This is the Water Read online

  “Darn,” Chris says. “I didn’t want to do this.”

  “Do what?” you say.

  “Cry,” Chris says. “It’s just that there are so many people I can’t tell, and it’s so hard not telling anyone.” You eat another grape, wishing this time that they really had turned to wine. You could use a drink. For a second you think about inventing a wine product in the shape of a grape, where the outside of the grape is made of something edible, and the middle is filled with wine. You could keep them chilled. You could take them with you and pop them into your mouth at sporting events. You could use them as ice cubes in seltzer to have as spritzers.

  You are confused. You aren’t sure if you want Chris to tell you exactly why she is crying. You get the feeling, the once-in-a-lifetime feeling, you think, because you’ve never had this feeling before, that what is going to come next out of Chris’s mouth here at the dead pool is going to change the world as you know it forever. You watch your girls lining up for their relay heats. Your youngest, Alex, your ten-year-old, has her elastic goggle straps set way too long. You can see that they will drag in the water and hit your girl’s arm as she swims, probably keeping her from swimming her best time. You are disappointed in yourself for not remembering to cut them earlier, when you were at home. Do you have something in your purse to cut them with now? No, of course not. Along with the ChapStick you’ve never used, you have click-button pens whose points are stuck in the on position so that the inside lining of your purse is riddled with what looks like a secret code of dashes and dots of black and blue ink. You have nothing that could cut. “Have you got scissors?” you say to Chris, or maybe you think you say it to Chris, but you can’t be sure, because Chris doesn’t answer you, and instead she says, “I think Paul is cheating on me.”

  “No, he’s not,” you say.

  “I think he is,” Chris says.

  “I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe that,” you say, because you can’t.

  “Well, there’s so much I can’t explain,” Chris says. “So much he can’t explain. It’s got to be the answer.”

  “You’re wrong,” you say. Chris swallows hard. You can hear the swallow. You are afraid the tears will start coming down again. “What man in his right mind would cheat on you?” you say.

  “He’s started working late. He comes back and it’s after midnight. He says he’s working, but he never used to work this hard.”

  “That’s it?” you say. “He works late and you think he’s been cheating on you? It doesn’t sound like enough to hang the guy.” You really don’t believe Paul is cheating on Chris. You realize all of a sudden that your daughter Alex is swimming her leg of the relay. She’s anchor and freestyling with all her might toward the wall for the win.

  “I’m so sorry, but I just can’t help thinking that it’s a misunderstanding,” you say, touching Chris on the elbow just after your daughter touches the wall for the win. “I’m positive.”

  You wonder why you are defending the man. You’ve never really had a conversation with him, you’ve never even talked to him up close, you just know him by sight—he’s come to a few practices and meets and you’ve seen him in the stands—whereas you and Chris have known each other for at least three swim seasons. She’s been to your house a few times to drop off Cleo to visit with your girls, and you’ve been to her house to drop off your girls to visit with Cleo. You’ve never seen Paul any of these times. Maybe he is cheating on Chris. Maybe he is banging one of his college students, a student who stays after class and leans over his desk asking him questions about things she knows he loves to talk about. It’s just hard to believe, considering how all the husbands you know let their tongues drop to their knees when they see Chris.

  Sofia is in the next relay. She is standing with her shoulders hunched, and you wish she would look up in the stands and look at you so you could mouth the words “back straight” to her, and so you could throw your shoulders back too, demonstrating. You think that ever since Sofia started her period her posture has been worse, and you wonder if it’s just because the girl is that much more tired.

  When she started her period she held out a panty liner and showed it to you. “Is this blood?” Sofia asked, and it was, the blood had stained the pad in the shape of an hourglass, and you looked at the design and considered how you were looking at it as if it were a Rorschach ink blot, and you wondered, if your girl kept showing you the bloodstains on her pads throughout the rest of her cycle, what more would you see in their shapes? Would you see a bird with its wings folded in? A hammer? A footbridge?

  “I’m sorry to put this on you,” Chris says. “It’s just that I couldn’t talk to my family about it. They all think Paul and I have a perfect marriage, and that he’s a saint. They’d blame it on me.”

  “Don’t be sorry, especially since I’m sure it’s nothing at all,” you say. “Sometimes I think Thomas is losing his mind. Just the other day he talked for hours about the decline of civilization, how he believes we’re going through it.”

  Your daughter’s dive is beautiful—high and long. She’s the leadoff, and what a lead she’s given to her team before she’s even entered the water.

  “How can I be sure it’s nothing?” Chris says.

  “Don’t think about it, that’s all,” you say. “And watch Cleo swim. I see she’s up next. She’s a good swimmer. She’s graceful, like you. Sometimes I don’t care how fast a swimmer can swim. Sometimes I just like watching them move in the water. It’s as if the water makes way for them, like it’s taken aback by how good a swimmer can be. Do you know what I mean?” Chris looks at Cleo, and her daughter looks up at the stands, looking for her mother. “Wave to her, she doesn’t see you yet,” you say, and Chris waves to her daughter and then the daughter waves back and forth, smiling, and you think if you put your hand up in the air, in the space between where the two hands are waving at each other, you could feel some kind of a force, maybe Chris’s mother energy. You don’t know what the name of it is. Maybe it’s something Thomas would know. It’s a quark, a pulse, a gravitational field, a gluon of extreme magnitude.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Contrary to popular belief, we are not all geniuses,” reads Floyd Arneson, our killer, while he’s at school on his computer. Right now there is no teacher in his office and the principal is at a meeting for the day. Floyd Arneson is an administrative assistant in an elementary school and his boss is the principal. The school runs almost all year round, because it also runs summer programs. Floyd Arneson calls himself a secretary because he has promised himself that he will not go through life fooling himself. I work as a secretary, he thinks to himself. I am also a killer. I know perfectly well what I am doing. I know perfectly well how I have to keep my knife very sharp or it will not cut easily through the skin, the fat, the larynx, and the tendons. I know very well how I have to dispose of my clothes afterward, how even a speck on the top of my shoe is a reason to dispose of the shoe and buy a new pair. Our killer is interested in himself and there is so much written about serial killers that he likes to know what is new and has been shared in the media. “Like the rest of the population,” he reads, “we range in intelligence from borderline to above average.” We could have wives and children. We could belong to the church. We could be the head of the church. We could have wet the bed. So many of us have wet the bed as boys. We could have pulled the tails of dogs, have stuffed cats into sacks. We could have splayed open wide the bellies of just-stunned birds not dead from their crash into glass they thought was just more world to fly through. We could suffer from psychopathy, we could be doctors, and we could be nurses, lawyers, and cooks. We could be women working with men, burying bodies in our yard. We could be women working alone. We could be extremely clever and intelligent, or we could be just average or below. We could be school secretaries, or we could be truck drivers. As children, we could have been plagued by nightmares or slept like babies. We could have set fires, or stolen purses, or tagged graffiti all over schoo
l walls. We could have helped our mother with the dishes and played nicely with the cat and done our homework every night. We could be the kid in school now, walking through the halls, holding the snack tray, careful not to let the cartons of milk fall over. The biggest myth, our killer reads, is that we want to get caught when really we do not want to get caught and we feel we cannot get caught. The killer laughs, he reads a line Jeffrey Dahmer once said, “When I was a little kid, I was just like anybody else.”

  This is you driving home at night, nearing your house, where the tops of the pines on the hill shine metal-bright in the moonlight like sword tips.

  These are the girls, running inside the house after you park the car in your driveway. They are after Thomas, jumping on his back and hugging him and wanting to know what he did without them while they were away. They want to know what food he ate, and Sofia bangs open the freezer, checking to see if he bought ice cream without them and left them some in the container. Alex shows him a sweatshirt she bought that has the name of the meet and her team logo printed on it, and then while Thomas isn’t looking, she takes the merchandise sticker off the sleeve, pats Thomas’s back, and says, “I missed you, Dad,” and the sticker is now stuck to the back of his shirt. “I missed you too! It’s good to have you home,” he says, trying to get another hug from her as Alex steps back from him and then doubles over with laughter, pointing at his back, saying, “Dad, you’re so gullible!”

  Thomas asks you how the drive home was and you tell him there was construction everywhere and he says, “You know what they say. There are four seasons here: leaf peeper, winter, mud season, and construction season. It’s now the start of construction season.”

  Usually, at night, in the dark, you tell Thomas the gossip you heard at the pool. You always tell him which coach was furious with which parent for overstepping that sacred boundary and taking on the role of coach. You tell him how Dinah’s husband is getting so deaf that he doesn’t even bother to talk to people anymore, and Thomas shakes his head while in bed. You hear his hair rubbing against his pillow while he says that’s a shame. You tell him which parent showed up lit and smelling like hard liquor when she picked up her kid, you tell him about the parents who you know are paying their kids to come to practice, you tell him who lost their cool at a meet and went up to the officials and judges and demanded they retract a DQ, a disqualification, that their kid received. But you do not tell him about Chris telling you that she thinks her husband is cheating on her. If you told him, then maybe he’d start thinking Chris is available now, or maybe he’d try to make Chris feel better and start talking to her more, and isn’t it bad enough the way he, and all the other husbands, look at her perfect breasts and her rear? So instead of telling Thomas about Chris, you tell him about the dead facility at the away meet, about how Sofia and Alex swam so well, and how it was so funny when one of the coaches slipped and fell into the pool because his own daughter happened to be swimming in a lane by the wall and he was running alongside her, yelling at her to “glide.” All of it is true, you think. You haven’t told Thomas any lies. The girls did swim well, the facility did appear dead, and the coach did fall into the water, afterward showing you the worn-down soles of his rubber shoes and how they did not afford him any traction on wet surfaces. Maybe another day you will tell Thomas about Chris, but now you are getting sleepy, the stars out your window seem blurry. You really must be tired, you think, and then you realize that Thomas has put the screens in the windows earlier in the day, and what you are seeing is the blur created by the mesh wires, and isn’t it funny that all of the almost 4 percent you can see is a blur, and does that change the 4 percent somehow, does it turn it into a 1 percent instead?

  You wake up in the night. You can’t fall back to sleep. If only I had more wife energy, you think. You would turn to Thomas and touch him. You would do all the things you know you are supposed to do. You would do all those things those women you photograph do to their husbands on the sacred first night of their marriage. You would do what you did to Thomas on the night of your own wedding day. You would climb on top of Thomas, you would slide down the length of Thomas, you would kiss all the tips of him, every one, even the tips at the flare of his hips and his collarbone. Now, even when you are so tired, you do it anyway. Even though your arm is so heavy, like stone, you lift it and touch Thomas. You let your fingertips softly run down his back, like pattering raindrops. You let your fingers trail down the front of him, the pattering raindrops falling on his sleeping penis. When he stirs, it’s not to stretch himself out flat on his back so you can touch more of him, it’s so he can lift your arm off himself, and how easily he does it, it’s not made of stone for him, for him it is a dried twig found on the trail, so easy to lift and let sail in a wind. He lifts your arm by the wrist, places your hand palm down on the cool sheet between you. There he pats your hand twice, and then he goes back to sleep. His sound of sleeping heavily comes amazingly soon. He can always fall asleep so easily. You hear the birds are chirping and it’s the middle of the night. Whatever happened to birds rising with the sun? You can hear something walking outside. It could be a deer. It stumbles on the wide, flat rocks Thomas placed in a row forming a walkway from the driveway to the front door. You hear a snuffling sound. You hear your daughter snoring from the next room and wish that years ago, when Alex had tubes put in her ears for frequent infections, you had also had her adenoids removed, because the doctor said it was a good time to get them out, while your daughter was under, and that if she snored at all, it would help with the snoring, and she would concentrate better in school. This is why, you think, your brother didn’t do well in school and why your mother was always having to tell your brother to study and do his homework, when really she shouldn’t have had to tell him anything, he should have been doing it on his own, and nobody told you when you were a girl to study, to hit the books, to ace the exam. Now I really will never get back to sleep, you think, because you are hurt by Thomas not wanting you to touch him when it took what seemed like so much effort to touch him in the first place, and the hurt reminds you of your dead brother and you have started thinking about him again, and all of the things you remember about him growing up parade in front of you. You remember how at the beach one family holiday you were playing by the shore, and your brother and your parents were closer to the dunes, where a beach blanket lay, where a cooler sat planted in the soft sand. You were playing with small white crabs that burrowed into the wet sand where the tide was coming in. You could hear the voices of your parents from where you were, but you could not make out their words. Your parents were yelling or screaming at each other, you didn’t know which. Your brother, who had been sitting beside them on the towel while they were standing and yelling at each other, suddenly stood up and sent sand flying up behind his feet as he ran toward you. “Let’s go in,” he barked, and grabbed you in his arms. You were afraid of the waves, and you told him so. “No, I don’t want to go in!” you said, kicking the air while he held you around the waist with one hand. “Stop!” you said, and he told you not to worry, the waves weren’t that big. He was holding you upright in the water when a big wave came over the top of you, and you could see him under water, where it was all green. Under water, you saw the look of surprise on his face, he didn’t know the wave would be so big, and under water, you started screaming. When the wave passed, you started hitting him, and he laughed, and was still laughing after you broke free of his arms and ran back to shore. You can’t believe that all of the memories you have of him right now are of him laughing, and is that a warning sign? Should you call helplines across the country and clue them in, let them know that if the person they’re trying to save is on the other end of the line laughing, that’s when you call the cops and get them to send a squad car to the bridge, the house, the cliff, wherever the man or woman is who wants to do themselves in?

  And why was he running so quickly away from your mother and father that day? What was it he was running away from? You’ve
often wondered this over the years, and more so since his death.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  This is the next day at practice. The rain is coming down hard on the facility and it sounds loud, as if the roof were made out of tin sheets and the place were a barn. Practices seem to be better when the weather is bad. Everyone happier to be in a place where it’s warm, not minding being stuck indoors. The starts look better to you. Your girls go off the blocks in streamlines tight enough to fit through holes in doughnuts. They’ve also got spring in their legs that takes them almost to the first flag strung above the pool before they enter the water. Kim’s butterfly kick looks so strong, it looks like she’s getting as much speed from her down kick as she does from her recovery kick. It won’t be long, you think, before she starts breaking pool records again. She must be done with growing, and now her movements are not so awkward. She has grown into herself. The coach, a woman who was a you-don’t-know-how-many-time all-star champion in college, is really pushing them along. You admire the coach. Everyone admires the coach. The girls on the team all want her attention. Sofia tries to get her attention by being sarcastic and making the coach laugh. Alice tries to do it by crying and complaining over sore muscles and slight scratches that always seem to require the coach to fetch her an ice pack or a Band-Aid. Kim tries to get the coach’s attention by swimming the fastest she can. Alex tries to get the coach’s attention by being silly and showing the coach how she can make the muscles of her stomach roll like waves. The coach has days when she doesn’t laugh, though. She can be serious, and those are the days your girls tell you practice was hard or practice was boring. At one meet, the coach raised her voice at Sofia, telling her that she didn’t take it out fast enough in the first fifty, and your daughter came to you and cried. You agreed with the coach. You saw the race. It looked as if Sofia was daydreaming, which she probably was, having just put down a book before she dove into the water. She was probably still thinking about the book’s characters in midair. She was still inside of the book. She was reading a book that took place in Afghanistan, and she was probably flying kites in Kabul during her entry. She was eating fresh fruit and lamb on the steps of a mosque at the turn. She was not thinking about how she should have taken the first fifty out as hard as she could, because if she had been then she could have won the race. The coach talks to you, the parent, about this. “Sofia has to take it out faster,” she says to you. “And I told her so, and I’m sorry if I upset her, but maybe it’s good I upset her. Sometimes I have to be harsh with the swimmers, or maybe there are just some swimmers I know I can be harsh with and Sofia is one of them, because I get the sense that she’s not a head case. She won’t get so upset by criticism that she’ll ruin her stroke entirely. She mustn’t be afraid of expending her energy. She doesn’t realize how strong she really is, how much breath will be left inside of her even after the first fifty,” the coach says. When you talk to Sofia about it, she says, “I know, I know,” and then puts her head back into her book. In her world, strings of kites glued with shards of glass are cutting each other in half against a blue Afghan sky.