Authors: Yannick Murphy
This is the Water (17 page)
T
his is the water the next afternoon at the pool looking cloudier, partly because it is mirroring the overcast sky of a hot late summer's day gathering storm clouds, and partly because it's dirtier from so many hundreds of kids swimming in it and having unknowingly taken into the water with them bits of grass that clung to the sides of their feet, and bits of dirt, and traces of sports energy drinks, and traces of body lotion used without success to moisturize skin that stews for hours every day in water treated with chlorine. This is Paul cheering Cleo on. He watches her race a one-hundred IM in the next lane even as he's timing for another swimmer in his own lane. When she hits the wall he stops his stopwatch instead of stopping it when the swimmer in his own lane touches two-tenths of a second later. Paul writes in a time he thinks the kid in his lane might have gotten, but is not worrying about it too much, because after all the kid didn't come in first or second or even third, but maybe second-to-last.
Driving home, Paul keeps telling Cleo how proud he is of her for winning her heat. He tells her so many times that she says, “Dad, can we just listen to the radio now?” and he turns it on to some popular station where she knows all the words to all the songs and he wants to know how she knows them all when he hardly lets her listen to that station in the car. The songs are all songs he listened to growing up, only now, after a few lines, the poetic lyrics are rudely stopped, interrupted by riffs of rapping and the disjointed telltale mechanized bass beats of dubstep.
This is Paul passing by rest stops along the way, unable to keep from craning his neck back to watch them a little longer as he wonders if the rest-stop killer is there, sitting in his red Corvair, or probably some newer car by now, thinking about who his next victim will be.
This is Paul entering his driveway, seeing that Chris's car isn't there, thinking how she's probably off with Bobby Chantal's daughter, Chris putting her hand on the daughter's shoulder, helping her deal with the upheaval of having to exhume her mother. He doesn't feel there's any stopping Chris now. He could have done something before, maybe, if he'd known this is what she'd be up to. Maybe he could have called Chris's parents and asked them to come for a visit and try to talk to Chris and explain to her how she was getting caught up in a world that wasn't her own, but now it is too late. Bobby Chantal's body is on its way to seeing the light of day once again after so many years, and Paul is on his way to facing months and maybe years of a legal nightmare that he can only hope turns out in his favor.
When Chris comes home later he is in bed, but not asleep. He reaches out to her when she comes into the bed, and he can feel her tense up immediately. She quickly turns to face him, as if she thinks he is going to hurt her, or that she wants to hurt him. “Hey, it's okay. It's just me, your husband,” he says. But he does not feel her breathing relax and her body still seems tense and her skin is cold, as if she has been outside for a while without a jacket or sweater.
“Can we talk?” he says. She shakes her head. He can hear her hair rasping on the pillowcase she shakes it so firmly. “But I've got to tell you something,” he says.
“Can it wait until tomorrow? I'm tired,” she says.
“No, it can't wait. It's a story I think you'll want to hear,” he says. He leaves the bed and goes and gets his briefcase. He printed out the story the last time he was in his office, and now he sits beside her on the bed and reads it to her. The light from the moon is strong enough that he doesn't even have to turn the light on, and he likes reading his words better that way, without even a pen in his hand to stop and make corrections to the writing. When he is finished Chris says, “That was you, in the story?” He nods. “You could have told me,” she says. “You had so many years to tell me.”
“I didn't want to upset you,” he says. “It wasn't like I could make Bobby Chantal come back. It wasn't like I took her away. I wasn't part of the equation.”
“How could you say that? You were! You saw the car. You saw the license plate. You knew what Bobby Chantal was doing up until minutes before her throat was slit.”
“If I had gone to the police they would have focused on me, Chris. They would have spent time, everyone's time, trying to figure out if I was the killer or not. It was better that I didn't come forth. Don't you realize that when this happened we had just decided to start seriously seeing each other again? It's not exactly information I was going to share with you to get you to date me.”
“No, you're right. If I had known how you were just watching out for your own self, I wouldn't have dated you at all. How do I even know you aren't really the killer?”
Paul knew this was coming, but still, to hear it from Chris at that moment makes him so angry.
“I am not the fucking killer!” he yells, and of course he realizes at the moment he yells it that he yelled too loud, his voice too high, even the moonlight seems to cringe from how loud he was and seems to dim, or is it just a passing cloud in front of the moon that makes it look as though Chris's face is darkening?
Cleo opens their door then. “What's going on? Why's Dad yelling?” she says. Paul steers her back to her room, to where the mobile of the planets swings and glows. “It's nothing. I'll tell you in the morning,” he says. “You and Mom are fighting, aren't you?” she says. “Yes, we are having an argument,” he says. “Are you going to get a divorce?” Cleo asks as he brings the blankets up to her chin and smoothes her hair away from her forehead. He shakes his head in the dark.
O
nly a few weeks have passed and it feels already like fall. Typical of New England, you think. One moment you're complaining of the bugs and the heat, the next morning you're waking up to a lawn covered with gold and red leaves. Even outside the facility leaves blow across the grass lawn next to the entrance. The sound of a bicyclist fitting and locking his bike into the bike rack, the metal hitting against metal, sounds sharper now than in summer, the cold somehow changing how things reach the ear. Decorative gourds on the facility's Moroccan blue check-in deck sit in a wooden bowl.
This is you inside the facility, where you watch a man who has come from the weight room walking toward the water fountain. He walks strangely, lifting each foot high off the ground as if the soles of his sneakers are covered in gluey wads of chewed gum, or as if he were walking on Jupiter and the gravity is so high it's a labor to lift up each foot and walk across its surface. And who knows, you think, maybe it's possible I went to sleep on Earth and woke up on Jupiter, and everything is the same as it is on Earth when I walk outside, though there will be many moons to keep me awake at night instead of just one. You know there are sixty-seven moons of Jupiter because Thomas once read you an article about Jupiter's moons and you were surprised that many of them have names. You had known about Europa and Io: Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter and the other moons. The tension between the two has made it very hot, and Io is the second-hottest object in the solar system; only the sun is hotter. But you had never known about all the other moons, which have beautiful names like Amalthea and Ananke. Why, you want to know, didn't our moon get a beautiful name? Why is our moon just the moon? Why didn't we bother giving it just one name, when we have bothered to name moons of Jupiter so far away they are invisible to the naked eye?
You jump in the water and start your workout. While you're swimming breaststroke, you hear the susurration of the water sounding as if it were a wind that talks to you every time you put your head down and your hands out in front of you for the glide. You think you hear the water telling you to move over. You look in front of you. Why would the water tell you to move over? There is no one else swimming down your lane. There is no coach at the end of the lane telling you to move over because they need that lane for the swim team kids. Then you remember that when you walked into the pool you saw a workman hanging from the pipe in the ceiling in a safety harness. He was right above the lane you dove into. He was up high fixing an air vent whose seal had come undone. You dive under the lane line and enter the other lane, and just as you do, you hear the splash of a large metal cuff that wrapped around the air vent, holding it in place, as it comes crashing down into the water. If it had hit you, you would have been seriously hurt. After everyone asks if you are all right, you dive down to retrieve the metal cuff for the workman. Its edges are sharp and it weighs a good ten pounds. The workman didn't even know it was about to fall. The lifeguards and the coaches keep telling you how lucky you are you decided to change lanes when you did.
On the drive home from the facility, you ask your daughters what you should call the moon. Sofia doesn't want to join in the fun, she reads her book without looking up, but Alex wants to call the moon Fred. “Okay, agreed,” you say. “Fred, don't be so bright tonight. Let me get some sleep at least.”
Thomas and Sofia work on algebra when you and the girls get home. While you cook dinner you hear the numbers being rattled off by Thomas as he dictates to Sofia, who writes them on a whiteboard. It has been years since you have had to think about algebra and doing equations with negative numbers. In school your teachers said you would need algebra and that it would come in handy as an adult, but algebra is never something you need to know. “Isolate the terms,” “Subtract the negative,” “A negative times a negative is a positive,” you hear Thomas saying, and then you think that maybe your teachers were right. Learning algebra is important. Learning algebra is one of life's greatest lessons. Who else taught you such lessons?
“What you do to one side, you have to do to the other side,” Thomas says.
And such fairness! you think to yourself.
“Again, a negative times a negative is a positive,” Thomas says. And such optimism! You want to stop cooking and go over to Sofia and Thomas. You want to learn algebra all over again, but there are the onions you're sautéing that you have to stir or else they will burn. There is the water you want to come to a boil, but you haven't yet found the lid that fits the pot to quicken the process. There is Alex asking how do you say coins in Spanish, and you can't remember even though you studied Spanish, and there is the dog, who is lying down in the kitchen beside you and following your every move with her eyes, asking, in her own way, to be fed her dinner of kibble soon. The goose outside is pecking at the door. Tick, tick, tick, tick, she is saying with her beak, wanting to come in because dark is falling and the coyotes might be out, and the days are shorter now, and the colder temperatures might cause a frost to fall over night.
This is the fall night, freezing the grass on the lawn, freezing the petals on the tomato plants already picked of their fruit, edging them in white, freezing the topmost surface of a bowl of water left out for the goose. This is the goose in her crate, put in for the night, her eyes closed for short periods of time, and then open again, listening for the sound of the coyote or the fox or the fisher cat. This is you awake, but with your eyes closed, thinking how Fred must not have gotten the memo. Either that or Fred just didn't bother to heed your request, because Fred's shining in through the windows as brightly as the sun, and you wonder if Fred, like Io, is caught in its own tug-of-war, one between itself and Earth that is causing volcanoes to form and its temperature to rise.
T
his is the body of Chris. Contrary to your beliefs, she's not perfect. This is her neck. There's a scar there from when she went to the beach and stayed too long and got a second-degree burn from the sun. This is her right foot. There's a callus on her pinky toe that every once in a while she shaves down with a razor blade. This is her vagina. Between her labia there's a brown beauty mark the size of a dime. She has had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to all of the four men she has slept with in her life. This is her left breast. It's smaller than her right. This is her left earlobe. There's an indentation in it as if she were born with her ear half-pierced. This is her right knee. There's a scar on it from having fallen off a high-powered moped on a rocky road on a Mediterranean island. Make that three men she has slept with that she had to explain the dime-sized brown beauty mark to. One was a one-night stand and they never turned the lights on and she left his house before daybreak.
This is her house. Nearby is a small town with a gas station and a convenience store that sells all the usual drinks and chips and gum, but also homemade chocolate cream pie by the slice. The house is on a main road twenty minutes away from the facility, but behind the house there is a winding trail where Chris and Cleo sometimes cross-country ski in the winter, and in the summer they ride their bikes on it or they run down it, chasing each other for fun, their bodies brushing up against the leaves and branches of the gooseberry bushes as they go. This is what they have seen on the trailâgarter snakes, baby chipmunks in a group of three, a snowshoe rabbit who looked too skinny to survive winter, a deer with twin fawns, and a black bear with his nose to the ground.
This is her childhood. A mother and father who owned a general store up north. She did homework behind the counter, and whenever she was stuck for an answer to a question, she'd ask a customer rather than her parents, who never seemed to know the answer or who were too busy slicing cold cuts or restocking beer onto shelves. This is where she learned how to skip stones, in a wide stream where after she swam she would lie down on flat rocks warmed by the sun. This is the owl she heard every night from her bedroom window. It's a barn owl with a white face that she liked to think of as being the ghost of her grandfather, who had a white beard and mustache. This is the length of her hair when she cut it for women who had cancer. Halfway down her back. This is her back. The shoulders are square and flat. She could rest a book on one of her shoulders and the book would not fall off. She has many muscles that can be seen on her back, even small ones that show up distinctly when she just raises her hair up to put it in a hair tie. This is her mouth. She has never had a cavity. This is the story you already know, the one of her babysitter named Beatrice and how she was raped. This is how Chris sometimes sleeps, with one arm rising in the air, and staying there as if she's holding it up for someone to come and grab it and bring her up from the deep. This is her in her studio, painting over and over again the face of the killer she has never even seen, while thinking of Beatrice. If only those rapists had been stopped beforehand, then Beatrice would have been spared, she thinks.
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T
his is the lawyer Paul knows he has to hire eventually, but cannot bring himself to meet because he knows it means a huge chunk of his life will be destroyed. Paul passes by the lawyer's office, which looks like a bed and breakfast, and probably was at some point, and Paul thinks how could a lawyer who practices out of an office with lace curtains and window boxes be the lawyer who stands up in front of a jury and explains that even though Paul's semen was inside the exhumed body of Bobby Chantal, and Paul never came forth in all these years to tell the police that he had been with her the night of the murder, he is still innocent? Paul stops in his tracks and sits on the rock wall outside the office with his back facing the lace curtains and the window boxes. He doesn't believe in God, but he wants one to know, if one exists, that he prays it will never come to him sitting in a courtroom facing a jury. He prays that there's no way to find out it's his DNA. He prays that Chris doesn't decide to report him to the police and tell them he was with Bobby Chantal the day she was murdered. He prays she understands how it would derail their lives forever.