But that mother and the father of that poor girl Kim, who was murdered, Dinah liked them. At away meets, the mother, Gina, would always save seats on the bleachers for the other parents by putting down extra sweaters or jackets. Poor Gina. Dinah can’t imagine what she’s going through, having a daughter who was murdered. Dinah feels glad she doesn’t know what Gina is going through. At the moment, it’s hard enough to be going through what Dinah is going through herself, watching her daughter cheat in her workout. Her daughter is getting out of the water and heading toward the bathrooms, though she just visited them not even half an hour ago. This is another tactic Dinah knows her daughter uses to get out of doing the complete workout. Dinah, not having her daughter to look at through her binoculars, uses them to look at the other parents sitting in the bleachers. She doesn’t see the usual suspects. Where are Paul and Annie? She thought for sure they’d be sitting together, their knees touching, Annie tossing her graying hair behind her shoulder like a teenager, and Paul the whole time not looking at anything else but Annie. They are not here tonight. Neither of them. Dinah is tempted to go out and see if they are together in the lobby, talking at one of the high café tables with the high chairs that once took such an effort for her to lift herself up onto. Or maybe they are sitting outside in one of their cars. Dinah has noticed how many parents do that. They sit in each other’s cars with the lights on and chat with each other until their children are finished with practice. She can see them in the dark some nights, lit up by their overhead ceiling lights, eerily glowing from within, laughing, talking, sharing snacks that are meant for their children but that they can’t resist partaking of themselves, the dinner they will eat still a long way off considering how far they live from the facility. Dinah is almost ready to go outside and check to see if Paul and Annie are in a car together, when her daughter comes back from the bathroom and dives into the pool to finish her workout. Dinah fixes her binoculars on her daughter now. The set is a breaststroke, her daughter’s best. She is gaining on the girl who has already taken off from the wall and is ahead of her daughter in the next lane over. Dinah wants to call out her daughter’s name, and then she wants to call out, “Go, Baby, go!” and she almost does, until she remembers that this is not a meet and this is not a race, but only a practice, on a rainy Monday night, just hours after she has told her husband, very loudly so that he could hear, that she is through with being married. “Done,” she said. She wanted to add, “Up to here,” and motion to her neck with a hand that looked as if it were slicing her head off, but really it is higher, where she is fed up. It is way past her neck. It is as high as the bit of stray hair that stands up from her head, and then some, that she is fed up. It is up to the rafters of the facility, where the ventilation ducts cross. It is through the sliding-glass roof that is opened on warm, stultifying days caustic with the smell of chlorine, and it is all the way up to where the glorious china-blue sky can be seen. Dinah puts down the binoculars now and slumps slightly in the bleachers. The practice isn’t even halfway over, and she is so tired. She just wants to go home and sleep, but the first thing she will do before going to bed will be to take those antlers off the wall above her four-poster. Tonight, she swears, she will sleep for once without hearing deer trampling through her dreams.
This is Paul trying to decide what to do. He is sitting with his hands on the sides of his face looking at a painting of the man his wife calls the killer. It has been months since he has been in her studio, but he is in her studio now, wanting to ask about who is going to drive Cleo to the next meet coming up. No one told him when he was standing before the priest on his wedding day that someday he might have to consider whether or not she needed mental help. “This is insane,” he says, and gestures toward the painting. He doesn’t like how the eyes of the man in the painting stare at him. What has gotten into her? “It’s him. I know it’s him,” she says. “Chris, what’s gotten into you?” he says. It’s so difficult talking to her these days. She doesn’t seem to answer him when he asks simple questions. She almost imperceptibly inclines her head toward her shoulder, as if there’s a small person perched there whom she’s acknowledging, but she doesn’t open her mouth to speak. If only it were Annie he was talking to instead. From her he knows he could get a straight answer, and Annie, at least, would be looking directly at him when he asked the question. He thinks of Annie as his muse. It was after he met her that he started writing the Bobby Chantal story in earnest. Before that he was just staying late at his office toying with a way to approach it. The actual writing of the story didn’t start until after he met Annie. Annie’s gray hair, almost white, framing a face that seems younger than the hair surrounding it, reminds him of his own mortality, reminds him he only has a finite time in this world to write fiction that matters before he too starts to turn gray and, eventually, dies. Annie is also so grounded and strong, so much the opposite of Chris, who right now is grabbing her car keys, saying she just needs to go for a drive.
When he walks back to the house from the studio, Cleo is standing in the doorway. “What was that all about?” she asks. Paul can only shake his head. “Your mother will be back later. It’s time for you to go to bed,” Paul says. He puts his arm around Cleo as they walk back into the house. He notices how strong and round her shoulder muscle feels beneath his hand. “My God, you’re getting fit,” he says. Cleo smiles. “Coach is working us harder than ever. She says it’s her tribute to Kim. She says if we all swim harder then it’s as if Kim didn’t die in vain. And guess what? I’m leading my lane now.” Paul says, “No, really? Well, that’s great, Cleo.”
This is Paul, alone in bed, remembering all too vividly that night he spent with Bobby Chantal and how they kissed and had sex on the picnic table that was up on the hill.
This is Paul’s computer in his office. It holds the first few pages of the story he’s writing about that night with Bobby Chantal. It is not a story he thinks he will ever try to publish. It is a story filled with too many personal details that would implicate him in the murder. First of all, it describes Bobby Chantal to a T. From the freckles on her nose, and her soft light-brown hair, down to her white-soled nurse’s shoes, which she said she kept looking white by covering the smudges with Wite-Out. It also describes Paul, a first year college student, with hair that was so dark it almost looked black, hair tied behind his head in a ponytail. It details the rest stop, with its picnic table, and with its view that had the ability to send Vietnam vets back in time with flashes of recognition so striking that sometimes they were left staring into the darkness of a deep depression. The story is like a written confession by a man who cannot help embellishing the facts and turning them into a story. It was when he first started staying late at his office, trying to plan the story, that Chris started accusing him of cheating. Maybe, in a way, he is cheating on her. He comes to the office most evenings after dinner to work on it. He sometimes even wakens with an idea or a detail for the story he hadn’t remembered, and rolls away from Chris’s warm body and gets into his car and drives to his office to write it down. He knows that reading the news article about the serial killer in Colorado, who was finally caught after strangling his last victim, and the news of Kim being murdered are the reasons he has been thinking about Bobby Chantal so much again. He knows it is the reason his nightmares are more frequent, and why in them he keeps trying to bring Bobby Chantal back over and over again. In truth, his memory of Bobby Chantal and his writing the story have been consuming him. He is not concentrating well in his teaching. He is reading students’ work without even leaving a constructive comment. He writes “Fine job” on the last page of their work, or something just as nondescript, when really their writing could use helpful criticism throughout. What do I really know about writing anyway? he thinks. He is doubting his own ability to tell the story. He feels that if he can get the story right, then somehow he’ll be rid of the guilt. I’m not stupid enough to go to the police and tell them I was there the night of her murder, he tells
himself. That could ruin my life, and the lives of Chris and Cleo as well. But writing the story in a way that exposes the humanity within him, that might help. It might redirect his thoughts, so that while he is eating dinner with his family he might have a conversation with them instead of staring at the salt shaker and thinking of how small leaves and blades of grass were mixed in with Bobby Chantal’s blood on her face and the front of her dress when he turned her over and saw the slit in her neck that ran from ear to ear, like the proverbial second smile that so many other victims murdered by having their throats cut are described as having. And best of all, getting past writing the Bobby Chantal story might just get him back to writing work that can be published again. There are stories inside him he wants to tell, only right now it’s as if Bobby Chantal isn’t going to let him write them unless he writes her story first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
You swim in a lane next to your daughters’ lane, where they are practicing reverse dolphin kicks on their backs. Waves from their undulations buoy you from side to side as you swim a slow free, your kick barely fluttering, your turnover rate high since you’re not pulling hard enough when you extend your arm below the surface of the water. You think it’s a good thing you’re not in the ocean, as the movements from the kids on the team would probably buoy you far away from the shore and out into the open sea where you’d . . . drown? Be lost forever? Swallowed? Saved by Japanese fishermen? You picture yourself lying on the deck of a trawler beside dolphins whose eyes are clouded over and whose skin is dull gray. Maybe the fishermen would give you salty broth made from soy and you would say arigato, and they would nod their heads up and down and smile, pleased you acknowledged them in their own tongue. Would you have the heart, then, to denounce them for the treatment of the dolphins?
This is you in the water swimming slowly, thinking of being saved by Japanese fishermen. Your stroke weak, your hair gray, coming out from under your cap in wisps, your hips on your backstroke sunk low. If you’d only tilt your head back more in the water, those hips of yours would rise up. Ah, there, you tilt your head back now. Good job, Annie, you think you hear the water say. You are not thinking of your brother now, how his wife, after he shot himself, found bits of his blood and skull on the dial for the volume control of the stereo system, and how she threw out all of his toothpaste and there were so many tubes. He must have stocked up one day, a day before he knew, of course, that he would choose to end his days. You are not thinking of Paul or the killer. This is you now laughing in the water, watching Alex being silly in the water as she swims beside you, coming up from underneath the lane line and crossing her eyes and blowing up her cheeks with air when she sees you. This is Alex being told by the coach to get back over into her lane and finish her set. Alex gives you one last funny look before she goes. This is you hearing the water again. You were wrong, you realize. It is not saying, Good job, Annie. It is saying, Do the job, Annie. Do the job, and you don’t know what it means.
We the parents agree not to interfere with the coaching of the swimmers and agree to let the coaches coach. We have to sign forms to that effect every year. We the swim parents, we think we are good swim parents. We the swim-team parents drive our children sometimes almost an hour just to get to practice, and we the swim-team parents hang out for two hours at practice while our children swim, then we drive almost an hour back. We the swim-team parents wake up at five a.m. some mornings to drive our children two hours away to a meet where they may only swim a few races, their actual time swimming in the water not totaling more than three minutes and thirty seconds. We the swim-team parents work at the swim meets, to help the team, for no pay. We the swim-team parents make sure our children are rested the night before, and that they have eaten pasta, because every good swim-team parent knows that pasta will carry them through the next day so they can drive home the finish and motor into the wall. We the swim-team parents buy our children the swimmer’s backpacks for exorbitant prices because they have mesh pockets to keep the wet swimsuits in for the car ride home, and we the swim-team parents buy the swimmer’s parkas with the swimmer’s name embroidered above the breast that the swimmers wear during swim meets to keep themselves warm in between races. We buy them the skintight racing suits that take two adults to get one child into. We the swim-team parents, some of us tell our children we saw how hard they tried when they raced but didn’t win or shave off time. Some of us tell our children to swim faster, to build up an oxygen debt. We want to see them panting for breath after a race, so tired they can’t pull themselves out of the water. Some of us, the swim-team parents, tell our children nothing and just let them sit on our laps after they’ve raced, even though they are too old for sitting on our laps and they are taller than we are, and we place a hand on their backs as they sit on us and the two of us just look at the people around us and the pool below, in constant motion with the movement of swimmers’ bodies. Some of us work at timing, holding stopwatches in our hands, or at admissions collecting fees for programs and heat sheets, or at the concession selling the ziplock baggies of brownies and paper plates of the gooey mac and cheese, or at the timing console making sure the touchpads are reset for the next race, or as officials faulting swimmers for single-hand touches or for wiggling before a dive off the blocks. Some of us don’t tell our children good job at the meet. We save our praise for later. We tell them in long car rides home when they’re tired and hungry and don’t want to hear it, and just want to read their books (all swim-team children are good readers in the car and rarely get carsick because they are so used to the long rides). We tell them how amazingly they swam and how proud we are and how we think all the hard work they’ve done all those evenings at practices in the pool have paid off, and we the swim-team parents can’t believe how much better we feel now that we’re out of that pool and that facility, and we the swim-team parents think that even the stale air of the car—we can smell where the wet dog has sat on the upholstery, and where there are bits of stale chips under the seats, and where there might even be a blackened, shriveled banana peel—is a much better smell than the smell of the hot, chlorinated pool deck we’ve been standing on for so long.
Your house, you think, is just a bigger version of your car. Inside there are also stale bits of food and the smell of the wet dog, and there are clothes scattered here and there, and wet towels no one bothered to hang up, and plastic containers that once held snacks for swim meets, such as fresh diced fruit (a swim-team parent doesn’t bring chips for their children to eat at a meet—each chip, a Frito, for example, acting like a small anchor inside the child’s belly). Some of the swim-team parents buy their children only organic milk, and some of the swim-team parents would like to buy only organic milk for their children, but like you, they have more than one child, and a husband like Thomas who drinks so much milk that buying organic milk would cost too much, and then where would the money come for the vacation you and your family took close to the equator, where Thomas held your arm as you walked on the beach and you saw the panther bounding toward the edge of the forest, and the ocelot crossing the road, and the puffer fish in two feet of water so blue it was the color of someone’s eyes you once dated, but never trusted, because with those eyes you couldn’t tell if he was sincere or not. What was his name again? you think. And then you don’t try to remember, it doesn’t matter. He has another life somewhere with some wife whose purse contents he knows forward and back, or doesn’t. Maybe he couldn’t recognize her purse even if it were stuck up under his nose and he were inhaling the leather smell, and would swear it wasn’t hers even when the contents revealed photos of him on their honeymoon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
This is the water, still remembering the way Kim felt moving through it, how her body broke the surface with both her arms being brought forward over the water and pulling back at the same time displaced the water, how it’s not just the molecules and atoms of past forms that compose it, but the memory of how bodies once moved through it. Th
e other girls, although they can’t name the sensation, can feel the water remembering, and it gives the girls a better sense of how the butterfly is to be swum. The simultaneous up and down movement of the legs and feet. Each turn at the wall on the breast. Each finish double-handed at the wall. This is the coach nodding her head while watching her team swim, noticing how they are better than they were before at the fly, how at least this is something to be grateful for since there has been such a pallor cast over the team since the shocking news of their star flyer’s death.
This is the Water Page 16