The Forms of Water (26 page)

“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.

I
F 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.

The edges of these cities and towns are abrupt, and between them lies more space than she ever imagined. The sky is so enormous that sometimes, as she waits for a ride for the better part of a day on a road that stretches from nowhere to nowhere for miles, she can see mountains—Cascades, Tetons, Absarokas—floating in the distance like a promise. Everything seems promising here, even the men who pick her up in their cars and trucks and warn her that she ought to be more careful. They look nothing like the men she knew at home. They remind her how easily she could be hurt, but none of them have hurt her. When they ask her where she's from, she makes up stories.

“Michigan,” she says. “Just outside Lansing.” Or San Diego, Arizona, Baton Rouge. In bars she tells similar stories to the men with whom she dances, and once in a while—on four occasions now—she has let a man bring her home. Twice, when she found work and a man she liked in the same town, she has shared a roof for a couple of weeks. She has yet to want anyone as fiercely as she wanted Roy, but she has almost stopped hearing the echo of Christine's voice.

Tonight she's in a bar just outside Spokane, watching couples dance to a raucous band. Stephen, the out-of-work carpenter sitting next to her, was leaning against the wall when she first walked in. One of his legs was bent, the sole of his work boot pressed against the paneling. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his jeans, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled halfway up his forearms. He was staring moodily at the spinning dancers, tapping his earthbound foot to the beat, and when she strolled up and asked him to dance, he said yes immediately. On the dance floor he led her firmly through a two-step, which she'd begun to learn in other towns in other states. His open palm, pressed against her back, was dry and strong.

After the dance he smiled down at her and said, “You're not from around here, are you?”

“No,” she said, and she touched his bare forearm. “Would you like a beer?”

For a minute she thought she might lose him, that she'd moved too quickly or misjudged the loneliness and longing she thought she saw on his face, but then he smiled and shrugged and said, “You surely can.” Now they're sitting knee to knee on a pair of stools at one end of the bar. He started buying, after the first round; a pitcher of beer sits between them and she keeps his glass filled. He was married once, he tells her. He is twenty-eight. His two little girls are in Boise with their mother.

When he mentions his daughters his face clouds, and Wendy does something she has learned to do in the past few months, which almost always works. “Do you have any pictures?” she asks.

He reaches for his wallet. Inside, in plastic sleeves, are stiff school portraits of a gap-toothed girl with blond hair and glasses and an older girl with a brown ponytail. “The little one's Dora. She's in first grade this year. Nancy's in third.”

“They're gorgeous. Beautiful girls.”

He smiles at her then, smiles at the pictures, smiles back at her. “So are you,” he says lightly.

She lowers her eyes. She knows she isn't beautiful; she is only young. As young as her mother was when she met Wendy's father; younger than Sarah was when Wendy's father fell in love with her; younger, even, than the women her uncle used to chase. When she thinks of how nearly she missed understanding what this gives her, she closes her eyes for a second and then sips at her beer. The beer flowers inside her, loosening her joints and her brain.

Stephen slips the wallet back into his pocket. “Where are you from?” he asks. One finger lightly strokes the soft flesh below her elbow.

“Here and there. I've been traveling for a while.” Below the bar his knee just touches her thigh, and soon he is telling her about the cabin he has in the woods twenty miles away. How snug it is when it snows; how his woodstove heats the whole place; how beautiful it is at dawn.

“I love it up there,” he says. “If I didn't have that place, I'd go crazy.”

“You're lucky. Having a place like that.” The dim light shadows his face, carving it into hollows and planes. In the morning it may only turn out to be another face, but right now it is everything she thinks she wants.

“What about you?” he says. “Where are you staying?”

“I don't know. I just got into town this afternoon.” She gives him the slow smile she has learned only recently, and his hand tightens on her arm. She knows he believes he's been hit by luck. For a second they hover on that fine edge from which the evening may fall either way, and Wendy thinks of all the times since Delia's wedding when she's been similarly poised.

The wedding was held in a rented garden at the art museum: very pretty, very subdued. Lise—not Wendy—was Delia's maid of honor, and when Wendy kissed Delia and wished her luck, Delia looked at her feet. After the ceremony, Wendy wandered over to the pond by herself. The ducks that dotted the sleek surface were feeding on something invisible, upending themselves so abruptly that their heads turned without transition into fat, pointed tails. The sight transfixed her, and she found herself muttering, “Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails,” like a gambler gone mad with a quarter. Her mother's life, Delia's life. The life her great-grandparents had led more than half a century ago. She could choose, she saw. She could live any way she wanted or in several different ways, carving her life into sharp, separate parts the way her great-uncle had. Massachusetts, China, Manitoba; Coreopsis and then St. Benedict's. He had moved a lot for someone meant to be bound to a single place. She moved from the pond to the hedge to the gate, from the gate to her house to the road.

Stephen splits the remains of the pitcher between their glasses. It is well past midnight; the dance floor is densely crowded. Couples lean into each other down the bar and along the walls, pursuing the delicate negotiations that will bring this Saturday night to the close they all want but haven't dared hope for. In the bathrooms, she knows, men are checking their wallets for the rubbers they think they remember putting in there a week or a month ago. Women are adjusting their underwear and consulting with their friends. The pay phones near the door are busy; there are parents and spouses being deceived, baby-sitters being begged to stay until morning. Within this desperate last-minute whirl, Wendy feels perfectly at home.

Home is what you dream of,
she remembers her mother saying.
What everyone does. But you have to learn that your only true home is in the Spirit.
Of all her mother's mottoes this now seems the most false: that the body is nothing, the body is dust, the world is made up of our ideas. Stephen leans over and cups her chin in his fingers and kisses her lightly. His cabin will be spare, she knows, clean and dark except for the glow from his woodburning stove. Stephen will be considerate. Her home, she thinks, is in her body, from which she learns everything.

When Stephen whispers, “Would you … do you think … I have this cabin and if you need a place to stay … do you want to come home with me?” she forces herself to hesitate for a minute, as if all that has happened between them has been his idea. He's forgotten that she first asked him to dance, that she touched him first, that she bought the first drink. She looks into the mirror behind the bar, as if she is weighing his invitation. She waits until he strokes her fingers with his. Then she says, “Well, I guess.”

At the door, Stephen wraps his scarf around her neck. “It's cold out,” he says. He smiles at the size of her backpack and sets it aside as he helps her dress. The backpack holds everything she owns, clothes and shoes and a few books, the sprig of mistletoe she stole from Christine and the list of rules she once kept in her closet. The list reminds her of Grunkie, who lived by so many rules they formed a Rule.

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.

I
T 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—”

“No business. I just need a place to stay for a while, until I figure out what to do.”

She had folded her hands in her lap. “I can't stop you. When has anyone ever stopped you from doing anything?'

Her neck had rings around it, he saw, and her hands were as creased and worn as his. He gestured toward the book. “Could I borrow that—just for a while? I'd like to have something of Da's with me.”

She'd let him take the book, which he now keeps on the floor by his cot, but he hadn't been sure when they'd parted if she'd forgiven him and he's still sorting out in his mind the acts for which he needs to be forgiven. For a few months he'd heard nothing from her, but then she started writing him letters after she learned that he'd finished the cabin. Cautiously friendly, guardedly open; letters in which he can feel her pushing herself to be kind to him. Guilt may be driving her, or pity or love; or maybe the letters are only a duty her church says she has to perform. Whatever they mean, he is grateful for them. She sends news of Wendy and Win and tries to answer the questions he asks.

Four sheets of paper,
he wrote in his last letter to her.
Lined, like they came from a notebook. The handwriting's hard to read, but it looks like Da's. What do you think they are?

Her answer arrived this morning, and now he reads her letter out loud to Marcus. He skips over the parts about the kids and about the job she plans to take, and also the lines where she asks him, for the tenth or twelfth time, why he's wasting so much time on these old things.
The past is the past,
she writes.
You can't change it.
And yet each time she writes him she seems to heal a part of their old estrangement.

“Listen to this,” he says to Marcus. “‘Those must be from Da's notebook. After Gran died, but before Da was so sick he couldn't hold a pen, he used to scribble things in this notebook with a speckled cover. He never let me see what he was writing. Then one day, after you took off with Kitty, I found the notebook under his bed with some pages torn out. All the pages left in it were blank. Maybe he stuck the ones he'd written in that briefcase before he gave it to you. But why would he give those to you and not to me?'”

Marcus reaches for the letter and reads the passage for himself. Then he asks, “Why would he?”

“I don't know.”

Marcus shakes his head and pours them both a drink. “Might as well add it to your list.” His tone is mocking but affectionate.

The list Marcus is talking about occupies the back pages of the notebook Henry has been filling: unanswered questions, things to follow up. There are forty or fifty of these. They have to do with his father and the tale Marcus told in the van, which he hardly heard at the time; with Brendan's request that they visit the dam before the land, which might have changed everything had he granted it; and with a score of other things related to Brendan's last journey. Who were those people camped out in the house in Coreopsis? Why did Jackson stay in his garage? What happened to the broker in Buffalo who was caught robbing all those banks? And where did that army of uprooted men come from, the men who knocked on his door when he still lived with Kitty and wanted to shovel snow or clean gutters, the carpenter's helpers and plumber's assistants who hung around Coreopsis Heights begging for work and who now seem to be everywhere, their lives as twisted as his?

The rest of his notebook is filled with the stories Marcus has told, the information he's gleaned from books and maps, and the fragments he's been able to reconstruct of the tales Da and his father and Brendan told. Henry writes in this notebook every night, the act of writing so new, after years of dictating to willing secretaries, that his pen still stutters on the pages. Sometimes he feels like a monk himself, shut inside a medieval cloister and patiently copying manuscripts no one will ever read. Even Marcus, who delights in uncovering obscure facts and useless details, sometimes looks at what Henry's doing and shakes his head.

“If you're going to spend your time like this,” he says., “why don't you put in some more stuff about everyday life before the reservoir? Why don't you write a real history of what happened to the valley?”

What he means, Henry knows, is
Why don't you put in some more stuff about me?
He can't answer that; he knows that's the question everyone else at the Visitors' Center wants to ask as well. The bookshelves at the Center are lined with pamphlets full of facts. What day the men in their fancy suits first came into the valley; their names and ages and occupations; who said what at the endless meetings; what houses were razed and in what order. But the heap of paper he's accumulating has a logic of its own, and he thinks that if he can understand it, he will understand what he's doing here.

Marcus moves to the window facing the water. “It's really coming down out there. We'll have six inches by morning.”

“You'll stay over?”

Marcus nods. He often spends the night on Henry's extra cot; the path to the cabin is rugged and he has nothing to rush home for. Henry reminds himself to set the alarm clock, so he'll have time to drop Marcus off. A load of sheet-metal stampings is waiting for him at the place in the valley where he sometimes works, and he's so grateful to have his license back that he almost enjoys loading the pallets, unloading boxes, driving rickety trucks full of metal parts over bad roads. When he returns from his run to Springfield, he may stop at a bar and have three beers. No more—if he has four, he knows he'll start to feel misunderstood. When he has four, he ends up telling other lonely drunks how he has come to be living like a hermit.

I messed up my marriage,
he will say in a small voice.
I took something that belonged to my sister and I ruined it. Then I took my uncle on a trip and couldn ‘t save him when he had an accident. Then I came here.

He will tell this over and over again, to anyone who will listen, and no one will understand how he has given up almost everything and gotten so little in return. No one will praise him for his sacrifices; no good luck will fall in his lap and no letters will arrive from his wife and daughters, begging him to come home. Wiloma told him that Delia threw out the framed copy of the Farewell Ball photograph that he sent as a wedding present. Lise won't answer his letters. No one seems to understand what a struggle it is for him to walk these acres every day and resist the urge to change them.

He rises and stands by Marcus, near the nail from which dangle the knotted ties that didn't save Brendan. It's too dark for him to see the reservoir, but despite that he sees his uncle floating below the water and then all he might build on this land. Buildings would block out his visions of Brendan, as they have blocked out everything for years. The temptation to build is terrific; if he had money, he might not be able to resist. But he has no money, and no prospects for getting any.

What he has, instead, are the stories that fill his notebook—the ones Wiloma and Marcus have told him, the ones he remembers from Da and Brendan and his father. When he looks out the window, he sees families jumping off the cliffs at Marpi Point, plums arcing over a wall, Da dying while Wiloma reads to him about snow and water and clouds. He sees Roxanne moving her hands along Brendan's legs and Marcus shooting into the night, just to be shooting at something. On Makin, Marcus has said, Henry's father had been brave but he had not, and he had been one of the men who shot at nothing.

Henry wonders if he may be shooting at nothing himself. He might be writing Latin verse in his notebook, for all the good it will ever do; no one will read it, no one will care, his lost family is only one among a million. The words with which he tries to preserve them are only words, no more likely to survive than the words Da scribbled so long ago. And yet Da's words lie on the table, on the pieces of paper that Marcus has set down, and Henry walks over and makes himself read them again.