Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

She’d loved the water, which sparkled and danced and was full of fish and harbored long-legged herons and ospreys, but she thought of the dam as a monster. Men were buried in it, her father said. Men who’d died working on it. There were fish who’d been sucked up by the huge hydraulic pumps and laid down in the silt, snails and weeds and clams and tools and lost gloves and toads. After he showed her the cemetery, just beyond the dam, where the dead people from the lost towns had been reburied, she had nightmares in which she saw the dam as a dragon, devouring everything and then wedging itself across the river’s mouth.

She’d forgotten all that until she saw the dam again. In the moonlight, the dam had looked clean and pale and benign, but she had bent over the dash of Waldo’s car and cried.

“What is it?” Waldo had asked. “Is this where your house used to be?”

“No,” she’d managed to tell him. “Not here — it’s miles north of here, this is only the dam. This is just where I thought we’d start looking.”

“Do you think your uncle’s here?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know — he could be anywhere.”

“We’ll find him in the morning.” Waldo had been sweet and soothing; he’d given her his handkerchief and then had taken charge of finding them places to eat and stay. A little motel lay just down the road from a restaurant he liked the looks of, and he’d driven up to it and checked out the rooms and taken two in the back, where it was quiet. She hadn’t had to do anything. He hadn’t asked her what she wanted or what she thought; he had taken the rooms, brought back the keys, driven them to the restaurant and steered her in, ordered their drinks. He had listened patiently to her choked tales of childhood. Now he sat tipped back in his chair a bit, with his legs crossed and his shirt collar open and his jacket unbuttoned. His left hand, resting on the arm on his chair, tapped in time to the music playing in the background.

“How are you doing?” he asked. “Feeling better?”

“Much.” She had been so calm when they started their trip, and the trip had been so pleasant and civilized, that the upswelling of emotion she’d felt at the dam had caught her by surprise. She hadn’t cried like that in years, and certainly not in front of Waldo. But she felt calmer now, numbed by the noise and the alcohol.

The music pulsing through the restaurant had gentled and slowed, and she saw that some people had risen and were dancing in a small cleared area near the bar. Waldo said, “Would you like to?” and she said, “What?”

“Dance.” He gestured at the spinning couples. “We used to be pretty good.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t danced in years.”

He rose and took her hand and helped her up. “Come on. We’ll dance a little and then we’ll call it a day. Things will sort themselves out in the morning.”

Her legs were floating, disjointed. He held up his left hand and she folded her right hand into it and placed her other on his shoulder, against his jacket. His right palm pressed firmly between her shoulder blades, steering her among the other couples. Her feet followed his as if they had eyes, remembering the hundreds of times they’d danced together. Weddings, parties, anniversaries — they had always danced well together, or at least they had whenever they weren’t fighting. He led firmly, without hesitation, and when she wasn’t angry at him she had always loved letting her body relax and follow his.

He pulled her a little closer and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. His neck was still as heavy and muscular as it had been when they’d first met, and the same smell still rose from the skin pressed next to her nose — a mixture of soap (Dial soap, which she’d long since banished from her house after being haunted by visions of Waldo every time she stepped in the bathroom) and after-shave and starch from his shirt collar and the underlying tang that was purely him. When she moved her cheek up she found that his skin was scratchy; his beard was heavy and he’d always needed another shave in the evenings, before they went out. He said, with his lips right next to hers, “You feel exactly the same.” She said, “You smell the same. It’s so strange.”

They danced for half an hour, drawing closer until they were pressed together like teenagers at a prom, and when Waldo finally said, “Shall we go back?” she could answer him only in a whisper.

Outside, in the parking lot, she stumbled over the curb and Waldo wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Tired,” she murmured. “A little drunk. I hardly ever drink anymore.” They drove to the motel in silence and walked around to the back, to the two rooms Waldo had taken side by side. “Well,” he said as they stood before her door. “Who would’ve expected this to be so nice?”

He bent down — this man who had fathered her children, beside whom she’d slept for fifteen years — and he kissed her. He might have meant no more than a gentle, friendly kiss, good night, sleep tight; he might have meant no more than to be kind and reassuring; but her mind was lost at the dam, at the bottom of that pool of water or in the depths of the glasses she’d drained, and she kissed him back without thinking, the way she had when his kisses had been a question before they got into bed at night. She kissed him back yes and touched his neck, and he ran his hand down her back and over her hips, and they stood in the lighted doorway necking like kids.

She forgot about Sarah and Courteney. She forgot her dislike of him, and all her suspicions — that he had driven her here, that he was being so kind, only because he wanted a crack at the land that Brendan had promised her. She heard herself say, in a husky voice, “This is crazy, standing out here like this.” She heard him answer, “Let’s go inside.” She watched his free hand fumble with the key in the oversize lock, but it was only when they moved inside her darkened room and he held the side of her head in his hand that she realized what she was doing. If they fell into bed, into their old, practiced embrace, she would never be able to let him go again.

She drew back from him. She tried to smile, although she knew he couldn’t see her in the dark. She said, “You’re sweet, taking care of me like this — really. I appreciate it. But maybe we should get some sleep.” Her tongue was thick in her mouth.

She heard Waldo take a deep breath and then laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “All that dancing — I got carried away. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

You were thinking of us, she wanted to say. The way we used to be, all the time we spent together — how could you give it all up? She said, “We’re both exhausted. Will you wake me early?”

“Seven? We’ll have some breakfast and then we’ll take a look at the maps and start wherever you want.” He touched her hair and then he left.

Wiloma undressed in the dark and then lay down carefully on the bed. When she closed her eyes the room began to spin. She sat up, her spine pressed against the headboard, and she turned on the reading lamp. Her body felt prickly, warm, oversensitive; next door, through the thin wall, she could hear Waldo moving around. He brushed his teeth. He dropped his shoes on the floor with a thump. She tried not to remember the slow, deliberate way he used to undress in their bedroom. She tried to tell herself she was glad she’d sent him away.

She did some breathing exercises and then meditated for ten minutes. Body is a reflection of Spirit, she reminded herself. The body cannot desire what the Spirit does not want. Her Spirit did not desire Waldo, not at all; she and Waldo were totally unsuited. And the yearning she felt in her skin and bones was false, an artifact, a creation of the alcohol that had poisoned her system and of her exhaustion and fear. It was insignificant, nothing, and she was glad she’d had the sense to send him away.