This is the Water

by Yannick Murphy

  This is Adam, the father of the boys who would rather be playing in the adjacent water park than swimming on the team. He is telling his boys in a voice that never rises, that stays the same, as if he were talking to them in a quiet room rather than a noisy facility with a rushing waterslide and continuous air-exchange vents pumping air, and fifty other small children screaming and splashing, to get out of the lazy river and get on over to the competition pool where their coach is starting practice. His boys don’t listen. They continue running up the stairs to the slide and coming down yelling, their feet flexed to increase the surface area when they hit the water and to make as much of a wake as possible cascade over the side of the plastic slide and swoosh onto the cement floor and disappear into the drains. This is Adam shaking his head, wondering how angry he has to become, or wants to become right now. He realizes he could become very angry now, something he never likes to do, so he walks away from his boys and looks out through the glass doors and windows that lead to the foyer, where the tall café tables are set up with their tall chairs, where the drink machines line the wall, and where the snack bar and the front desk are located. What he notices, though not right away, is a man in his midfifties with thick, dark hair and prominent wrinkles on his forehead. Adam has never seen the man before. He seems too old to be a parent who has a young child on the swim team. He doesn’t seem like a member of the facility. Members of the facility all look as though they have enough money to afford it. The women wear pricey, casual athletic clothing, and the men wear shiny athletic shoes. Perhaps he’s a new janitor, Adam thinks, and he’s just changed out of his work clothes and is waiting for a ride. Where the man sits he has a perfect view through the glass windows of the pool, where the swim-team girls and boys are coming onto deck. The girls are adjusting their swimsuit bottoms to cover their rears, and they’re piling their hair on top of their heads and then leaning over, asking their friends to help scoop their swim caps over their heads. Adam notices the man watching the girls. For a moment he’s glad he just has boys, and no girls to worry about, but then a feeling of protectiveness over the girls on the team comes over him, even though they’re not his. He decides that later, after he gets his boys out of the lazy river and onto the competition pool deck where practice is about to begin, he’s going to point the man out to the head coach.

  But Adam’s boys are not cooperating. The youngest starts splashing Adam while Adam’s on deck. The warm, chlorine-smelling water drenches Adam’s shorts and tee shirt. “Enough now, boys. It’s time to get out,” he says. The boys swim away from him, back to where they can get out of the pool and climb up the stairs again to the slide. Adam makes his way to the slide, where his boys will shoot out. He is lucky this time. They have slid down together in the manner of a train, and all he has to do is grab them both up under an arm and drag them to the other pool. He practically holds them off the ground as he walks with them, their small toes suspended in the air, only grazing the wet cement now and then. His boys start howling as he drags them. “I’m going to call social services and report you!” his older boy yells. Adam can feel the other parents on the team trying not to embarrass him, looking away from him and his boys. He’s thankful, but still, he’s embarrassed. When the assistant coach sees his boys, Adam sighs with relief. She’s all smiles and gives them high-fives. “So glad you made it!” she says, and the boys high-five her back as hard as they can. “That’s all you’ve got? Let’s see how hard you can really do it.” She has them high-five her again, and now Adam’s boys are diving in for their coach, who whoops and hollers for them as they’re in midair.

  Adam just wants to disappear from the pool deck as quickly as possible, so he goes out to his car and sits with his head back against the headrest listening to the radio. It isn’t until later at night when he’s in bed, and his boys are asleep after countless requests for glasses of water and hugs, and his wife is asleep beside him, that the image of the man at the pool comes back to him, and Adam remembers now that he forgot to tell the coach about the man. He wishes he hadn’t forgotten, because the way the man looked at the girls, Adam thinks, wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

  This is Sofia doing no-breathers during practice. Since Kim’s death, Coach has been having them do a lot. She has them do six in a row, swimming the length of the pool and back in freestyle without taking a breath. This is Sofia thinking she has enough time left to do a seventh, even though the coach hasn’t asked them to do it, because Sofia thinks the more she does them, then the more she can do them during her one-hundred-free race, at least for the first fifty, and that will definitely make her faster. This is Sofia climbing out of the pool after her seventh no-breather and standing on the deck and beginning to black out. This is Sofia sitting down on deck against the wall made of glass and putting her head between her legs and her hands on her knees and staring at the tiles on deck and thinking how the voices of her teammates sound so far away, as if they were outside even, close to the hillside where the granite rocks, so shear, stick out like chunks of black ice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  On the equator trip you left the air conditioner off and the doors wide open at night, wanting to hear the waves rolling in, not even minding the din of the howler monkeys in the nearby trees that sounded like your front-loading washing machine at home after you have crammed too many towels and jeans into it and it is complaining at a high pitch. If you had bought only organic milk, you wouldn’t have been able to afford the trip, but on the trip you felt pangs of guilt when you looked at Alex, your nine-year-old, whose breasts you could see budding through her swimsuit. Maybe, just maybe, all that highly processed milk was making her hormones kick in prematurely, and what have I done, you think, and now, with all this about the killer, you feel even more often that the earth is sucking you in from below, and if it weren’t for being able to think about Paul instead or the handles on the chair you are sitting in while eating your raisin bran, you’d be all the way sucked in, the image of your brother with his blood running out of his head feeding the vortex, providing the extra whoosh that would make your journey to the center of the earth entirely possible.

  Driving to practice, the road is gleaming from an overnight shower, but the sun is lighting up the blacktop in a promising warm glow as you pass by a man who opens his mailbox and hands his newspaper to his collie, who takes the newspaper gingerly in his mouth, and with his tail high trots back toward the house. On the car radio you hear a report from the same trooper with the battered nose who was at the pool and who was pictured in the paper. In a voice that is sonorous and clear and can be heard even through the static you’re encountering because you’re traveling between mountains, he says that unfortunately there are no leads, no leads at all in the murder case, but he knows that in time, a shred of evidence will appear, and when it does, he will act on it. The killer will be caught.

  What’s that in the water? you think while swimming your workout. There are stretches of silt at the bottom that cover the tiles like dark scarves settling down to the ground after blowing in a breeze. The filter on the blink again, you think, and wonder if you or your daughters should even be swimming in the water today. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re not protecting them from a killer and that you’re not feeding them organic milk and their breasts are rearing their small heads? Now, on top of everything else, your girls have to swim in dirty water? What if they inhale those bits of silt? What if they have an open cut and the dirt gives them an infection that will never heal?

  You swim anyway. The cool water wakes you up. You are always tired as you drive to the pool. You yawn huge yawns, one after the other, that make your eyes close up because your jaw is stretching so wide and you’re afraid your yawning will affect your view of the road. But when you’re actually swimming you’re always impressed that yawning is the farthest thing from your mind. You look down at the silt at the bottom and wonder why everything you see you interpret like a Rorschach, why the silt looks like scarves to you an
d why your daughter’s menstrual blood on a pad looks like an hourglass and why even the grain of the wood in your bedroom walls looks like a smiling face, and clouds, oh my god, you have seen more shapes of animals in clouds than you’ve seen on the sides of the roads while driving, more cottontail rabbits up in the air than you’ve ever seen in a summer field, more whales and dolphins than you’ve ever seen in your life, and more horses rearing, their manes flying behind them, than you’ve ever seen before on the many farms you drive by every day on your way to practice. Even in people’s faces you have seen things—the shape of the lines around Thomas’s mouth look like the hats the Japanese wore while working in the rice fields long ago, and in your own face you have seen scars on your forehead from cuts you received as a child, and it looks as if someone created a scene of a rural landscape on your forehead. Slightly wavy lines representing the lay of the rolling land, and other stray marks representing random birds in flight.

  You even see things in things you haven’t seen. For example, your brother’s blood pooling on the carpeted floor was, in your mind, in the shape of a head of cauliflower.

  You hear the water soothing you, telling you it’s okay. Shush. There now, the water says. There, there.

  You sit on the topmost bleacher after your swim and lean back against the wall. You were practicing your fly in the water, trying to get more glide in your stroke and also trying to bring up your arms faster instead of letting them drag behind you and slow you down, but you don’t think it worked at all. Your fly was as slow as ever, and did not resemble at all the fly the swim-team girls do where they look like sea serpents moving through the water. You see your daughter Sofia sitting against the wall of the facility. You wonder if she’s tired. You tell yourself to remember to feed her a better snack before practice next time. You’ve heard of the other swimmers eating bananas before practice and even yams because they keep you going for so long. Yams. When was the last time you even bought a yam? You see Thomas in the facility. He has come with you and he has used the treadmill and the weights and now he is walking to the water fountain, holding his fingertips to the inside of his wrist. He likes to check his pulse when he feels his heart flutter strangely or skip a beat. You think that whenever you feel your heart trip and stumble, you don’t want to stop what you’re doing to see if it will pass. Instead you keep doing what you’re doing, even if sometimes that’s swimming. You think dying will probably hurt as much as the time you and Thomas were stacking the woodpile and he threw a log on top of your thumb by mistake. You wanted to puke, it hurt so badly, but you lived through it. After your fingernail turned the purple color of the inside of a mussel’s shell and fell off, you got out your pink nail polish and painted all your fingernails pink, as well as the skin on the thumb where your nail used to be. If anyone noticed the bumpy coat of polish on your thumb that looked as if a child had painted it for you, they didn’t say so. You admire how people can be so polite sometimes, not even mentioning if there’s food hanging off your lip, or if your underwear is showing above the waistline of your pants in the back.

  You want to get back to reading Anna Karenina. Karenin is thinking of divorcing her, and he’s demanding she hand over the love letters that Vronsky wrote to her. It’s taking you forever to finish the book, months even. You’ve only been able to concentrate long enough to read a few pages a night, and Thomas keeps interrupting you. Thomas tells you about nicotine, how years ago people drank it. He wants to create a new alcoholic beverage, one that has caffeine in it as well as nicotine. Think how it would sell! he says. You, of course, think how bad the drink would be for people’s health, but then you start thinking there may be a profit in it. You think of all the people you see in your town who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and drink alcohol and you are sure they would try the beverage, and just as soon as you start imagining the possibilities, the people you know who could help promote the product (Larry, the liquor distributor, for example, whose daughter is on the swim team and who often has his daughter help stack the displays of bottles in the grocery stores after hours), and the fortune to be made, Thomas tells you it’s probably not possible, what with all the tobacco regulations the government has, and the control the tobacco companies have over their own product, you probably couldn’t do it. You, deflated, look out the window on the drive back from practice and listen to the conversation of Sofia and Alex in the backseat. They are talking about cheaters. Swimmers in their lanes who don’t do the full workout. Swimmers who when the coach isn’t looking don’t bother to kick when they’re on a kick set, or who don’t bother touching the wall to complete the set, and turn around early, going back down the lane, or who say they did the whole set, but end early, or who reach a hand out and grab on to the lane line, giving themselves a little extra propulsion. Thomas tells your girls how those cheaters will suffer come race day. Come race day they won’t be as fit as the others, and it will show in their times. You can’t hide poor training, he says. What’s worse is not bothering to study, say on a math test, he says. What’s the point of even taking the test if you haven’t bothered to learn the material? And you see Alex in the backseat shrink down, and you wonder if Alex is one of those swim-team cheaters or not, or maybe she hasn’t shrunk down in her seat at all for feeling guilty, but has merely shrunk down in her seat because she’s tired, because she has swum her heart out for the past two hours and every fiber of her adolescent muscles is saying I’m tired, and feed me. How did I expect them, you think, to be satisfied with just one apple a piece on the ride home? I should have brought granola bars and bananas too. You reach out behind you in the car to touch one of your daughter’s hands, to more than pat it, to hold it up in your own hand and squeeze it, to somehow parlay some energy back into her. If only I had the energy to give, you think, and then you feel a warmth course through your body, and as if on cue, your body seems to have found the extra reserves to share with your daughter, the endless supply of mother energy that all mothers have, even when their children are full-grown.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Some of the time Mr. Floyd Arneson, aka the killer, likes to show up at work on time, and sometimes he shows up early, but he never shows up late, because he does not want to have to be called into the principal’s office. This is Floyd Arneson thinking, I know perfectly well there is a pretty blond woman who is trying to bait me into killing her. I can see the outline of the handgun sitting in her oversized pocket. She is careless, though, and turns her back to the woods too often, where I could come out quickly and be on her in no time. Floyd Arneson likes thinking about this woman rather than having to think about work. He is so often annoyed with the teachers when they want to order supplies and say they need them right away and need him to type up a purchase order for them right away and then, when he orders them right away, even cutting his lunchtime short to get it done, the package arrives and they leave it in their mailboxes for days. So it was no hurry, really, at all. He is tired of the way they come into his office without knocking, while he is working, asking for substitution forms to fill out, asking where the principal is, or asking how to work the new phone system, which they should have learned by now since he has put a copy of the manual in each one of their mailboxes. He is tired of the way they open up his desk drawer while he is out, searching for postage stamps or scissors or tape or pens when, of course, if they weren’t so lazy, they could just go down to the supply room and get most of those items themselves.

  Floyd Arneson likes the children. He likes hearing their small hands rap on the sliding glass window when they come up to deliver the attendance list. He likes opening the sliding glass window and peering down to where they are standing up on tiptoes trying to see him and pass him the list. He likes how yellow like corn silk the little girls’ hair can be, and he likes how long the boys’ lashes can be. He doesn’t like how at recess he can always hear the teachers telling the children to stop climbing the trees and to stop playing with sticks and to stop playing by the stream whe
re the poison ivy grows. He wishes the teachers would just let the children have fun.

  He knows that if he wanted to, he could easily kill the blond woman he sees at the rest stops, but he doesn’t want to stop seeing her when he goes and parks his car on a dirt logging road on the other side of a rest stop and walks through the woods to get to the rest stop. He likes how she keeps patting the pocket where her handgun is located right before she walks into the restroom. He likes how a few times he has looked through the door and seen how she stands at the mirror and washes her hands, hardly looking up at her reflection, when you would think a woman that attractive would be drawn to looking at herself all of the time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  This is you at home hanging up your suit after your workout, noticing how it’s stretching out, how it now looks as if it could fit one of the dancing hippos. This is you listening to rain falling on the copper roof and Thomas going around the house shutting the windows, the rubber stripping in the windows making a sucking sound as they’re closed, sounding vacuum-packed, as though the house is being sealed in for good. This is you thinking maybe it’s for the best, that you shouldn’t be let out of the house again anyway. Locked inside, you won’t be talking to swim-team husbands you shouldn’t be talking to. Locked inside, maybe you will finally clean out the pantry, arrange the myriad of spice containers and sponge off the shelves, wiping away the overlapping circular stains the bottoms of the containers have left on the wood and making it look as if your pantry were some kind of an official Olympic item, sporting the signature interlocking rings. This is you in the evening looking out your office window at a lilac bush getting its leaves battered by the heavy rain. This is you hearing your girls fighting over something in the other part of the house. Sofia is shaking the carpet from her loft bedroom down to the level below where Alex has her bed. Alex is shrieking about the dust and dirt falling on top of her covers and Sofia is telling her she’s imagining things, nothing is really falling from her carpet. This is you debating whether to go and mediate and tell Sofia to knock it off, or whether it’s best if you stay out of this one. Your girls can’t always expect you to be there when they fight. They will have to learn how to stand up for themselves and be strong. This is you thinking you have to be strong too. You have to keep away from the facility for a few days. The facility is no longer safe, not with Paul there, or Chris there to remind you of Paul. Not with the both of them reminding you of Kim and Bobby Chantal. You could always visit with another friend at the facility, one who could make you laugh, one who could talk to you about the swim team and get your mind off whatever that feeling is that grabs you from the bottom of your chair at the breakfast table and wants to drag you down, but now you have to stay away and lay low. This is you lying in bed with Thomas, and the rain outside is still coming down, and the wind is shaking the treetops back and forth as if it is trying its hardest to uproot them. This is you listening to Thomas asking you how Foucault made his pendulum, and how he accounted for the movement of the earth when he did. This is you not understanding what Thomas’s question means in the least, but knowing he doesn’t really expect you to have an answer anyway, he just asked the question in order to say it aloud and help himself answer it. This is Thomas falling asleep. Snoring when he’s just drifted off. This is you taking the pillow and laying it on top of his face so that he stops. This is Thomas rolling over, showing his back to you. How many moles and spots are there on Thomas’s back? Too many to count, you think. These are the calls of the coyotes down by the hollow near the stream—they are short and overlapping, and then there is one last long call that sounds as if it were a wolf’s instead. This is the smell in the air, the rain smelling like a pond. This is you thinking that even if you don’t have any wife energy, and you search inside yourself and find there is none, that you will have to start finding some wife energy pronto, because it seems so much hinges on this wife energy. Even if Thomas didn’t respond to this energy before, you have to try again. This is you waking Thomas up with your touching, having found some shred of wife energy somewhere in the marrow of you. This is Thomas turning away from you and toward the closet where your clothes hang. You dislike all of them. They are so unflattering, the blouses that make you look pregnant. The jeans that are too tight and have been for a couple of years now, but that you refuse to get rid of because you think it’s a waste to toss a perfectly good pair of jeans. This is Thomas falling asleep again, facing all the clothes that hold the shape of you that you don’t like.