The Forms of Water by Andrea Barrett Read Free Book Online Page B

towns, to trample on our rights as citizens. Compromise with such blind aggression is untenable.
    Frank B. Auberon, Sr.
    Pomeroy

7
    B RENDAN THOUGHT HE HEARD SIRENS, IN THE PARKING LOT, before they’d even left the grounds; at the spotlight where, sitting high in the van, he overlooked his patch of sidewalk; on West Street, as they finally rolled away from the Home. He expected police cars, motorcycles, announcements on the radio—because of course the Home had no policy of loaning out its vans, and he could not believe that Henry had believed him.
    All week he’d been wondering how he might approach Henry. He’d planned a campaign of pity and guilt:
The end is near, my boy. Would you deny a dying old man his last, modest wish?
Something along the lines of that, which would twist Henry’s ears with shame. But in his desire to see the valley once more, in his mad passion to gaze at the water beneath which his first abbey lay, he had forgotten that Henry no longer had a car. His heart had almost stopped when Henry had reminded him. Then he’d looked out the window and seen the vans and plucked his scheme from the air like an unripened quince. It was weak, there was nothing behind it. It depended on luck and on his last-minute appeal to Henry’s greed and need to master Waldo.
    He had not seen the administrator. He had not spoken to anyone. He had wheeled himself into the basement room where the janitors kept their tools and their coffeepot and the pegboard on which hung the keys to the vans, and then he had directed Fred Johannson, who sat drowsing in his chair, to the whirlpool in the other wing. It sounded funny, he’d said. Like it might be overflowing. Fred had lumbered off and Brendan had leaned up against the board and knocked down the keys marked “Medical Transport Van No. 1.” A minute’s work, except that the keys had fallen to the table and Brendan’s hands had banged against them like hooves. He had thought of the way the dogs they’d kept at the abbey had scooped up bones, pressing the pads of their paws clumsily together. No fingers, no thumbs; he had scooped up the keys in a similar fashion and dropped them into his lap.
    He had wheeled himself back to Henry as fast as his chair could carry him, and then he had tried to look calm and unworried as Henry dawdled over the closets and drawers and gathered together the scraps of clothing Brendan needed. “Not in the suitcase,” he’d told Henry sharply. “Use that plastic bag.” They’d slipped through the halls, out the door, and into the parking lot, and he’d prayed that anyone looking out the windows might think they were going for a walk, that the row of oaks shielding the vans would conceal them, that the van would start, that the lift would work, that no one would run shouting after them as they drove away.
    He hadn’t prayed so much in years. Consciously, guiltily, he had employed what his abbot used to call linear prayer. Prayer that moved the way things move in the world: point to point, step by step, effects following causes and building into a plan—his abbot had spoken of that as something to shed, to be replaced by the deep prayer that sank wordlessly into the mystery of the world. “We have been given everything,” his abbot had said. “But we fail to understand that. Deep prayer is the way we recognize that we already have what we seek.”
    But deep prayer wouldn’t get him a van or set him on the road, and so he’d resorted to the kind of prayers made by old women bowed before banks of candles. Pleas, promises, bargains—they were undignified, almost sordid. They were hardly any better than Wiloma’s superstitious rituals, and yet for the moment they appeared to have worked.
    In part, he knew, they’d worked because he’d laid the ground for his disappearance. He hadn’t known when he was going, but he’d spent the