The Forms of Water

The Forms of Water

A
NDREA
B
ARRETT

For Margot Livesey,
who helped me find my way

From the US reviews for
The Forms of Water:

‘If any group of mortals knows how it feels to be expelled from paradise, it's the Auberon clan, the appealingly wretched family in this novel. Barrett nicely details the quiet agonies of people who have fallen from grace through bad luck and worse judgement, and suggests that if you can't regain paradise, you can at least make peace with its loss.'

New York Times

‘Subtle and strong … Barrett's talents shine. Barrett not only gets the geographical terrain right, she has the emotional terrain down as well. Her writing is insidious and fluid and as clean as a Berkshire stream. Long after the book has been shelved you'll find yourself thinking of Brendan, a crowning achievement for any writer.'

Detroit News

‘Barrett returns with her speciality – a story about the tangled web of a family told in prose that's spun smooth as silk … The strength this time around lies in Barrett's fine writing and the haunting power of the water, rising to fill that reservoir. It was a real event, but like the best of fiction writers, Barrett makes it more than real.'

Kirkus Reviews

‘Barrett is a skilful writer. She moves smoothly among the many consciousnesses that inhabit her book, giving us clearly defined and differentiated personalities and voices.'

Washington Post

H
ENRY AUBERON, NEARING FIFTY AND WITHOUT A CAR, SAT IN
a shabby living room that didn't belong to him. The tenant before him had had a cat, which had shredded the armchair and sprayed on the rugs. A water-stained book propped the window open; the gutter above the window leaked and the foundation below it shed chunks of mortar the size of finger bones. Had the house been his, Henry would have fixed these problems instantly. But the house belonged to his sister's ex-husband, who had grudgingly offered it when Henry had found himself with nowhere else to go.

The house was for sale and might disappear from under him at any minute, but Henry refused to think of what would happen then. He sat in his armchair and refused to think of his own lost home or of the wreckage he had made of his grandparents' farm in Coreopsis. He refused to think of the foreclosures, the bankruptcy proceedings, the shame, the failure, his amazing errors; he refused to think of his wife, who had thrown him out; he refused to think of the drunken accident that had cost him his driver's license and reduced him to walking to the temporary job that he also refused to consider, his three-to-eleven shift at the box factory near the Rochester stadium.

Henry refused all this; he refused it absolutely. Instead, on Friday night, just after midnight, aware every minute that he had to rise at six to catch the chain of buses that would take him to the nursing home for his weekly visit to his uncle—instead, Henry closed his eyes and thought of the places he yearned to visit and never had.

He imagined himself in St. Croix, scuba diving along the reefs and following his bubbles back to the surface. He pictured himself in South America, nose to nose with an anaconda; with the gorillas in Rwanda or the Patagonian penguins. Belize, Zaire, Alaska, Spain—until his life had collapsed, six months ago, he'd relaxed at night by reading travel books and plotting how he might get from here to there. Although he had never, except for a few brief trips to Toronto, left the eastern United States, he had planned for years to retire young and explore.

And now here he was, no longer young, trapped in a dead-end job with no future he could see. Having lost his house, his daughters, his friends, his wife, he was left with the travels he could imagine. Caucasia, the Black Sea, the Gobi Desert. The Himalayas and then Bombay. He carried visions of these places to the box factory and held them to him while his machines spewed out sheets of corrugated board printed the wrong colors, slit and scored in the wrong places, glued into improbable shapes. Then at night, in this place he refused to call home, he rolled in his fantasies.

Bujumbura, Madagascar. Apparently he had lost his sister as well. Earlier, as he'd been walking home, a lit storefront window had caught his gaze. In front of a group of people perched on orange chairs had stood a woman who gestured like Wiloma. He had stopped and pressed his face to the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to cut the glare from the streetlights. That was her, there was no doubt about it: Wiloma, trying to lead another group of people down on their luck to the glories of her newfound religion. In the old days, before her conversion, she would never have ventured into this run-down part of Rochester after dark. Now, he knew, she made these missions twice a week.

He had stared through the window and tried to decipher what she was saying. When her mouth stopped moving, he had tapped gently on the glass. Her face looked so open and animated that foolishly, unthinkingly, he had assumed she would welcome him. Luck had brought her to him, he'd thought; he'd been thinking about her all week, since his last visit to his uncle. Thinking about her and longing to ask her what she knew about their uncle's land. That huge parcel near the Paradise Valley, which Henry had always assumed was long gone but which their uncle still, mysteriously, owned—
half will be yours,
his uncle had said, as blandly as if he hadn't kept its existence a secret for forty years.
After I die, half will be yours, and half will be Wiloma's.

Wiloma had looked right at the window. She had seen him, he knew she had. Then she had turned her head away and started moving her lips again. He had stepped back from the window, wounded but not entirely surprised. His family sprouted siblings in pairs, as if no other pattern were possible—his father and his uncle, he and Wiloma, his own two girls and Wiloma's daughter and son—but Wiloma had severed their connection and cut him off from the communion he deserved. Since Coreopsis Heights had failed, she'd been very cool to him.

In his dark apartment, among the broken lamps and the rank purple carpets, Henry thought of the land his uncle had kept secret from him and then of Wiloma, cut off from him once by a sheet of glass and then again by her refusal to see him. This pained him so much that he squeezed his eyes shut and sent himself to a beach on Hiva Oa.

A white bird landed in one of the palm trees swaying near the rocks. Huge waves broke on the shore. The Marquesas were volcanic islands, Henry remembered reading; they rose straight up from the sea. The trees burst into red flowers and lianas trailed to the ground. A flat-faced woman rented Henry a house and loaned him a spotted horse, and as he galloped along the black sand he saw waterfalls thundering down the cliffs and in the distance, bearing down on the island, the ship that visited once each month. He blurred the horse's feet beneath him, blurring with them the fact that he didn't know how to ride.

The ship came, he imagined, to buy the dried coconut meat the islanders harvested and also to deliver mail. On the ship were two letters for him.
Come back,
his wife and daughters had written in one.
All is forgiven. The bank made a mistake—Coreopsis Heights is making more money than you can imagine.
Wiloma had scrawled the other letter on the back of a faded photograph of their grandfather. Da, who had been dead since 1961.
Why did you leave us?
she had written; nothing more.

But Henry didn't want to think about Da. He opened his eyes, went up to bed, closed his eyes again, went to sleep. He dreamed of the day he and Wiloma had first come to Da's farm in Coreopsis. In his dream his parents were still alive and the fields were covered with smooth snow and bore no resemblance to the sea of choppy mud he'd made from them. There were willows, leafless and yellow-branched, down by the water.

He woke feeling very tired. The coffee he bought at the corner was cold and the second bus was crowded. At the stop for St. Benedict's Nursing Home, he had to push his way through a group of young men before he could get off the bus, and then he saw that he was already late. His uncle Brendan, eighty years old, had already rolled his wheelchair down the sidewalk to his favorite perch, next to the stoplight at the intersection of Ashton and West. The brakes on the chair were set and a blanket was draped over his twisted legs despite the warm June sun. His uncle looked like a troll, Henry thought. He acted like a child. He understood so little about the world that he had not, apparently, even realized that the land he owned might have saved Henry from his disgrace.

“Fine day!” Brendan was calling to a woman in a blue Toyota. She was stopped at the light where, every morning, Brendan carried on shouted conversations with people trapped for the time it took for red to turn to green. He sat there even during the winter, bundled in blankets and gloves and a hat, but dependent, then, on strangers kind enough to reach over and roll down their windows.

“Fine day!” Brendan called again. His voice was eager and gay.

This woman's windows were open already, and she was pleasant enough. As Henry watched, Brendan flapped his left arm beside his head in a gesture midway between a salute and a tic. His head was rigid in the brace that supported his weakened neck, and his white hair, grown too long, drifted downily around his skull. Henry told himself that he would not act hurt, he would not complain. He would only, gently, try to lead the conversation back to his uncle's land.

“It
is
nice,” the woman called. “Are you having a good time out there?”

“Lovely!” Brendan said.

Henry sighed and walked over to the only person in his family still speaking to him.

B
RENDAN, WHO HAD A PHYSICAL THERAPY SESSION EACH SATURDAY 
morning at ten, had urged Henry on several occasions to come a little later. “Sleep in,” he told his nephew. He would have preferred to savor the session by himself. “Relax. Come after lunch if you want.”

But Henry showed up tired and bleary-eyed each week, as if he were doing penance. He got off the bus looking pained and put-upon, and then he stood and stared disapprovingly while Brendan chatted at the corner with the passersby. Men poked their hands through the sunroofs and waved; women turned down their radios to say that their peonies were blooming. Children bounced in their seats and squealed hello when their mothers said, “Say good-morning to the nice man,” but Henry stood stiff and aloof, frowning until Brendan agreed to go inside.

He acts like I'm crazy, Brendan thought, as Henry wheeled him down the ramps and into the basement of St. Benedict's Home. He knew he looked odd, especially since his last stroke—the left side of his face no longer moved as freely as his right, and his left arm was apt to wander. Lying in bed those first few days, unable to speak while his thoughts hummed at twice normal speed, he'd watched everyone act as if he'd lost his mind and not just his words.

Did he visit me then? Brendan thought. While I was lying there frozen? No. His speech was clear now, completely recovered, and his mind was as sharp as ever. His friends inside the Home and the people in the cars outside treated him as if he were fine. Only Henry continued to act as if he were senile. He seemed to be unable to tell the difference between Brendan's condition and that of the blank-eyed men who strolled the halls in their pajamas, their minds erased despite their strongly pumping hearts.

Behind him Henry hummed an unfamiliar tune. Brendan poked at his ears with a finger but he still couldn't make out the song. “What
is
that?” he said over his shoulder.

Henry gave a startled laugh and then turned the corner clumsily, bumping Brendan's footrest against the wall. “I don't know,” he said. “They play the radio all day where I'm working now, the same songs over and over again, three or four times an hour—they get stuck in my head.”

“Doesn't sound like much fun.”

“It isn't,” Henry agreed. He pushed open the door to the physical therapy room and wheeled Brendan inside, where Roxanne was waiting in the dim light thrown by the cones on the walls. Her hair shone smooth and golden, and she looked so young that Brendan was reminded of how he'd been in the Home almost as long as she'd been alive.

Roxanne unfolded a white sheet and held it up by the corners. She turned her head as Brendan wheeled himself behind it. “Would you like to take a little soak?” she asked Henry, as she did each time he appeared. “Keep your uncle company?”

Henry refused, as always. While Brendan undressed behind the sheltering sheet, Henry drew a plastic chair to the edge of the whirlpool and sat there uneasily, fully dressed.

Brendan took off the brace that straightened his neck. He handed Roxanne his clothes and then he grasped the sides of the sheet and pulled it around him, hiding his body from her eyes. Roxanne tucked the canvas sling beneath him, dropped the arms of his chair, swung him over the tiled lip, and lowered him into the water.

The sheet came with him, draped over his withered hips and twisted legs, shielding his genitals. He and Roxanne had argued over that sheet at first—“I see naked men all the time,” she'd said. “It's no big deal.” Brendan had insisted that he keep the sheet in the water. She didn't see naked ex-monks, he'd told her, men on whom no woman had ever gazed. That had silenced her. He'd learned over the years that any mention of his vocation embarrassed people into doing whatever he asked.

The sheet also hid him from Henry, whose eyes skittered like minnows over the flesh that Brendan exposed. The swollen, gnarled, splayed shapes that were Brendan's hands and feet, the huge nodules on his elbows and knees, the scar tissue on his thin chest, the discolorations, the ropy veins, the wattles and wrinkles and creases and pleated folds and sores—he was unsightly, he knew. He'd shriveled up so much that his skin hung on him now like a suit made for two men, one of whom had already died.

Henry's eyes settled on a point an inch or two above Brendan's head. He seemed so disgusted by Brendan's body, so irritated by Brendan's awkward movements, that Brendan wondered why he bothered to visit at all. It was duty, Brendan supposed. Certainly that was more likely than love. But duty hadn't called Henry here during all the years when he was thriving—until he'd fallen into trouble, he'd seldom shown up except on holidays. Now he came every week, and each time he looked at that spot in the air.

“I'll be back in twenty minutes,” Roxanne said.

She winked at Brendan, and Brendan let himself think of the long massage she'd give him when she returned. Her hands would be warm; she'd warm the mineral oil. She'd start at his neck and work down to his toes, covering every inch of him except for the small area wrapped in his sheet. Her hands were remarkably strong for such a small woman, and the pleasure they brought him was indescribable.

“Soak,” Roxanne said. “Loosen up those joints.” Flecks of grass clung to the hems of her pants, as if she'd walked through a newly cut lawn on her way to work. She slipped out of the dim room, her feet silent in spongy-soled shoes.

Brendan would have liked to slip his ears underwater and lose himself in the silence, but he knew Henry would be offended. He sighed and settled himself more comfortably on the ledge, sliding down until the water reached his shoulders. “How's work?” he asked.

“Horrible,” Henry said. He launched into the litany of complaints that would, Brendan knew, fill his soaking time and possibly even part of his massage. Brendan closed his eyes and inched over until his spine was centered in front of a whirlpool jet. “And then,” his nephew said, “he did, and then he said …” Henry moaned about the same things every week, but today his complaints seemed to have an extra, acid edge. He was miffed, Brendan saw, and he meant for Brendan to know it. Brendan smiled and said nothing and nodded occasionally. Henry's mood might prove helpful, he thought, if only he could figure out how to propose his plan.

Next door, in the library, Brendan could hear the people in the prayer group singing a hymn. “Praise the Lord,” he heard, over the bubbling water and the drone of Henry's voice. “Praise the Lord, all ye beasts and fishes.” There was no keeping that group away—they were based in Pittsford but descended once a month on the Home to hold a healing service. Half the Home's residents were in with them now, holding hands and praying for their afflictions to be healed. One of the group's leaders had visited Brendan earlier, offering to exorcise the evil spirits plaguing him.

“We'll pray in tongues for you,” the woman had said. “We'll do a soaking prayer. We'll soak your being in the love of Jesus until the evil spirits leave you and you're healed.”

“You can leave my being be,” Brendan had told her. He'd thought of how, after compline, the single lamp that lit the
Rule
for the reader had been extinguished, leaving the monks to chant the psalms in darkness and exorcise the terrors of the night. Compline: the completion of the day. The last of the day's canonical hours, when the sins of the day were reviewed. He'd given that up, he'd wanted to say to the woman. Why would he accept her feeble prayer?

The woman had bowed her head sorrowfully. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” she'd said. “Who can know it?”

“Who indeed?” Brendan had said, and he'd wondered who could heal him now. He had tumors on his kidneys and in his lungs, others dotting his liver; in his colon, the mass had spread so far that what he swallowed came up as often as it went down. He believed that the seeds of those tumors had come, like the arthritis that crippled him, from the years he'd spent in northern China during the Second World War. Those freezing nights in the abbey's dormitory, which had swarmed with ticks; the even colder hours in the choir, listening to the Chinese novices wrap their tongues around the Te Deum; the months in the Japanese internment camp—those were the things that had made him sick, and if those were evil spirits, they were not the sort that could be chased away.

He closed his eyes and gave himself over to the swirling water. Then he opened them again, aware that Henry's flow of complaints had stopped.

“How are you feeling?” Henry asked. “Really, I mean.”

“All right,” Brendan said. “About as well as you'd expect.”

And that was as much concern as he could get from Henry, who sank back into his own worries instantly. “This man I know,” Henry said, “just like me except he built office parks instead of residential developments, he got arrested last week in Buffalo for robbing a bank. I saw it in the paper. The police said that this was his fourth one. There's so much office space standing empty now that he couldn't lease a single square foot, and he had a family and cars and a big house and a summer place and he couldn't make the payments on anything, so he started robbing banks …. You can't believe what it's like out there. You don't have any idea.”

Henry's voice trailed off again, and as it did the voices next door rose in a sudden, excited babble that sounded to Brendan like “wa-ka-
wa
-ke, wy-a-
wee
-no, ko-
tay
-nu, ko-
ba
-lu,
way
-lo
,
wa-ka-
wa
-kee …” Of course it didn't make sense, it wasn't supposed to make sense. “Praise the Lord!” someone called clearly through the babble. “Praise his works, his ways, his days.” In his beloved abbey in the Paradise Valley—not the one burned to the ground in China, not the austere one in Manitoba nor the inhospitable one in Rhode Island but his first abbey, his true abbey, which had lain beneath the Stillwater Reservoir for half a century now—he had praised the Lord seven times daily, his voice blending with sixty others in a cry that rose up from the choir like smoke.

Henry stared into the whirlpool. “They're going to send him to jail,” he said. “That guy. I played
golf
with him. I met his wife.” He shifted his eyes toward Brendan, as if checking to see what effect his story had had, and Brendan knew he was thinking about the land and what it might be worth.

The land was worth nothing, in Henry's terms; it had no price, it could not be turned into money. On a wooded ridge in Massachusetts, overlooking what had once been the Paradise Valley and was now the Stillwater Reservoir, lay the only remnant of their family's land that hadn't vanished underwater. Frank junior—Brendan's brother, Henry's father—had built a cabin there after the evacuation of the valley, and Henry and Wiloma had lived there until the accident that killed their parents. Brendan had held on to the piece that passed to him until Henry and Wiloma were grown. Then he'd held on to it longer, fearing Henry's greed and Wiloma's impulsiveness.

The mess they'd made of Coreopsis had proved his decision was right, but now the doctors had told him that he was running out of time. And so last week, first during Henry's Saturday visit and then again, on Sunday, when Wiloma had come, he had finally revealed what he meant to leave them. They had stared at him as if he were mad.

“That was Da's land,” Henry had said. “Da sold it after the accident, to help pay for raising me and Wiloma.”

“Half of it,” Brendan had explained. “He sold
half.
He made a will before you were born and left half to your father and half to me. After your parents were killed, he sold the part where the cabin was. But I still own the other two hundred acres.”

Wiloma had been equally puzzled. “In the valley?” she'd said. “How can you own land in the valley? There
is
no valley, it's all gone. I thought the place where you grew up was underwater now.”

“It's
near
the valley,” Brendan had told her, feeling tired and exasperated. Sometimes Wiloma was as dense as a tree. “Near the valley, adjoining the valley, the land your grandfather owned on the ridge—you lived there. Don't you remember it?”

She'd stared at him blankly. “I was eight,” she'd said. “When Mom and Dad were killed. You expect me to remember everything?”

“Something—don't you remember anything?”

“I remember the cabin, sort of. I remember Mom listening to the radio and acting stranger and stranger. I remember the day Dad came home from the war.” She had paused and looked at the wall. “I remember the night they were killed. You were gone.”

She had paused again, and the pause had opened into the hole that swallowed him whenever he let himself think of his brother's death. No one had been able to tell him how that accident happened, because no one had been around; there had been no other cars on the stretch of empty road and no survivors. In place of Wiloma, sitting across from him, the accident he'd envisioned so many times had flashed before his eyes again.

The inside of the old gray Plymouth is steamy and the windshield keeps fogging up. Frank junior has both hands on the wheel and drives silently while Margaret chatters about the friends they've just seen at the VFW dance. The road is slippery and rain pounds on the roof of the car. Margaret's dress is white. They are almost home; they are on the last curve of Boughten Hill before it dips into the valley and rises again to the ridge. Margaret says something to Frank junior, and just as he begins to answer, a deer flashes across the road. He taps the brakes once and then again. The deer bounds safely into the woods. But the brakes lock, the car skids, Margaret shrieks and he wrenches the wheel. There is no guardrail on this stretch of road and the rain has turned the shoulder to mud. The car lurches, tips, falls heavily onto its side and then rolls, over and over and over, to the base of the ravine.