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

the beach below him a young woman with two little girls in tow. The girls were blond; the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, was black haired, creamy skinned, delicately boned. She looked like Henry’s mother, whom Henry could hardly remember. She spread out a blanket, settled the girls and the dolls they’d brought with them, and arranged a meticulous picnic: sandwiches cut neatly in half, grapes and peaches wrapped in a napkin, homemade cookies in a lidded box, and miniature versions of everything for the dolls. A baby-sitter, he’d decided, watching as she solemnly poured liquid into the dolls’ cups. Working for one of the wealthy summer families. The charmed circle she and the girls had formed on the sand looked like everything he’d missed in his own life. He had climbed down from the roof and dropped his hammer and told his foreman he was taking a break. Drawn by an envy so strong that it was already almost love, he had introduced himself to Kitty and her charges.
    â€œIs that your house?” she’d asked, and he would have given anything to have been able to say yes. The sweet, bland surface of her life enchanted him. She had two parents, two brothers, a dog and a cat; as he courted her, with a frenzy that excluded both his sister and his ailing grandparents, he saw a chance that he could escape his ragged childhood and make a stable family for himself. His dreams had worked out just the way he’d wanted. He’d married her and moved into the city and left Coreopsis behind; they’d raised two daughters and had picnics on beaches and vacations in the mountains. All along, until that wretched radio station had captured her, he’d thought she shared his contentment.
    And then one year, when the girls were half-grown and he was working day and night building the fortune he’d thought they both wanted, she’d signed up for some night courses and made friends with a group of women he disliked. She’d started volunteering at the radio station when Lise entered high school, and then somehow, when his back was turned, she’d become a stranger with a tangle of black hair and too much eye makeup and this voice—this husky, rippling voice—that rained over the city five times a week.
    There’d been times, in the last few years, when he’d been driving along the back roads searching for land and had heard her voice purring from the radio. Then he’d imagined that he didn’t know her at all and that he could go home and fall into bed with this frightening, exciting stranger. He’d imagined creeping up the stairs and coming upon her damp from her shower, her hair glistening with steam and her voice caressing him. But she kissed him absently when he approached her and then put a load of laundry in the drier or a chicken in the oven. She set her glasses on her nose and said she had papers to read, or she complained about his friends or his hours or his bills. When he made love to her, she looked out the window or twined her fingers in the fur of Bongo, who came and stood by them and sniffed and whined. She had pushed him away—on purpose? By accident? He’d never been sure—and then used the women to whom he’d gone for comfort as an excuse to push him out.
    Her face soured when she caught sight of him. “Oh,” she said. “You.”
    â€œKitty,” he said. She looked dry, self-possessed, incapable of yielding. And yet he could remember a time, before the voice, when she’d lain down with him in the fields of Coreopsis.
    â€œAre you here for a reason?” she said.
    He stood behind Brendan’s chair and waved his hands over Brendan’s head, meaning,
Don’t humiliate me. Don’t do this in front of my uncle;
feeling, behind his hope, the weight of all the hard words she’d heaped on him the past six months.
    â€œWe’re busy,” she said, disappointing but not surprising him.