This is the Water Read online

  “Paul, a car? Really? You saw a car all those years ago?” you say, almost with a pleading tone in your voice, wanting him to tell you the truth, to clear things up. You are confused. If only you were back on vacation at the equator, on that long stretch of beach where at night the stars were so bright that when you breathed in they seemed to clear everything up for you. The coach of the team then comes out of the pool area. She has a duffel bag over her shoulder and a light jacket on. She is obviously done for the night and going home. She doesn’t say good night or anything to Paul or you as she walks out. She walks with her head down and her lips pursed.

  Paul speaks quietly. “I think we should talk about this some other time. Not here.”

  You are waiting for him to suggest another time and place. What if he asks you what you are doing later on? Sleeping, I’ll be sleeping, you think, and for a flash of a moment you think of your bed with the flowered cotton sheets that look like wild flowers and vines and you wish you were in it right at that moment, on the verge of the sweetness of sleep. You are not in the least bit free later on. You have to go home and make your family dinner. You have to do dishes and put clothes in the dryer and a new load in the washer. You have to choose photos to send your client from your last photo shoot. You see the hours spanning in front of you. You have to read about what’s going to happen to Anna Karenina. Of course you know the ending, everyone knows the tragic ending, but maybe somewhere along the way, in all of that text, you’ll find there’s a way she could have avoided her death—a place where she could have changed herself. You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That’s all there is to it. Paul never suggests when and where another time would be. “All right, some other time,” you say. And then your eye begins to twitch. It sometimes does this when you are tired, or when your goggles have pressed on the side of your eyelid for too long. You turn away so Paul won’t see it and think you are spastic or have neural problems. Luckily, Cleo comes out of the locker room. She is showered and dressed, her swim bag slung over her shoulder. Paul smiles at you. “Have a good night, then,” he says, and touches your arm before he looks at Cleo and asks her if she is ready to leave.

  Driving home your girls ask about Kim. You decide that what is best is that you answer them as truthfully as you can. You are so thankful they are not old enough to drive yet, not while this killer is still at large. Alex wants to know if Kim knew the man who killed her, and Sofia wants to know what Kim was doing at a highway rest stop at night, anyway. Didn’t everyone know they were dangerous and you weren’t supposed to stop at those things? “Really, they should rename them kill stops,” Sofia says. That night Alex wants you to snuggle with her in bed. You move the assortment of books off her bed and climb in next to her. You slide Alex inside the space you make when you are curled on your side and you stroke your girl’s hair and together you stare out at the sky and the trees that are lit up by the light of the stars. Alex says their coach kept making mistakes that day. She would assign them six fifties to practice and then stop them after the fifth fifty, or she would assign them eight one-hundred IMs and then insist they hadn’t done all eight of them and make them do an extra.

  “It’s hard on her,” you say. “She was close to Kim. She coached her for years, and now she’s gone.”

  “Mom,” Alex says, “she’s not just gone. She was murdered. She had her throat slit. Do you think when your throat’s slit and you’re bleeding to death that you can still see and hear and think?”

  “Maybe, for a second, but that’s a lot of blood to lose very quickly. I’m sure she just passed out.”

  Alex shuts her eyes and then opens them and says, “You know how you can see the silver outlines of shapes under your eyelids even after you’ve closed your eyes? You know how it looks like a photo? Do you think the police can get that image off the insides of Kim’s eyelids? I mean, maybe from her eyes they can get a picture of what Kim last saw. Maybe it was a picture of the guy standing over her, making sure she was really dead. Wouldn’t that be cool?” You agree it would be cool. “We’d be rich if we could figure out that process,” Alex says, sounding just like Thomas. You wonder what the last thing was that your brother probably saw. The telephone in his room, where the last phone call was to a friend? The stereo system knobs before they were splattered with blood? A picture of himself on a shelf as a boy holding on to his favorite stuffed animal? It was a dog he named Doggy Dear and its coat was bald in patches from her brother plucking the fur and twirling it between his thumb and forefinger in order to comfort himself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A week later there is a memorial for Kim in the auditorium at her school. Students are invited, the coach, as well as a few older girls from the swim team. Kim’s mother wishes the girls from the team weren’t there, only because seeing them reminds her so much of Kim, and also because they look so strange wearing clothes and not their swimsuits. Kim’s mother hardly recognizes some of the girls with their hair brushed and dry. They also wear dark dresses and are crying, their heads lowered. The girls she’s used to seeing on the team hold their heads high and laugh, but these girls are bent over as their shoulders shake with their sobs. Kim’s mother wishes the coach, who is also shaking with sobs, would just do what she does best, and go down the line, facing these girls, telling them they’ve got to dig in and push themselves harder than ever before. The coach should be high-fiving the girls and wearing her athletic shorts and her team shirt, not this heavy dark dress just past her knees and covering her arms, her hands low in front of her clasped tightly together. Who is this woman? thinks Kim’s mother, and then Kim’s mother is also lowering her head, the sobs coming again as they have been coming for days, her shoulders even sore from them. Kim’s father puts his arm around Kim’s mother, but instead of it feeling comforting, it feels weightless, as if he were a small bird just alighting on her for a moment, and she can sense how any moment he will remove his arm, and fly off, and she will be left feeling only the absence of warmth.

  This is an evening at home. This is one of Alex’s violin strings breaking in the middle of an étude, and Thomas helping her feed a new one in through the peg holes. This is Sofia curled in her bed, using a stuffed bear as a pillow and reading and rolling her eyes every time Thomas tells her to come downstairs and start doing math work. This is you staring at the photos you took at your latest wedding shoot, thinking how if it weren’t your camera the photos came from you would say the photos weren’t yours. You barely remember taking them. It seems so long ago because everything prior to the death of Kim seems long ago. This is a strong wind coming up, and the old sheets of aluminum that Thomas uses to cover the stacked woodpiles sail off and sound like thunder, startling everyone, making Sofia look up from her book, making Thomas and Alex turn their heads to look out the window, making you lift your head from looking at photos you could almost swear you never took.

  This is the night, when you first close your eyes after turning off the light. This is you in the dark asking Thomas how his work was at the lab today, and this is Thomas not even answering, but falling asleep so quickly you can’t believe it when you start to hear him snore. This is you thinking about your brother. That time at the beach when he scooped you up and ran. Why did he do it? you wonder. What was the rush? Why did he run so fast? What was he running away from? You don’t know, but you think maybe it holds the key that will unlock answers for you as to why he killed himself years later. You push the thoughts of your brother aside. You remember Paul at the pool instead. You are thankful you’ve been running into Paul at the pool these past few weeks since you last saw the trooper at the pool. This is you seeing his face at the pool the last time you saw him at practice. He was smiling at you. You want to keep the image there a while, but then Thomas turns on his side, facing away from you, and you are remin
ded you share your bed with Thomas, and the image of Paul fades, and you are just left with sleep. Sleep is rolling over you, closing off images and voices you have seen and listened to throughout the day. The last voice you hear, though, is Paul’s, from that day a few weeks ago when he was saying, “It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.” You can’t believe how his words are coming back to you now. It’s as if after the first time he said them, you deliberately forgot them. But now you remember, and it jolts you awake.

  In the morning, while the girls are still sleeping and Thomas has left for work, you don’t even sit down to eat your cereal. You hold it standing at the counter. The voice of Paul saying it was a red Corvair plays over and over again in your mind. You stand because you don’t want to have the feeling of the floor beneath the chair sucking you down and you having to hold on to the armrests just to keep yourself from sinking. And what if I just call the police and tell them that information? you think to yourself. Aren’t there anonymous tip lines? A tip that’s not going to implicate Paul? But no, he should be the one to leave the tip. It would only be right. It could be helpful, really helpful. Maybe this is the same guy, and maybe years ago he owned that red Corvair and there’s a record of it and his name could be discovered. Before you realize it, you have finished your cereal. You don’t even remember eating it. You’ve been so lost in thought. You don’t remember if you fed the dog either, so you feed her again, even though Thomas always says the dog is fat enough, and that if anything you should let her skip a meal.

  That evening you drive the girls quickly to practice. When you’re going past the house that looks as if it’s folded in half, you forget you’re in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone and go forty-five instead. You’re all set to tell Paul what he should do. Call the police tip hotline. You even copied the number down on a Post-it note for him. Your daughters look up from the books they are reading. “Jeez-um,” says Sofia. “We’re almost at the pool already. You must have speeded all the way here.”

  “Look at this booger, Mom,” Alex says as you pull up in front of the pool.

  “Do I have to?” you say.

  “Yes, look, it’s got three of my hairs in it!” Alex says.

  “Oh my God, she is not my sister,” Sofia says. “You’re all not related to me. Tell me I was adopted, please. Anything but knowing we share the same gene pool.”

  “Not only do we share the same gene pool, Sofia, we share the same swimming pool!” Alex says.

  “Yuck, I am not looking at your hairy booger,” you say to Alex, laughing. “Go, go, get out of the car and get to practice.”

  After the girls leave the car, you wait in the parking lot for Paul to pull up so you can talk to him outside the facility, away from the eyes of the other parents, such as Dinah, who you see has now taken to bringing small binoculars with her to practice, supposedly to be able to watch her daughter, but every now and again you see the lenses of the binoculars focused on you when you’re talking to Paul. Usually some parents park and let their kids walk up to the facility, but now you notice that more are dropping their children off at the entrance, afraid the killer might just grab them and force them into his car. Some parents are even getting out of the car and walking their children into the facility and helping them undress in the locker room. In small groups in the foyer, parents talk to each other about the death of Kim. You have seen them hugging each other more often. You have overheard the words “terrible” and “tragic” and “such a beautiful girl” so many times in the past few weeks. You have said those same words yourself when talking to the parents while you are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring in at your children through the glass window and watching them swim, almost afraid to take your eyes off them for minute, not even daring to run errands while they’re practicing, because what if? What if one of your own was now in the grave?

  It’s Chris who drives into the parking lot after dropping off the girls at the facility’s front entrance, not Paul.

  “Hi. What happened to Paul?” you ask.

  “He had work to do at his office, so I brought Cleo instead,” Chris says.

  This is you in the parking lot with a slight breeze blowing by, blowing through your hair and making it come up around your face so that it gets in your mouth and your eyes, but blowing through Chris’s hair and making it blow back behind her head as if she were an actress on some movie set and not in the facility’s parking lot where there are stains on the asphalt from members dumping out the remains of their morning coffee. This is Chris asking you if you’ve heard any more about Kim’s murder. This is Chris saying all she’s heard on the news is that the cops don’t have a clue, but that they think it may be the same murderer who killed a few nurses at rest stops years ago. “I hope that bastard gets caught,” she says. “I have a feeling he’s not done killing young girls, and the next one could be one of ours.” This is you thinking this is the first time you’ve ever heard Chris say a curse word. This is Chris saying she’s tempted to go and hunt the guy down herself. This is you laughing, because she must be kidding. This is her laughing too, saying, “Right, I can’t even catch my husband cheating on me when I know he is. How could I possibly catch a murderer?”

  This is the wind blowing so that strands of your hair are thick in your mouth, while Chris’s hair is still blown back perfectly behind her. These are the mountains around you, storm clouds gathering at their peaks, and next to them there is a hillside of exposed black granite that looks slick with rain, even though it isn’t.

  This is Kim’s mother, at home in Kim’s room, touching the silky ribbons on the curtain Kim created with all of the ribbons she ever won. This is Kim’s mother wishing she had never asked Kim to take the wall down because she thought it made Kim think winning was more important than improving her technique. This is Kim’s mother touching each and every silky ribbon on that homemade curtain because she knows at one time her daughter touched each one of them and maybe touching the ribbons is like touching Kim again.

  This is Sofia about to practice with not one, not two, but three suits on for optimum drag. They are three of her oldest suits, the elastic giving way and the inside linings giving out. She has decided that if she swims with three on, then, come the next meet, when she’s only wearing her skintight racing suit, she’ll be that much faster, and maybe she’ll be able to go faster in her first fifty the way Coach has wanted her to do. Everyone on the team is trying to swim harder now that Kim is gone, and now that Coach reminds them so often of how Kim was such a dedicated swimmer and how they should all follow her example. The coach has been reminding them so often that Sofia thinks to herself that it’s not the swim team she’s on any longer, but the “Kim team,” with the swimmers’ every stroke, every breath, every turn, and every kick taken in memory of Kim.

  In the pool, the water gets trapped in the stretched-out seat of Sofia’s outermost suit and makes a balloon. Swimming the practice and making the intervals is difficult with all of the suits on, but Sofia manages to do it. When she’s finished with practice, she goes into the locker room to change, and when Mandy, who is cleaning the sinks in the locker room, sees Sofia walking in, she thinks how there are so many straps crossing over Sofia’s back that it looks as though she’s wearing a lattice fence. She’s wearing a wing back, a fly back, and a vortex back all at once. It takes her five minutes in the bathroom stall to peel all of the straps off her shoulders. She breathes loudly when she does it, and even grunts and whimpers a few times. “Everything all right in there?” Mandy says on the other side of the stall, but Sofia is too shy to answer and maybe, just maybe, Mandy isn’t talking to her but to someone else in the locker room.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This is you at the indoor facility, swimming in the water that’s cold today, and slightly bumpy from the dancing hippos swimming in the lane beside you. You see Chris up in the bleachers, and you’re glad it’s not Paul up there watching you swim. You feel out of shape, even aft
er swimming so often. You feel that besides the rest of your body starting to sag, your eyelids are starting to droop, and maybe it’s reducing how much people can see of your eyes. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re only seeing 4 percent of the universe without looking as though you’re seeing even less of it? This is you getting such a strong whiff of the hair spray from one of the dancing hippos that you feel it going down your throat and causing a burning sensation. These are Chris’s words coming back to you, as your throat burns, and you feel a headache coming on from the perfume of the hair spray, that the next girl he kills could be one of yours. Something has to be done. The water seems to say it too. Some-thing-has-to-be-done, it says over and over while you kick a six-beat free-style kick. The police have to know what Paul knows. This is you getting out of the pool early, not finishing your warm-down of a two-hundred free that you like to do after a speed set. You’re out early, rushing through your shower, putting conditioner in your hair even before all the shampoo’s completely rinsed out, just so you can get to the phone and call the police hotline. You hate leaving your girls in, but you know they’ll be fine while the coaches are there, and this is something you have to do because in the end it just might save another girl’s life. You don’t want to use your own phone. You want the call to be anonymous. You decide to drive to a nearby gas station where you remember seeing a payphone. You can’t remember the last time you were in a payphone booth, but the one you’re standing in now feels as though it was just set there this morning. It wobbles back and forth as you shift your weight, nervous and impatient while you hear the phone ringing. When you start retelling the story, that you know someone who was at the rest stop that night Bobby Chantal was murdered so many years ago, the woman taking the information starts talking to someone else. “I’ll take a Homewrecker,” the woman says, and a man’s voice says, “You want chicken or beef in it?”