The Forms of Water (2 page)

“Uncle Brendan?” Wiloma had said, and the vision had vanished and he'd seen her face again. He'd been in China, in a hospital bed, when that accident had happened: waiting to be shipped home and unaware that he had no home. He hadn't seen his brother for twelve years. He'd never met his brother's wife.

“It's our family's land,” he'd told Wiloma, who stared at him as if she blamed him for his long-ago absence. “It'll be yours when I go—yours and Henry's.”

She'd smiled and changed the subject; she was so focused on her own strange plans that his news hardly seemed to sink in. But Henry—Henry's eyes had flared and his whole face had glowed. “Two hundred acres?” he'd said. The number had rolled on his tongue like a truffle and was hiding behind his lashes now. He would bulldoze each acre, Brendan feared, unless he could see a reason not to. “Jesus,” he'd said.

In the library, Brendan heard someone cry, “Jesus, protect us and save us.” Henry looked over Brendan's shoulder and said, “What's going on in there?”

“Some kind of healing service.”

“Who are they healing?”

“Me.” Brendan smiled sourly. “They asked me to come this morning, so they could cast out my evil spirits and make me well. When I said I was busy, they said they were going to pray for me anyhow.”

“Couldn't hurt,” Henry said. Which reminded Brendan of Wiloma, whose plans could hurt him, and were about to hurt him, unless he could convince Henry to help him first.

S
EVERAL WEEKS AGO, WHEN BRENDAN HAD TOLD WILOMA
what the idiot doctors meant to do, a vision had sailed into Wiloma's head. Brendan had told her, over and over for years, that he was happy at St. Benedict's. He had friends there, he'd said. He liked the routine. She'd believed him because it was convenient to believe him. But the vision of him hooked up to tubes and pierced by needles had finally convinced her that it was time to bring him home.

“The spare bedroom's empty,” she'd told him. “There's plenty of room, it's what I want to do. And now that the doctors are acting so irresponsibly, we can't afford to wait.”

“It's just a little chemo,” Brendan had said. “They just want to try.”

“A little chemo,” she'd replied. “A little
poison.
They want to poison you, they think you're dying.”

“We're all dying,” Brendan had said, and then he'd rolled his eyes at her behind his glasses. She had known what he was thinking—the same thing her children thought, the same thing her unconverted neighbors thought. That she'd been brainwashed by the Church of the New Reason; that she was fanatical, out of control. When it should have been obvious to anyone what the Church had given her.

On this Saturday morning, Wiloma fluffed a pillow in her spare room, straightened the bedclothes, and adjusted the bedside lamp. Brendan could roll his eyes all he liked, but no one could stop her from signing him out and bringing him home. Most likely no one would even try. The staff at St. Benedict's had given up on him and avoided his room as if he were already dead. And so of course he was dying, they were drawing off his life force. The drugs they wanted to give him would quench the last of his Spirit.

She imagined Brendan's Spirit glowing with renewed energy from the new sheets and blankets, the egg-crate mattress she'd bought, the furniture she'd moved, and she thought proudly of all she'd done in the past three weeks. She'd called St. Benedict's and set the paperwork in motion. The social worker there had suggested she hire a daily nurse, but she'd done something better: she'd engaged Christine Emerson, the Church's local spiritual neuro-nutritionist. Christine had told her what else she needed to do. She'd filled the small bookcase with Church literature, as Christine had directed; she'd placed her well-thumbed copy of the Manual within easy reach of Brendan's bed. On the wall she'd hung the framed linen square she'd cross-stitched herself.
Nothing exists external to our minds,
read the motto on the square.
Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas.

When she'd completed her detoxification, almost two years ago, that motto had been the raft on which she'd floated to safety. The detox team had pulled her bad memories from her one by one, her bad attitudes, her dichotomous taxonomies, her negative and judgmental faculties and her desires for sickness and pain. They'd left behind that motto and the other sayings in the Manual, and they'd helped her understand that her husband's desertion of her for Sarah, his bookkeeper, had been for the best.

The team had enabled her to see how Waldo had impeded her spiritual growth and kept their children from the Light. He had
had
to leave her, she'd learned, so that she could flower into the Spirit. And he had
had
to marry Sarah, and Sarah had
had
to become pregnant with Courteney. Just as she herself had
had,
shortly after Courteney's birth, to suffer a pain so sharp and startling that she would slip over the edge at the sight of her children's misbehaviors and crash into a wall of darkness. The Church was big on things that
had
to happen; you had to drown, she learned, before you could be saved.

All of that had been necessary, she'd learned, all that wallowing in the fog of pain her own mind had created. It had been necessary that she go away for a while, necessary that Waldo take Wendy and Win and refuse to return them to her until she had, as he called it, “straightened out.” And if her new serenity concealed things of which Waldo might not approve, that was none of Waldo's business now.

She'd had her children back for eighteen months and they were doing fine. Several weeks ago, at Wendy's high-school graduation, she'd been able to sit calmly with Waldo and Sarah and Courteney. Win, looking handsome in a new navy suit, had sat beside her and held her hand while Wendy went up to receive her diploma. Wendy had walked smoothly up the stairs and smoothly down. And afterward, when they stood in a row outside the auditorium and Wendy had kissed them one by one, Wiloma had been able to smile and bless the Spirit in Courteney when Wendy had lifted her into the air.

There is no pain,
she'd told herself then.
There is no guilt. There is no blame. Life is what you believe it is.

She felt happy now, perfectly clear. And all she wanted to do was share that clearness with Brendan, so that, if this was his time to die, he went smoothly into the Light. Not pickled with drugs; not hazy-headed and pricked by needles; not bound by the tired religion that had crippled his life and almost captured her. A clear transit: the best she could offer him, less than she owed.

She checked her watch—ten-thirty already, and Waldo had promised to bring the kids back right after breakfast. She felt a prickle of fear, which she quickly suppressed. Sometimes, when she grew lazy and lax, she couldn't push away the thought that Waldo might steal the kids back for good. Behind that came the thought that he had stolen them once; and behind that the sense that they had sealed off parts of themselves during her absence, and that Waldo had had as much to do with their withdrawal as with their reformed behavior.

But she knew these thoughts were only true if she believed in them, and she pushed them down and buried them like stones. She reminded herself that Waldo was always late; that his tardiness was a part of him and that he wasn't in control of his deeper self. As soon as she thought this and calmed herself, she heard the kitchen door open and her children clatter in.

“Mom,” Win called from downstairs. “Mom? Did you wash my soccer stuff? I have a game today, I have to get going ….”

“Up here,” she called, but it was Wendy who came up the stairs and into the spare room. She was wearing nice clothes, expensive clothes that Sarah had no doubt picked out and paid for: high-waisted sage-green pants, a mustard shirt with large pearly buttons, a broad belt, and pretty sandals. Wiloma looked down at her own faded skirt and old blue blouse, and she noticed for the first time that her skirt had a large stain below the right pocket. Part of the hem seemed to be coming down and her ankles looked callused and dry. She knew she dressed badly. She had often, since Wendy had started dressing so well, meant to clean herself up. But she had so little time to pay attention to her clothes, and even when she tried it seemed as if nothing she owned really went with anything else. She suppressed a sigh, and with it the thought that she missed Wendy's old clothes, the drooping skirts and men's jackets worn over tired T-shirts, the leggings and army boots and old hats studded with pins.

She watched Wendy take in the soft armchair, the bright pillows, and the throw rug she'd transported from the living room. “It looks good in here,” Wendy said. “Grunkie's going to like it.”

The nickname came from a time when Wendy, at the age of three or four, had been struggling to fit her mouth around “Great-uncle Brendan” and had come up with those two childish syllables instead. When she said them now, she sounded eight rather than eighteen, but there was nothing childish in the way her smile disappeared when she saw the cross-stitched motto on the wall. “Do you want that in here?” she said. “Really?”

Wiloma nodded. “Really,” she said.

The scorn in Wendy's voice annoyed her—surely anyone could see how the Church might heal Brendan, after all it had done for her. It was different, entirely different, from the other disciplines she'd sampled between Waldo's departure and Courteney's birth. She'd experimented with Zen, hours of sitting on a round black cushion and listening to the great drum and the ping of ceramic bells. In a Gurdjieff group she'd learned some of the movements; in the latihans of Subud, she had growled and cried and sung. Then one day she'd driven past a convent, which was hidden behind a wall and a row of trees, and she'd remembered how, when she was just a girl, she'd asked Brendan what he'd felt like when he'd first entered his abbey.
Peaceful,
he'd said.
Clean. Whole. Happy.
Feelings that, in those first few months after Waldo's departure, she couldn't imagine ever having again. She'd never been inside a Catholic church. Her parents had died before they'd settled the issue of which faith, Presbyterian or Catholic, would claim their children, and her grandparents had given up on church completely. But she remembered the light in Brendan's face when he talked about his youth, and she wrote the Sisters and asked if she could visit them.

The Sisters mailed her a blue pamphlet with a text handprinted on coarse paper. Inside were prayers and a daily schedule and a number of photographs: women in calf-length white dresses and black tunics and short white veils, women in work clothes and boots and glasses and scarves that hid their hair. Women milking cows, fixing tractors, cutting melons into quarters; praying, eating, baking, doing useful work. The pictures were hugely appealing and the note clipped inside the brochure said that Wiloma was welcome anytime for a weekend retreat.

She hadn't gone; she'd shown the brochure and the note to Brendan, sure that he'd approve, and he'd suggested, gently, that perhaps she work up to a retreat in steps. Find a church you like, he'd said. A priest you trust. Join a prayer group and see about some religious training. He had asked her what she knew about the Catholic Church these days and she'd had to admit she knew almost nothing. “It's a big commitment,” he'd said. “Starting from scratch at your age.”

She had gone twice to St. Mary's, a mile from her house, but the services had made no more of a dent in her distress than had her other experiments. The convent was worlds away, she'd seen. Even a visit was years in the distance. And then her Manual had arrived in the mail, in response to a coupon she'd forgotten she'd filled out, and its quiet voice had begun to speak to her.

Spirit is real; matter is unreal. Truth is real; error is unreal. Light is real; darkness is unreal.
The voice was simple, the voice was clear. It spoke the words she'd been yearning for. She had fallen into the Church's warm embrace and had never turned back—not when Brendan had expressed his dismay, not when her own family mocked her.

Now she watched her daughter frown and change the subject. “Soft,” Wendy said, as she sat down on the edge of the bed and tested the egg-crate mattress. “Sort of strange.”

“How was your visit?” Wiloma asked.

“Also strange,” Wendy said. Stranger than usual. Sarah made cassoulet—she said it had taken her two days and she was upset when Win didn't like it. But it tasted a lot like baked beans to us. Win gave Courteney some of his, and Courteney threw it in the fireplace. Dad and Sarah got into an argument over some bills. Then after supper Dad took us into that den of his and started showing us maps of this place in Massachusetts. Some of them were topographic maps, those green ones with the lines. Then he had these old ones, not really old but copies of old ones, that he said he'd ordered from the Geological Survey people in Washington. He kept us in there looking at them for an hour.”

Wiloma looked at her sharply. “What was that all about?”

“Grunkie. I think. Dad showed us, on the old maps, this place where Grunkie used to live. And then he showed us the new ones, and how that place had been covered by a reservoir. He said there was a big hill or something at the edge of it that Grunkie still owns, and that you and Uncle Henry had been born there.”

Wiloma stared at the armchair and tried to sort out what Waldo might be up to. She had mentioned the land to him casually, when he'd stopped by to drop off some papers just after her visit to her uncle. It had seemed like an interesting fact, a drop of oil to smooth their awkward conversation, but she'd known as soon as she mentioned it that she should have kept quiet. “Don't you dare go giving that to the Church,” he'd said, as if he had any right to tell her what to do. “Don't do anything with it until I have a chance to get it appraised.”

She had shrugged off his comments, thinking them just another example of his reflexive attempts to meddle in her financial affairs. But she couldn't imagine why he'd gathered those maps, or why he'd shown them to the children.

“It was interesting,” Wendy said. “How come you never told us about that? This huge area, all these villages being drowned—isn't that amazing? I mean it's awful, in a way, but still …”

“I never saw those places,” Wiloma said. Her stomach was beginning to ache. “The reservoir was filled before I was bom.”

“Dad says Grunkie lived there, and that your grandparents had a farm there before they had the place in Coreopsis. It's so amazing—do you think Grunkie remembers it?”

“Of course he does,” Wiloma said. “He just doesn't like to talk about it.” She didn't either; she had heard the story so often during her childhood that she couldn't stand to repeat it.

“They
stole
it from us,” Da used to say. He'd held her and Henry captive for hours at the table in Coreopsis, telling and retelling his tales of the Paradise Valley as if he could bring his dead son back with his words or recover his lost life. She'd known, even then, that those tales were what kept him from functioning as any kind of surrogate father. “Those men in suits, those Boston men—it was Curley and his gang, all that Boston gang, they stole the ground out from under our feet.”