Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

But no one had listened to her. Delia had been drinking vodka and telling jokes and humming songs, and Roy had been listening to Delia, and Win had been asleep and Wendy had been so absorbed in the pleasure of sitting next to Roy that they had all ignored Lise, acknowledging her comments only enough to tell her she worried too much. Which she did, Wendy saw, but no more than she did herself, and anyway they both had reason to worry. She couldn’t remember how and when she and Win and Delia had begun to band against Lise, but she knew they’d started long ago, even before their parents had shattered their lives. She wondered now if they’d shunned Lise because she was nasty, or if Lise had grown nasty because they’d shut her out.

“We think they might be on that ridge over there,” she said to Lise, trying to speak gently and kindly. They had everything in common, she thought. Neither of them had Roy. “Or maybe just beyond it. They can’t be far.”

“Fine,” Lise snapped. “Let’s go. I swear, if I get my hands on my father …” She walked off, all by herself, through the waving grass.

BRENDAN SAID, SEVERAL TIMES, THAT HE WANTED TO SEE THE dam first, but Henry, with the enthusiastic backing of Marcus, overrode him. The dam would keep, Henry said. Although of course he wanted to see it, too, and they would see it, later — but the morning was so beautiful, perfect for walking, and he was so full of energy, and Marcus had said that if they went by the Visitors’ Center they might be stuck there for a while. “And anyway,” Henry said, “I want to see the place where I was born.”

The words cloaked his real longing in a reasonable disguise, and Brendan was unable, as Henry had known he would be, to resist him. Henry hardly felt guilty about this at all. He’d done everything else that his uncle had wanted this whole long trip, and he could see no reason not to give in to the fierce excitement that gripped him.

“We’ll be there in half an hour,” Marcus promised. As they set off, pulling away from the shady square and heading east and north around the base of the reservoir, Henry was filled with a sense of well-being. He’d slept — not a lot, but enough — and he’d eaten and had his coffee; the sun cast a buttery light on the land. When he gazed in the rearview mirror he saw, not the battered face he’d been wearing for the past six months, but the face he’d had before his crash. The lines around his eyes only pointed up their sparkle. His hair wasn’t gray but only attractively streaked; his complexion was rosy, not florid. He saw a man in the prime of life — young, still quite young, full of vigor and optimism. He’d gotten his uncle here safely and had had the great good fortune to meet a man who’d known his father. And although breakfast had dented his slim bankroll he still had twenty-two dollars left, which was almost enough to get them back home. He felt sure he could persuade Marcus to lend them a little more.

Brendan was silent in the back of the van and Bongo was asleep, but Marcus, sitting next to Henry, kept up a nonstop flow of chatter and directions.

“Take a left here. Then a right, at that light. This used to be farmland here, where those brown buildings are — they make computers in there. All these businessmen have moved here from the city the past couple of years, and you wouldn’t believe the prices they’re paying for houses.”

Henry’s heart leapt at that. An influx of wealthy executives, a rising real estate market — if his uncle’s land had any view at all and even reasonable access, anything he did there would mint money. The land would come to him clean and unencumbered, the way the farm had in Coreopsis. But this time he’d know what to do with it.

“Turn left here,” Marcus said, and then he started talking about the years before the dam was built and how, even before the acts authorizing construction had passed through the legislature, men from Boston had invaded the area.

“They were the slick ones, they were, and you can’t tell me they didn’t plan every step of it. We didn’t have phones or electric then, and most of the roads weren’t paved, and most of the farmers weren’t doing so well and neither were the mills. Those men were like vultures — they smelled the weakness. They came sniffing around, sniffing out the greedy men and the failures and the widows, and they spread rumors that the dam was coming and that land values were going to crash.”

Marcus’s voice rose a little and he plucked at the loose skin on his neck. “‘Sell now,’ they said, and they offered a premium to the first ones who did. Pots of money, more than some could resist. Then they went to the neighbors and said, ‘See, so-and-so sold already for a good price. We can’t offer quite as much now, but it’s still a lot, more than you’ll get if you wait.’ They offered each round of sellers less, and pretty soon people panicked — and the diehards, the ones who’d held out until the rumors became a sure thing, they threatened them with eminent domain.”

He pursed his lips and made a disgusted noise. “What can you do with men like that? ‘We can take it anyway,’ they said. ‘And we will.’ And they did. People like my parents, and your grandparents — they held out so long they got almost nothing.”

Henry listened with half an ear, but Marcus’s story seemed impossibly distant, like a fairy tale set in a time Henry couldn’t imagine. The fact was — his daughters and Kitty had often accused him of this, and he’d had to admit they were right — the fact was that, despite his ability to imagine alternate lives for himself in places he’d never been, he couldn’t imagine a scene without himself in it.

He tried to picture the valley during the 1920s, but he could see only flappers and gangsters, images from movies, nothing that squared with Marcus’s tales or with what his parents and grandparents had told him. And he couldn’t help thinking that those men from Boston had only been doing their jobs. He’d used the same tactics himself, on a smaller scale — in his glory days, when his developments had sold out immediately and the people who moved in were young and had small children and were thrilled with their homes, he had sometimes acted secretly to piece together his parcels of land.

He had never looked at land that was already advertised for sale. Instead, his talent had been to cruise the countryside in a mood as relaxed as a trance, waiting for the flash that would tell him here, here, here. A certain combination of topography and location would flash in the sun like a mirror, and he’d look at the land and see himself reflected in it. Then he’d start the slow, secret process of tracking down the various owners, and after that the even more secret process of finding out what those owners might want or need. And of course he’d approached those people one by one, cutting them out of the herd, and of course he’d offered large sums to the early sellers and then smaller sums to the later ones. How else could he have assembled his tracts at a reasonable price? Those men from Boston had only been canny, and he blamed his grandparents’ bitterness on their inability to see what was coming and get out early.

He interrupted Marcus midsentence to say, “But you all knew it was coming — why didn’t you just get the best price you could and go somewhere else?”

“Because this was our home,” Brendan said acidly from behind Henry’s head. “Our families had been here for generations. Our lives weren’t for sale.”

“That’s right,” Marcus said, and he gave Henry an odd look. “What do you do for a living, anyway?”

Henry stiffened, waiting for his uncle to say something scathing about his real estate career. Marcus seemed old-fashioned, one of those stiff types who disapproved of development on principle, and Henry was anxious not to alienate him. When Brendan said nothing, Henry said, “I’m working in a corrugated-box factory these days, running a die-cutter.”