This is the Water

by Yannick Murphy

  “Beef, here, take some money,” the woman says.

  “Are you listening to me?” you say. “Isn’t this a police tip hotline? This is important.”

  “Yeah, sure, go on, oh, and Jimmy, get me a Coke with that Homewrecker too,” the woman says.

  Slamming a hard plastic phone back on a payphone’s metal cradle is much more satisfying than pushing a button on a cell phone, you think to yourself as you slam the phone down. You’ve heard about tip hotlines before, how half the time the person taking the call is spinning their finger by their ear as if the person giving them information is crazy and can’t be believed. What you really must do is get Paul to go in and give a detective the information that he knows.

  Since you’re out early from practice, you decide to go see if Paul’s in his office at the college. He’s not hard to find. You know which department he teaches in and his office address is listed. You wish you weren’t going to his office but someplace else, someplace quiet, maybe even to the beach where you vacationed near the equator. You imagine watching incoming waves with Paul and sparks of phosphorescence in the water at night. You’d like to ask him more about his teaching. You know he teaches writing, but what exactly about writing does he teach? Does he have suggested methods? You once taught a class for students who were studying for college entrance exams, and in the training for the class you taught them tricks. You taught them that guessing is always better than leaving the answers blank. Does he have that sort of thing for his students? A checklist of sorts they can go through that helps them write well? You want to know what exercises he gives them to get their juices flowing. Does he tell them to keep a hat filled with favorite lines they have heard and then to close their eyes and pull one of the lines out and start with that? Does he tell them to triple-space their lines so they can see their mistakes more easily? You once had a teacher in a college composition class who told you to do this, but you had to stop after a while because you couldn’t afford the paper it was using up.

  When you’re standing at Paul’s office door, you can hear him talking to a student. The student is asking what Paul means by writing from the heart, and he says it means a lot of things, but the thing it means the most is to write something that she feels strongly about. Something that if she were denied the opportunity to write about, she would feel she couldn’t go on. You slide down against the wall next to the door. This could be a long meeting, you think. You start thinking how you would do if you were a student in Paul’s class. Would you even know what writing from the heart means? The only things you think of writing down are things that are not easy to describe. You want to write down how a sunset looks sometimes, but it is impossible for you to put it into words. Some sunsets to you feel different from other ones. The way the clouds sometimes pass quickly over the setting sun gives you a feeling of sadness, but how boring would that be to put on paper, and it’s really not an image at all, is it? you think. Sometimes you want to describe the stars, how their incessant shining can make you feel claustrophobic. Where you live there is no other source of light from buildings or houses to diminish their glow, and sometimes you’d like them to stop winking. Sometimes you’d like to describe how the sound of a loon feels as though it enters through your chest, as if that’s where you hear it first instead of through your ears. You realize why you take photographs for a living instead. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to describe what you feel and can just take a picture of it. You remember how when you first took a photography class in college, you were so excited to see what stories you could tell just with the shots you took. The teacher assigned everyone the task of putting captions of what the people were saying beneath the photos, and you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. You received a poor grade for that class, but it made you want to become a professional photographer. You realized how much you wanted to be able to tell a story without words, and you realized you never wanted anyone to come along and ask of your photos, “And what is that person feeling?” You wanted them to be able to feel an emotion from just looking at the photo, and if they couldn’t do it, then the photo wasn’t worth taking in the first place. From then on you majored in photography. When graduation day arrived, you didn’t even sit in the audience so you could take photos of your classmates, the bright sun shining down on their mortarboards and making the silky cloth look from up above like waves sparkling on a rippling sea. Oh, no, I would be a horrible student in Paul’s class, you think, and you begin to feel sorry for the student too, until the door swings open and out comes this young, beautiful girl with long brown hair in tendrils that curl far past her shoulders and brush the hem of her shorts, which are so short they look more like bikini bottoms. A scent of jasmine seems to be coming from her skin as she walks by.

  You can still smell the jasmine in Paul’s office when you knock on the doorframe.

  “Prof, I’ve got a problem,” you say. “I can’t write from the heart. It’s all closed up. Can you help me?”

  Paul smiles. “Hey, look who’s here!” he says. “What brings you here? Aren’t you supposed to be at practice? Sit down.” He pulls out the chair that the beautiful student must have sat in. The seat is still warm.

  “Practice isn’t over yet. I still have time to pick the girls up. I, I . . .” Paul is leaning in close, and the smell of the jasmine seems to be surrounding you now. You start thinking maybe he’s drawn to you because he just had the beautiful student in his office, and now he’s aroused. “Paul, you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to talk to the police about what you know about that red Corvair. It could mean something to them, and that poor girl Kim from the swim team, well, in a few years that could be Cleo or my girls.”

  You notice while you’re talking that Paul’s office is decorated with different plaques. There are framed diplomas and framed awards, all with his name on them. You didn’t realize how academic he was. He wears a white tee shirt and blue jeans most of the time, and for crying out loud, he wears his hair in a ponytail! How would anyone believe from meeting him outside of the college that he wasn’t just some house painter or bartender?

  “Have you been talking to Chris?” Paul says. “That’s the same thing she said to me, that in a few years it could be Cleo that this man goes after. I don’t think either of you realize what a huge coincidence that would be. It’s just not going to happen to our girls. The odds have it.”

  “But it could happen to some other woman, and very soon.”

  “Listen, the incident just occurred a few weeks ago. We don’t know, there may be plenty of witnesses who come forth in the coming weeks and who remember something suspicious from that night. Let’s give them a chance to come forward with relevant information. The information I have is over twenty-eight years old. Whatever I tell them about a red Corvair with Illinois plates could even be a red herring and keep them from following a solid lead.”

  “You don’t want to dig this all up, do you? Be honest, you’re just covering your ass.” You wish for an instant that you had swum your entire workout earlier, because right now you feel tense, and you don’t have that dreamy feeling you usually have after you’ve swum a full hour and change.

  Paul doesn’t answer you. He covers his face with his hands, but just for an instant, letting his long fingers slide down his aquiline nose until the tips of his fingers rest over his lips. You stand up, ready to go. You know the answers now to your questions. Paul stands up with you. You think he’s stood up to open the door for you, being just as anxious to have you out of there as you are to leave, as if somehow you’re putting to shame all the plaques that line his walls, but instead he pulls you close to him and kisses you. You’re overcome by how good it feels to kiss someone. It’s like being handed a glass of water and drinking it all down, not realizing how thirsty you were when the glass was first handed to you. It has been so long. It has been too long. His lips are smooth and his tongue exerts just the right amount of pressure against your own. You’d like to go on kissing for a l
ong time, because what’s the harm in kissing? You’d like it to be this way forever because you never want it to go farther than this. When you start thinking of Thomas, you force him out of your mind. If Thomas kissed you more often, you’d never be here in this jasmine-smelling office in the first place. You will not let Thomas take away this moment, this one kiss, because that’s all it will ever be, and its memory will have to last such a long time.

  It’s the ringing of your cell phone that interrupts the moment. It’s not a number you know. When you answer the phone it’s Sofia’s voice. She must have borrowed a phone from a friend. “Mom, where are you? We’ve been waiting ten minutes. Practice ended early,” she says.

  “I’m coming. I’ll be there soon,” you say. “Oh, and be safe. Don’t go outside. Wait for me in the foyer.”

  Paul locks up his office and walks out with you to your car. “Have a good night,” he says, before you get in. You cannot look at his face. You’re afraid if you do then you might want to continue with the kiss, right here in the parking lot, where someone might see him who knows him and knows he’s married. Funny, you think while driving, that you consider the kiss interrupted and not ended, as if it were a thing to be continued at a later time.

  Before Kim was murdered, some parents would drive their cars up to the entrance of the facility and wait for their swimmers to hop in the back. Some parents would sit in the parking lot and wait while reading a book. Some parents would park their cars and go into the facility and wait in the foyer, talking to other parents, about swimming or about school, or about anything, considering how they are all friends and see each other so often they can talk about anything, or sometimes they would just complain about how long it takes their swimmers to get out of the shower and get dressed. Some parents would barge right into the locker rooms and yell at their swimmers to hurry it up, while their swimmers were drying off and struggling to put on socks over wet feet, or while their swimmers were fooling around, the little ones hiding inside the metal lockers, bursting out like jack-in-the-boxes and screaming, “Surprise!” and the older ones chatting away with other girls about books and clothes and teachers. But now, since Kim has been killed, all the mothers have been going into the locker rooms and making sure their children are escorted into their cars. You would usually wait in the foyer for your children, but today Sofia and Alex are waiting outside for you as you drive up, and waving you down frantically, annoyed with you because you happen to be late, when recently, ever since Kim’s death, you have picked them up straight from the locker room. You’re annoyed with them too. You told them to wait inside and not go outside. It’s then, when you see them waving as if they’ve been marooned on an island, that you remember what Paul said to you in his office, that the red Corvair had Illinois plates. He hadn’t told you that before, you are almost sure of it. Wouldn’t you have remembered that they were Illinois plates? Why is it that he keeps layering on the details about something that he at first said he knew nothing about at all? And why did he kiss you then, right after he said it? Was it to make you stop thinking about Bobby Chantal? You realize that the kiss made it difficult for you to understand what really happened that night he was with her. The kiss was like a layer of fog that crept inside of you, clouding up what might otherwise be clear, and masking whatever you heard.

  “I’m starving!” you daughters say in unison when they get in the car, and to keep them quiet so that you can think about the kiss and the Illinois plates on the long drive home, you stop and let them buy doughnuts, only briefly thinking about what an unhealthy food they are.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thomas says the universe is expanding like a balloon, and that every year we are twenty-two miles farther apart from other celestial bodies. You wonder, for a second, if he’s making an analogy between you and him—that every year the two of you are drifting farther apart, but of course you know that’s not how he thinks. He doesn’t think about relationships. He thinks about actual celestial bodies. You want to know, then, why we bother trying to visit other solar systems when it’s just going to be harder to do so every year. We should just give up now, you think, while looking down at the goose. The goose is two stories below on the ground and you can see the goose turning her head and looking up at you with one eye while you look out the window. “Hello, there, goose,” you say, and the goose tilts her head some more. The goose, you think, does not care about the universe, or the expansion of it, and neither does she care about the neighbors or the road beyond. The goose maybe cares about the two chickens that eat her food, and the dog that eats her food, and maybe she cares about the fox that trotted off with the rooster in its mouth a while ago. The expanding universe is not on the goose’s agenda, you think. This is you thinking that you need to stop thinking about Paul, Bobby Chantal, and the red Corvair, that those things shouldn’t be on your agenda, because they are expanding your universe beyond proportions you can understand or are comfortable with. In order to keep your universe small, the way you like it, you start folding the towels. There are always so many towels, and you like to feel the nub of the terry cloth against your dry fingertips because your fingers are always dry from swimming in chlorine. You have to put away your clothes and Thomas’s clothes, and then the girls’ clothes, and then the rags that go in the rag chest, which are really not rags but just an assortment of napkins and dish towels you keep by the dining room table. Often, a stray sock or a pair of underwear gets thrown into the rag chest too and someone during a meal will go get a rag to wipe their face and dig into the rag chest without looking carefully at what they are picking up and they will end up wiping their face with a gym sock or a flowered panty instead, which gets everyone laughing at the dinner table, but not for long, because the meal has to be finished quickly, you and the girls have come back from swim practice so late and now there is violin to practice and now there is homework, and where are the protractors, the rulers, the colored pencils for filling in landmasses and rivers on maps? And how did this happen, Thomas asks you before bed, that Alex swims more than she studies? How did we let that happen? The swimming won’t get her anywhere in life. How is it that our daughter knows nothing about how the plates move? About how magma was formed? About what igneous rocks are? About what sedimentary means? And you don’t say so, but you are not so sure yourself. Sedimentary sounding awfully similar to sedentary, and does this mean they are rocks that formed by barely moving, and is such a thing even possible? Thank goodness it is night now, the lights are out, the dog has settled against the door, the engine of the car out in the driveway has finished making its tick-tick-ticking sound, the owls have begun their calling, the swim suits and towels are all hung up, your daughters have practiced their violins and have completely memorized “Perpetual Motion.” And your mind’s suddenly able to recall that sedimentary means rocks formed by layers, so now you can go to sleep with one less thing on your mind. This is you thinking what a fine job you’re doing keeping Paul and Bobby Chantal and that red Corvair out of your mind.

  This is Chris at home, looking through boxes in the attic at three in the morning and finding the handgun her father once owned and kept behind the counter of his store just in case there was trouble. This is Chris remembering Beatrice, the babysitter she had as a girl who was raped. This is Chris finding the box of bullets alongside the handgun. This is Chris remembering Beatrice, how every night she would fall asleep next to Chris. This is Paul asleep downstairs, having a nightmare that he has found Bobby Chantal again. He is holding her in his arms. Her throat is slit. “Oh, Bobby,” he is trying to say in his dream, trying to bring her back to life, but to anyone listening to him it sounds like “Oh, baby” instead, because words you say in a dream sound distorted to others who are awake. In short, it sounds like a dream he’d want to have, not a nightmare. This is Chris in the attic, hearing through the floorboards Paul saying, “Oh, baby,” and thinking to herself that he is dreaming about the woman he’s seeing. This is Chris not caring so much now. In a
world of ten thousand things, what’s more important? Her husband with another woman, or a killer who’s killing young girls, girls on the same swim team as Cleo, girls almost as young as Cleo, even? She takes the handgun and the bullets with her down the rickety attic ladder. She hides them in her bedroom, where she keeps her winter sweaters folded up and encased in a plastic garment bag. Again Paul moans in his sleep. She doesn’t mind it now. She is thinking of how she will find that killer.

  During the day, out your window, you can hear what must be tree limbs rubbing against one another in the wind and squeaking, but it sounds like a new kind of animal, or just an animal you’ve never heard before.

  In the shower, while thinking about how Paul kissed you, you keep saying “water, water, water,” imitating the boy in the wheelchair at the facility whom you often hear showering in the next stall over. Maybe the drain hears everything and Thomas has figured that out already and that’s why he does most of his talking in the shower. Someone’s listening, someone who gives him the time of day. Someone who says, “Yes, tell me more about quarks, quasars and pulsars. Tell me how we are moving away from other planets at twenty-two miles per day. Tell me how Pluto was sent off course by a stray meteor and now has a wobble.”

  This is Paul asleep while Chris gets up from bed and gets dressed. He is not someone who snores, and Chris often has to go right up to him and watch his breathing in order to tell whether he’s asleep or not. She can tell he’s sleeping when his lips are slightly parted, as if he’s just about to say something, or he has just pulled away from a kiss. He is sleeping now. She knows the rest stop that Kim was killed at, and when she drives by it she can see that there are police barricades blocking the entrance road. This is Chris driving farther up the highway, liking how she has the lanes to herself, liking how she can use her brights and not have to worry about blinding an oncoming driver because there is no one else but her on the highway. This is Chris pulling into a different rest stop, farther up north, in the dark, hearing her tires make a crumbling sound over the blacktop. This is Chris going into the bathroom, where moths fly by the light above the door and where a cricket is chirping in the corner by the sink, whose pipes sweat beneath the basin. This is Chris finished in the stall, and now standing at the sink washing her hands, realizing there are no hand towels and wiping her hands on the skirt of her dress instead. This is her hand sliding over her pocket, sliding over the hard handgun she can feel beneath the cloth. This is Chris looking in the mirror, looking to see who could be standing behind her looking at her looking in the mirror, but there is no one behind her. The door is behind her and it is shut, but not all the way, and wouldn’t it be easy, Chris thinks, for someone to just open up that door and find her?