The Forms of Water (16 page)

Christine had kept her basket on her back, but now she leaned against the counter and slipped her arms from the straps. Quietly, she unloaded a bundle of branches with waxy leaves and shiny white berries, and then an assortment of small paper sacks that were folded, stapled, and labeled. She said to Wendy, “Where are the cups?”

Wendy gestured toward the cabinet over the sink, and when Christine reached in for the mugs, Wendy's arm stole out and plucked a branch from the bundle and slipped it into her pocket. Win and Roy and Delia were all watching her but she couldn't stop herself. She had to see if this woman knew everything. Christine looked back over her shoulder and said, “Are you very drunk?”

Wendy, suddenly speechless, turned to Win. “No,” he said. “We haven't been drinking.”

“Not you two, the others.”

“What business is it of yours?” Roy asked.

“None,” Christine said. If she'd seen the branch disappear, she apparently wasn't going to mention it. Wendy pulled her shirt over her pocket. “But I have some tea here, it's sassafras. It'll clear your heads.”

She measured out something brown and dusty from one of the sacks and then poured water into the teapot that stood near the toaster. Wendy watched her helplessly, wondering if there was a way to push her out into the night, and then she followed her to the table and sat down. The four of them sipped at their tea as if Christine had cast a spell on them. Her mouth was too small, Wendy decided. Or maybe it was her eyes that were too big, or the way her eyebrows vanished unless the light hit them just right. Whatever the reason, her eyes seemed to take up half her face.

“The question,” Christine said, “the question
is
 …,” but before she could finish Lise walked in and Delia burst into tears. Roy, as if Lise were a gust of wind, leaned away from Delia and toward Wendy. Lise had shoes on, Wendy saw. Not sneakers or flip-flops, but shiny hard shoes with pointed toes. And stockings. And she carried a purse. She had cut her hair and she looked like Henry in drag. She squared her bony shoulders and said, “Does someone want to tell me what's going on?”

“You would be … ?” Christine asked.

“Lise. Delia's sister. Who are you?” But before Christine could answer, Delia rose and took Lise's arm and led her out of the room. Wendy could hear Delia's voice behind the wall, rising, falling, crying—Delia, she realized, was drunker than she looked. Roy covered Wendy's hand with his. “Let her get it out,” he whispered. “I usually just let her cry for a while.”

Win slapped his palms against the table. “I don't suppose,” he said to Christine, “there's any chance you'd pack up your stuff and get out of here.”

“I have to go where I'm called. That's my job. I'm sorry you feel I'm infringing on your space.”

Win rolled his eyes at Wendy. Roy said, “This seems like sort of a family thing. Maybe I ought to get going.”

“Stay,” Wendy said. “Please.” She was so tired that she wanted to rest her head on the table and sleep, but she knew something dreadful would happen if she closed her eyes in Christine's presence. She'd go to sleep as one person, wake up as another; she'd wake up believing everything her mother believed she believed. She'd wake up on Christine's side, sure the world could be fixed by faith in a simple set of rules. Christine had power; Wendy could feel it flowing across the table from those clear eyes. Something in her was so calm and strong, or so calmly mad, that Wendy could almost imagine what had lured her mother into the Church.

Christine leaned over and fixed her gaze on Wendy. “Your great-uncle's Spirit is getting ready to transit. If I don't help him soon, he's going to be lost.”

Win snorted into his tea. “Lost where?” he said. “Mom told us you were going to cure Grunkie. Keep him alive.”

Christine kept her eyes fixed on Wendy. “Your mother said I was going to
Heal
him. You weren't paying attention to her words.”

“You can't cure him?” Wendy said.

“Maybe not his body. He's let this disease get a grip on him, and it's gone a long way—he believes in it and believes it's going to kill him, and as long as he does, it will. But I can Heal his Spirit—I can teach him how to think correctly and give him certain herbs and foods that will free his Spirit from his disease. I can make sure his Spirit finds the Light.”

Roy tipped himself back in his chair. “I don't get it. Are you some kind of priest?”

“I'm a certified spiritual neuro-nutritionist,” Christine said quietly. “From the Church of the New Reason.”

Roy shook his head, but he was polite and Wendy was grateful for that. What must we look like? she wondered. This house, this woman, this family—to an outsider, we must all look nuts. There was a reason she never brought friends home, a reason she never dated, and this was it, right here, sitting across the table. Their lives sometimes sailed along normally for months, but when she least expected it, when she was most lured into thinking they lived like everyone else, things like this came out of nowhere. A Christine appeared, or a convoy of cars loaded with people prepared for a group meditation, or two men in dark suits rang the doorbell and wouldn't leave.

Lise led Delia back into the kitchen just then, and this time she looked sharply at Roy. “Don't I know you?”

Roy draped his arm over the back of Wendy's chair. “I used to go out with your sister. Till she went away to school. Then I met Wendy.” Wendy reached her hand back for Roy's.

“You,” Lise said. “I remember you. You had that ugly dog.” Roy flinched and Lise addressed herself to Wendy. “Delia told me what's been going on. It's just outrageous. Grunkie ought to be in a hospital, or at least back at St. Benedict's. The
idea
of bringing him here—I don't know what Dad's up to, and it figures he'd mess up whatever it is, but I can certainly sympathize with his wanting to keep Grunkie out of this.”

Christine looked at Lise. Her eyes, Wendy saw, were not gray but almost violet. “You aren't very happy,” Christine said. “Are you.”

Win laughed out loud at that and even Delia smiled. The tip of Lise's nose looked white and pinched. “I don't know who you think you are,” Lise said, “but if you think you have any right—”

“Have a seat,” Christine said, and Lise frowned but sat down. Delia sat, too, and then Christine said, “Now listen. We have a situation here. You two”—she pointed at Delia and Lise—“are worried about your father.” Lise opened her mouth, but Christine silenced her with an upraised hand. “You're angry. Disgusted. But also worried. And you two”— she looked at Wendy and Win—”are worried about your mother. And you're all worried about your great-uncle and I am, too. And the question is—what are you going to do?”

She glanced over at Roy, who was staring out the window. “I'm not ignoring you. You're worried about the girls. You're part of this.”

Roy drew his eyes back from the window. “That's right,” he said. “I am.”

Then Win looked at Wendy and Delia and said, “We're not part of
anything.
Don't you get it? If we let ourselves get caught up in this, then we're acting just like them—we have to stay out of this. Just stand by.”

Christine said, “Yes? Like you did when your mother was sick? Did you find that helpful?”

Win paled beneath his tan and Wendy caught her breath. That was cruel, she thought. We were children then. We did the best we could.

“Why don't
you
do something?” Lise said. “If you're so smart.”

“Because I am not allowed to intervene,” Christine said. “Except in matters of the Spirit. I can listen. I can counsel. I can heal. Nothing more. And anyway, my concern isn't with your parents, except as their actions affect your great-uncle. My concern is with him.”

For a minute they all sat silently. Roy rubbed his thumb along the back of Wendy's chair, causing a tiny vibration that Wendy felt in her flesh. Lise crossed her legs and plucked at her stockings. Delia pouted. Win rose, opened the refrigerator, and started pawing through the white sacks Christine had deposited there. “Lily buds,” he said, reading the labels. “Poppy seeds. Horseradish root. Cattail tubers. What do you do with this stuff?”

“Same thing I do with the mistletoe,” Christine said, laying a hand on the bundle that was now missing a branch. “Release the Spirit from the flesh. Connect it to the great Spirit that animates the earth.”

“We could call the police,” Lise said, her sharp face brightening. “Have you arrested for practicing medicine without a license.”

“We're an official, tax-exempt church,” Christine said. “And I'm an official Church representative, and the Healing is an official Church ceremony. We're completely legitimate—why can't you accept that I'm here to help?”

Wendy fingered her stolen twig. The leaves felt smooth and soft and gently sticky; the berries were hard and cool. Her uncle's salvation, if Christine was to be believed, was lying right here in her hand. She thought of all the people who'd tried to rescue her when her mother had been sick, teachers and neighbors and friends' parents who'd held out their hands and tried to help. But all along she'd known that the salvations being offered were not her salvation, that whatever she needed was beyond their ability to give. Christine couldn't help them, and her twigs and powders couldn't help Grunkie. But perhaps there was something she and Win and her cousins could do themselves.

An idea had been forming in her mind while Lise and Christine spoke, and in the pause that followed, it rose to Wendy's lips and escaped like a bubble. “We ought to go after them.”

“You could do that,” Christine said. “If you chose. You're old enough to know your own mind.”

The others turned to look at Wendy, and Wendy focused on them and tuned out Christine. “Mom and Dad can't do anything together,” she said. “You know how they trip each other up. Even if they find Grunkie and Uncle Henry, Mom will mess up anything Dad figures out, and Dad won't be able to get Mom to agree to do anything.”

Delia, after a guilty look at Lise, chimed in, “And our father's out of his mind. Honest to God—he's dangerous. I don't know what he's doing, but I know he can't take care of Grunkie the way Grunkie needs. I'm not saying we should bring Grunkie back here—but at least if we could find them, we could maybe keep Dad from getting arrested. Or worse—what if he smacks up the van the way he smacked up his car?”

“Except,” Win said dryly, “except that you don't know where any of them are.”

“But we do,” Wendy said. “You saw those maps Dad showed us—he was all excited about that land.”

“What land?” Lise asked.

“This land in Massachusetts, where Grunkie grew up. He told your father and my mother he was leaving each of them half of it, and your father got all excited about it, or at least that's what my mother says, and then my father got all excited, too—he showed us these maps of the reservoir the land's on, or under or near or something, and then …”

Rumors, lies, and speculations, she thought as her voice trailed away. She knew those; they were what fueled half her waking hours. She told herself she was not falling under their spell but combating them actively. If she found her family and herded them home she'd be doing something real, which might reverse the events her mother's phone call had set in motion. She might be able to unwind the day and set them all back to the place where they'd been before.

“But we don't have the maps,” Win said.

“But I remember,” Wendy said. “Sort of. Don't you? All we have to do is head for the reservoir. We could find it on a road map, and once we were there we could figure out the rest.”

“You're out of your mind,” Win said.

“Completely,” Lise agreed.

But Christine was smiling at her broadly. “What an intelligent young woman you are,” she said, and Wendy's skin prickled in warning. “You'd be doing your mother a favor if you could help her out, keep your father from interfering—and you'd be helping your great-uncle, too. I need to see him very soon.”

“This is
my
idea,” Wendy said. “We're not going because of you.” She turned to Delia. “Would you come with me?”

“I guess.” Delia looked at her sister nervously. “You can't go by yourself. Maybe Roy …”

“I'll drive,” Roy said. “If you have to go, we'll take my car. You've had too much to drink.”

“If you think you're taking off at this hour with these two girls …,” Lise said.

“You can come,” Roy said mildly. “If you want.”

“I'm not staying here alone,” Win said. He tilted his head toward Christine. “Not with her.”

“I'll stay here,” Christine said. “Keep an eye on things.”

She smiled at Wendy again, but Wendy ignored her. This wasn't Christine's idea, it had nothing to do with her. They weren't going after Grunkie just to bring him back to Christine. They were going, she thought, because their parents were children; because they were confused and lost and destructive and incapable of caring for themselves. They were so busy chasing after a past they couldn't recover that they couldn't see what was happening right in front of their eyes. Somewhere, she knew, her mother was sitting next to her father and pretending they were still married—wishing, dreaming. Undoing everything she'd spent four years working through. Somewhere her uncle Henry was trying to fix his life by tunneling back to the years before he'd wrecked it.

They'd always been that way—she and Win had known that for years, and now Lise and Delia knew it too. Their parents weren't like other parents because they had no parents of their own. Sometimes, when she and Win had been living with their father, she had tried to imagine growing up without her parents, in the care of two people as old as Grunkie. Sometimes she tried to imagine the moment her mother had once described, when strangers had come for her and Henry and said, “Come with us. Your parents have been in an accident.” Then, for brief stretches, she'd been able to understand her mother's quirks.