Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  With the top of her head still above the water, Mara pleaded with her eyes for Frank to help her. She whined like a stray dog. She shook her head, making her hair go in her nose, her eyelids, forming a mask. She hit the acrylic in desperation, stoking the pain in the back of her neck. And though she knew she would swallow water and there was no point in calling for help, she couldn’t stop herself from letting out one last cry.

  “Barbarbraaaaaehb!”

  That was the sound to which her words were reduced. When she was about to submerge completely, Mara saw Frank’s grimace relax with his satisfaction at what was happening in front of him. It was easy to guess what he was thinking. She was a drunk woman, alone at home, with a serious blow to the head resulting from an unfortunate slip on her hot tub—an accident that paralyzed and ultimately killed her, like so many other similar incidents. The fact that Frank was responsible for her slipping, that he’d unbalanced her with a slap, the redness from which would soon disappear, would be a truth only the two of them would know—and in a few minutes, as soon as she’d finished drowning, only he would know it. The door hadn’t been forced, and no one knew about her relationship with Frank. Even in the event that some sharp forensic scientists suspected they were looking at something other than an accident, they would name thirty suspects before him: all the guests who’d come to the party. The floor was covered in organic traces from dozens of people.

  But no one would come to gather samples. A drunk woman drowning in a tub, with no abusive partner or known enemies, in a property neither broken into nor attacked, is an obvious domestic accident. Mara read all these thoughts in Frank’s eyes. All he had to do was stand there and wait for his biggest problem to solve itself. Wait a little longer for the impertinent woman who wanted to teach him a lesson to drown in front of him, taking his darkest secrets with her, the very secrets she’d worked so hard to force him to reveal.

  Mara accepted that the last thing she would see would be the undulating silhouette of the man who’d decided to let her die. She also accepted that her whole life was worth less than the secret of an infidelity. From under the water, she saw Frank take his first step toward the exit, deciding to leave and forget about her forever. That was when her big toe responded. Mara felt it move—just that toe, but she could control it. She managed to insert her toenail into one of the nozzles at the bottom of the tub, enough to stop her body from sinking and propel it upward. Forehead, eyes, and nose emerged first. A final push that threatened to break the toenail was enough to also bring out her mouth. Mara sucked in a desperate mouthful of air that hurt her chest, and the injection of oxygen made her dizzy.

  Frank took a step back. He narrowed his eyes, frustrated to see his secret resisting being hidden under the water, being silenced.

  The truth always emerges. Even if you drown it. Mara gave him the closest thing to a smile she was able to give.

  “You’re not going to get rid of me, Frank,” she said, as if she’d won some kind of battle. Then desperation overcame her again. “Frank! For God’s sake, help me.”

  The cry filled her mouth with water. She choked on it, coughed. Her convulsions ended up breaking her toenail. When she lost her support, Mara sank a few inches, but her ankle caught on the same nozzle, preventing her from going under.

  “Farbabrar.”

  Her plea was translated into bubbles, her mouth underwater again. Only her nostrils remained above the surface, and at least she could breathe through them. Her whole body tingled—recovering its mobility, perhaps. Or maybe it was losing sensation forever. Mara moved her head, trying to find a better position, but she inhaled water, and she choked again. She left her neck in the position that enabled her to breathe. One eye was submerged, the other was not. With this one eye she saw Frank watching her desperate maneuvers closely, without doing anything. He just rested his hands on his waist like someone who, after fixing an engine, wonders why the car still won’t start. What he would be wondering was why this woman wouldn’t drown.

  His frustration filled Mara with satisfaction. Now that she could breathe again, the situation didn’t seem so serious. Even if she could have spoken, if her mouth hadn’t been underwater, she wouldn’t have asked Frank for help. She would’ve yelled at him to go, to leave her. She felt capable of holding on as long as necessary, until a friend worried that she wasn’t answering her phone and came to her apartment to save her. Mara would rather wait for all the water in the tub to evaporate than stoop to ask Frank for help again, so she could get out with the same desire to make him confess.

  Despite the degrading and humiliating situation, Mara fixed her one eye on Frank, defying him. Making the coward know that he was very wrong if he thought he was going to be lucky enough to kill her with a harmless slap. If her big toe had come back to life, that meant the blow to the back of her head might not have been so serious. Soon she would start to move her foot, both her feet, her legs, her arms. She just had to hold on a little longer. And she could hold on for as long as it took, because she had the desire, the rage, and a beautiful hole in her nose through which to take in as much air as she needed until the coward was gone.

  But then the coward took a step toward the hot tub.

  And he did it with a thumb.

  With just a thumb.

  As if she were an insect on the table to be squashed, Frank rested his thumb on her temple and pushed down. The little force he applied was enough to sink her head, submerge her nose, take away her breathing. The ankle that served as a brake came off the nozzle, and her body slid down the tub’s curved paneling again, submerging her. Mara tried to flail with her entire body, to flap as if she were drowning out at sea, but with her paralyzed anatomy her efforts translated only into a slight movement of her big toe. She shook her head to splash water out of the hot tub, to empty it, to make the water level descend to below her nose. It was no use. She bit the water in an absurd attempt to propel herself upward like a fish, like a tadpole. She even beat her eyelids, expecting some illogical kind of propulsion from them. That was when Mara felt her lungs expand until they were like enormous empty tanks in her chest. Then the instinct to breathe filled them with water, shrinking them, making them heavy. And hot. They burned. They burned until every uncomfortable feeling suddenly disappeared.

  Mara drowned with her nose just a couple of inches from the air on her balcony, where the man who’d ended up killing her with a single finger, like a flea, stood watching. Her last thought, before feeling death and its soap flavor finally take her to a radiant and placid space beyond the water and beyond the world, was to hope that the security camera on the balcony ceiling had recorded everything.

  Frank stood watching the bubbles that rose to the surface from Mara’s face—her nose, her mouth—and disappeared in little explosions that carried off her being, transforming it into air. The last bubble that popped left the water calm, establishing a sharp boundary between life on the surface and death underneath.

  As he did the first time he slept with Mara, Frank found it very easy to rationalize what had happened. And he was clear in his mind that he hadn’t done anything. A slap doesn’t kill anyone, and the slip had been Mara’s fault—she was the one who hadn’t been able to keep her balance. Nor could the fact that he’d pushed her head underwater, in a tub, with a finger, a single thumb, be considered a cause of death, unless that death was already about to happen. Whether he’d been in the apartment or not, the outcome for Mara would have been the same—she wouldn’t have held on in the position she was in for much longer. Everyone knows how dangerous it is to fill a bath while drunk, when more prone to falling. Even the friends who’d been with her at the party would think it. And they’d blame themselves, they’d regret leaving their friend’s house without tidying up afterward, without asking how she was. Or without staying to keep her company overnight and saving her life.

  As Frank stood entranced by Mara’s pale body, a light came on in his pocket: the screen on his cell phone. The plucked strin
gs in “You Were Meant for Me” rang out on the balcony. In front of his lover’s dead body, Frank listened to the song with which he’d persuaded his wife, twenty years ago, that they were made for each other. Listening to the ringtone without answering, he imagined Grace in the hospital, walking in circles in the corridor, wondering where her husband was. He had to get back to her before it became more difficult to explain his absence. When he turned around to begin his escape, a memory gripped his stomach. The afternoon Mara suggested making a homemade sex tape in the very same hot tub. He looked up at the ceiling, fearing what he was going to find. There it was, the apartment’s security camera. And he was looking directly at the lens to offer a close-up portrait of his own clumsiness. Perfect for a wanted poster for the most inept criminal in history.

  “Christ!”

  Frank cursed his incompetence. He had known perfectly well that the camera was there—he’d let himself be recorded by it months ago, showing off his sexual prowess. But the idiot Frank hadn’t remembered it when he slapped a woman, left her to drown, and with his thumb even helped her remain submerged. He could say goodbye to the theory of the domestic accident on which he’d based all his decisions in the last few minutes.

  Frank ran to the surveillance system’s control panel at the entrance. From which Mara had deleted that homemade porno. He tapped the touchscreen to activate it. The padlock symbol occupied the monitor while a fingerprint icon flashed blue. An arrow pointed from the icon to a sensor. Frank rested his thumb there. He received an error message. He tried with another finger. Error.

  “Shit!”

  But it was logical: only Mara’s fingerprints would activate the system. Frank pinched his bottom lip, thinking about what to do. And he headed to the kitchen. He selected some large scissors from the utensil drawer. Kneeling beside the hot tub, he lifted Mara’s left hand out of the water. He trapped the thumb between the implement’s two blades. He applied pressure on the digit before realizing how stupid his idea was. A drowned woman’s body with a finger cut off would look like anything but an accident. He only had one option.

  He dipped his arms in the tub, getting his polo shirt and part of his pants wet. His heart was beating in his chest, his neck, his ears. He lifted Mara’s lifeless body, slipping on the large quantity of water that overflowed when he did so. Her arms hung like the pincers on a gigantic lobster. Her hair dripped water all over the balcony and the living room, creating a river all the way to the entrance. Frank tripped on a beer can, slipped on an ice bag, and both times almost lost his balance. He touched the screen again to activate it, but now it was Mara’s thumb he placed on the sensor. He’d read in some article that fingerprint readers don’t work with dead people—he hoped it referred to people who’d been dead longer, not the still-warm body of a newly drowned woman. It didn’t work at first, but after he dried the thumb and pressed harder with it on the sensor, the red background on the screen turned green. The padlock disappeared. A menu of options welcomed him to the system. Frank sighed, blowing out his cheeks.

  Without letting go of the body, he returned it to the hot tub, leaving it in the water. The wave the immersion caused splashed onto his shoes. Crossing the living room, he saw the mess he’d made, water splashed everywhere, his footprint in some of the puddles. He decided to make even more of a mess, emptying plastic cups on the furniture, beer cans on the floor. Anyone seeing it would think the party had gotten out of hand.

  In the system’s welcome menu he searched, disoriented, through the various options. Battling with this electronic puzzle, in his mind he heard the repeated echo of the thousands of times Audrey had called him a digital dinosaur. He remembered the exasperation with which Grace tutted when she tried to tell him about her YouTube channel, her subscribers, her live or archived streams, and saw the bewildered look on his face. Now that he really needed to navigate these touchscreen menus to resolve the awful mess he was in, Frank regretted his pride at being the digital technophobe who drove his daughter crazy, resisting technological progress as if it was something to be proud of, when all he was achieving was arriving later to the same future everyone was heading toward whether they liked it or not.

  Frank tapped icons, bars, and windows until he found the recordings folder. A mosaic of thumbnail images sorted them by time, starting from midnight the day before. There were miniatures of the empty apartment in the morning, of Mara lying on the sofa in the afternoon, of the living room full of people a while later. He remembered Mara explaining to him that the files were deleted automatically at the end of each day. Even if Frank left the apartment right now, the most likely possibility was that the incriminating evidence would be gone in a couple of hours, before anyone even began to worry about Mara. But he couldn’t take the risk. He pressed the thumbnail for the time frame that corresponded to his visit and was presented with five horizontal bars labeled Living Room, Entrance, Kitchen, Bedroom and Balcony. One for each of the rooms that had a camera. He discovered that running his finger along the bars skipped through the recording. He relived his arrival, his argument with Mara at the door. He switched cameras to see what happened in the hot tub. He saw the slap he gave Mara, recorded as clearly as the time she’d stood to offer him what was between her legs.

  Jewel’s plucking emerged from Frank’s pocket, the delicate melody that was so out of tune with the situation. Grace was calling again, unable to imagine that, at that very moment, her husband was watching his lover hit her head to be left paralyzed in the water. And watching himself fail in his duty to help her. While the country singer on his phone sang about breakfasts of pancakes and maple syrup, Frank saw himself pushing Mara’s head under with his thumb. Taking away her breathing, her oxygen, her life. The video continued with Frank moving the body. It ended on the camera at the entrance, when Frank accessed the system.

  He pressed and held the five bars on the screen to select them. A trash basket icon appeared in a corner. He tapped it with a sigh of relief, anticipating the files’ disappearance. A notification sound made him jump, but it was just a window confirming the deletion. He tapped to confirm it. And he heard another annoying sound.

  Is it really you? A smiling icon asked the question on the screen, and the fingerprint sensor flashed again. Confirm your fingerprint to delete file(s).

  “Fuck!”

  Frank felt like sitting on the floor, covering his ears, hiding his head between his knees, and giving up. But he resisted the urge and returned to the balcony. He pulled the body out of the water once more just as his cell phone rang again. That pest Jewel was waking up at 6:00 a.m. again to make smiley faces with egg yolks while Frank, for the second time, pressed a corpse’s thumb against a fingerprint sensor.

  His knees, flagging now under Mara’s weight, threatened to give way with the relief he felt when the system’s screen confirmed the files had been deleted. The thumbnail for the removed time frame disappeared from the folder of videos. In case it was suspicious that a single hour had been deleted, Frank selected the entire day and used Mara’s thumb to send all the files to the trash. He also stopped the cameras’ recording. He grinned at the black, empty screen as if the events in the hot tub had never taken place. From now on, only he would remember what happened, and he intended to forget about it as soon as he set foot outside the apartment. From that moment on, he would make sure that the place in his brain reserved for these memories would be as black and empty as the screen in front of him.

  As he returned to the balcony, Audrey’s ferrets played between his feet, unbalancing him. The animals sniffed Mara’s hanging hair. One of them leapt up onto her belly, explored her wet breasts, investigated the corpse’s mouth, the nose. Frank threw the body into the tub with the ferret on top, and it escaped the water in terror just as its companion fled the tsunami that formed on the balcony.

  Frank stood hypnotized for a few moments at the final vision of Mara in the hot tub, but the cell phone that lit up in his pocket again required his attention. With a final check
of the apartment, as chaotic and untidy as he wanted it to be, Frank ran to the door and left.

  Grace squashed a mosquito on the back of her neck with a smack—the motor home’s outside light was attracting them. In front of her, brandishing the knife, Mara killed another insect with her free hand, echoing the slap Frank had given her on the balcony.

  “You left the hospital and didn’t answer the phone for two hours,” Grace said to Frank, beside him on the road. “You came back soaked in sweat saying you couldn’t stand being in the hospital, that you felt too guilty. You told me you’d been wandering aimlessly around the streets.” Grace repeated what Frank said had happened, to reinforce those events, to make them true, a truth much easier to come to terms with than the one Mara had just revealed. “You went to her apartment?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Of course he did. And what he did was kill me and try to cover it up, Grace. I swear to you, I felt what death is. The first thing I thought of when I came around was the same thing I thought of before dying: the security camera. When I saw that all the recorded files had been deleted, I knew Frank would’ve had to pull me out of the hot tub to access the system with my thumbprint. So first he killed me, but then he may have saved my life, too. Apparently, apnea in an unconscious person can perform miracles like that. You should’ve made sure I was underwater when you left, Frank. You should’ve made sure I couldn’t come back to life.” She drew quotation marks in the air as she said the final words, like it was an inappropriate joke.