Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

He coughed from time to time, wet gasps that cleared nothing. She understood that he would not wake again. She wished — she had wished then, and she wished it even more strongly now, had felt it more and more every year — that she’d held his hands and stretched the truth and said, “We were happy here. We loved our lives. We hardly missed our parents once we had you,” He had given them what he could, everything he had. Mimi jumped on his bed and crept among the pillows wedged beneath elbows, hips, and knees; pillows meant to take the place of flesh and keep bone from metal, bone from bone. Da’s head fell sideways, his neck so stiff she couldn’t move it back.

In her book. Da’s book. Da had marked the last page, where the author had bidden his readers farewell. Here, my friend, our labors close, she remembered reading. She read out loud; she slipped a hand between Da’s cheek and the pillow it was pressed against. She read slowly, her lips at Da’s ear. It has been a true pleasure to have you at my side for so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own.

Parents and children, Da had written on that page. Or maybe it was parents are children — his handwriting was so bad it was hard for her to be sure. He drew one last breath after she read those words, and then he was silent. She looked up from her book. Silence. His hands and feet were cold and his skin no longer felt like skin. She laid her head on his chest again and heard only her own blood, rushing in her ears. Air filled his open mouth — air, not breath — and when she pushed his lower jaw gently up, his mouth would not stay shut. She closed his eyes with her right hand and bathed him one last time. His left hand was bent in the shape that had held her thumb, and she unfolded it and dressed him and settled the blanket around his feet.

Mimi jumped up on his chest, she remembered, and his right eye floated open, but there was nothing left, it wasn’t him, it was flesh, stone, clouds. The wind blew through the open window and caught his spirit, which spiraled up like a moth and took part of her with it. Ice to water, water to vapor, vapor to snow and rain. Here then we part, she read over his shell: the last words in the red-bound book. And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us.

He was gone before she could say all she’d meant to, gone years before she’d had any knowledge of the Church or of how she might have eased his Spirit’s passage. She would not, if he were dying now, have told him a fairy tale about a valley or read to him from a red book that was full of pretty words but had no substance. She would have read to him from her Manual. She would have said what she still had a chance to say to Brendan, the words Christine would recite with her as a part of the Healing: Our bodies, consisting of flesh and bone, are made of the dust of the earth and have no significance. Without the light of the Spirit they are corrupt and mortal. Every creature is created Spirit and shall return to Spirit, swallowed up like a drop in the ocean. She would have said to Da — she would say to Brendan, she would not let him die as Da had, comforted clumsily by an ignorant girl— Paradise is not a place but a state of mind, in which all manifestations of Spirit are immortal and in harmony. We are as angels there, pure shafts of ethereal light.

But in order to say that, she had to circumvent Henry. Henry, with his transparent excuses, had left her all alone when she’d most needed him. Now, when Brendan most needed her, he had stolen Brendan away. In the darkness of her motel room, she thought of Henry as he’d been when they’d first arrived in Coreopsis. A little boy, but still older and wiser than her, he had whispered no as they hid in their rooms and puzzled over Da’s outbursts.

“Does Da hate us?” she remembered asking Henry then.

“No,” he’d said. “Da misses Dad. We remind him of him.”

Henry had understood that, but he didn’t seem to understand anything anymore, and she was, she realized now, afraid of him. Afraid the way she’d fear a cobra or a Martian: afraid they no longer shared any common speech or understanding. She would charm him, she thought. Lie to him if she had to; fight him if it came to that. But she would not let her uncle die alone.

TWO HOURS INTO THEIR TRIP, LISE TOLD ROY HE HAD TO LET HER drive. It was only fair, she said, that they split the drive into equal segments. It was only reasonable.

“Sit up here with me,” Lise told Delia next, after they’d all finished stretching their legs by the side of the road. “Keep me company.” Win claimed the passenger-side window in the back, and so Roy ended up in the middle, wedged between Wendy and Win. When Wendy whispered, “Why did you let Lise do that?” Roy whispered back, “What’s the point of fighting? She’ll only take it out on Delia.”

Which was true, Wendy thought; when Lise was crossed she always turned on Delia. But she wondered how Roy had figured this out. Then she wondered if any man would ever know something like that about her.

As soon as Lise started driving, she looked over her shoulder at Roy and said, “Why do you keep this car? It’s a piece of shit. The steering’s so loose I feel like I’m floating. The brakes are soft.”

“It’s an old car,” Roy said patiently, but Lise couldn’t leave it at that; every rattle and wheeze upset her. “Is that one of the tires?” Lise said. “Is something loose in the trunk? Do you think that tapping means anything?”

“I don’t know,” Roy said finally. “Do you think it’s going to blow?”

Delia laughed loudly and Wendy snickered despite herself. Delia had brought along a bottle of vodka, which she sipped from now and again despite Lise’s objections. When Delia passed the bottle back to Roy, Roy took a long hit and then held it out to Wendy, who shook her head. “I better not,” she said, not wanting to tell him that she never drank anymore. “I’ll drive after Lise.”

“Suit yourself,” Roy said. He drank some more and then passed the bottle back to Delia, who turned up the radio and started singing along with the tunes that filled the car. Roy sang, too, and eventually Wendy joined in. For a while, then, except for Lise’s brittle silence and the fact that Win had somehow fallen asleep against the window with his own radio plugged into his ears, Wendy found the journey almost festive. They might have been driving to the mountains or the ocean, she thought. Driving all night like any other group intent on landing someplace wonderful by morning. No one said a word about what they were really doing, and the music almost muffled her fears.

Christine’s words echoed in Wendy’s head in the gaps between the songs. Your great-uncle’s Spirit is getting ready to transit, she’d said. I can make sure his Spirit finds the Light. But there was no light, Wendy thought, as she tapped out a rhythm on her thigh. There was no way out of this. The best she could hope for was that she found her family before her mother flipped out completely, before her uncle did something stupid, before Grunkie got hurt. All she could do on this trip was hope to restore everyone to the state they’d been in before Grunkie vanished in that van. Only this morning, she’d dreaded and despised that state. Now it seemed almost desirable.

She pushed away Christine and Grunkie, her parents and her uncle. The car was moving, the music was blaring. She was young and Roy was sitting next to her. She thought of the way he’d looked the afternoon he’d opened his door clad only in his shorts. She thought of him and Delia intertwined on his mattress on the floor; she thought of how she belonged in the front seat with Lise — crabby, frustrated Lise — and Delia belonged back here with Roy. Then she thought how nothing, not even her fears, could move her from this seat just now. Her body felt very peculiar, as if her bones had expanded and were stretching her skin into a thin, taut film. Roy’s hip was touching hers, and although she had only Lise to thank for this she relished the gentle contact.