This is the Water

by Yannick Murphy

  While swimming an easy five-hundred free to warm up, you see Chris in the bleachers watching the team. There’s a sad smile on her face and even from far away you can see how beautiful Chris is. You can also see how men sitting in the bleachers just reading books or working on their computers while waiting for their daughters to finish practice glance up from what they’re doing once in a while to look at Chris and smile at her. You feel slow in the water. You must be tired. You remember waking up in the night when Thomas woke to shut the windows, and you remember flashes of lightning breaking up the darkness over the hillside. You remember the dog barking for a little while, a bark that made you think there was someone coming up to the house, but then you fell back asleep, telling yourself it was probably just a deer. You live far out in the country. You live so far out in the country that a while back your dog had run to the low kitchen windows and barked at a moose that was a few hundred feet away, standing by an old burn pile where Thomas had set some brush on fire to get rid of it. The moose was a cow, and did not have the signature antlers, but she was big, and the barking did not send her tearing off through the woods back to where she had come from, as a skittish deer would have done. Instead the moose stumbled around for a while, grazing, and then she lifted her head in the air and turned to the left, ambling off. Through the window you could hear the clomp of hooves the size of dinner plates as she tread over the burnt ground.

  You break into fly. It feels good to feel your heart pumping faster. You swim two laps without taking a breath every time you bring out your hands, but then you switch to taking a breath every time. Fly was always a challenge. The swim-team girls practicing in the lane over from you make it look easy, though. You try to watch them underwater while you swim next to them. How was it they could kick while their hands entered the water, and then kick again as their hands exited the water, without looking spastic, the way you knew you looked when you did it? You think you hear the water sigh. You wonder if it was you sighing instead. Then you wonder if it could possibly be the water sighing, and you wonder what it was sighing about. Was it a sad sigh? Did it miss the streamlined body of Kim Hood moving through it? Then you think you hear the water whispering again, only it’s more like the sound of a strong wind that has been recorded through a microphone and played back. The sound whips about your ears as you swim, sounding as if it is repeating one word with each gust. It sounds as if it is saying “stop, stop, stop,” and you wonder why. What exactly should you stop? But that is not so difficult to figure out. There are so many things you should stop. You should stop bringing your right arm in close to your body on your pull in the freestyle. You should stop kicking as if you weren’t really kicking at all. You should keep your head higher. You should stop diving so deep in the fly. You should stop thinking about Paul. You used to think about your brother too much, and you’d swim to forget him. Now you think about Paul in order to forget your brother, and thinking about Paul is like diving too deep in the fly. It makes the recovery that much harder, you have that much more water to lift yourself out of, that much more time wasted before you can lift up your head and breathe. Instead you should be thinking about your girls. You should be making sure Sofia really doesn’t need your help getting used to menstruation. How can you assume that everything she needs to know she read in a book or she learned from her friends? You think how you should be trying harder to listen to Thomas when he tells you about articles he has read in magazines. You think how it’s his way of talking to you, and it’s always been his way of talking to you. It’s not as if there were a time when you were first married or before you were married that he sat down with you and asked you to tell him all your deepest feelings. Even before you were married he would say, “Hey, listen to this,” and he would tell you an idea of his or about some article he was reading. When you responded, or just understood what he was trying to tell you, you knew he felt closer to you because you now shared a common language with him, and it was his favorite language. For him it was better than intimacy. You tell yourself you will stop thinking about your brother and Paul and then you do stop, because the susurrations you hear from the water telling you to stop aren’t stopping. You get out and think that if you just go to the bathroom and jump back into the pool, maybe then the sounds will stop. When you go into the locker room, you see Alex sitting on the bench. She is holding her head and crying. “It hurts, Mom,” she says. Ah, this is why the water told me to stop, you think. She hit her head coming up for a turn at the wall on the pole that extends under the blocks to hold onto before taking off on a backstroke start. There is a little blood, but she will be all right. You hold her. You get her an ice pack. You tell her to sit out the rest of the practice.

  When you go back into the water to finish your swim, the water no longer tells you to stop. You have a good workout, doing a set of ten fifties on the fifty easily, until you see state troopers walk onto the pool deck. They look stiff in their uniforms and overly dressed compared to the swimmers on the team, who wear their low-backed practice suits, and compared to the coach, who wears a team tee shirt and shorts. You see the coach tell the swimmers to keep going on with their set, and then she talks to the troopers. You wish you could hear what they are saying, but of course you cannot. Swimming in the pool with everyone now doing a kick set makes it difficult to hear anything but splashing, and also the music is blaring away. It isn’t until you are out of the water and grabbing your bag to go into the showers that you overhear one gray-haired trooper, with a nose that looks as if it has been bashed in more than once, say that he was on the original case years ago when a young nurse was murdered at the same rest stop, and since then, he says, there have been several other women murdered, and he thinks the cases are all related. Even though you are warmed up from doing your swimming, you suddenly feel cold, as if the facility’s skylights have opened up suddenly, letting in a cold draft that runs over your wet skin and makes you shiver and makes you walk quickly to the locker room and into the warm showers. The boy in the wheelchair is in the next shower again. He is repeating “water, water, water,” and his aide is telling him again, “Yes, you’re right. We’re in the shower. This is the water.” You close your eyes under the hot shower, and an image of Paul comes to you, and then you know you must wipe the image away. I will not think of him anymore, you tell yourself. “Water, water, water,” you hear the boy in the wheelchair say, and then to stop yourself from thinking of Paul you say to yourself, Stop, stop, stop, and somehow, for a while, it works, and you do not think of Paul.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  This is Mandy sweeping the facility deck, thinking how can so many people, who must have some money because they can afford the facility membership, be such slobs and be so careless? There are candy wrappers left in the lockers and a pair of brand-new sneakers forgotten under the benches. Where she’s sweeping now, on the other side of the glass wall where one can see the lazy river, there’s a wad of chewed-up gum some pig spit onto the floor. Even if there are some members who haven’t been raised with money, at least they should keep their facility clean and throw away their garbage. While she’s trying to remove the gum from the broom’s bristles, a little boy comes up to her and asks her what is under the big metal grate at the bottom of the lazy river. “That? That is the entrance to the tunnel that leads to where I live!” Mandy says. “Really?” the boy says, and Mandy nods, thinking she misses when her daughter was young and gullible, and she reaches out to pat the boy on the shoulder and reassure him it’s all right when the boy runs away screaming, “She’s going to kill me!” and the boy’s mother marches over to Mandy and tells her, “Don’t touch my child ever again,” and Mandy, holding the broom, thinks how she’d like to shoo the mother away with the bristles of the broom as if the mother were a mangy cat who had wandered inside the doorway. Now this is Mandy sitting in the facility director’s office being read the riot act, which she doesn’t listen to, instead looking at framed photographs on the wall of skiers going down mountai
ns that look too big to be in this country, and she wonders why an aquatic facility director has pictures in his office of snow-covered mountains, and not pictures of large bodies of water that are tempting to swim in. This is Mandy not being fired, but being close to fired, and going back into the locker room to mop, but then going into a bathroom stall instead and sitting down on the uncovered seat while still wearing her jeans. She shakes her head, and cries a little, and then shakes her head some more. She cannot help but think of the girl Kim, who was murdered. Mandy has stopped at that rest stop many times before, usually when she and her husband were on their way to the lake for the weekend. She remembers the girl, Kim. She always smiled at Mandy, and said hello when she saw her. Mandy thinks how the next time she drives up along that stretch of highway with the rest stop, she will stop and leave a bouquet of flowers in a vase. Maybe she can even get her husband to make a wooden plaque with Kim’s name on it and the date of her birth and death.

  The dancing hippos enter the locker room noisily. The dancing hippos are a group of older women who take a swimmercize class. No one likes the dancing hippos, because they could just as well do their workout in the smaller pool with the lazy river, but instead they come into the competition pool and take up lanes and space and their hair spray gets mixed with the pool water and the cloying fumes get inhaled by all the lap swimmers. In the locker room they talk about Kim, how awful they feel for the mother, how they have told their own grown children to stay off the highways at night and, whatever they do, never to stop at a rest stop. Then they start chatting and laughing about something you don’t want to know about. They can carry on that way for long stretches of time, discussing inanities such as where they bought a potholder or how to rid the garden of blight, all the while blow-drying their hair at the sink and spreading on lipsticks the colors of corals and flamingos and baby blankets. You don’t have a garden, and anything to do with gardening usually makes you sleepy right away. You don’t know how to recognize different plants raised for eating unless the fruit or the vegetable is hanging right off them. You don’t know you need stakes for tomatoes or twine for training snow peas. You don’t care. Why don’t the dancing hippos just shut their mouths for once? Why are they always so loud about nothing? Why do they take so long to get dressed? Don’t they have families to go home to and chores to be done? You know that the minute you enter the door at home you have to start cooking dinner and feed the dog that will be barking continuously until you do. You know you have to empty the dishwasher to load the dishwasher before you even have enough counter space to be able to chop the vegetables and start the dinner for the family, and your girls will be starving, of course. They’ll tell you they are starving, and if you tell them to be quiet, they will tell you how many yards they have swum, and it will be in the thousands, and then you will feel bad for them because it is such a long way to travel, all those yards, without eating. Sofia will tell you exactly how far she has swum. She has been tracking how far and recording it in cyberspace. Already she is rounding the southern part of the island of Saint Kitts, and heading back north. You imagine her really swimming in the Caribbean. You see her amidst the blue and green clear water. You see her from up above. She is smiling. She is not concerned with taking out her first fifty faster, the way the coach has been telling her to do. She is just swimming at her own pace, occasionally turning her head to the side, admiring a nearby breaching dolphin, a pelican’s impressive dive.

  The dancing hippos cackle, at least that’s what you hear, a high-pitched cackle that sounds like blackbirds or angry seagulls. You wish you were back on your vacation at the equator and not in the locker room with the dancing hippos, who are now talking about church. At the equator, from a great height overlooking the ocean, you saw a pod of whales that looked just like a breeze ruffling the water here and there. You ate a strange red fruit that looked like the inside of a fig when you bit into it, but almost tasted like a tomato. You used soap on your body provided in the shower that was in the shape of a seashell. You never wore a sweater at night or a wrap. You saw a snake rising from its own coiled body on the driveway to look at you in the headlights of your rental truck. You picked up a crab on the beach with a body as yellow as the sun and legs the color of Japanese eggplants. You stepped on stingrays that slid out from under your feet and made you jump on your surfboard and paddle hard away from them in any direction you could. You breathed in the air deeply while watching stars, and thinking what you were breathing in was some of the light from the stars as well. They were vast, expanding breaths that you thought made you think more clearly.

  Now the dancing hippos are talking about food, which they always do after their aerobics class. They trade recipes back and forth that do sound good. Swedish meatballs and Brie cheese baked in puff pastry. This is not the talk of the swim-team parents. We, the swim-team parents, talk of roasted edamame beans for quick protein. We compare organic chocolate milk brands that come in convenient containers. We cook fava beans. We make quinoa pilaf. We flavor with sea salt. We bake with flax. We fry in cast iron. We create salads with fiddleheads found on our land or in our neighbor’s fields. We berry-pick at local farms. We meet the steer we’ll consume throughout the year. We raise our own hens. We raise our own turkey. We make our own ice cream. We know the horrors of the levels of the saturated fats in the nearby chain’s doughnuts. We extol the local Japanese sushi joint. We do not talk of the bag of peanut M&M’s we buy to get us through the long day of working at a swim meet. We will not talk of the Diet Coke we drink, perfectly timed to be drunk after our coffee and before the lunch hour, but never in front of our children, lest they see how we drink soda, and we never let them drink it themselves unless it’s soda water flavored with natural juice high in some kind of element or vitamin they wouldn’t normally get in their daily diet and packaged in a can whose design wipes out any image of an industrial facility spewing smoke, spinning the dials of the electric meter, and hiring immigrants at low wages. Instead the can design screams healthy, whole, natural, good for you, flowers, fruit orchards, and sunshine. As if the cans themselves were just plucked from trees.

  You wish the dancing hippos would talk more of food. You’d like to ask them the perfect recipe for a piecrust. You have been trying to perfect your own. One recipe you know calls for vodka instead of water (vodka doesn’t evaporate during baking). One recipe asks for lard, not butter. One recipe asks specifically for vegetable shortening to ensure flakiness. One recipe says keep the butter cold with ice before you use it. One recipe asks for baking soda. One recipe asks for ground almond bits. Which recipe do you choose? you want to know, but don’t know how to interrupt. Do you just barge in on the conversation, smiling, asking if they could share their favorite piecrust technique? Do you not interrupt, because you feel guilty that when you saw them in the pool, in the end lane, smelling up the water with their hair spray, you wished them, and their ludicrous weight belts for jogging and their foam noodles wedged between their legs for floating, out of the pool and back where they came from.

  Now the dancing hippos are singing. It is from a musical. It is from My Fair Lady. “With a Little Bit of Luck” is the song. It is from when Eliza Doolittle’s father danced through the streets, weaving in and out of bars, singing that all he needed was a little bit of bloomin’ luck. You dress so quickly to get away from them that you don’t even bother to brush your hair in front of the mirror. You brush it while running out of the locker room door. You are fighting a knot in your hair so snarled it seems to have claws and be fighting back, when you see Paul waiting in the foyer. The minute you see him you want to do an about-face and go back into the locker room and finish brushing your unruly hair. You want to apply eyeliner and lipstick to spruce yourself up. You’d even use a coral-color lipstick like the dancing hippos use, anything to avoid having him see you the way you look now. Your graying hair bushy around your temples and your eyes with rings around them from the impressions your goggles left on them. You don’t turn
around, though, and he waves to you and smiles and walks toward you. You can’t help but smile back. Maybe your hair doesn’t look that bad after all. He puts his hand on your arm when you get close enough. “Hey,” you say. You begin to blush. You can feel your face turning hot, even though your hair’s still wet from your shower and the rest of you feels refreshed. “What are you doing here? I thought Chris dropped Cleo off today.”

  “She did. She left early, though, and asked me to swing by and pick Cleo up after work. It’s on my way.” Just then, the troopers walk out of the facility, their radios crackling against their hips and their shoes squeaking loudly on the polished floor.

  “Did you hear about the girl on the team?” you ask Paul while watching the troopers as they leave. The old trooper, the one with the nose that makes him look like a prizefighter, gives one last look at the people working at the front desk before he leaves the facility, as if wanting to memorize their faces.

  “I did,” Paul says. “It’s incredible. The same rest stop, and everything.”

  “Do you think it’s the same man?” you ask.

  “I don’t know what to think. The car’s got to be different, though. That was a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean, the car’s got to be different? Did you see a car that night?”

  “Yes, didn’t I tell you? It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.”

  “But you said you didn’t have any information to give the police. You said you wouldn’t be able to help them in any way,” you say, suddenly feeling very tired, almost sick from feeling so tired, and thinking maybe it has been a while since you have eaten, but the last thing you want now is to eat. The facility smells like onion bagels being toasted at the snack stand, but toasted too long, almost burning. You wish you could go outside, but you have to wait for your daughters to come out of the locker room.