The Forms of Water Read Online Free PDF

the shrubs. Both of them had worked to move the matted drifts of old leaves toward the fence at the rear of the lot, and neither of them had said much about how furious they were. Another person to take care of, another person to whom they’d have to lie. The heap of leaves was already enormous.
    All that smiling, Wendy thought now, as she left her mother and bypassed her messy room and fled to the waiting pile of leaves. The pallid compliments she’d offered on Grunkie’s new room, the way she’d left the Church motto untouched when what she really wanted was to tear the linen in half and then scream at her mother,
Don’t bring him here! Don’t we have enough trouble without him? Can’t you leave him alone?
—her lies had made her face feel as stiff and deceitful as a Chinese mask.
    She seized the pitchfork with relief and attacked the compacted leaves on the ground. As she lofted them to the top of the pile, she heard Harmon Bayer working on the other side of the fence. Snip, she heard. Harmon was edging the grass along his neat beds of ivy. Snip, snip, snip, and then a sneeze, a snuffle, and a wheeze. Harmon had allergies and his breathing was almost as loud as the sound of his shears. She wished him swollen eyes and a streaming nose. Harmon had built the ugly six-foot barrier between their yards, where once there had been only a knee-high hedge as porous as a sieve. When the Silverstons had lived in Harmon’s house, Wendy and Win and the Silverston children had flowed through the hedge like water.
    Wendy paused and dropped her lower jaw and stretched her mouth until her face began to relax. Then she attacked the leaves again and tossed wads of them over her shoulder. She was rewarded with the pleasure of hearing the snips subside and the wheezes increase on the other side of the fence. Harmon, she knew, was acutely aware of her but would never acknowledge her presence. She whacked leaves against the boards and remembered how Harmon had bought the Silverstons’ house during her freshman year in high school, not long after her father had left them to marry Sarah and her mother had started flirting with bizarre religions.
    The yard had been beautiful up until then—a long row of roses trained on a trellis, smooth beds of myrtle around the silver maple, shrubs and ferns and rhododendrons and clumps of iris and daylilies. The lawn had stretched like a piece of velour from the flowerbeds back to the low hedge. Then her father had taken her and Win for a stroll by the lake and sliced their lives in two.
    They’d been walking. The wind had been blowing. The waves had rolled gently on brown sand scattered with roots and weeds. They’d been chatting about everyday things and then her father had said, “I have to tell you something important,” and had severed the sinew and bone of their lives so cleanly that she’d felt no pain at first. He’d gone on talking, heaping one sentence on another until his message was clear, but only weeks later, after he’d packed and moved and introduced them to Sarah, had she understood that the first words of his first sentence held the shape of the rest of her life.
    She bent down to pick the twigs and leaves from the myrtle on her side of the fence, thinking of that horrible time when her father had first left and her mother had drifted so far away. She and Win had turned wild almost overnight, drinking and smoking and slinking around as if they’d been possessed. They’d become expert at cheating and lying and hiding, and for a while they’d occupied themselves by setting fires. That stack of old wood by the lake, Wendy thought, remembering the pale, unstoppable flames. And then she remembered the clothes she and Win had stolen, and the notebooks and records and cigarettes, and the way everything they did had seemed to flow past their mother like smoke. They’d found her sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed