Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“We’d like to go for a hike,” she said. Her voice was high and cracked, with a hysterical edge even she could hear. She hadn’t slept all night. The woman’s unblinking eyes reminded her of Christine, and every time she looked at Roy she thought of Christine’s words: that she took things, stole things, to make up for all she’d lost. Christine had been talking about Henry, but Wendy was sure the reproach had been directed at her.

Everything, at that moment, reminded her of everything else. The maps on the wall reminded her of how badly she’d gotten everyone lost, after Lise had finally relinquished the wheel: she’d chosen the wrong road from.the snarl of highways intersecting west of Albany, and then, when she’d discovered her mistake just north of Troy, she’d chosen wrong again in her attempt to find a route to the Massachusetts Turnpike. While Roy and Lise and Delia slept and Win stared at the back of her head, dropping his lids each time she looked in the mirror and offering no help at all, she had wandered through the Berkshires until she’d stumbled onto the Turnpike by accident. At the exit for the reservoir, when she asked the tollbooth attendant for directions, she’d been so bewildered that she’d written the directions down carefully but somehow still written them down wrong. And so when Roy woke up and insisted on driving while she navigated, what should have been an easy half-hour end to their trip had turned into a two-hour exploration of Holyoke and Ware and a string of towns she had never wanted to see.

The towns had all looked the same and the road never went in the right direction. Roy said nothing about what they’d done and seemed determined to act as if nothing had changed. He had set his jaw and looked straight ahead and driven as if he were working, never once looking directly at her, never once touching her. When she had let her hand drift down to his thigh, he had twitched away as if he’d been burned. And now, in this building that had taken them so long to reach, he seemed to think he should spill their secrets to this stranger.

The woman looked from Roy to Wendy and back again, as if she were reading the tension between them. “Where would you like to hike?” she asked Wendy.

Her voice placed invisible quotation marks around the word hike, and her gaze sharpened as she took in Delia and Lise and Win, who stumbled wearily behind Wendy and Roy. We look like delinquents, Wendy thought, running her tongue around her sour mouth. There was a certain pleasure in being so grubby that her clothes no longer acted as a disguise.

“Along the east shore?” she said. “Sort of toward the north?”

“North? It’s a big place ….”

The woman’s face tightened when Lise plopped down on a chair and said, “This is ridiculous.” The woman took a flimsy, crudely drawn map of the reservoir from the stack before her and tossed it down in front of Wendy.

“Here. Dotted lines are the hiking trails. Solid lines are the roads. Gates are marked with these small numbers — you can leave your car at any of them. No swimming. No fires. No hunting.”

Lise sniffed and said, “Do we look like hunters?” which did not improve the situation. The woman’s growing disapproval of them hung in the air like an odor. The walls were lined with all the information they might need, but the woman didn’t offer any of it and Wendy was too worn out to ask. She realized, standing there, that they’d been crazy to come. Hurtling through the night in pursuit of their parents, hoping to find Grunkie on a bit of land along an enormous shoreline — Lise was right, it was ridiculous, and the way she’d acted with Roy was worse than that. The peculiar smile he’d given her when he’d opened his eyes had seemed so accepting, as if he believed that they’d both been lost in sleep and had committed only an unconscious bit of mischief, easily dismissed. The way he stood so coolly beside her now told her that he’d found a way to blame her for what they’d done.

She thanked the woman, folded the map, and left, with the others trailing behind her. In the parking lot she smoothed the map over the hood of Roy’s car and stared at it. The lines swam in front of her eyes, and she might have given up right then if Roy had not dropped a hand on her shoulder and said, “Calm down. It’s going to be all right.” When she turned to him, she read a distant kindness in his eyes.

“Let’s get focused here,” he said. “Let’s try and remember what we’re doing.”

Win was standing apart from the rest of them, with his eyes fixed on Roy’s hand. “I’d really like to find my mother,” he said quietly. Wendy stepped aside and let Roy’s hand fall from her shoulder. “Sometimes she gets a little … disoriented, or something,” Win said.

“That’s true,” Wendy said, relieved to think of her mother’s behavior, which was always worse than hers. In this way at least, her mother was reliable. “Especially when she’s around Uncle Henry.”

“You’re sure you want to interfere?” Roy asked.

She wasn’t sure, now, that she’d wanted anything more than to escape from Christine’s presence and sit next to Roy in the dark car, but she supposed that she and Win and Delia and Lise did want to interfere. They wanted to interfere with their parents’ strange behavior, which was galloping away with their lives. Their parents were careless with everything, with their own lives, with each other, with them. Lost in the little towns north of Troy, crossing and recrossing a narrow causeway suspended a few feet above a lake, it had come to her that Grunkie was really dying. Her mother and Christine could neither help nor hurt him much; her uncle, by keeping Grunkie out of their clutches, couldn’t save him from what counted. They were wasting what might be Grunkie’s last days, and as she thought of him tugged this way and that by his niece wanting to save his soul and his nephew wanting to save his land, her sense of purpose returned.

She said to Roy, “Sometimes we have to interfere. Sometimes we’re the only ones who know what’s going on.” Her mistake, she saw now, lay in calling her father. If she hadn’t been so lost in her own daydreams, and so jolted by the panic in her mother’s voice, she would have seen that she and Win could have driven their mother here themselves. No Lise, no Delia, no Roy. No mess.

Delia sided with her immediately. “We have to help however we can,” she said, and although her face was pale from all she’d drunk, her silliness had vanished and her words were serious.

“Okay,” Roy said. “So where are we going?”

Wendy drew Win to her, but he pulled his arm away. “I saw you, you know,” he said angrily, as if she hadn’t been aware of his eyes throughout their whole long night. He maneuvered Wendy away from the others and turned his back to them. “I saw you and Roy. And I saw that stuff in your bag, that you ripped off at the plaza. What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” she whispered. “I don’t know.” She could feel herself unraveling, the loose ends of her old lives sticking out in all directions. She smoothed the panic from her voice. “Let’s just do this, okay?”

Win still stared at her suspiciously, as if she were turning into their mother before his eyes.

“I’m all right,” she told him. “Really.”

“Really?” he said, and when she nodded they bent over the map together. The outlines of the reservoir were similar to what she remembered of the maps their father had shown them: an elongated mitten, with a narrow western branch stretching north like a thumb, a short lobe like a wrist in the south, and then a larger, wider, eastern branch. The spot their father had shown them lay, she thought, along the eastern branch and near the top. Either of the two points jutting into the water might be the point near Grunkie’s land.