Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

“That’s Ben,” Parker says. “He promised us all he’d do this.”

“You knew about this? Don’t you want to go in?”

“I’d rather listen from out here. Those prayer people make me nervous.”

Ben’s voice cracks but then steadies again. “O Lord,” he says, “we ask you to be gentle with the soul of our beloved brother, who underwent many trials on his journey to you. We ask you to forgive him his small trespasses, and to welcome him into the peace of your presence. Although we could not be present at the burial of his body, we join together today in praying for the repose of his soul.”

There is a rustle inside, and then a murmur. When Wiloma cranes her head around the doorframe, she sees that all Brendan’s friends have somehow produced white sprays of freesia from their pajamas and robes. The long stems sprout paired buds near their bases and open flowers at their tips. Kevin, leaning against his walker, seems to have caught his stems in the zipper of his warm-up jacket. The blossoms jut out from his stomach as if they have grown there. Wallace, propped up next to Kevin, leans over and tugs the flowers free.

“Praise the Lord,” Ben sings out, and the men with the flowers repeat this after him. The outsiders, the prayer-group members who have come to lead the service, shuffle about uneasily. It is clear that the old men have caught them by surprise. “Praise his works, his ways, his days,” Ben says. A minute of silence follows, and then the men, perhaps responding to a signal from Ben that Wiloma can’t see, toss their flowers all at once toward the center of the room. The arched stems hang in the air for a minute and then fall onto the table awaiting them. When they land, Wiloma releases the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

The flowers remind her of the story Christine told her when she came back from the reservoir. When she limped home, grieving and lost, Christine said she’d performed a Healing Ceremony that morning in Brendan’s absence. She’d recited the passage from the Manual, she said, and burned the mistletoe in a porcelain bowl. As she was mixing the ashes with birch extract and powdered minerals, she saw a flash signaling Brendan’s successful passage into the Light.

“And there was a smell,” she told Wiloma. “A little like andromeda — you know those waxy white flowers on the shrub out back?”

The andromeda near the kitchen window was in bloom on the day that Brendan died, and Wiloma suspects that Christine only smelled the fragrance through the screens. This is the woman, after all, who lied about the children: Wiloma hasn’t forgiven her for that, and they haven’t seen each other since that night. But still, Wiloma can’t account for the flash Christine saw, any more than she can now account for the soft fragrance filling the library. Freesias are deeply scented, she knows; perhaps the fragrance is only natural. But it is deeper and stronger than she would expect from a handful of blossoms, and it carries to her the conviction that Brendan’s Spirit is finally safe.

That night, when Wiloma goes home, she tries to explain to her son what she saw: “The men at St. Benedict’s had a sort of memorial service for Grunkie today. They ordered a box of flowers from somewhere and each of them held a few stems. When they offered them up at the end of their prayer, it was like …” She looks at Win’s face, which is closed and suspicious, and she reels her words back. “It was nice,” she says lamely.

Win might as well be in another country; since Wendy’s disappearance he has spent most of his time at school and the rest frantically assembling information he has gathered from colleges in California. If he could go farther, Wiloma knows, he would; if he knew how, he’d keep running across the water. If he could figure out a way to enter college early, he’d do that, too. Meanwhile he waits for his freedom so palpably, and with such fear that he’ll never get it, that Wiloma feels forced to behave in front of him.

She knows that, despite his longings, he won’t leave until he thinks she’s all right. Much of her energy, these days, goes into convincing him that she is. She does much less with the Church. She never brings Church people home. She makes real dinners for him and watches TV with him at night, instead of reading pamphlets in her room. But still he is thin and tense and very unhappy, and although he hardly ever mentions Wendy, she knows that he misses his sister and resents her for leaving him here alone. When Wiloma looks at him, she is haunted by her last days in Coreopsis, alone with Da after Henry had fled. She wants more than anything that Win should not feel trapped in the same way. Christmas is still several days away, but she decides to give him his best gift early.

“I got a job,” she tells him. “A real one. I’m starting right after New Year’s Day.”

“You did? Not with the Church?”

“At St. Benedict’s,” she says. The relief spreading over his face is so visible that it stings. “I’ve been spending so much time there I thought I might as well make it official. They hired me as an aide.”

Win’s face falls a bit. “The money. They can’t be paying you very much …”

“It’s enough. Your father’s going to pick up your tuition when you’re ready, and he’s willing to help out with the mortgage here — it’s enough, it’s more than I’ve had. I’ll be fine.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

The knowledge that she finally has a job brightens Win’s mood considerably. He starts to tell her about Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA, flashing photos from college brochures and telling her about the soccer scholarships he may get if he plays well next season. She listens as attentively as if his plans were not almost wholly the result of his need to run away from her.

The house seems very silent when she finally lies down in bed. She hears the babble of the prayer group and the gentle whisper of the flowers soaring through the air; she sees Brendan, as she does each night, slipping through the water as Henry tries to save him with a web of good intentions. She tries to picture Wendy slipping out the door, but all she can see is her slim back, turned away from everyone on the day of Delia’s wedding. A slim back in a dull green dress; she left the dress behind along with all her other clothes.

“Mom,” said the note Wendy left on the refrigerator. “I’ve gone on a trip. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll be fine.”

During all of July and the first weeks of August, Wendy hardly ever left the house. She had lost her museum job — some business about a few missing dolls, some irregularity Wiloma never got straight — and she paced around like a restless cat. Waiting, Wiloma had thought. For college to start, for the summer to end. Grieving over Brendan, perhaps; maybe worried about her. But at the wedding the look on Wendy’s face had warned her that something else was also going on.

“I’m fine,” Wendy writes, on postcards that do no more than tell Wiloma what part of the country her daughter has just passed through. The postcards come from Montana and Oregon and Wyoming and Idaho; Wendy writes that she has been waitressing and cleaning salmon and baling hay. Wiloma worries about her all the time, and yet part of her also feels a deep satisfaction at Wendy’s escape.

When Wiloma finally falls asleep, she dreams of the day she graduated from high school in Coreopsis. She dreams that she took her diploma in one hand, her suitcase in the other, and walked boldly out of the building and into the world.

IF WENDY WERE SLEEPING SHE MIGHT DREAM OF HER MOTHER, but she’s still wide-awake. For months now she’s been hitchhiking from place to place, keeping the Rocky Mountains between herself and her old life. Keeping odd hours, shedding old ways. Kalispell, Dillon, Coeur d’Alene; she’s drawn to small cities and towns contracted to their cores, fading and failing places where the only inhabitants are people who’ve always lived there and haven’t yet run away.