The Forms of Water (15 page)

All of them were young. Anita, as she'd looked on the day when Coreopsis Heights was still a dream; Kitty, as she'd looked on the shore of Canandaigua Lake; Lise and Delia; his mother. Even Gran looked as she had in the wedding picture that had hung over the mantel in Coreopsis. He looked down at himself and saw that he alone had a fifty-year-old body. He had hair in his nose and his ears and his eyebrows were growing together. His stomach hung down, no matter how hard he tried to suck it in. His hands and feet were callused and freckled and the skin where his thighs met his groin was creased. In the soft breeze, against the fresh vegetation, he looked obscene.

He threw himself onto the grass and rolled like a dog, and when he stood he bristled with green stems. He pranced in his green coat; he danced and threw his hands in the air; and when the smooth-fleshed women still ignored him he jumped into one of the trees and sang like a mad bird. The stems clothing him had turned into feathers. The women, he realized, could neither see nor hear him, and he raised his tattered wings and flew over the water.

He woke when he heard his uncle calling, “Henry? Henry?”

Feathers? he thought, feeling his clothes with his hands. Where had that come from? He walked to the van and stuck his head through the open window.

“What is it? Are you all right?” He couldn't see Brendan's face at all.

“I have to take a leak,” Brendan whispered. “I had a little cup, I left it on my chair.”

The chair stood next to the van, and Henry felt along the seat until his fingers touched a plastic cup. He passed it through the window. “Do you need help?”

“No. But you can toss it for me when I'm done.” Henry heard water again, just a trickle this time, and then Brendan said, “Here.” Henry emptied the half-filled cup on the ground.

“Can you sleep?” he asked his uncle.

“On and off. How about you?”

“I was dreaming,” Henry said. “I had such a strange dream.”

“Go back to it,” Brendan said. “I'm sorry I woke you.”

Henry went back to his blanket, but his dream was gone.

T
HE EVENING HAD PASSED SO SMOOTHLY, AND IT HAD BEEN
so nice to have the house to themselves and not to think about what their families were up to, that Wendy had let time slip and slide and high-step past her without telling Delia what had happened. Sometime after eleven, though, in the living room littered with cartons of grapefruit juice and vodka bottles and pizza boxes, Delia said, “So where'd your mother go, anyway? One of her weird retreats?”

Wendy had almost forgotten how strange her story was. Casually, almost flippantly, she explained about Grunkie's disappearance and her mother's reaction to it, and her father's reaction to her mother's reaction, and her mother's suspicions that Henry had actually stolen Grunkie away. Wendy's embroidered bag leaned against her chair with the rag dolls showing at the top, and as she spoke she took the dolls from the bag and manipulated them like puppets. The story, backed by the dolls' gestures, seemed almost funny. She said, he said, I said; she said he said; I said to her; rumors, guesses, speculations. She was not prepared for Delia's response.

“My father did
what?”
she said, and it took Wendy a minute to realize that Delia might see the story from a different perspective, evidence of one more link in the endless chain of her father's recent fuck-ups. She forgot, sometimes, that Delia took her father's escapades so hard. She'd had less than a year to get used to them, and she felt guilty about the way he'd ended up. Lise and Kitty had shed Henry like snakes, but Delia still seemed tied to him by a tag of obligation or love, like the string of flesh left behind by a pulled tooth.

“This whole thing's probably in my mother's head,” Wendy said soothingly. “You know how she gets. All anyone really knows is that your father and Grunkie left St. Benedict's together in this van they borrowed. Mom and Dad both think they went to Massachusetts, so that's where they've gone to look for them.”

Delia bent over until her head met her knees. “Asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole.”

“Your father?” Roy said. He rested his hand on the back of Delia's neck.

“Of course my father.” She sighed and lifted her head and stretched her arms behind her back. “He's such a jerk—after all he's done to us, after all he's done to his family, you'd think he'd give it a rest. But no—he has to take a helpless old man from a nursing home, fuck up everyone's lives again ….”

“We don't
know
that,” Wendy said. “We don't know what happened at all. I'm only telling you what my mother said.”

Win, who had finally agreed to stay home, had been playing with the Nintendo paraphernalia Waldo had loaned him. The television bleeped and flickered as a helicopter exploded again and again and was miraculously resurrected. Now he set down the controls and drifted toward Delia. “What's going on?” he asked. “What's the problem?”

“The problem,” Delia said, “the problem is …” Without warning, and with considerable grace, she hurled her glass of grapefruit juice and vodka into the fireplace. “I'm so sick of this family,” Delia said more calmly. “I'm so sick of my father I could puke. This is all his fault, I know it is—I don't even have to know what's going on to know he did it. He's like a bulldozer without a driver out there, crashing through the world and wrecking up everything. He's such a child.”

With her flushed face and her curly hair, Delia looked like a child herself. Win bent over the fireplace and began picking up the shards of glass. “What's the big deal?” he said. “Your father, my mother—they're both crazy. It's not like this is news. What's the point of getting all upset?”

“You're sixteen,” Delia said scornfully. “What do you know?”

“More than you do. I know there isn't any point in worrying about whatever they're doing. They're all out there on the road somewhere, buzzing around each other, and you watch, whatever's going on, they'll all be back tomorrow acting like nothing ever happened. And that's because probably nothing
is
happening. You can't take them seriously.”

Delia rose unsteadily and headed for the kitchen. “I have to call Lise,” she said, as if Lise had ever been any help to her. She shook off Wendy's hand when Wendy reached out to stop her. “Don't touch me. I can't believe you didn't tell me this was going on.”

“I
did
tell you,” Wendy said. “I just did.”

“Now.
After letting me sit here all night, thinking everything was fine.” Delia vanished into the kitchen and Roy touched Wendy's forearm gently.

“It's not your fault,” he said. “She always overreacts when she hears anything about her father. She can't stand to side with him, but she still feels sorry for him and she gets herself all tangled up.”

When Delia returned from the kitchen she looked grimly satisfied. “You won't believe this,” she announced. “Lise is over at Mom's helping her pack up, and when I told her what was going on, she said that Dad and Grunkie had been there around lunchtime, in a van no less, and that Dad was in this really strange mood and he and Mom had one of their fights. Lise said she heard Dad tell Mom that he was bringing Grunkie over here for dinner.”

She said she heard him tell her, Wendy thought. “Not for dinner,” she admitted. “To stay.”

“What?” Delia said. “What else aren't you telling me?”

Win frowned across the room at Wendy, but Wendy kept on talking. Somehow, even without the dolls in her hands, her words didn't seem to matter anymore. All the words that had sprung from everyone's lips all day had fused and mutated and taken on a life of their own, which seemed bound to sprout strangely no matter what she did. She said, “Grunkie was supposed to stay here. Until—you know.”

“Until he dies,” Win said firmly. He came and stood next to Wendy and picked up the dolls she'd set against the pizza boxes. “Where did you get these?” he asked Wendy quietly. “Did you take them?”

“I borrowed them.”

“I don't get it,” Delia said, while Win scanned Wendy's guilty face. “Why would Grunkie come here?”

“Because,” Wendy said. “Mom wanted—he was due for some chemotherapy, and Mom said it wasn't going to do any good, and she wanted him to come stay here so someone from her stupid church could try some sort of diet on him.” She rose and beckoned to Delia and Roy and then led them into the spare room her mother had readied for Grunkie.

“Look at this,” she said. She showed them the Manual, the bookcase filled with Church literature, and the cross-stitched sampler bearing the Church motto.
Nothing exists external to our minds,
she read for the second time that day.
Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas.
She made a mental note to add another item to the list in her closet:
I will remember that the world is real.
Ideas had gotten them nowhere, she thought. Ideas had brought her mother to this.

“He was supposed to come tomorrow,” she said. “Mom was going to pick him up. And then somehow she was going to take care of him. Except she can't even take care of herself half the time.”

Delia laughed bitterly. “Look at this crap.”

Wendy drew a deep breath. She and Win used to try to hide their mother's strangeness from Delia and Lise, but Henry's crash had offered them a peculiar relief—since Delia had started confiding in them, they'd started confiding back. Sometimes, caught in a long exchange of “my mother said” and “my father did,” they had actually laughed. She had nothing to lose by saying what came next. “Mom said Grunkie must have told Uncle Henry about the neuro-nutritionist who's supposed to come.”

“The what?” Delia asked.

“This nurse, this lady from the Church who's supposed to help him. Grunkie wasn't all that thrilled about the idea, I guess. And Mom said Grunkie must have told your father, and your father maybe took him away so he wouldn't have to come here. You know how he hates Mom's Church stuff. He thinks it's crazy.”

“It is,” Delia said. “You told me so yourself.”

“Your father isn't?”

They stared at each other until the doorbell rang.

“That's probably Lise,” Delia said. “I told her to come over.”

Wendy groaned. “Now? You know she'll just make things worse.” Lise knew everyone's weak spots and hit them unerringly, and Wendy had always wondered if Lise noticed the way her words drove everyone away. The way she had of acting forty instead of twenty-three, as if she were decades older than the rest of them—Wendy felt a stiffness creeping up on her already, an echo of Lise's rigid posture. Delia had, she knew, long since stopped telling Lise about anything important, and as they moved to the door she whispered to Delia, “Did you make up something?”

“About what?”

“Why you're home. What you're doing here. Roy?”

“Shit. I forgot all about that. Tell her I'm visiting you, okay?”

“Okay. But she's going to remember Roy.”

Delia rolled her eyes and then pulled Roy to her and whispered something to him. Roy laughed. Delia said to Wendy, “Tell her Roy's with you now. That you two hooked up after I left.”

She gave Wendy the same conspiratorial grin they'd shared as children, whenever they'd banded together to protect themselves from Use's prying. Before Wendy could say anything, Roy left Delia's side and moved to hers. “My darling,” he said in a joking voice. “My own true love.”

Her whole arm grew warm as he took her hand and held it. “My prince,” she said, trying to keep her voice as light as his.

Win, who had been watching all this, said, “Are we ready?” His voice was sarcastic. “Everyone got everything sorted out?”

Wendy and Roy and Delia nodded, and Win threw open the door. A woman stood there, not Lise, a woman older than Wiloma with short white hair and very white skin and a face so creased and lined and scored that it resembled a cotton shirt someone had washed and then forgotten to iron. Her gauzy printed skirt sagged almost to her ankles and was topped by a blue blouse. A large wicker basket was strapped to her back.

“Hello?” Wendy said. “Can I help you?”

“You must be Wendy,” the woman said. Wendy felt a prickle of fear. “Is your mother here?”

Win pushed himself in front of Wendy. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I'm Christine. From the Healing Center. Your mother asked me to come.”

“Tomorrow,” Wendy protested as Christine walked past them and into the living room. “You're supposed to be here
tomorrow.”

“I always come the night before, to make sure the treatment area is properly arranged.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Win asked. “Barging in here like this.”

“I come where I'm called,” Christine said.

Delia laughed. “This is a joke, right?”

Christine gazed at the filthy living room and the dolls on the table and the spray of juice on the fireplace. “Nice,” she said. “Does your mother know about this?”

“Our mother's away for the evening,” said Win.

“Why?” asked Christine. She wandered toward the kitchen before Wendy could answer, with her hands out before her like a blind woman's. She touched the walls and the doorframes and the chairs and the drapes, as if she were trying to read them with her hands. As Wendy and Win and Roy and Delia followed her, she touched the stove, the sink, the dishwasher, and the refrigerator. Then she turned to Wendy expectantly. “On the counter,” Wendy blurted. “Under the phone.” She couldn't understand what had made her speak.

Christine picked up the note Wendy had placed there earlier and read it. “But this is serious. Explain.”

Wendy told her the same story she'd told her father and then Win and then Delia, aware that it sounded worse with each repetition and afraid that she'd twisted, somehow, the already twisted tale her mother had told her. He said, she said, we said, she thought. They said, you said, I said. I said. She closed her eyes and felt the world chipped into bits around her, made up of the same small squares that formed the creatures and obstacles of Win's video games. Nothing smooth and blended, everything sharp-edged and discrete, every word and act and person separate from every other, and the illusion that they formed a whole just that, just an illusion, visible only from a distance that blurred everything. Her voice trailed off and she opened her eyes to find Christine staring at her. “I mean,” she said faintly, “I mean that's what my mother thinks. I don't know what my father thinks. I don't know why he went with her.”

“Your mother has good instincts,” Christine said. “Her hypothesis may be correct. Your great-uncle's been a little resistant to the idea of being Healed. And if your uncle feels the same way …”

“He's my
father,”
Delia said impatiently.

Christine turned toward Delia, her gray eyes shining like lamps. “Your father?” Wendy noticed that her eyebrows were almost invisible. “You're the niece?”

“Wiloma's niece,” Delia snapped. “Henry's daughter. Grunkie's grandniece. And my father feels the same way Grunkie does. He thinks you're all crazy.”

Christine nodded gravely. “That would be consistent. Your father is the one who lost the farm in Coreopsis?”

“That's him,” Delia said, while Wendy wondered what else this woman knew. “The one who loses everything.”

Christine moved to the stove and started heating a kettle of water. “But he doesn't just lose things,” she said. “Does he? He takes things all the time, to make up for everything he's lost. Other people's land, other people's love …”

Delia's face turned a strange color, and Wendy felt her own face flush as she thought of the dolls in the living room. It was sickening, what this woman knew. Her mother must have told her everything.