Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“Marcus,” Brendan said. A hazy memory surfaced — a small, wiry, red-haired boy who had tagged after him, along with Frank junior, during some of his rambles through the woods. Marcus and his family had walked to the Catholic church in Pomeroy each Sunday, and after Mass, Frank junior had often brought Marcus home.

“Your folks had the summer camp,” Brendan said. “Camp Nichewaug, where all the rich kids from Boston came.” Was the camp gone? The tidy white bungalows, the warm wooden docks with the splintery ramps, the canoes lined upside down on the racks?

“That’s right. Of course that’s gone now.” Marcus rocked on his heels. “Do you have a few minutes? Why don’t you come out and sit with me for a while?”

“I can’t.” Brendan realized that Marcus could see only his head and shoulders through the window. “But why don’t you come in?”

Marcus fumbled with the van door, and then his face fell as he saw Brendan’s wheelchair. “Ah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You’ve been in that long?”

He climbed into the van and sat down in the passenger seat. “Long enough,” Brendan said.

“The war? No, of course not. You went into the monastery, I remember. After high school. And then when they tore it down, they sent you all away. I heard some of the brothers went to Tennessee.”

“Not me. I went to China — I was there during the Japanese occupation. That’s when this happened.” Brendan pointed to his legs. “Just arthritis. But it got a little out of hand.”

“China? You monks get around.”

Brendan made a face. “I left the Order thirty years ago.”

“No,” Marcus said. “You didn’t.”

“I did.”

Marcus leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. “Was it women?” he whispered.

Brendan laughed. Marcus and Frank junior, he remembered, had once been caught getting drunk on sacramental wine. “No,” he said. “Not women. It was a lot of things — I was just worn out. It stopped making sense to me.”

“I can see that. Never made sense to me in the first place. All those lists and rules — I was sick of it by the time we were out of school. Remember Father Quinn?”

“Who could forget him?” Brendan said, but then he turned the conversation. When he’d dreamed of this trip, he’d never thought he might see anyone he knew. For years he’d thought of himself as the valley’s last survivor, although there was no reason why this should be so — he was only eighty and plenty of people lived longer than that. There were plenty more, a few years younger than him, who might still remember the valley and yet be only in their seventies. But as glad as he was to see another survivor, he found that he didn’t want to call back his childhood. Or not yet, at any rate, and not here: just thinking of his old home, with the woods stretched all around him and Frank junior still alive and making mischief with Marcus, was enough to make his heart stutter. He remembered that he and Marcus hadn’t really been very close, especially as they’d grown older. But your parents, Marcus had said when he’d heard of Brendan’s decision to enter the Order. Who’s going to help them out? You’re leaving Frankie stuck with everything. Hadn’t Marcus said that, sixty-odd years ago?

“But what have you been up to all these years?” he asked Marcus now. “What happened to you after I left?”

“I moved to Athol when they cleared the valley. Worked there for a while. Then there was the war. Then I came back, got married — Annemarie Scanlon, you probably don’t remember her — and we had three kids. I sold insurance, thirty years. Annemarie died in ‘74.”

Marcus paused and ran his fingers over the dash. He had tufts of white hair in his ears, Brendan saw. They made him look like an old cat. “Two of my kids live in Michigan now. One’s on the West Coast. I live here.” Marcus gestured toward a shabby white house across the square. “I’ve got a nice room there, and a nice part-time job — you know. It’s just a life.”

Just a life, thought Brendan. As if anyone’s were ever that. He longed for details, but when he tried to imagine telling Marcus about his own life, he could see why Marcus had been so brief. It would take hours, days, for them to explain themselves to each other, and the telling would mean reliving everything. And who could stand that? Just surviving was work enough.

He felt tired, suddenly — enormously, overwhelmingly tired — and he wished he’d found Marcus a decade ago, when he’d still had some energy. His hands shaped a few signs in the air, the first signs of the Lord’s Prayer, but he didn’t realize they’d done so until he looked up and saw Marcus watching him curiously. “We used to hear you guys talked to each other with your hands,” Marcus said.

“True enough,” Brendan said, but he tucked his hands under his shirt and willed them to be still. Bongo, who’d been watching them patiently, sighed and yawned and flopped to the floor and closed his eyes. Brendan wished he could lie down beside him.

“Nice dog.” Marcus reached down and scratched Bongo’s ears. “Yours?”

“My nephew’s. He’s the one who’s driving — he went to get some coffee.” Brendan was so tired he thought he might be asleep already, his eyes open but his brain completely disconnected. He struggled to keep the conversation going. “This job you have. What is it?”

But before Marcus could answer, Henry opened the door and stood before them with his hands full of paper sacks. “Hello?” he said. “Who’s this?”

“This—” Brendan said, but it was all so complicated, how could he ever explain? Years ago, his abbot had told him that there were no true coincidences. There were lesser plans and greater plans, plans that might influence only the comets or a pair of paramecia. But every conjunction of events or people had a purpose, however small. Why had Marcus been sitting just there, feeding the pigeons just then?

Marcus shot out his hand and took over. “Marcus O’Brian,” he said to Henry. “I was sitting here feeding the birds and I noticed Brendan watching me, so I came over to make a little conversation. And wouldn’t you know, it’s the damnedest thing. Brendan and I knew each other when we were boys.”

“You’re kidding,” Henry said.

“No,” Marcus said. “It’s true.” His hand still hung in the air, waiting for Henry to grasp it. “Brendan and his brother and I used to play together.”

Henry’s face paled. “You knew my father?”

Marcus looked at Brendan, who nodded. “This is Henry. My nephew.”

“You’re Frankie’s boy?”

Henry grasped Marcus’s hand. “I am.”

“But we’ve met. You wouldn’t remember, you were so little — your father and I were in the service together, and I visited him and your mother a few times after we came home, before … didn’t you have a sister? A little girl, curly brown hair?”

“Wiloma,” Henry said. “You saw Wiloma.”

Brendan leaned his head back and wished he were not so tired. Henry seemed to feel all the excitement at meeting Marcus that he should have felt himself, that he would have felt if his head had not grown so heavy that even his brace could hardly hold it up. The coincidence didn’t seem to bother Henry at all. What kind of mind did he have? Brendan wondered. He had come to St. Benedict’s for a routine visit, agreed to an unexpected trip, accepted the improbable gift of a van without a question. Now he accepted the appearance of this stranger who was no stranger equally easily. And yet it meant something that Marcus was here. It had to mean something.

Brendan let Marcus chatter on, filling Henry in on the details of how his family had known theirs, how he and Frank junior had done this and that, and how he remembered the very night Henry’s mother and father had gotten engaged at the Farewell Ball. Brendan thought how he’d missed all of that. He’d been in the abbey when Marcus and Frank junior had been in high school; he’d been on his way to China during the Farewell Ball and had heard about it only years later, from his parents. He had never known Henry’s mother, and it was strange to think that Marcus knew more of Henry’s family than he did himself.