The Forms of Water (19 page)

He coughed from time to time, wet gasps that cleared nothing. She understood that he would not wake again. She wished—she had wished then, and she wished it even more strongly now, had felt it more and more every year—that she'd held his hands and stretched the truth and said, “We were happy here. We loved our lives. We hardly missed our parents once we had you,” He had given them what he could, everything he had. Mimi jumped on his bed and crept among the pillows wedged beneath elbows, hips, and knees; pillows meant to take the place of flesh and keep bone from metal, bone from bone. Da's head fell sideways, his neck so stiff she couldn't move it back.

In her book. Da's book. Da had marked the last page, where the author had bidden his readers farewell.
Here, my friend, our labors close,
she remembered reading. She read out loud; she slipped a hand between Da's cheek and the pillow it was pressed against. She read slowly, her lips at Da's ear.
It has been a true pleasure to have you at my side for so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own.

Parents and children,
Da had written on that page. Or maybe it was
parents are children
—his handwriting was so bad it was hard for her to be sure. He drew one last breath after she read those words, and then he was silent. She looked up from her book. Silence. His hands and feet were cold and his skin no longer felt like skin. She laid her head on his chest again and heard only her own blood, rushing in her ears. Air filled his open mouth—air, not breath—and when she pushed his lower jaw gently up, his mouth would not stay shut. She closed his eyes with her right hand and bathed him one last time. His left hand was bent in the shape that had held her thumb, and she unfolded it and dressed him and settled the blanket around his feet.

Mimi jumped up on his chest, she remembered, and his right eye floated open, but there was nothing left, it wasn't him, it was flesh, stone, clouds. The wind blew through the open window and caught his spirit, which spiraled up like a moth and took part of her with it. Ice to water, water to vapor, vapor to snow and rain.
Here then we part,
she read over his shell: the last words in the red-bound book.
And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us.

He was gone before she could say all she'd meant to, gone years before she'd had any knowledge of the Church or of how she might have eased his Spirit's passage. She would not, if he were dying now, have told him a fairy tale about a valley or read to him from a red book that was full of pretty words but had no substance. She would have read to him from her Manual. She would have said what she still had a chance to say to Brendan, the words Christine would recite with her as a part of the Healing:
Our bodies, consisting of flesh and bone, are made of the dust of the earth and have no significance. Without the light of the Spirit they are corrupt and mortal. Every creature is created Spirit and shall return to Spirit, swallowed up like a drop in the ocean.
She would have said to Da—she would say to Brendan, she would not let him die as Da had, comforted clumsily by an ignorant girl—
Paradise is not a place but a state of mind, in which all manifestations of Spirit are immortal and in harmony. We are as angels there, pure shafts of ethereal light.

But in order to say that, she had to circumvent Henry. Henry, with his transparent excuses, had left her all alone when she'd most needed him. Now, when Brendan most needed her, he had stolen Brendan away. In the darkness of her motel room, she thought of Henry as he'd been when they'd first arrived in Coreopsis. A little boy, but still older and wiser than her, he had whispered
no
as they hid in their rooms and puzzled over Da's outbursts.

“Does Da hate us?” she remembered asking Henry then.

“No,” he'd said. “Da misses Dad. We remind him of him.”

Henry had understood that, but he didn't seem to understand anything anymore, and she was, she realized now, afraid of him. Afraid the way she'd fear a cobra or a Martian: afraid they no longer shared any common speech or understanding. She would charm him, she thought. Lie to him if she had to; fight him if it came to that. But she would not let her uncle die alone.

T
WO HOURS INTO THEIR TRIP, LISE TOLD ROY HE HAD TO LET HER
drive. It was only fair, she said, that they split the drive into equal segments. It was only reasonable.

“Sit up here with me,” Lise told Delia next, after they'd all finished stretching their legs by the side of the road. “Keep me company.” Win claimed the passenger-side window in the back, and so Roy ended up in the middle, wedged between Wendy and Win. When Wendy whispered, “Why did you let Lise do that?” Roy whispered back, “What's the point of fighting? She'll only take it out on Delia.”

Which was true, Wendy thought; when Lise was crossed she always turned on Delia. But she wondered how Roy had figured this out. Then she wondered if any man would ever know something like that about her.

As soon as Lise started driving, she looked over her shoulder at Roy and said, “Why do you keep this car? It's a piece of shit. The steering's so loose I feel like I'm floating. The brakes are soft.”

“It's an old car,” Roy said patiently, but Lise couldn't leave it at that; every rattle and wheeze upset her. “Is that one of the tires?” Lise said. “Is something loose in the trunk? Do you think that tapping means anything?”

“I don't know,” Roy said finally. “Do you think it's going to blow?”

Delia laughed loudly and Wendy snickered despite herself. Delia had brought along a bottle of vodka, which she sipped from now and again despite Lise's objections. When Delia passed the bottle back to Roy, Roy took a long hit and then held it out to Wendy, who shook her head. “I better not,” she said, not wanting to tell him that she never drank anymore. “I'll drive after Lise.”

“Suit yourself,” Roy said. He drank some more and then passed the bottle back to Delia, who turned up the radio and started singing along with the tunes that filled the car. Roy sang, too, and eventually Wendy joined in. For a while, then, except for Lise's brittle silence and the fact that Win had somehow fallen asleep against the window with his own radio plugged into his ears, Wendy found the journey almost festive. They might have been driving to the mountains or the ocean, she thought. Driving all night like any other group intent on landing someplace wonderful by morning. No one said a word about what they were really doing, and the music almost muffled her fears.

Christine's words echoed in Wendy's head in the gaps between the songs.
Your great-uncle's Spirit is getting ready to transit,
she'd said.
I can make sure his Spirit finds the Light.
But there was no light, Wendy thought, as she tapped out a rhythm on her thigh. There was no way out of this. The best she could hope for was that she found her family before her mother flipped out completely, before her uncle did something stupid, before Grunkie got hurt. All she could do on this trip was hope to restore everyone to the state they'd been in before Grunkie vanished in that van. Only this morning, she'd dreaded and despised that state. Now it seemed almost desirable.

She pushed away Christine and Grunkie, her parents and her uncle. The car was moving, the music was blaring. She was young and Roy was sitting next to her. She thought of the way he'd looked the afternoon he'd opened his door clad only in his shorts. She thought of him and Delia intertwined on his mattress on the floor; she thought of how she belonged in the front seat with Lise—crabby, frustrated Lise—and Delia belonged back here with Roy. Then she thought how nothing, not even her fears, could move her from this seat just now. Her body felt very peculiar, as if her bones had expanded and were stretching her skin into a thin, taut film. Roy's hip was touching hers, and although she had only Lise to thank for this she relished the gentle contact.

Lise refused to give up the wheel when they stopped at one of the Thruway plazas for gas. Delia said she was hungry but too tired to move. Roy said he needed to take a leak and so Wendy had to move after all; once she'd stepped out to let Roy by, she decided to go inside and find something to eat. She bought a bag of chips from the vending machine in the lobby, as well as a bag of M&M's and another of pretzels. Then she went into the gift shop next door, and as smoothly as if she were still fifteen and used to doing this every day, she lifted two road maps, a white plastic mug that said I
THE ADIRONDACKS,
a T-shirt printed with a picture of a moose, and a toy log cabin. One by one she slipped these things into her bag, although she wanted none of them. In her mind she could still hear Christine's acid comments about the things her uncle Henry had stolen, but his actions didn't seem related to her in any way.

The woman at the counter had thin, dry hair, scraped back into a wispy tail and splotched with white roots. Her arms were bare and enormous. She'd looked at Wendy when Wendy walked in, but after a brief glance she'd turned back to her magazine and Wendy had realized that she was invisible. Her clothes concealed her, and her well-cut hair and her straight teeth. She looked down at her neat jeans and her blue-and-white shirt, both of which Sarah had bought for her: her jeans were unfaded and her shirt had extra buttons on the sleeve plackets and crisp pleats at the yoke. It had never occurred to her before that this cleaned-up version of herself, which her father and Sarah had manufactured, might serve as a perfect disguise.

The woman never looked at Wendy, nor did she check the mirrors hanging overhead. Wendy stuck out her tongue. The woman didn't notice. Wendy took a Yankees sweatshirt off a pile, held it out, refolded it, and then laid it quite deliberately in her bag, on top of the rest of her loot. The woman said nothing. She looked up when Wendy walked out the door, but her face was blank and no sirens rang. Wendy realized she could have walked off with anything there. No one looked at her in the lobby either, and in the bathroom women walked past her as if she weren't there. She looked like anyone else, she realized. Like any other middle-class girl, as safe and unthreatening as soap.

When she got back in the car she shoved the bag between her feet, and the next time Delia passed the bottle she took a modest drink. How could anything happen to a girl who looked like her? The vodka tasted like nothing but seemed to relieve the tenseness in her skin. She drank some more. Lise drove just at the speed limit through the quiet night, and Wendy laughed at the steady stream of jokes Delia and Roy exchanged. Delia was funny, she saw. Roy was funnier. Win was asleep and Wendy felt a surge of affection for him and reached behind Roy to touch Win's shoulder. Her hand brushed Roy's neck on its way back. Delia told a long joke about two old women and a vase of flowers, and then she yawned and stretched and leaned her head into the window and said, “I'm going to catch a few Zs, okay? So I'll be fresh to drive.” And although Lise protested that Delia was much too drunk to drive even after a nap, Delia just said, “We'll see,” and then closed her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Roy asked Lise. “Don't you feel sleepy?”

“Not at all.” Lise seemed to have no intention of ever relinquishing the wheel. “I can drive all night.”

“We'll take shifts,” Roy said firmly. “Just like you said. But if you don't need the company now, I guess I'll try and catch a snooze, too. Let Wendy drive when you're tired.”

“I can drive,” Wendy said, but everyone ignored her. “I could drive right now.”

She sat very still as Roy slumped down in the seat, angled his legs away from hers, and leaned his head and shoulders back. His left shoulder was just touching her right arm. His left hip was resting against her right thigh. After a few minutes, as his breathing slowed, his head slumped over until it rested on her shoulder. A few minutes later, when she was sure he was asleep, she let her head tilt until her cheek rested on his hair. Of course Delia wanted him, everyone wanted him. His hair was surprisingly soft.

She moved slowly, imitating the sleepy movements Win made on the other side of Roy from time to time. She drew up her legs and then stretched them out next to Roy's. Her whole right leg now lay against his left one, which was warm and solid and so delightful that she sighed, just as Delia sighed in the front seat, and let her left arm cross her body and rest against Roy's hip. If Lise looked in the mirror, she thought, she would see only a row of tilted bodies collapsed and crushed against each other and as innocent as a tangle of puppies. Lise had turned down the radio, but the music still drowned out the soft breathing of Roy and Delia and Win and hid the sound of Wendy's, which had quickened.

She still felt invisible. She was just Delia's cousin, playing Delia's game: pretending to be with Roy for Lise's benefit. Everyone was asleep but Lise, and Lise thought she and Roy belonged together, and she let her hand stroke Roy's thigh and her cheek rub gently against his hair, knowing this was stealing more surely than what she'd done in the store. But nothing she wanted came to her when she behaved herself, she thought. She'd bent her life into a shape it wasn't meant to have for her mother's benefit, and here her mother was chasing a paranoid notion over the hills.

Roy turned to her. He was still asleep, or mostly asleep, but he rolled into Wendy's hand and drew his legs up next to hers. He slipped an arm around her and drew her against him, so that her cheek slipped down next to his and their mouths were almost touching. His touch filled her with gratitude. She had thought she might never have this, not even after she escaped from her family. She tried not to move.

She was Delia's size and shape, and she thought that Roy, in his sleep, must be moving against her the way he moved against Delia on the mattress they shared. The car was very dark. He pushed himself gently against her hand and she let her palm press into him. His head turned, searching for her mouth, and at first she kept her lips taut and closed, so that everything might still seem to be his mistake, his desire; so that she might still plead sleepy innocence if he woke. Then he let the arm around her shoulders drop down until his hand was on her breast, and she opened her mouth until she was kissing him back, and his hand was sliding down and under the edge of her shirt and back up against her skin, and his tongue was in her mouth and then on her neck, and he was pressing and pressing against her hand until he lowered his own and unzipped his fly and moved her hand inside.

His eyes were closed, but he could not possibly still be asleep. And yet his eyes were closed, and his face looked trusting and pleased, and nothing about him indicated that he felt anything like the fear and exultation rushing through her. The sprig of mistletoe in her pocket pricked her thigh, and she thought of the powers Christine had ascribed to her twigs and seeds.
Release the Spirit from the flesh,
she remembered Christine saying. As if anyone would want to separate the two. Her spirit was
in
her flesh; her body felt completely beyond her control. Roy ran his mouth down her neck and her collarbones and she gave up then, if she had not already given up minutes before.

She wasn't sure how long they lay like that, groping, rubbing, and she couldn't be sure whether Roy opened his eyes when he came in her hand or the minute after, when he muttered and untangled his legs from hers and then yawned and looked up and smiled drowsily. He blinked; he focused his eyes. He whispered, “Wendy. I'm sorry, I fell asleep. I didn't mean to get all mashed up against you. I was having a dream.”

“Some dream,” she said.

He moved quickly away from her and she smiled at him. He looked over the seat at Delia, who was still sleeping, and at Lise, whose eyes were fixed on the road. Then he looked back at Wendy and made the strangest face, half sheepish grin and half rueful grimace. She kept on smiling. Her family was so far away that they might as well be on another planet. She stretched herself and smiled and smiled until Roy leaned back to zip his fly and she caught sight of Win's eyes, which were open.