The Forms of Water (25 page)

Win ignored him. He had already stepped out of his sneakers when Delia walked to the edge of the water and began shouting toward the boat. “Grunkie!” she called, waving her arms. “Grunkie! Hi! It's me!”

Lise joined her. “Grunkie! Come back!”

Brendan had kept his back toward Wiloma and the sounds Henry was making in the distance, but when he heard his nickname he craned his head over his shoulder and saw Lise there, and Delia and Wendy and Win, lined up on the shore and waving at him. For a minute he thought he might be dreaming. He hadn't seen them all together in years; Wendy and Win took turns coming to visit him with their mother, and although he'd seen Lise only yesterday, before that he hadn't seen her or Delia since Delia had left for college.

Years ago, Kitty and Wiloma had sometimes dressed up all four children and brought them to St. Benedict's for Christmas. They'd crowded into his room, squirming and squealing and restless, holding cards they'd made from red and green construction paper. All up and down his floor, his friends had strained for glimpses of them; all year long he'd held the vision of their last visit in his mind. And now here they were, as tall and straight as young poplars on the shore. It was wonderful, wonderful; Wiloma must have brought them with her as a surprise to him, and he was grateful to her and then embarrassed that he'd left her behind. Somehow she'd understood that he wanted his whole family here with him; she hadn't been chasing him, she'd come to join him. He leaned over the side of the boat and waved to his family with both arms, and just then, just when Marcus, looking alarmed, pulled in his oars and said, “Be careful!” Bongo recognized Delia's voice and leapt to his feet and barked.

He was a big dog, and his toenails hadn't been clipped in a long time. His feet spun on the aluminum and he fell heavily, rocking the boat; Brendan, unbalanced and twisted toward the shore, slipped over the side and into the water so quickly that his greeting was still on his lips. His head rose above the water once, but his glasses fell off and he could see only colored shapes. The water wasn't cold. His family was all around him, and Marcus had rowed him just to the spot overlying his abbey, and he sank easily, gratefully, down into the silky water, past a school of minnows that scattered, past a pair of trout who eyed him kindly, past the waving weeds and toward the glimmering stones. Surely that was the chapel below him? And the cloister, the garden, the great wall against which he'd leaned as a child, listening to the monks within? And there were the fields and the grazing cows and his family's farm in the distance; and the sky was blue and his brothers were chanting and his family spoke softly to him.

He thought of Roxanne, the one person at St. Benedict's he'd failed to say good-bye to; he felt her warm hands on his legs. Then he thought of all the kind people who'd leaned from their cars and spoken to him as he sat on his lonely corner. He heard Bongo barking above him, fish breathing water below him, and he thought of the tale his abbot had told him before he'd sailed for China, of a man who heard a voice in a dream that told him to set out on a journey. The man obeyed the voice; he traveled far and had many adventures. But when he reached his destination, he found only a stranger who told him the treasure he sought was hidden back in his own house.
That's the way it works,
his abbot had said; he'd said that only a journey to distant lands could reveal what lay buried at home.

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.

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

“
T
HE 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.”

“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.