Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

The van was impossibly hot and noisy — his breath, his uncle’s, his dog’s; snores, creaks, groans. He sat up suddenly and grabbed Kitty’s other blanket and slid the side door open. The outside, bugs and dew or not, could not be worse. He found a spot twenty yards from the van, where the ground seemed fairly smooth, and he lay down wrapped in his blanket. The stars above him shone brilliantly and the trees made a black fringe against the horizon. Water was running somewhere, in a creek or a stream nearby. Jackson’s drums were silent now, and he thought of Jackson lying on his cot inside that empty, dirty garage, waiting for Rhonda to call him home. He fell asleep thinking of his own young-fleshed mistake, of Anita, who had left him.

He had met her at the bank and she had not, despite what Kitty had said, been stupid at all. She had only been young. She had processed the application for his doomed loan on Coreopsis Heights, and when he’d driven her down to look at the land he’d been able to make her see the finished project through his eyes. She believed him. She believed everything he said. She slipped her hand around his elbow as they paced the hummocked ground.

Anita had beautiful thighs, as smooth and curved as a swan’s wing, and she’d lost her job because of him. When Coreopsis Heights had failed and he’d defaulted on his loans, the bank had blamed her for approving them in the first place. She’d stood by him during his long slide, during the months when Kitty had screamed at him nightly and he’d scrambled for a foothold in the mounting heap of bills, but when she lost her job, she dumped him. She didn’t tell him face-to-face; she didn’t even call. She sent a cool, cruel letter to his house, which Kitty opened. Then Kitty threw him out and he crashed his car.

They were gone now, both of them. He dreamed of a green stretch of land, cut through by a broad river — the land of the blessed, the fairy-tale land that Gran used to tell stories about, which had come to her from her own grandmother in Ireland. Across the ocean and hidden by mist, she said, lay a temperate land of warmth and light. Grapes there grew to the size of apples. Otters stepped from the streams and walked on their hind legs, bearing gifts of fish. The men were brave and the women were lovely; no one ever grew old there and no one ever died. A monk, the one Gran had named Brendan for, had set sail from Ireland with his companions, bobbing and tossing for seven years in a hide-covered curragh until they found the land of promise. They wandered there for forty days, which passed like a single afternoon. Then an angel found them and sent them back home.

Gran had called that place the country of the young. In his dream, Henry stepped out of a leather-skinned boat and set foot on a soft white beach. Deer stood in the grass where the beach merged into the forest. The river was full of salmon and the trees were heavy with fruit. Henry made his way through the woods until he came upon a clearing. In the clearing a fire burned in a ring of stones, and around it stood all the women he had ever loved.

All of them were young. Anita, as she’d looked on the day when Coreopsis Heights was still a dream; Kitty, as she’d looked on the shore of Canandaigua Lake; Lise and Delia; his mother. Even Gran looked as she had in the wedding picture that had hung over the mantel in Coreopsis. He looked down at himself and saw that he alone had a fifty-year-old body. He had hair in his nose and his ears and his eyebrows were growing together. His stomach hung down, no matter how hard he tried to suck it in. His hands and feet were callused and freckled and the skin where his thighs met his groin was creased. In the soft breeze, against the fresh vegetation, he looked obscene.

He threw himself onto the grass and rolled like a dog, and when he stood he bristled with green stems. He pranced in his green coat; he danced and threw his hands in the air; and when the smooth-fleshed women still ignored him he jumped into one of the trees and sang like a mad bird. The stems clothing him had turned into feathers. The women, he realized, could neither see nor hear him, and he raised his tattered wings and flew over the water.

He woke when he heard his uncle calling, “Henry? Henry?”

Feathers? he thought, feeling his clothes with his hands. Where had that come from? He walked to the van and stuck his head through the open window.

“What is it? Are you all right?” He couldn’t see Brendan’s face at all.

“I have to take a leak,” Brendan whispered. “I had a little cup, I left it on my chair.”

The chair stood next to the van, and Henry felt along the seat until his fingers touched a plastic cup. He passed it through the window. “Do you need help?”

“No. But you can toss it for me when I’m done.” Henry heard water again, just a trickle this time, and then Brendan said, “Here.” Henry emptied the half-filled cup on the ground.

“Can you sleep?” he asked his uncle.

“On and off. How about you?”

“I was dreaming,” Henry said. “I had such a strange dream.”

“Go back to it,” Brendan said. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

Henry went back to his blanket, but his dream was gone.

THE EVENING HAD PASSED SO SMOOTHLY, AND IT HAD BEEN so nice to have the house to themselves and not to think about what their families were up to, that Wendy had let time slip and slide and high-step past her without telling Delia what had happened. Sometime after eleven, though, in the living room littered with cartons of grapefruit juice and vodka bottles and pizza boxes, Delia said, “So where’d your mother go, anyway? One of her weird retreats?”

Wendy had almost forgotten how strange her story was. Casually, almost flippantly, she explained about Grunkie’s disappearance and her mother’s reaction to it, and her father’s reaction to her mother’s reaction, and her mother’s suspicions that Henry had actually stolen Grunkie away. Wendy’s embroidered bag leaned against her chair with the rag dolls showing at the top, and as she spoke she took the dolls from the bag and manipulated them like puppets. The story, backed by the dolls’ gestures, seemed almost funny. She said, he said, I said; she said he said; I said to her; rumors, guesses, speculations. She was not prepared for Delia’s response.

“My father did what?” she said, and it took Wendy a minute to realize that Delia might see the story from a different perspective, evidence of one more link in the endless chain of her father’s recent fuck-ups. She forgot, sometimes, that Delia took her father’s escapades so hard. She’d had less than a year to get used to them, and she felt guilty about the way he’d ended up. Lise and Kitty had shed Henry like snakes, but Delia still seemed tied to him by a tag of obligation or love, like the string of flesh left behind by a pulled tooth.

“This whole thing’s probably in my mother’s head,” Wendy said soothingly. “You know how she gets. All anyone really knows is that your father and Grunkie left St. Benedict’s together in this van they borrowed. Mom and Dad both think they went to Massachusetts, so that’s where they’ve gone to look for them.”

Delia bent over until her head met her knees. “Asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole.”

“Your father?” Roy said. He rested his hand on the back of Delia’s neck.

“Of course my father.” She sighed and lifted her head and stretched her arms behind her back. “He’s such a jerk — after all he’s done to us, after all he’s done to his family, you’d think he’d give it a rest. But no — he has to take a helpless old man from a nursing home, fuck up everyone’s lives again ….”

“We don’t know that,” Wendy said. “We don’t know what happened at all. I’m only telling you what my mother said.”