The Forms of Water by Andrea Barrett Read Free Book Online

The bank had snipped his credit cards to bits.
    He stood behind the chair, released the brakes, and began wheeling Brendan out of the room and along the halls. Near the recreation center Brendan said, “There may not be a next time.”
    â€œWhat?” Henry said. “Why not?”
    â€œBecause Wiloma’s planning to take me home with her. Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to set me up in her spare room and bombard me with positive thoughts until I’m cured.”
    â€œShe didn’t tell me,” Henry said, thinking of the way Wiloma had averted her face last night on the far side of the storefront window. “She didn’t even ask me what I thought. But it’s not like she ever tells me anything.”
    They passed a man in another wheelchair, sitting perfectly still with his chin mashed against his collarbone and his hands drawn up over his heart. The hall smelled faintly of urine and disinfectant. “Would you rather stay here?” Henry asked. “Would you rather have the chemo?”
    â€œOf course not. But that doesn’t mean I want Wiloma’s heathen healers all over me. They’re not even Christians, never mind not being Catholic—as far as I can tell, they think they’re all part of some amorphous spirit. Like the cells in a big sponge, or something. I can’t believe she believes in that.”
    Near the solarium, along the hall that led to Brendan’s room, Henry stopped at the niche in front of the picture window. “So what
do
you want?” he asked.
    Below them the park stretched rolling and green, and a wedding party decked out in shades of lavender posed in front of some shrubs. A very large woman, perhaps the mother of the bride, shouted something Henry couldn’t hear at the driver of the limousine. Brendan’s left arm drifted up from his chair and hung in the air for a minute.
    â€œWhat I want?” he said. “What do I want?” His hand drifted back down to his lap, and then he said, “I want to go to Massachusetts. I want you to drive us there, so I can show you the land I’m leaving you and Wiloma. I want to see the reservoir. I want to see where your parents lived.”
    For a second, Henry saw the cabin in which he’d spent his first nine years. He saw the rough pine paneling and the wood-burning stove; he saw his mother bent over the kitchen table, snipping war reports from newspapers and magazines. He saw the map of the Pacific she kept on the wall and the pins dotting the islands where battles had raged, with and without his father: New Guinea, Makin, Eniwetok, Saipan. He heard his mother’s voice telling him how he’d leapt in her womb during the 1938 hurricane, which had started on the same day Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and so been ignored by almost everyone.
Calamitous days,
she’d told him.
I carried you through calamitous days.
His spirits soared with his uncle’s request and then promptly crashed.
    â€œHow can I take you?” he asked. “You know I don’t have a car.”
    Brendan stared out the window and flapped his arm tensely in the air. “We could get one. Those vans in the parking lot, the ones with the wheelchair lifts—we’re allowed to borrow them.”
    â€œCome on,” Henry said. “You’re kidding.”
    â€œI’m serious,” Brendan said. “I could go talk to the administrator, sign one out, get the keys—it’s as easy as that. I could sign one out for the weekend, we wouldn’t even have to tell anyone where we were going ….”
    â€œReally?” Henry thought of a smooth road, a few days of freedom, the pleasure of knowing that his uncle trusted him, even if no one else in his family did. Then he remembered that he didn’t have a license. The police had handcuffed him after the accident, once they’d pried him out of the car and decided he wasn’t hurt. They’d