The Forms of Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

one day, poring over a pamphlet that had come to her in the mail.
    â€œWhat is this?” Wendy remembered asking. She could still hear the words that signaled her mother’s seduction by the Church of the New Reason.
    â€œIt’s a way to make sense of things,” her mother had said. “Nothing exists external to our Spirits. Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas. So if we change our ideas, we change the world—I’m working on changing my ideas. I’m reprogramming myself.”
    â€œBut what’s the point?” Win had asked.
    â€œThe
point,”
their mother had said, “is that there has to be something to life besides missing your father and raising you. I hate the way I feel. Our family’s falling apart. And there’s nothing I can do about any of it.”
    Wendy and Win had redoubled their efforts to be bad, as if this might somehow bring their mother back to earth. But the extent of her self-deception was amazing. They told her the teachers who sent home angry notes were insane, that the clothes that appeared in the absence of money were gifts, that it had been Wendy’s girlfriend’s mother who had pierced Wendy’s ears four times.
    When they lied about their crimes, their mother closed her eyes and said, “Fine. Whatever you say.” Then she retreated to her dark room, which was empty by then except for her bed and her new books. She vanished from their lives, and their father, preoccupied with his newly pregnant new wife, seemed to vanish as well. When their mother took off on three-day retreats with her fellow believers, Wendy and Win skipped school and filled the house with stray classmates, falling deeper and deeper into trouble that neither of them enjoyed.
    A few weeks after Courteney’s birth, their mother had come home early one day and found the garbage cans smoking with pillows they’d accidentally set on fire, and the upstairs bathroom window smashed, and a twelve-year-old friend of Win’s throwing up on the living room rug. She had gazed at the overflowing ashtrays, the soiled walls, the broken records, and half-filled cups, and then she’d smiled strangely and said, “This doesn’t exist.”
    She had walked out the door; Wendy and Win had found her, hours later, sitting against a tree in the woods at the end of their street. They’d had to help her back to the house. They’d had to watch helplessly when the two men from the Church arrived for the evening’s planning session and found Wiloma on the floor repeating,
I have nothing. Nothing is mine.
The men had made phone calls while Win and Wendy watched. They’d arranged for Wiloma to visit the Church’s Healing Center in Boston for a few months, and they’d offered to board Wendy and Win in the home of a local Church family while she was gone. Both men had eyebrows so pale and fine as to be almost invisible.
    Wendy had called her father then, not knowing where else to turn, and he’d taken them into the horrid house he’d built for Sarah. He’d been furious with Wiloma at first, blaming her for her weakness; then, as he began to discover all that Wendy and Win had done, furious with them. He missed nothing. He smelled smoke on their hands, beer on their breath, lies on their tongues. He told them that even if their mother got better, they couldn’t live with her again unless they straightened out. They had looked at each other and gone underground as smoothly as snakes.
    He was firm, not cruel, but they couldn’t bear living with him. All that attention, Wendy remembered, as the mound of leaves rose up to her waist. All those eyes. Sarah had monitored their meals and grades and friends, counting their clothes when she did the laundry and wanting to know where this blouse had come from, how Win had torn those pants. Waldo had named the baby Courteney, setting her off from the matched set of
W
names