Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

In the water, which was warm and pleasant, his hands shaped the words for his abbot and then for his brother and Jackson and Marcus and the little boy in Henry’s half-built house. Then they fluttered and snapped as the water made its way inside him. Horrible, to lose the air; horrible to be sinking from the light the way the families on the Saipan cliffs had sunk into the rocks and waves. The darkness was overwhelming, but against it he saw plums — fleshy, succulent, sweet — arcing over a wall and into his hands. His limbs felt weightless and liquid, all their pains dissolved. Finally, he thought. Finally, I have come home.

Henry, so oblivious that he hadn’t seen the boat leave the shore nor heard his daughters and his niece and nephew calling to Wiloma and Brendan, suddenly became aware of the shouting below him and saw that his uncle’s wheelchair was empty. He looked away from Waldo, with whom he had been arguing, and he said, “What’s going on down there?”

Waldo took his hand off Henry’s arm. “Those are our kids. On that point across from Wiloma. How the hell did they get there?”

Henry looked at the four children, all of them, along with a stranger, facing the water and shouting something he couldn’t understand. He saw Win step out of his clothes and hurl himself into the water, swimming toward a small boat in which sat a man — Marcus? — and a dog that looked like Bongo. The boat was rocking from side to side, although the water was glassy. Wiloma, he saw, was standing with her arm on Brendan’s wheelchair. Her mouth was open in a circle.

“Where’s my uncle?” he asked Waldo. Waldo had accused him of kidnapping Brendan, and the idea had made him so furious — kidnapping, when he’d gone so far out of his way to help his uncle, when he’d done everything his uncle had asked — that he’d accused Waldo of ruining Wiloma’s life. And then Waldo had brought up Coreopsis, taunting him again with his failure, and Henry had retaliated by telling him what he planned for this land, and the two of them, once again, had almost come to blows. But now, in the light of Brendan’s disappearance, they stood quietly and tried to figure out what had happened.

“Maybe he’s in the shed,” Waldo said. “This sun — maybe he wanted to get some shade.”

“Without his chair?”

“We better go down.”

“There’s a path here. A shortcut.” Without thinking, Henry found his way to a trail he’d known as a child, which led down the face of the ridge and cut directly toward the shore. As they descended they vanished from sight among the trees, and when Wiloma turned around to cry for help, they were gone.

Bongo stood with his front paws on the side of the boat, barking loudly at the water that had swallowed Brendan. Wiloma closed her eyes and then opened them, thinking Brendan might somehow miraculously reappear if she willed it strongly enough. When he didn’t, when she saw only the barking dog and the rocking boat and Marcus stabbing his oars into the water as if he could fish Brendan out, she bent her head over the wheelchair and threw up. She couldn’t swim and neither could Henry; Da had never let them near the water and had refused even to let them wade in their shallow pond. Her own children swam like fish, she had made them take lessons very young, but she had never been able to learn herself and all she could do now was wipe her mouth and then listen as a strange wail, which seemed to come from outside her, filled the air.

Her son splashed through the water, as naked as a fish, but she watched him without either hope or fear. There was no chance that he’d get to Brendan in time, she thought, and no chance that he’d drown trying — the sun was warm, the water was calm, and Win was very strong. He’d swim out and back and nothing would change; he’d continue drifting away from her, growing more and more distant each year until he was gone entirely. He was gone and Brendan was gone and Wendy was leaving; Henry and Waldo had vanished. She had nothing and had brought this on herself.

She had allowed herself to believe that her uncle was dying and that Henry had kidnapped him; she had let her panic overwhelm her and push her into a corner where this was the only possible outcome. She recalled the words of her Manual: We see what we believe as surely as we believe what we see. All the thoughts we have ever had exist even when we do not think of them, just as rain exists on a cloudless day.

She made herself think of Brendan’s Spirit floating up from the reservoir and merging into the Light. He was transiting without her or Christine or the Healing Ceremony, but he was only lost if she believed he was. She saw her son swimming toward the boat, as if he still believed he might help. She watched him hang on the boat, catching his breath, and then dive once, twice, three times, returning empty-handed. The old man in the boat reached down and helped her son from the water, nearly tipping the boat over in the process. She saw Win rest his head on the old man’s knees, as if he were crying.

She could not spare a glance for the children on the opposite shore, who stood as if they’d taken root. Wendy meant to swim out with Win, but the looping, wordless wail that had poured from her mother’s throat paralyzed her. Even Delia’s voice, when she finally heard it, seemed to come from far away. “I shouldn’t have called him,” Wendy thought she heard Delia say to Lise. Delia’s face seemed to have shattered into unrelated parts, which Wendy could focus on only separately. A swollen eye against glinting water, a nose against a background of trees, a mouth among the rocks. A pair of sandpipers hopped behind a pair of knees, and in the shallows Wendy saw a set of shimmering shapes that resolved into a school of minnows. The minnows were lined up with Lise’s eyes, which were fixed upon the water.

“I called him, too,” Wendy heard Lise say woodenly, and then Delia wailed, “Bongo!” as if Bongo were something more than a dog, as if they could blame a dog. Delia fell to the ground in a tangle of hair and tears and arms and legs and cried so hard that Lise sat down and twined Delia in her bony arms until no one could see where Lise ended and Delia began.

Roy stood near Wendy with his hands over his eyes; he said nothing when Wendy stepped out of her shoes and began walking toward her mother. The water looked like a broken mirror, the edges facing the sun lit up and the trailing surfaces shadowed. It rose to her ankles, then to her knees, and then her thighs. Perhaps Roy never noticed that she’d moved. The water rose to her waist and then to her chest and she leaned into it, ready to lift her feet from the bottom and swim. But Win had been right, after all — the water in the narrow cove never rose over her head, and at its deepest point she was able, by stretching her neck and her legs, to keep her toes on the bottom and the water below her chin as she parted the glittering fragments with her hands.

FROM THE “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” OF THE PARADISE VALLEY Daily Transcript:

March 29, 1938

Dear Sirs:

Yesterday, when our towns formally ceased to exist and the Commission took over our valley by eminent domain, marked the end of our twenty-year struggle to preserve our homes. We have all received notices asking us to vacate our properties. Our train has ceased to run; our churches have ceased to hold services; our fields lie fallow and those buildings already abandoned have been razed before our eyes. Meanwhile the embankment rises higher each day, and the politicians in Boston gleefully anticipate the completion of the dam and the filling of the reservoir.

And so it appears that, after all, we must go. A few more town meetings, the closing of our schools and post offices and clubs, and then those of us remaining must leave. Who can calculate the damage done to us? Ten years from now, when the people of Boston turn on their taps, who among them will sense the lives that were destroyed to provide them with water? Who among them will even know that such a place as the Stillwater Reservoir exists? They will drink thoughtlessly, perhaps imagining that their water comes from a source closer to home, and if they should look at a map, they will not connect the great blot in the center of the state with the liquid filling their glasses. In a decade or so the blot will seem to have been there always, and no one will remember that beneath it once lay a community.