Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

Once, visiting him with her mother, she’d asked him about those rules: “Are they like punishments? Or like the warnings on the playground list at school?” She’d been eight or ten then, still in love with his smiles and the warm approval in which he bathed her. At Christmas, when she and Win and her cousins poured down the pale halls to his room, he’d given them crisp white envelopes filled with pressed flowers and leaves and then promised prizes to those who named the plants correctly. His rules, he told her, were neither warnings nor punishments. They were suggestions that shaped a joyous life the way an empty bucket shaped sand. They were nothing in themselves, he said. They became what you filled them with.

So far she hasn’t managed to fill her own rules with anything, and if it weren’t for him she would throw her list away. What she remembers of Grunkie is the way he turned to her and Lise and Delia when they called his name, the way he smiled and raised his arms before he fell. She is sure he smiled, and sure his smile meant something. And somewhere in the back of her mind, she is aware that he drowned six months ago today.

Stephen stands behind her, easing her arms into the sleeves of her coat and then folding himself around her like another garment. She wonders how her mother and Delia could stand to give up all this wildness. She wonders how Grunkie could live so long without having this even once.

Stephen turns her around until she faces him. “All set?” he asks.

“All set,” she says.

Soon she’ll have to leave his cabin and begin her travels again, but for now she likes the dent in his chin and the way he holds her. When he opens the door, she sees snow piled up on the parked cars, as white and solid as if it had never been water.

IT IS ALSO SNOWING IN MASSACHUSETTS, WHERE HENRY SITS IN a cabin even smaller than Stephen’s. One room, four windows, a simple porch, and a steeply pitched roof. Marcus, who helped Henry build this place, has told Henry it sits a hundred yards from the site of his parents’ old cabin. The windows frame segments of water and sky similar to those Henry saw as a child.

Across the cluttered table from Henry, Marcus peers at some yellow papers. He has pushed aside the cards and the cribbage board, as he often does when he visits; he comes for a drink and a friendly game, but he ends up telling stories. A pair of bricks may set him off, or an iron hinge, an ancient scythe blade, one of Henry’s family mementos. He has a tale to go with the picture of Henry’s parents at the Farewell Ball, which is tacked to the south wall. He has anecdotes related to Da’s newspaper clippings, which hang from a corkboard on the north wall, and more to go with Da’s “Letters to the Editor,” which frame the window facing east. Lately he’s been telling stories about the papers he now holds in his hands.

The papers come from the briefcase Henry received from Da when he first left Coreopsis; the same briefcase he took from Kitty’s closet at the start of his journey with Brendan. As soon as the cabin was finished, he hung the pictures and the clippings on the walls. Then he leaned the briefcase against the table, where it sat until the night Marcus idly picked it up and ran his fingers over the leather.

“Used to be everything was made like this,” Marcus said. “You don’t see tanning like this anymore.” Marcus slid his fingers inside and commented on the firmness of the stitching. Then he asked Henry what he’d left in the small interior pocket.

“Nothing,” Henry said. The briefcase had never been more to him than the shell surrounding the relics Da had left him, and he’d emptied it carelessly. But Marcus said, “There’s something here,” and then fished four sheets of paper out. A pain shot through Henry’s chest, as if he’d swallowed a seed.

“Your grandfather’s handwriting,” Marcus said. “I think. Do you know what these are?”

Henry bent over the brittle sheets. The writing was cramped and jagged, the pen strokes so shaky that each letter appeared to be fringed. He could not be sure Da had written the pages, nor could he tell where the pages were from. He told Marcus he’d ask his sister what she knew, and then they waited for her answer for two weeks. Still, he counts himself lucky that she writes to him at all.

In July, after Waldo sold the house out from under him, and after Delia announced she didn’t want him at her wedding, Henry had packed his few belongings and then gone to visit his sister. He had nothing, he’d told her then. His job had vanished, his kids didn’t need him, he had no place to live. “I’m going to take off. Make a new start somewhere.” He’d heard the self-pity in his voice, but he hadn’t been able to correct it.

The children had been at Waldo’s and her house had been empty and quiet. She had a spare room, he knew: the place where she’d intended to bring Brendan. For a minute he wondered if she might offer to take him in.

“Again?” she’d said. “You’re leaving again?”

Her voice had been so bitter that he’d been completely surprised. “What again? It’s not like I’ve ever gone anywhere.” At that moment he’d believed his words absolutely. He was fifty years old and he’d never been anyplace interesting; all his travels had been in his dreams.

But Wiloma sat down at the table and wept, and when she could catch her breath, she said, “It’s not like you’ve ever stayed. How could you leave me alone when Da was dying? Where were you when Brendan drowned? You’ve never been here, you’ve always been off with your stupid projects.” Then she told him a story about Da’s last days, which he’d never heard before. “There was a book,” she said; she went up to the attic and returned a few minutes later with a faded, red-bound volume. “This was all I had to get us through it.” She handed it to him. “Where were you?”

He couldn’t remember. Driving, he supposed; that was what he’d always done when he was troubled. He drove Kitty to Niagara Falls, he drove back and forth along the lake, he drove to his new apartment and around the site of his first development. He held Wiloma’s book in his hands and remembered driving very fast and going nowhere. But she couldn’t have thought he meant to abandon her.

“I don’t know where I was,” he said. A wave of guilt swept up from his stomach and then was pushed aside by anger. “Maybe I was around and you didn’t want to see me. Like that night before Brendan and I took off — how come you wouldn’t even say hello?”

“I always talk to you when you’re around,” she said. “When was this?”

He reminded her how he’d stood in front of the community center window and waved at her, how she’d looked right at him and then turned away. “I hate it when you do that,” he said, and all the pain of that moment hit him again. “I hate it when you ignore me.”

“I didn’t see you. Really. I don’t remember seeing you at all.”

And that might have been true — at the reservoir she hadn’t seemed to be aware that she never looked at him. “That’s worse. That you can’t even see me.”

She couldn’t seem to answer him. She looked over his shoulder, out the window, into the trees. Then, finally, she looked at him. “Where are you headed?”

Of course she wasn’t going to offer to take him in. “Massachusetts,” he said. Of course he would have turned down her offer, had she made it. “I want to spend some time on the land Uncle Brendan left us. That’s all.”

Wiloma had let him hold her precious book, but at that she snatched it back from him. “Don’t you touch that land. It’s half mine, it’s mine as much as it’s yours. If you think you’re going to pull some business like you did with Coreopsis—”