. You know what she said?”

“What?” asked Brendan. He was bent forward, listening intently. Henry imagined him sitting like that at St. Benedict’s, listening to the stories of the other old men while years and years went by. “What did she say?” Brendan’s voice was low and kind.