This is the Water Read online

  This is the moon shining down so close to the hills Chris thinks something’s wrong with Earth’s orbit or gravity, and the world is in danger of being struck by the moon. This is the picnic bench she sits on, listening to the filaments in the light buzz above the bathroom door. This is the deep breath she takes that’s full of the cool night air and the smell of a dew-filled lawn that in the morning will probably be dotted with mushrooms. This is Chris getting sleepy, knowing that if she lies down on the picnic bench she will fall asleep, but then wake up cold and dew-covered and with her dress probably soiled by whatever wet film the rotting wooden tabletop seems to be coated with. This is Chris driving back down the highway, feeling good, feeling that this was a start in the right direction toward finding the killer or having him find her.

  This is Chris imagining the killer. He has a thickly wrinkled forehead, as if the wrinkles were a flight of stairs a very small creature could climb up or down. He has eyes that are small and set wide apart. Their lashes are straight, and sometimes the top lashes stick right into the bottom lashes, or even go under his bottom eyelid, so that he has to open his eye wide and roll it to the side and insert the pad of his finger into his eye to free the top lashes. He has teeth that bits of food become easily caught in, and his breath often smells like the bits of food caught days ago in the spaces of his teeth. He has hangnails he bites off. He has sideburns as thick as Velcro. His straight hair is thick, not showing any signs of thinning even though he is approaching fifty. He is amazed by the thickness of his own hair and often puts his hand through it just to feel how much there is.

  This is Chris back home in her bedroom, taking out the handgun from her pocket and putting it on the top shelf of her closet, and then taking off her clothes. Paul doesn’t wake up. This is Chris, stepping into Cleo’s room to make sure her daughter is covered, even though the night is warm. This is Chris seeing Cleo asleep with her arm stretched out to the side, and wanting to bring her arm back in close to Cleo’s side, because her arm looks as though it could be grabbed so easily if someone were to walk into her room and take her away. So as not to wake her, though, Chris just tiptoes backward outside of the room, closing the door in front of her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In the morning, Thomas, while slurping his cereal and reading his science magazine, tells you that amnesia is actually caused by having too many memories and the brain not knowing what to do with all of that data. So you feel better. You know why you can’t remember if you put honey in your tea or not. It’s not because you’re losing your mind, but because there’s so much going on all of the time. The dog, for example, is barking to go out and then, a second later, barking to come back in. The hummingbirds are at the feeder all taking turns sipping at the homemade nectar Thomas made of boiled sugar and water. The goose is honking and flapping her wings in the front yard, ruffled by something you can’t see, the dog, perhaps, or a low-flying hawk, or Alex up early searching for caterpillars in the milkweed as tall as she is to bring them in the house and put them in a jar. So, of course, who could remember if honey were in the tea or not with all of that taking place?

  The brain can be trained. It is capable of doing much more than we think, Thomas says, reading from another article in his magazine. A child born with a weak eye can put a patch over the strong eye and train the weak eye to do what the strong eye already can. An aging person’s failing vision can be corrected by having the person sit for hours of training in a darkly lit room trying to make out blurry lines and shapes. Sounds like torture, you think, because you have become as attached to your dime-store reading glasses as you have to sidling up to your children and having them read small print for you whenever you’re confronted with it. The plasticity of the brain can be stretched by a person living in an active environment, with diversions and friends and plenty of time for exercise, Thomas reads. All of this just spells vacation to you, and you realize you are the kind of person who actually really does see the spelling of words when they’re spoken, and not just in English. Once on vacation you heard a French man, who had lost his little dog, searching all along the beach for him calling “ici,” and you kept seeing the letters spelled out as he repeated the word, so to you he was calling out “i-c-i, i-c-i, i-c-i,” over and over again.

  To you, even Paul’s name is sometimes “P-a-u-l” when you think about him, which of course you have continued to do even though you’ve tried to stop thinking about him because you started to believe that the only reason he kissed you was to make you forget about him being with Bobby Chantal. Now you’re not sure what to think. You just know you’re afraid you’ll say his name when asking at the table for the ketchup to be passed, because after all, you have just learned from Thomas’s magazine that the brain is capable of anything, and you’re afraid yours will rebel. That like the strong eye covered with a patch allowing the weak eye to grow strong, if you’re constantly trying not to think of Paul, then a part of you will compensate and do it anyway. Maybe soon you will be saying his name when you want to say “soap” instead. “Pass the Paul, please,” you’re afraid of blurting out in front of your family at the dinner table instead of asking for the salt. You imagine that like some supernatural phenomenon, his name, because you are thinking of him so often, will burn through your skin and show up on your chest with smoke and the smell of your cooking flesh rising up from the burn.

  What makes everything suddenly clear about your brother is Thomas reading to you that pain is addictive, that the same pathways that handle addiction handle chronic pain, so the body keeps wanting to feel the pain long after the trauma has occurred. Now, for example, you have been able to stop thinking about your brother by thinking about Paul instead. You’ve just transferred addictions instead of curing the first one. Until something else comes along and takes its place you’ll be doing it indefinitely, and now Thomas is talking about taking the girls to swim practice this afternoon because he will be headed up that way anyway. “No,” you blurt out, “I’ll take them,” thinking that if you don’t go you’ll miss seeing Paul, but then you remind yourself that Paul is an addiction, and that you shouldn’t want to see Paul. Probably the best thing for you and for everybody is that you not see Paul, and so you say, “Yes, that’s a good idea. You take them instead.”

  You know later that day when you’re standing with Chris in her studio why you’re really there. It’s not to visit with Chris, or to see her latest artwork—paintings mostly of dark-colored flowers on dark canvasses that you know have already been bought by a wealthy collector/admirer in Connecticut even though they’re not yet completed—but to be standing in Paul’s house, touching the pen with the bank logo on it that he might have touched, and touching the door handle he touched and the window sash he might have opened on a hot, restless night after one of his nightmares woke him up. You should turn around and leave. You’re ashamed to realize why you’ve really come. You stand to leave. I will get up and go home. I’m ridiculous, you say to yourself, but you don’t go. You know Chris would be offended if you took off and left. Already she has put water on to boil for tea, and started talking again about how there still is no evidence against the killer. She shows you one of her latest paintings. You’re surprised. It’s not one of her usual dark ones of dark flowers painted on an even darker background. It’s a portrait of what she thinks the killer looks like. He has a forehead that hangs across his eyes like a ledge and wrinkles on his forehead so pronounced they look like rolls of flab. “I don’t get it. How do you know he looks like this?” you ask. Chris shrugs. She sips her tea and looks at her painting as if she were seeing it for the first time. “I don’t know,” she says. “I only feel that he looks like this, but it’s such a strong feeling I think maybe I should show it to the police. What do you think?” You shake your head. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she says. “They’d think I was crazy. But it’s the first time I’ve started painting anything in weeks. I was just so upset about Paul that I couldn’t. Now, though, I can’t s
top painting this guy’s face.” She shows you multiple sketches she’s done of the killer’s face. She shows you his profile and she shows you him head on. Each time you wish you could turn away or push the sketches away, or better yet that she’d move the papers for you so you wouldn’t have to put your hands near him. “I think somehow me painting his face over and over again will help the guy get caught,” she says.

  When the phone rings and Chris goes to answer it, you’re relieved. She takes the sketches with her to the kitchen, where the phone is, and you don’t have to look at them any longer. You wander around her house sipping your tea. You go into their bedroom. On the shelf is a picture of Paul and Chris on their wedding day in their wedding clothes holding hands and jumping off a dock and into a pond. Midflight, they are smiling, and the sun is shining so brightly the water looks white. You wish you had been at their wedding. You bet it was fun. You wonder which side of the bed Paul lies on. The right side looks just as rumpled as the left, the covers are peeled back on either side, and there’s a glass of water on a table on one side, but of course there is no way to tell if it is Chris’s, because you have never seen Chris wear lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. You wonder if you held the glass up and just saw the imprint of the lips on the glass if you could tell whose they were. Would you know by just having felt Paul’s lips on your own what the shape of them could actually look like? The picture of them on their wedding day has a silver frame. One side of the frame looks smudged with fingerprints, as if Chris had picked it up time and time again just to stare at it, remembering how they once were.

  You look out the window. Is this the view Paul sees every day? It’s a windy day. The kind of day that makes you think that colder weather will come back for sure and that you shouldn’t be fooled by the bright sunshine, because the wind brings down some dried leaves off a nearby gardenia bush, making you think of maples losing their leaves in the autumn. There is a hedge of American Beauty and a small cherry tree that looks newly planted, with wood chips circling its base. There is a robin pecking at the ground. There is an old wooden playhouse that must have been Cleo’s when she was younger. The shutters by the playhouse’s window look as though they could fall off in the next breeze.

  The tea has been served in mugs without handles that look like Japanese teacups. They are beautiful, like most of the things in Chris’s house. Even the plate surrounding the wall switch is a beautiful scene of a mountainside with a pink sunset painted on ceramic. You think of your own house. You have barely decorated it. You believe the knots in the wood form enough pictures on their own, and you don’t want to put up anything on the walls to detract from them. You haven’t even planted flowers outside of the house. The layering of the rocks on the rounded stone wall that garden snakes sometimes slither out from is artistry enough for you. How nice it must be for Paul to come home to this house, where the photographs are framed in silver frames, and where the windows have curtains.

  You take another sip of the tea. Holding the mug without handles is comforting. It warms your hands. After Chris gets off the phone, she shows you articles and a website she found that talk about the past murder victims of the rest-stop killer who probably killed Kim.

  “I’ve read through all this information, and I can’t find any link between them all,” Chris says. “Some were very young, and some were just young. What they all had in common was the slit in their necks when they arrived at the morgue, and of course the fact that they were killed outside of a rest stop. All of them were women alone. Some lived in the state, some lived in a neighboring state and were just passing through. I don’t think the cops had a thing to go on. There wasn’t the science back then to figure out the identity of the guy, but now we can look at the DNA. We can see who did it. Hell, we can even dig up a body and look at the old DNA and get an identity match. I think the police should be asked to dig up the bodies. I’ve even talked to the families about it.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “There’s one who’s all for it. It’s the daughter of one of the victims. Her name is Pam Chantal. Her mother was a nurse named Bobby Chantal. At the time of the murder, Pam was only five. Her father was a Vietnam vet, but he never married Bobby Chantal, and he disappeared not long after Pam was born. Now Pam wants to know who killed her mother, the only relative she ever knew. I told her I’d help her talk to the police and tell them they have permission to exhume the body and test it for DNA samples. She seems to need someone to go through it with her.”

  “Chris, are you that obsessed by this case?” you say. “It sounds like quite a job to take on. Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I am,” Chris says. “This guy killed a girl on our team, Annie. It could have been one of our girls. It still could be.”

  This is you, sitting on either Paul’s side of the bed or Chris’s, not believing what you’re hearing, and by accident letting tea from your cup pour off to one side and stain the foot of the bed. This is Chris coming up to you and taking the teacup from you, telling you with a small laugh that it’s all right, that it’s Paul’s side of the bed and he’ll never notice the stain. This is you saying out loud, “I think you made more sense when you were convinced Paul was cheating on you,” and this is you wishing you hadn’t said anything out loud and then immediately saying, “I’m sorry.” This is the bed, the tea stain now shaped like a puffy cloud. This is the room getting darker, the sun going down behind the other side of the house. This is the way the bed feels to you, as though it’s the floor beneath your chair at your kitchen table that threatens to suck you down to the center of the earth every time you think about your brother, but you are not thinking about your brother now. Maybe thinking about him would be better than thinking about Paul and Bobby Chantal. Maybe imagining your brother’s chipped front tooth, and his long fingers, and the way it sounded almost silent when he laughed is better than thinking about Paul. This is you standing up from the bed and getting your purse, which you left on the table in the entryway. This is you saying you hadn’t realized it was so late, saying there is dinner to get started before the girls come home. They always come home starving. Isn’t it the same with Cleo after a practice? you ask.

  “Yes, she’s ravenous when she gets in the door,” Chris says.

  “What about the swim meet this weekend—will you be going?” you ask, standing in the doorway to be polite instead of just leaving right away as you’d like to.

  Chris shakes her head. “I’m not. I’m just not cut out for those swim meets. I can’t stand to watch them. Even if Cleo’s winning a race, I’m nervous for her. I feel it like a knife in my stomach. Where does it say in the parent’s handbook that swimming has anything to do with your gut? There are only pages about getting your kid to practice on time and feeding them a healthy meal, nothing about acute ulcers on race day afflicting the parents.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  This is you shaking your head while driving home, thinking of Chris, thinking you’ve got to hand it to her. How many women would bother to help find a serial killer? You realize you’re almost jealous of her for being so involved.

  When you get home and the telephone is ringing and the girls are practicing violin and the dog is barking and Thomas is standing on the log pile chainsawing, you think about the place you stayed in at the equator. At the equator, beaches stretched on for what could have been miles and there were no other people on them. There were a few caves you could walk into and hear your voice echo. At the bottom of the caves there were pools of water where small fish swam and sea urchins lay shored against rocks. In the water one day there were jellyfish. The sting of the jellyfish was not so bad, and you could pick up the jellyfish by holding your palm over their tops and then turning your hand over, and you could throw jellyfish at one another for fun. Your children liked this game, and Thomas liked to hold a jellyfish up to his eye and say, “Oh, darn, I lost my contact,” or put the jellyfish on the top of his head and say, “I think the water’s lovely today, don’t you?
” Thomas also liked putting two jellyfish over his chest and asking, “Do you like my new bikini?” You wish that you were back at the equator and swimming in the ocean and riding the waves. You wish you hadn’t met Paul and didn’t think about him every night right before falling asleep. You should be thinking about your girls instead. Sofia’s been reading too many YA books that are poorly written. You want to go through your own books and find one that’s a classic, one you know she’d like, but lately you haven’t had the time or the energy, the wherewithal to get up from your chair and do it. You’d like to take Sofia for a haircut. It’s getting so long now and she keeps hiding behind it. Some days she pulls it so far in front of her face it seems as if it’s just the tip of her nose that peeks out. How can you make her feel good about herself and at the same time suggest that she’s got to change the way she wears her hair? You remember how at her age your brother also hid behind his hair and wore it so long that a big swath of it covered his eyes. If he ever wanted to see something he had to spasmodically jerk his head to make it flap away from his eyes. If only your father would have stayed with the family and been there those years to watch your brother switch from playing trumpet to guitar, how easily your brother did it, how beautiful he sounded in no time at all, then maybe your brother wouldn’t have killed himself, you think. This is you thinking how Alex’s birthday is only a few days away and you haven’t begun to think of what to get her. Does she really need new sneakers? Can’t she just wear the old pair another few months? She keeps telling you she needs a new racing suit, but you refuse to believe it. You bought one only a few months ago, right before the summer swim season. Could she have possibly grown so much? Shouldn’t there be some kind of balance between the rate of their growth and the rate of how much the suits stretch out each time they wear them to race? The suit she has now, you’re sure, fits fine. It fits the way it’s supposed to. It digs into her shoulders and leaves a raw-looking red mark as much as it ever did, but not any more so. It cuts into her thighs as much as it ever did. It makes it as hard for her to breathe as it ever did, and it hurts your fingers as much as it ever did, but not more than usual, to squeeze her into the suit when you’re standing in a bathroom stall, banging your elbows against the metal wall every time you get a good grip on the sides of the suit and heave your arms up to try and lift it over her rear.