Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“Where to?” Marcus asked. He rowed with small, hesitant strokes, the blades barely breaking the surface, but the water was so smooth and calm that they moved along quickly. Wiloma, on the shore, had broken into a run; she stopped near the empty wheelchair and called to Brendan and then, when he didn’t answer, turned and began shouting to someone on the ridge. Henry, Brendan supposed; they must have found each other.

“That woman’s calling you,” Marcus said.

“That’s my niece. Henry’s little sister.”

“No.” Marcus squinted through his glasses. “Not Frankie’s little girl — what’s she doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“We better go back.”

“In a while,” Brendan said. “In a few minutes. Not yet.”

He looked past Marcus, at the three islands closest to him. They were lined up in a jagged row, like the islands his patron saint had found on his voyage across the sea. The Island of Sheep, where the sheep were as big as cows and as white as clouds; the Paradise of Birds, where the trees were covered with talking birds instead of leaves; the Crystal Island, as clear as glass, pierced by a hole through which the curragh had slipped. There were birds thick around these islands, but no floating icebergs and no sheep, although Bongo sat gazing over his shoulder and looking as wise as the hound that had led the saint and his men to safety.

He hadn’t expected the reservoir to be so beautiful. His father’s bitter stories had made him imagine it as shallow, weedy, and dark, shadowed by the mist of deception that he’d sensed for himself as a boy. One of the reasons he’d joined the Order was that he’d heard the monks gathered at night and prayed for the preservation of the valley. Politics had failed, he remembered, and so had pleas and complaints; the men from Boston had baffled his parents’ neighbors and confused them so badly that they argued over details when they met. But the monks within the enclosure walls had acted with one mind, which he’d wanted to join. He said to Marcus, “I can’t get my bearings. Those islands there — what were they?”

“You know.” Marcus lifted his oars from the water and pointed. “That one on the left, there, that’s the top of what used to be Blueberry Hill. The one in the center’s the top of Hollaran Hill, and the big one on the right is what’s left of Mt. Pomeroy. Your parents’ place was in the gap between Blueberry Hill and Hollaran Hill — remember? We can row right over it.”

They still weren’t very far from the shore; when Brendan turned he could see Wiloma clearly, and he thought he could even make out Henry in the distance, among the trees. Blueberry Hill, Hollaran Hill. What was Wiloma doing here? He supposed she had heard about the missing van and had grown anxious; she fussed over everything and always had. A fish jumped from the water near the boat and left an arc of glittering drops in the air. Bongo snapped his jaws at them.

Brendan said, “Could you row us over toward the right a little? If we could head just to the left of Mt. Pomeroy …” The monastery had lain between Hollaran Hill and Mt. Pomeroy, in the rich land through which the Paradise River had run.

“You’re the boss,” Marcus said. “What a day — isn’t this weather something?” He rowed a few strokes, facing the shore and the ridge while Brendan faced him and the islands. “Say, I think I see your nephew up there on the ridge. He’s an odd one, isn’t he? He doesn’t seem like his father at all.”

“It was hard for him,” Brendan said quietly. “Being orphaned.” The war story Marcus had told had shaken him badly. In the van, bumping up the rutted dirt road, he’d seen the accident that had cost Henry his parents as he’d never seen it before.

The inside of the old gray Plymouth is dark and quiet. Frank junior and Margaret haven’t spoken since they left the dance; Frankie, sodden with drink, picked a fight with two acquaintances and then stormed out to the car. Margaret wouldn’t have followed him if she’d had any other way to get home. But the hall was eleven miles from their cabin on the ridge and the rain was falling hard.

She sits next to him silently, only saying, “Slow down. Please?” when he twice takes a curve too fast. She is wearing a white dress and thinking about the months to come, wondering how she will pull him out of this dark mood he can’t seem to shake. And Frankie — Frankie is thinking how much he’d like to close his eyes and rest. Just rest: neither plagued by nightmares nor haunted by his dead companions and his memories of what lies beneath the reservoir. He is only thinking, not planning, but his foot is heavy on the accelerator and when he heads into the last curve on Boughten Hill, Margaret shrieks and so startles him that his hands leap from the wheel. Even as the car stumbles over the edge of the road he is trying to find his way back.

But that couldn’t be right, Frankie couldn’t have left the world like that. Marcus couldn’t have meant for him to infer that from the story he told. Marcus, he saw now, was meant to bring him to this place. And while he was glad Henry was up on the ridge, exploring his parents’ land, and even glad that Wiloma had found her way here, he could not, for the moment, concentrate on anything more than the boat’s slow movement toward the place where his abbey had been.

He imagined the buildings still intact beneath the water, although he knew this wasn’t so; his father had told him that everything had been razed. But still he imagined that beneath the water lay the garden surrounded by the stonewalled cloister, the dormitories looking down on the garden, the stone chapel, the flowerbeds, the fields, and the high enclosure walls. His whole life seemed to lie there, in the silent community he’d had for a decade and had never been able to reconstruct. He saw, now, that his decision to leave the Order had really been formed when he’d left this place, and that the grim days in China had only served as his excuse.

His faith in monastic life had broken during the nights when he and his brothers had prayed so fervently for the preservation of their valley that it seemed the whole place might take wing. Even Father Vincent had joined in, despite his warnings about the danger of praying for specifics. This was different, he’d said; although their prayers sounded like petitions, they were really appreciative worship of a beloved place. The sophistry of that argument had been evident to Brendan, but he’d pushed aside his qualms while they chanted the first lines of a dark psalm over and over again.

Save me, O God, he remembered, for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dry: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God. What could resist the power of all that prayer?

Anything, he’d learned. Any group of men with a plan.

He bowed his head and tried to pray again, and that was how the children saw him when they first came out on the shore. The cove that separated them from the point where Wiloma stood with her hand on Brendan’s chair was very narrow; no sooner had Wendy seen the chair and her mother than Win pointed toward the water and said, “Isn’t that Grunkie? In that boat?”

“That’s Bongo!” Delia said. “That dog.”

“But that isn’t Dad rowing,” said Lise.

They were so tired and discouraged that they hadn’t spoken for more than an hour. The distance from the old square over the hill to the water had been deceptive, and they’d lost the trail entirely and had to wade through a bog tufted with club moss and sphagnum. Wendy had lost her bag in the bog; the strap had snagged on a jagged stump, throwing her to her knees. When she’d turned to disentangle her shoulder, Lise, who’d been following right on her heels, had stumbled and stepped on Wendy’s arm and then, in a motion so clumsy Wendy still couldn’t believe it, had leaned against the stump for balance and pushed the bag off and into a pool of water that seemed to have no bottom. They’d lost half an hour fishing about in the pool with sticks, but the bag was gone and so were Wendy’s wallet and the blank-eyed dolls.