The Forms of Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”
    On and on he’d gone, about the engineers and the politicians and the cover-ups and the lies; about the woods chopped down and the buildings razed and the bodies exhumed from the cemeteries. And then about what had happened to the twenty-five hundred people who’d been displaced at the height of the Depression—how some, such as Wiloma’s father, had migrated to the nearby towns on the boundary of the watershed, while others, such as he and his wife, had left Massachusetts altogether and wandered through western New York until they found someplace where they felt safe.
    â€œSomeplace
cheap
enough,” Da had said. “Not just safe enough,
cheap
enough—those bastards hardly gave us any thing. Farms that had been in our families for generations, and what did they give us? Jack shit.”
    Wiloma had heard those tales so many times that she almost knew them by heart, but she never thought about them anymore. The detox team had pulled them out by the roots, disarmed them so they’d never haunt her again. When her uncle had mentioned the land, she’d been able to let the pictures he’d called up roll right past her.
    It’ll be yours when I go,
he’d said.
Yours and Henry’s.
She’d smiled at him and ignored his words and focused her healing energies on his chest. And now Waldo had crept up behind her with this, using Wendy to prick her unprotected flank. He knew the kids came home and told her what went on at his house; sometimes he said things to them that he was afraid to say to her face, knowing the message would reach her. But she wasn’t sure what he thought he’d gain by prying at this part of her past.
    â€œI’ve got to go to work at noon,” Wendy said. “Want me to do anything before I go?”
    â€œMaybe clean up your room? I want the house to look nice for Grunkie tomorrow.”
    Wendy nodded and left. Below her, Wiloma heard Win humming. All day long his head bobbed to the signals of the Walkman his father had given him. He mowed the lawn with it clipped to the back of his pants and fell asleep at night with the tiny black pads still shooting messages into his brain. He was sixteen, he was going through a phase. He hummed with no sense that his humming was tuneless. Sometimes Wiloma dreamed of slipping one of her
Life in the Spirit
seminar tapes into his machine when he was asleep.
    She gathered herself together and visualized her list for the day. Vacuum the living room, she thought. Wash the windows. Buy groceries. Go to the dentist—she knew she shouldn’t, but a filling had fallen out and she couldn’t pray it back into place. Last night, while she’d been lecturing, her whole left jaw had ached. She had looked into the window behind her group and seen her face, twisted with pain, reflected back to her. Her mirrored image had so resembled her brother’s unhappy face that she’d thought for a minute that he was there.
    Don’t think about Henry,
she ordered herself.
Don’t think about Waldo. Don’t think about Uncle Brendan’s land.
    She pictured each of these thoughts as a virus, crystalline and threatening, and then she surrounded each virus with the clouds of red and green particles that were her mental antibodies. She saw each thought sink into darkness, rendered harmless by the healing powers of her mind.

4
    F OR TWO WEEKS, WENDY AND WIN HAD BEEN HALFHEARTEDLY trying to get the yard back into some sort of shape for Grunkie, whose new room overlooked the entire unkempt length. Win had mowed the grass three times; she’d weeded the flowerbeds and trimmed