Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

Newspaper reporters from other parts of the state swarm here now, suddenly perceiving what they choose to call “the tragedy of the valley residents.” They ask us for interviews. They photograph our abandoned buildings. Where were they, one wonders, when this tragedy might still have been prevented? Where were they during the hearings that decided our fate? I would urge you to send these vultures away with the contempt they deserve.

Frank B. Auberon, Sr.

Pomeroy

“THE NIECE,” THE OLD MEN SAY, AS THEY DO EACH WEEK WHEN Wiloma swishes through the pneumatic doors. She brushes the snow from her jacket and boots and sets down her carton of books. In the common room the windows are dressed with sprays of spruce and holly and a large artificial tree bristles in a corner. “The niece is here,” the old men say, and they sit straighter in their chairs.

They never call Wiloma by her name; she is “the niece” as Henry is “the nephew” and Wendy and Delia and Lise and Win are “the children.” A legend as florid as any saint’s life has grown up in the six months since Brendan’s journey, and in it Wiloma and her family have been reduced to nameless characters. Roy doesn’t exist in the legend; Waldo surfaces only rarely. Brendan, as Wiloma once foresaw, has become a hero to his old companions.

Spencer, Charlie, Kevin, and Ben; Wallace with his clouded eyes; even Parker with the electronic box in his throat where his larynx used to be — they’re glad for the food and books she brings, glad for all her help, but what they really want is to talk to her about Brendan. They want to tell her how they were present the day he broke out, and how they knew he was planning something outrageous.

“Brendan was cunning,” they whisper in their shattered voices. “He bided his time.”

“He stole the keys,” they say, holding up their own twisted hands in imitation of his. “He tricked Fred Johannson and stole the keys and convinced his nephew to drive the van, and then he took off on this journey ….”

They want not to hear what happened but to repeat their versions of what they want to have happened. In some of the versions, the encounter with the police cruiser at the 7-Eleven has turned into something just short of a shoot-out, with Brendan defying the officer from the van as the nephew roars out of the parking lot. In others, the Home’s quiet search has turned into a statewide manhunt. There are versions in which Brendan meets a beautiful waitress who takes him home for the night, and others in which he and his nephew sleep in the fields like tramps.

“He went back to his family’s land,” say the men. “He made his way back home.”

The administrator has told them that Brendan died in his sleep. Peacefully, painlessly, they’ve been told. At his childhood home. Buried near his family. And so the men, who don’t know that his body has never been found, nor that his childhood home is long gone, accept the official version of Brendan’s end and embroider the rest of the journey instead. They crowd more and more details into each telling, although no one could have accomplished so much in so little time. They tell stories of meals in lovely restaurants and dancing girls in bars, offer scenes in a boat and in the mountains and in several different hotels. There are evil bikers whom Brendan confronts, a reunion with a long-lost brother, a contest involving three questions and a knife. And yet in all these tales, no matter how fantastic, there is always this kernel of fact: the trip is always Brendan’s idea, Brendan always the instigator. Bitter and hard to swallow, but true. Wiloma has had to let go of the idea that Henry kidnapped him.

Waldo brought her that news first, before she was in any shape to hear it. “It’s not like you think,” he said on the shore of the reservoir. He and Henry had emerged from the trees together, after it was too late for them to help. She had raised her hand to strike Henry’s face and Waldo had caught her arm.

“Brendan talked him into it,” Waldo said then. “He took the keys to the van and told Henry they were allowed to borrow it. Henry just did what Brendan asked. He just drove.”

“I just drove,” Henry repeated.

He stared at the water, stupid and stunned; he looked at her and said, “He fell in?” When she nodded, he sprinted for the van. Running away again, she thought, and so she was amazed when he returned a few minutes later with a tangle of colored silk ties. Days later, he told her he’d rescued them from Kitty’s closet at the start of his trip; the girls had given them to him, he said, and he didn’t want Kitty to throw them out.

But that day on the shore they seemed to have come from nowhere. Henry knotted the ties in a useless rope, not looking at her or his daughters, not looking at the water, watching his hands and knotting, knotting, until Win finally rowed Marcus back to land. Afterward, after that bleak, lost sequence of hours punctuated by policemen and divers and wailing sirens, Waldo told her that Henry sat the whole long afternoon with his hands tangled in the ties.

She can’t remember this. She remembers Wendy, dripping wet, emerging from the water. She remembers Waldo leaving and then coming back with strangers in uniforms, Win sitting so close that she could smell his hair, Lise and Delia clinging to Roy. She can’t believe Henry was left by himself except for the few minutes Waldo could spare him. But Waldo says this is what happened. He says Henry only drove, only did as Brendan asked. He says the only words Henry said that afternoon were, “I can’t swim. I never learned how.” Should she believe what Waldo says? The tales the old men tell her are based, in part, on the smooth story Waldo told the administrator: lots of omissions, no lies. Waldo’s version of Henry’s words probably reflects the same unconscious adjustments.

The men have no tales for her today; many of their rooms are empty. But upstairs, on Brendan’s old floor, she finds Parker valiant in red plaid, rolling his wheelchair back and forth as he impatiently waits for her.

“I want to show you something,” he says, tapping the face of his watch. The box through which he speaks reduces his voice to a raspy squawk. “But we have to go now. Can you take me down to the library for a little while?”

Wiloma has things to do at home and knows she ought to get going, but she has made a rule for herself since she saw Brendan slip below the water: on her weekly visits here, she tries to do whatever the old men ask. She doesn’t give them advice; she doesn’t try to change their lives. If they want liquor or cigarettes or chocolates wrapped in foil, she brings them and never says a word about what’s healthy or not. Parker’s color is bad today; he’d be better off in bed. When he says, “Can we go?” she nods and says, “Yes.”

Down the corridors, down the elevator, out into the green basement hall — she can just make out Roxanne through the window in the door to the whirlpool room, massaging the legs of a man whose face is hidden. Strange sounds emerge through the open library door down the hall. “Wa-ka -wa- kee,” Wiloma hears, or something like that. A woman’s voice, clear and passionate. “Wy-a- wee -no, ko- tay -nu.”

“Latin?” she asks Parker. She steers his wheelchair around an empty florist’s carton sprouting frills of green tissue. “Is that Latin? Or is it Greek?”

“Neither,” he rasps. “That’s the prayer group in there — that woman’s received the gift of the spirit. But listen to the rest.”

As the woman’s voice rises and then fades, another voice comes from a hidden comer. A man’s voice, cracked and worn, says, “Let us offer up a healing prayer for the soul of our brother Brendan, who departed this earth six months ago today.”