Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

She’d smiled and changed the subject; she was so focused on her own strange plans that his news hardly seemed to sink in. But Henry — Henry’s eyes had flared and his whole face had glowed. “Two hundred acres?” he’d said. The number had rolled on his tongue like a truffle and was hiding behind his lashes now. He would bulldoze each acre, Brendan feared, unless he could see a reason not to. “Jesus,” he’d said.

In the library, Brendan heard someone cry, “Jesus, protect us and save us.” Henry looked over Brendan’s shoulder and said, “What’s going on in there?”

“Some kind of healing service.”

“Who are they healing?”

“Me.” Brendan smiled sourly. “They asked me to come this morning, so they could cast out my evil spirits and make me well. When I said I was busy, they said they were going to pray for me anyhow.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Henry said. Which reminded Brendan of Wiloma, whose plans could hurt him, and were about to hurt him, unless he could convince Henry to help him first.

SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, WHEN BRENDAN HAD TOLD WILOMA what the idiot doctors meant to do, a vision had sailed into Wiloma’s head. Brendan had told her, over and over for years, that he was happy at St. Benedict’s. He had friends there, he’d said. He liked the routine. She’d believed him because it was convenient to believe him. But the vision of him hooked up to tubes and pierced by needles had finally convinced her that it was time to bring him home.

“The spare bedroom’s empty,” she’d told him. “There’s plenty of room, it’s what I want to do. And now that the doctors are acting so irresponsibly, we can’t afford to wait.”

“It’s just a little chemo,” Brendan had said. “They just want to try.”

“A little chemo,” she’d replied. “A little poison. They want to poison you, they think you’re dying.”

“We’re all dying,” Brendan had said, and then he’d rolled his eyes at her behind his glasses. She had known what he was thinking — the same thing her children thought, the same thing her unconverted neighbors thought. That she’d been brainwashed by the Church of the New Reason; that she was fanatical, out of control. When it should have been obvious to anyone what the Church had given her.

On this Saturday morning, Wiloma fluffed a pillow in her spare room, straightened the bedclothes, and adjusted the bedside lamp. Brendan could roll his eyes all he liked, but no one could stop her from signing him out and bringing him home. Most likely no one would even try. The staff at St. Benedict’s had given up on him and avoided his room as if he were already dead. And so of course he was dying, they were drawing off his life force. The drugs they wanted to give him would quench the last of his Spirit.

She imagined Brendan’s Spirit glowing with renewed energy from the new sheets and blankets, the egg-crate mattress she’d bought, the furniture she’d moved, and she thought proudly of all she’d done in the past three weeks. She’d called St. Benedict’s and set the paperwork in motion. The social worker there had suggested she hire a daily nurse, but she’d done something better: she’d engaged Christine Emerson, the Church’s local spiritual neuro-nutritionist. Christine had told her what else she needed to do. She’d filled the small bookcase with Church literature, as Christine had directed; she’d placed her well-thumbed copy of the Manual within easy reach of Brendan’s bed. On the wall she’d hung the framed linen square she’d cross-stitched herself. Nothing exists external to our minds, read the motto on the square. Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas.

When she’d completed her detoxification, almost two years ago, that motto had been the raft on which she’d floated to safety. The detox team had pulled her bad memories from her one by one, her bad attitudes, her dichotomous taxonomies, her negative and judgmental faculties and her desires for sickness and pain. They’d left behind that motto and the other sayings in the Manual, and they’d helped her understand that her husband’s desertion of her for Sarah, his bookkeeper, had been for the best.

The team had enabled her to see how Waldo had impeded her spiritual growth and kept their children from the Light. He had had to leave her, she’d learned, so that she could flower into the Spirit. And he had had to marry Sarah, and Sarah had had to become pregnant with Courteney. Just as she herself had had, shortly after Courteney’s birth, to suffer a pain so sharp and startling that she would slip over the edge at the sight of her children’s misbehaviors and crash into a wall of darkness. The Church was big on things that had to happen; you had to drown, she learned, before you could be saved.

All of that had been necessary, she’d learned, all that wallowing in the fog of pain her own mind had created. It had been necessary that she go away for a while, necessary that Waldo take Wendy and Win and refuse to return them to her until she had, as he called it, “straightened out.” And if her new serenity concealed things of which Waldo might not approve, that was none of Waldo’s business now.

She’d had her children back for eighteen months and they were doing fine. Several weeks ago, at Wendy’s high-school graduation, she’d been able to sit calmly with Waldo and Sarah and Courteney. Win, looking handsome in a new navy suit, had sat beside her and held her hand while Wendy went up to receive her diploma. Wendy had walked smoothly up the stairs and smoothly down. And afterward, when they stood in a row outside the auditorium and Wendy had kissed them one by one, Wiloma had been able to smile and bless the Spirit in Courteney when Wendy had lifted her into the air.

There is no pain, she’d told herself then. There is no guilt. There is no blame. Life is what you believe it is.

She felt happy now, perfectly clear. And all she wanted to do was share that clearness with Brendan, so that, if this was his time to die, he went smoothly into the Light. Not pickled with drugs; not hazy-headed and pricked by needles; not bound by the tired religion that had crippled his life and almost captured her. A clear transit: the best she could offer him, less than she owed.

She checked her watch — ten-thirty already, and Waldo had promised to bring the kids back right after breakfast. She felt a prickle of fear, which she quickly suppressed. Sometimes, when she grew lazy and lax, she couldn’t push away the thought that Waldo might steal the kids back for good. Behind that came the thought that he had stolen them once; and behind that the sense that they had sealed off parts of themselves during her absence, and that Waldo had had as much to do with their withdrawal as with their reformed behavior.

But she knew these thoughts were only true if she believed in them, and she pushed them down and buried them like stones. She reminded herself that Waldo was always late; that his tardiness was a part of him and that he wasn’t in control of his deeper self. As soon as she thought this and calmed herself, she heard the kitchen door open and her children clatter in.

“Mom,” Win called from downstairs. “Mom? Did you wash my soccer stuff? I have a game today, I have to get going ….”

“Up here,” she called, but it was Wendy who came up the stairs and into the spare room. She was wearing nice clothes, expensive clothes that Sarah had no doubt picked out and paid for: high-waisted sage-green pants, a mustard shirt with large pearly buttons, a broad belt, and pretty sandals. Wiloma looked down at her own faded skirt and old blue blouse, and she noticed for the first time that her skirt had a large stain below the right pocket. Part of the hem seemed to be coming down and her ankles looked callused and dry. She knew she dressed badly. She had often, since Wendy had started dressing so well, meant to clean herself up. But she had so little time to pay attention to her clothes, and even when she tried it seemed as if nothing she owned really went with anything else. She suppressed a sigh, and with it the thought that she missed Wendy’s old clothes, the drooping skirts and men’s jackets worn over tired T-shirts, the leggings and army boots and old hats studded with pins.