Free The Forms of Water by Andrea Barrett Page A

to the same thing.
    Kitty closed the door behind Lise, shutting out Henry and Brendan and also Bongo, who had slipped out behind Brendan’s wheelchair and was chasing a squirrel around the yard. Henry walked slowly toward the van, carrying his box of useless objects. When he opened the van door, Bongo leapt inside before Henry could finish raising Brendan’s chair. Henry looked at his dog, flop-legged and pink-tongued and uncomplaining and eager, and he said, “Fine. You want to come, you come.”
    â€œHenry,” Brendan said from his perch behind the driver’s seat. “This maybe isn’t a great idea.”
    Henry closed his door and started the engine. “He’s
my
dog,” he said, and the three of them drove off.

9
    A
NYTHING WE CAN CONCEIVE OF DOING, WE CAN DO,
WILOMA READ.
In our dreams we can do anything, and the same is true of our waking lives.
    Wiloma was sitting at her kitchen table eating cottage cheese, although she would have preferred a tuna sandwich. She’d eaten tuna for several years after she stopped eating meat, but then she’d read about the dolphins; now she ate bland white curds doused with tamari and sprinkled with sunflower seeds. In between bites she tested her new filling with her tongue and felt guilty about her visit to her dentist.
    Her tooth felt smooth and whole again. She knew that if she’d been able to visualize it strong and healthy it would have healed itself, but each time she’d closed her eyes and called up a picture of it she’d seen it cratered and crumbling, the dark interior leading to a ribbon of pain. She had failed; she could admit that. She found it harder to admit that she had looked forward to seeing her dentist and enjoyed her visit to him.
    Her dentist had a warm, burred voice and a lovely neck. The chair in which she lay tilted so far back that her head was under his chin, and when she looked up, she saw the beard beneath his white mask and his shaved neck and the soft skin behind his ears. His hands were gentle and strong, and the way he cradled her head with them made her wonder how he’d hold the rest of her. While she lay there, her mouth stretched open and filled with a rubber dam and a drain and thin metal bands, she took her mind off the pain by staring at his eyes and his skin. She told herself that the fantasies she wove in that chair were not so terrible—she hadn’t made love to anyone since Waldo had left her, and it was natural, normal, that she should be attracted to this man. What was not so normal—what went, really, against the grain of everything she believed—was that her teeth acted up more these days than they ever had before, and that she couldn’t put the energy into healing them that she knew she should. And that was, she suspected, because she didn’t really
want
them healed; healing them would mean missing those gentle hands.
    It was ridiculous, embarrassing. She was forty-eight and knew she ought to know better. She turned back to her Manual, which she’d propped on the table behind her cottage cheese, and she read both to prepare herself for Brendan’s arrival and to stiffen her resolve not to let her mouth rule her mind.
    Heal the Spirit and the body will heal itself,
she read, from the chapter on nutrition and healing.
    Drugs are a diversion and a distraction and work only by suggestion; how can that which is material, and thus unreal, influence that which is Spiritual and real? Healing occurs only through strengthening of the Spirit. However, certain foods can aid healing, through transmission of qualities of Spirit which are diminished in the Subject. These foods are curative 
not through any corporeal property, but because of the Spirit manifested in all things which grow from the earth.
    Spiritual nutrition is an art, which we discuss in detail elsewhere; it requires the full collaboration of the Subject and a trained neuro-nutritionist for the