This is the Water Read online

  This is the next week. This is you seeing Paul in a knot in the wood in the hallway. You stand there with the laundry in your arms staring at the wall, not believing your endless ability to see shapes in everything, and how the knots in the wood remind you of his eyes. They’re small knots, and what would seem to be the outside parts of the eyes are tapering upward, as if they were smiling. You try not to stare for too long at the knots in the wood, especially since Sofia is walking behind you wanting to go downstairs as well. “Speed the plow,” she says, passing you, and you think how you never would have used certain expressions around your children when they were young if you had known they were going to start using the same ones with you when they got older.

  You have not seen Paul in a few days, almost a week. To avoid seeing him, you have not taken the girls to practice, but let Thomas take them instead. For the best, you told yourself. But you aren’t feeling the better for it. You are sullen and don’t feel like doing anything. You can’t even bring yourself to brush the dog, and you have been looking at the dog every day for the past few weeks thinking, I really must brush you, what a mess of matted hair you have become! Twigs are wound up in her sweeping tail hair, and she licks and chews her hind legs to free the sticky nettles clinging to them. You wonder if Chris has told Paul that she has met Bobby Chantal’s daughter. If he does know, you are sure Paul will stop Chris from trying to exhume Bobby Chantal’s body. His DNA would be on her. But what does it matter? The police don’t have Paul as a suspect. No one would even approach Paul for a sample to match the DNA because no one ever saw Paul and Bobby Chantal together. Unless, of course, someone from the coffee shop or the restaurant they went to recognized Paul because he was a regular, and recognized Bobby Chantal’s face in the newspaper the next day. But if that were the case, then Paul would have been questioned long ago. So no one remembers seeing them together. Paul is safe, and you are relieved you have come to this conclusion. It’s as if you’ve been carrying the weight of his possible implication in the murder on your shoulders ever since you visited Chris and learned she knew Bobby Chantal’s daughter. You go upstairs and begin to pack for you and the girls. The next morning you are leaving for a big swim meet and Paul will be there. The weather will be warm, so you pack short skirts and tank tops to wear. As you put them into your bag, you wonder if the skirts are too short. Do they show off too much of your legs, which, at your age, might be better off covered? Do the sleeveless tops reveal too much of your arms, which you call bingo arms, because when you lift them up in the air the wings of fat that have started to hang from them remind you of the flabby arms of old women playing bingo in unair-conditioned halls and raising their cards and shouting out “Bingo!” when they win.

  You check your girls’ swim bags, making sure they have towels and swimsuits and goggles and water bottles, the water bottles being important because the coach, this coach with many all-star athlete commendations under her belt, has told the swimmers that they cannot swim without a water bottle positioned at the end of their lane to drink from now and then during a two-hour practice. You agree with the coach on the drinking of water during practice. You have seen how red in the face your own girls get during a strenuous workout. You have seen other girls, paler girls, get red down their necks and their shoulders and their chests as well, after swimming, for example, ten one-hundred frees on a 1:10 with only a ten-second interval. You do not agree, though, with the swimmers drinking electrolyte drinks during practice. You think all they need is water, even though you have sat in on those parent education meetings the swim team sometimes provides in the spinning room where it smells like sweat, and you have learned that your daughters need more than just water during practice, and that your daughters need to eat right away after they swim, and that the best thing for them after practice is chocolate milk. You just cannot bring yourself to give your daughters sugar water during practice, even if it does have electrolytes, and you cannot bring yourself to give your daughters chocolate milk after practice, because as a girl you yourself never got chocolate milk except on special occasions, and since when did it become okay to have chocolate milk every day?

  At the meet, after the anthem is sung by three girls who sound like cats in heat, the meet director asks for a moment of silence for Kim Hood, the swimmer who recently died. You want to yell out, “Murdered! She was murdered!” because to you there are such big differences between just dying, and having been robbed of your life, and even taking your own life. When your brother killed himself, there was no crime committed, and you could not understand why so much taxpayer money had to be spent on cordoning the property off with crime scene tape and starting an investigation. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone around that the cauliflower stain of blood forming by his head, and the gun in his own hand, was not the scene of a crime, but the scene of a jerk, an asshole, a complete idiot who thought only of himself and who was so narrow-minded and devoid of willpower that killing himself was the only solution he could come up with to provide himself with some relief? If only he was one to exercise, then he might not have done it, you think, and you wonder really if that’s true, if there’s some study that’s been done where those who exercise regularly have lower suicide rates, and if so, think of the decline in need for shrinks and pills. Wouldn’t some kind of a mandatory facility membership be just as effective? Or is that just narrow-minded thinking, not taking into consideration chemical imbalances in the brain and genetic predispositions. You close your eyes and, along with everyone else, you remember Kim. You do not want to remember the way she was in the newspaper, out of the water. You remember her in the water, the way she moved up and down, a perfect body moving in perfect fluid rhythm in the shape of a sine curve, a motion that looked as if it could last forever, a motion that seemed more like the real girl than the girl herself did when she was just standing on deck or in the foyer after practice. There are sniffles heard while everyone’s head is lowered and remembering. There are also the hard choking sounds of people trying to keep from sobbing. The head coach makes the sound too, and then the meet announcer announces the first race of the day with a long whistle, and the swimmers in the first heat stand up on the blocks with a weak morning sun breaking over them that makes you think all of what you are seeing you’re seeing through a tropical haze.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It’s a break-even day. Your girls gain time in some events, and shave time in others. Sofia does well in the first fifty of her two-hundred free, though, going faster than she ever has. Her coach high-fives her on the deck, telling her the no-breathers really paid off. At the end of the day, after the girls have drunk numerous drinks promising to replenish all the electrolytes they lost throughout the day (of which a total of four minutes was spent racing. The rest of the time they were sitting on blankets under tents with their noses in books, or they were racing around on the grassy grounds of the facility, playing tag and ninja with their teammates), you pack up their things and get ready to head back to the hotel. You and Paul had been timers for most of the day, but timing for different lanes, so you didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him except to say hello and to wish Cleo good luck. Now, on the walk back to the parking lot, Paul and Cleo catch up to you. “Can we order pizza again and watch TV in the hotel with Cleo?” your girls plead. You look at Paul to see what he thinks. “It’s okay by me,” he says, and you tell your daughters, “Okay, but we’re not staying up as late this time. You girls still have to race tomorrow.”

  It’s funny, really, how you were hoping the girls would request to repeat what they did the last time they stayed in a hotel together. You are the one who, when the door closes behind you and you’re inside Paul’s room, wishes you had all night to be together, because not much time passes before he goes over to you and you start kissing again, and you think, Oh, good, we can finish the kiss that we started in his office. We can finish all of this and I can go back to Thomas and he can go back to Chris. I can lie beside Thomas in bed and listen to hi
m talk about a fifty-thousand-year-old girl whose remains they found and who, they can tell from her DNA, already carried the gene for a speech disorder. I can listen to him tell me about how submarines are really just cylinders welded together at the seam. I can listen to him tell me that feed laced with antibiotics increases growth in farm animals by 15 to 20 percent. When Paul goes back to Chris, he can sit on his tea-stained bed and look at his silver-framed picture of them jumping into the pond on their wedding day. He can watch her in bed on bright nights when the clouds are gone and the moon is high and he can admire her beautiful face and breathe in deeply, smelling something like mint.

  But the more you kiss Paul—the more you feel his mouth inside of yours and his hands on your back, pulling you close—the more you know that the kiss is a kiss that can never be finished, and at the same time it is a kiss that never should have been started. When you pull back from him, you immediately wish you hadn’t. The warmth of him, the way he smells of his leather jacket, is something you want to step inside of again. You reach out and hold on to the wall for a moment, and know that the coldness of the hotel room wall is good, even though it feels anything but good, it feels hard and shocking, but at least it is going to wake you up. You won’t have to go up to Paul again and start kissing him as long as the wall is there to hold on to.

  “You’re right. You’re right,” he says, and shakes his head at the same time, making you think you were anything but right. Why doesn’t he come back to you? Why doesn’t he take your hand from the wall and start kissing you again? “Ah, we should eat,” he says. He opens a pizza box that is on the desk. He tears off a slice for you and puts it on a paper plate and hands it to you. You don’t want to take a bite. You want to remember the taste of him in your mouth. But neither do you want to hand back the plate, because by holding it you look as if you are in his room for a reason. If another swim-team parent or your girls come knocking on the door, at least you can say you are just there to enjoy a slice topped with mushrooms and sausage.

  Now he’s telling you about Cleo’s race day. How she hit the lane lines on backstroke because, he is sure, the sun was in her eyes. He is looking forward, almost, to the fall season, when the indoor meets will start up again and true backstroke times can be counted. He says that in the middle of the day he finally wised up and bought Cleo some tinted goggles at the facility’s front desk. They helped, but still, Cleo didn’t do as well as she usually does in the back. The front-facing strokes were a different story. Cleo shaved off time in every one of those.

  You take a few bites of the pizza. Paul isn’t even eating himself. He is sitting on the end of the other bed. How can we keep from touching each other again? you think. “Can we watch TV?” you say. In a second Paul is grabbing the remote to turn it on.

  You don’t have a television at home because where you live there is no service to receive the major stations. You are amazed by how many cuts to commercials there are and how loud they are. The pace of the images and the loud, fast music accompanying them makes you eat more quickly, and before you know it Paul has placed another slice on your plate. You pick up the remote and change the channel. When you find the news, you stop and watch. Kim Hood’s face takes up the screen. They still have no leads, no clues as to who killed her, but they have established through measurements taken of the other victims’ throat wounds that he could be the same man who killed other women at other rest stops around this part of the country. The same state trooper with the battered nose is now being interviewed live. “Yes, that’s right,” he says. “We’ve had a request from Bobby Chantal’s daughter to exhume the body of her mother. If we think it will aid in the investigation, we will certainly comply, but there was a thorough examination of the body at the time of the murder.” The news program then cuts to a beautiful blond-haired woman. It takes you a moment to realize it’s Chris. You are so surprised you can’t say anything, and just watch the TV with your mouth open. The reporter puts the mike in front of Chris, so close to her lips it’s as if she wants her to eat it. “Is it true that your client has agreed to exhuming her mother’s body? How does she feel about that after all these years?”

  “First of all, I’m not her lawyer. She’s not my client. I’m just someone who supports her. Exhuming her mother will be emotionally difficult, of course, but she’s prepared to go forward and do that if it means putting a stop to the murders. The examination, twenty-eight years ago, can’t be considered a thorough one by today’s standards, not when scientific testing has advanced so much. Take for instance DNA testing, which wasn’t even used in criminal investigations back—”

  Paul grabs the remote and shuts off the television. “I can’t believe this. What does she think she’s doing? Who does she think she is?” He’s standing now, staring at you, waiting for some kind of an answer, when there’s a knock at the door. Paul doesn’t even look as though he’s heard it. The knock comes again. It doesn’t sound like one of your girls knocking. If your girls were on the other side of the door, they would knock about thirty times in a row and kick the bottom of the door and call out your name, or call you a name even, and demand to be let inside the room. This was an adult knock. “I’ll get it,” you say.

  Dinah doesn’t wait to be asked in. She marches into the room, taking everything in—the condition of the beds, the pizza on the desk, the clothes that are still on the backs of you and Paul.

  “Well, what do we have here?” she asks. “A romantic dinner for two? I came by to let you know a bunch of us other swim parents on the floor are ordering in from the nearby Chinese place, but I can see you two have already taken care of your needs.”

  “Get out, Dinah,” Paul says, and as he does, he pushes her backward out of the room.

  “Hey, hey, didn’t mean to interrupt your wild night with Thomas’s wife!” Dinah yells, but you can hear she’s not yelling it into the room at you or Paul. She is yelling it so that it carries up and down the hotel floor, so that all of the other swim-team parents can hear. You stand up to leave.

  “I’d better go,” you say.

  “No. No, please don’t go. I need you,” Paul says. You play back in your head what Paul just said. They are words Thomas has never spoken to you. He may have told you he needed you for something utilitarian—to help stack the wood, for example—but he has never told you he needed you for anything emotional. Then again, you have never asked Thomas for anything emotional either. When you received the phone call telling you your brother had shot himself, and you stood leaning over the counter, feeling as if your legs would not hold you up any longer, and you started to cry, it was the dog who came to you first, whining beside you, wanting to jump up and lick your face, to see what was the matter. Thomas stood off to the side and watched you, and later that night when you questioned aloud why your brother had done it, why he had shot himself, Thomas told you it was because he was an asshole, and there was no need to waste any more energy discussing it. “Why is he an asshole?” you asked Thomas, and he answered that anyone who leaves three kids without a father is a jerk. You wondered if Thomas was right about your brother being an asshole. You didn’t sleep that night, crying intermittently while Thomas slept beside you. You were surprised that grief could cause such insomnia. In the past it had always been worries or anticipation that had made you stay awake.