Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“East Pomeroy,” Win said. “Isn’t that what Dad said the town was called?”

“I think,” Wendy said. “But those old names aren’t on here.”

“We’ll just have to wing it,” Win said. “We’ll hike in, take a look around. If they’re not at the first gate we try, we’ll try another.”

“I could go back inside and ask that woman,” Roy said. “She might know what we’re looking for.”

She might, thought Wendy. She might know exactly where East Pomeroy was, or used to be; she might even know the place where their father had once lived. But Wendy couldn’t bear to face her again. “No,” she said. “We can find it.”

And so they drove north to the gate Win picked, and they found it without any trouble and parked the car and started walking. But they hadn’t counted on the unmarked trails or the deer paths that crossed them or the exuberant undergrowth, and they hadn’t expected the hills and streams and ridges that weren’t on their useless map, and they hadn’t realized just how exhausted they really were. Within minutes, they were seriously lost.

Wendy’s shoulder ached from her bag, although she’d crammed the loot from the Thruway plaza beneath the seat. Win strode next to her, trying to look as if he knew where they were headed. She was sure they had strayed from the main path some time ago, and that the tiny overgrown trail they were following had been made by deer or dogs. Behind them, Delia was drooping and dragging her feet and sticking close to Roy. Lise trailed all of them and complained about her shoes, which were pinching.

“We ought to be heading to our left,” Win said. “The water has to be to the left of us.”

“I know,” Wendy said. But every time the path looped to the left it bent right again a few yards later. They seemed to be traveling along the outlines of a knot, and she was sure they’d crossed their own tracks several times. She was hot and tired and thirsty and had nothing useful in her bag. A huge bird, a hawk or a heron, rose from a tree with a whir that made Delia shriek.

“See?” Win said. “See how he’s heading left? He’s heading for the water.”

“So?” Wendy said. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Win gave her a disgusted look. “We should have gotten a better map. We should have asked that woman for some help.”

Wendy could see no point in telling him how that woman had frightened her. “You want to go back?”

“Too late now. But how about we break our own trail for a while? If we cut through here, I know we’ll hit the water.” Win plunged into the tangle of dogwood and witch hazel to their left.

Roy drew up to Wendy. “Where’s he going?” he asked. The hairs on his arms lay in smooth, soft lines.

“He’s sure the reservoir’s over there,” Wendy said, forcing herself to meet Roy’s eyes. She felt herself begin to blush.

“You think?” Roy said, but then Lise caught up with them and said, “I’m not going in there,” and Wendy snapped, “Fine. Stay here,” and stomped after her brother, pushing aside the branches and vines and no longer caring who was behind her. None of this would have happened, she thought, if Lise hadn’t been so obnoxious in the car. And if Delia hadn’t been so afraid of Lise, and if she’d had the sense to flaunt Roy instead of trying to hide him — the ground was dry, and the path Win was making was not so difficult after all. Branches whipped at her knees and thighs, but her shoulders and head were clear. Behind her she could hear Roy urging Delia on, and all she could think was that they were truly lost, the kind of lost where they would not be able to retrace their steps and where their only hope was to stumble forward into what they longed to find.

Win marched ahead of her, sticking grimly to his chosen direction. Christine’s comment last night had stung him, Wendy knew, and so had her own behavior; he was so afraid of failing to act, or of acting as strangely as the women around him, that he was unwilling to admit to the confusion and fear she knew he felt.

They came out on a trail as smooth and wide as a sidewalk. The trail led to a wider dirt road; the road led to a clearing and split around a large wedge of grass. Craters lined the sides of the fork, and Win stopped and said, “Cellar holes. Look.”

The holes were edged with bricks and draped with ivy and vinca and raspberry canes. Lise came up behind them and said, “We’re here? About time.” Then she plopped down on the grass and took off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Roy sat down as well, and before Wendy could move to join him, Delia threw herself down and rested her head in his lap.

“We’re still friends,” Delia said in response to Lise’s frown. From the look on Lise’s face, and from Delia’s disregard of it, Wendy knew the charade she’d acted out with Roy was over. Delia must have realized that Lise couldn’t do anything more to her than tell their parents, and that their parents were too distracted to care. Or perhaps she’d sensed the troubled current flowing between Wendy and Roy. Delia smiled at Roy and teased him quietly. But there was no mistaking the confident way she touched his arm.

Mine, that touch said, and Wendy convinced herself that Delia deserved him. Roy gazed over Delia’s head at Wendy and stroked Delia’s hair quite deliberately. Wendy felt that he did this not to be mean but to let her know where they stood. Which was nowhere, she thought, with a kind of calm despair; they were more than friends, less than lovers, connected through Delia and almost family. They were drawn to each other and weren’t going to do anything about it. She couldn’t imagine living with the wild surge of feeling that had filled her in the car. Then she couldn’t imagine living without it. Grunkie, she thought, had cut that part of his life out like a wart. She had no idea what an abbey looked like, but she imagined a group of vaguely churchlike buildings surrounded by a wall. In the wall was a gate that closed at night, shutting everything murky and dubious outside.

She looked away from Roy and Delia to find Win peering at a small brass plaque set in the grass. “This was the Pomeroy Common,” he called. “Maybe this is the place.”

Their father, Wendy remembered, had said the cabin stood in East Pomeroy, and she wondered if he’d made some sort of mistake. But this land was low, and she’d had the impression that the land they were searching for lay along a ridge. And also there was no one here. But a ridge rose south of them, low and rolling, past the tall grass beyond the cellar holes, and the sky behind it had the glow and spaciousness of sky over water. Wendy pointed this out to Win.

“They could be up there,” she said. “The reservoir’s probably just beyond that ridge, and maybe there’s some other way in that we missed completely, and that Mom and Grunkie and Dad and Uncle Henry took.”

Win studied the map. “There’s a gate below us they might have taken,” he said.

What was wrong, Wendy realized, was that the land they were searching for shouldn’t have been inside any of the gates. The gates marked the boundary of the reservoir’s watershed, and it didn’t seem likely that her grandparents could have had a cabin inside that line. From the corner of her eye she saw Delia drape an arm around Roy’s neck. Lise stood up suddenly and strode over to Wendy and Win and flicked the map with her thumb. Her face was pinched and drawn.

“So where are they?” Lise said. “All this way, and they’re not even here … are we just going to sit around all day?”

Lise was jealous, Wendy realized. She’d been jealous of her and Roy when she’d thought they were together, and now she was more jealous of Delia and Roy and upset at what she must have sensed of the conspiracy to fool her, and she was so lonely her only comfort was her sharp tongue. In the car last night, she’d complained about her mother — how, now that Kitty was losing the house and moving into Lise’s apartment complex, she was all over Lise all the time and leaned on her for company and comfort. It wasn’t fair, Lise had said. Her mother was counting on her too much because she couldn’t count on Henry at all, and it wasn’t fair.