This is the Water (14 page)

When he walks back to the house from the studio, Cleo is standing in the doorway. “What was that all about?” she asks. Paul can only shake his head. “Your mother will be back later. It's time for you to go to bed,” Paul says. He puts his arm around Cleo as they walk back into the house. He notices how strong and round her shoulder muscle feels beneath his hand. “My God, you're getting fit,” he says. Cleo smiles. “Coach is working us harder than ever. She says it's her tribute to Kim. She says if we all swim harder then it's as if Kim didn't die in vain. And guess what? I'm leading my lane now.” Paul says, “No, really? Well, that's great, Cleo.”

This is Paul, alone in bed, remembering all too vividly that night he spent with Bobby Chantal and how they kissed and had sex on the picnic table that was up on the hill.

This is Paul's computer in his office. It holds the first few pages of the story he's writing about that night with Bobby Chantal. It is not a story he thinks he will ever try to publish. It is a story filled with too many personal details that would implicate him in the murder. First of all, it describes Bobby Chantal to a T. From the freckles on her nose, and her soft light-brown hair, down to her white-soled nurse's shoes, which she said she kept looking white by covering the smudges with Wite-Out. It also describes Paul, a first year college student, with hair that was so dark it almost looked black, hair tied behind his head in a ponytail. It details the rest stop, with its picnic table, and with its view that had the ability to send Vietnam vets back in time with flashes of recognition so striking that sometimes they were left staring into the darkness of a deep depression. The story is like a written confession by a man who cannot help embellishing the facts and turning them into a story. It was when he first started staying late at his office, trying to plan the story, that Chris started accusing him of cheating. Maybe, in a way, he is cheating on her. He comes to the office most evenings after dinner to work on it. He sometimes even wakens with an idea or a detail for the story he hadn't remembered, and rolls away from Chris's warm body and gets into his car and drives to his office to write it down. He knows that reading the news article about the serial killer in Colorado, who was finally caught after strangling his last victim, and the news of Kim being murdered are the reasons he has been thinking about Bobby Chantal so much again. He knows it is the reason his nightmares are more frequent, and why in them he keeps trying to bring Bobby Chantal back over and over again. In truth, his memory of Bobby Chantal and his writing the story have been consuming him. He is not concentrating well in his teaching. He is reading students' work without even leaving a constructive comment. He writes “Fine job” on the last page of their work, or something just as nondescript, when really their writing could use helpful criticism throughout. What do I really know about writing anyway? he thinks. He is doubting his own ability to tell the story. He feels that if he can get the story right, then somehow he'll be rid of the guilt. I'm not stupid enough to go to the police and tell them I was there the night of her murder, he tells himself. That could ruin my life, and the lives of Chris and Cleo as well. But writing the story in a way that exposes the humanity within him, that might help. It might redirect his thoughts, so that while he is eating dinner with his family he might have a conversation with them instead of staring at the salt shaker and thinking of how small leaves and blades of grass were mixed in with Bobby Chantal's blood on her face and the front of her dress when he turned her over and saw the slit in her neck that ran from ear to ear, like the proverbial second smile that so many other victims murdered by having their throats cut are described as having. And best of all, getting past writing the Bobby Chantal story might just get him back to writing work that can be published again. There are stories inside him he wants to tell, only right now it's as if Bobby Chantal isn't going to let him write them unless he writes her story first.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Y
ou swim in a lane next to your daughters' lane, where they are practicing reverse dolphin kicks on their backs. Waves from their undulations buoy you from side to side as you swim a slow free, your kick barely fluttering, your turnover rate high since you're not pulling hard enough when you extend your arm below the surface of the water. You think it's a good thing you're not in the ocean, as the movements from the kids on the team would probably buoy you far away from the shore and out into the open sea where you'd . . . drown? Be lost forever? Swallowed? Saved by Japanese fishermen? You picture yourself lying on the deck of a trawler beside dolphins whose eyes are clouded over and whose skin is dull gray. Maybe the fishermen would give you salty broth made from soy and you would say
arigato
, and they would nod their heads up and down and smile, pleased you acknowledged them in their own tongue. Would you have the heart, then, to denounce them for the treatment of the dolphins?

This is you in the water swimming slowly, thinking of being saved by Japanese fishermen. Your stroke weak, your hair gray, coming out from under your cap in wisps, your hips on your backstroke sunk low. If you'd only tilt your head back more in the water, those hips of yours would rise up. Ah, there, you tilt your head back now. Good job, Annie, you think you hear the water say. You are not thinking of your brother now, how his wife, after he shot himself, found bits of his blood and skull on the dial for the volume control of the stereo system, and how she threw out all of his toothpaste and there were so many tubes. He must have stocked up one day, a day before he knew, of course, that he would choose to end his days. You are not thinking of Paul or the killer. This is you now laughing in the water, watching Alex being silly in the water as she swims beside you, coming up from underneath the lane line and crossing her eyes and blowing up her cheeks with air when she sees you. This is Alex being told by the coach to get back over into her lane and finish her set. Alex gives you one last funny look before she goes. This is you hearing the water again. You were wrong, you realize. It is not saying, Good job, Annie. It is saying, Do the job, Annie. Do the job, and you don't know what it means.

We the parents agree not to interfere with the coaching of the swimmers and agree to let the coaches coach. We have to sign forms to that effect every year. We the swim parents, we think we are good swim parents. We the swim-team parents drive our children sometimes almost an hour just to get to practice, and we the swim-team parents hang out for two hours at practice while our children swim, then we drive almost an hour back. We the swim-team parents wake up at five a.m. some mornings to drive our children two hours away to a meet where they may only swim a few races, their actual time swimming in the water not totaling more than three minutes and thirty seconds. We the swim-team parents work at the swim meets, to help the team, for no pay. We the swim-team parents make sure our children are rested the night before, and that they have eaten pasta, because every good swim-team parent knows that pasta will carry them through the next day so they can drive home the finish and motor into the wall. We the swim-team parents buy our children the swimmer's backpacks for exorbitant prices because they have mesh pockets to keep the wet swimsuits in for the car ride home, and we the swim-team parents buy the swimmer's parkas with the swimmer's name embroidered above the breast that the swimmers wear during swim meets to keep themselves warm in between races. We buy them the skintight racing suits that take two adults to get one child into. We the swim-team parents, some of us tell our children we saw how hard they tried when they raced but didn't win or shave off time. Some of us tell our children to swim faster, to build up an oxygen debt. We want to see them panting for breath after a race, so tired they can't pull themselves out of the water. Some of us, the swim-team parents, tell our children nothing and just let them sit on our laps after they've raced, even though they are too old for sitting on our laps and they are taller than we are, and we place a hand on their backs as they sit on us and the two of us just look at the people around us and the pool below, in constant motion with the movement of swimmers' bodies. Some of us work at timing, holding stopwatches in our hands, or at admissions collecting fees for programs and heat sheets, or at the concession selling the ziplock baggies of brownies and paper plates of the gooey mac and cheese, or at the timing console making sure the touchpads are reset for the next race, or as officials faulting swimmers for single-hand touches or for wiggling before a dive off the blocks. Some of us don't tell our children good job at the meet. We save our praise for later. We tell them in long car rides home when they're tired and hungry and don't want to hear it, and just want to read their books (all swim-team children are good readers in the car and rarely get carsick because they are so used to the long rides). We tell them how amazingly they swam and how proud we are and how we think all the hard work they've done all those evenings at practices in the pool have paid off, and we the swim-team parents can't believe how much better we feel now that we're out of that pool and that facility, and we the swim-team parents think that even the stale air of the car—we can smell where the wet dog has sat on the upholstery, and where there are bits of stale chips under the seats, and where there might even be a blackened, shriveled banana peel—is a much better smell than the smell of the hot, chlorinated pool deck we've been standing on for so long.

Your house, you think, is just a bigger version of your car. Inside there are also stale bits of food and the smell of the wet dog, and there are clothes scattered here and there, and wet towels no one bothered to hang up, and plastic containers that once held snacks for swim meets, such as fresh diced fruit (a swim-team parent doesn't bring chips for their children to eat at a meet—each chip, a Frito, for example, acting like a small anchor inside the child's belly). Some of the swim-team parents buy their children only organic milk, and some of the swim-team parents would like to buy only organic milk for their children, but like you, they have more than one child, and a husband like Thomas who drinks so much milk that buying organic milk would cost too much, and then where would the money come for the vacation you and your family took close to the equator, where Thomas held your arm as you walked on the beach and you saw the panther bounding toward the edge of the forest, and the ocelot crossing the road, and the puffer fish in two feet of water so blue it was the color of someone's eyes you once dated, but never trusted, because with those eyes you couldn't tell if he was sincere or not. What was his name again? you think. And then you don't try to remember, it doesn't matter. He has another life somewhere with some wife whose purse contents he knows forward and back, or doesn't. Maybe he couldn't recognize her purse even if it were stuck up under his nose and he were inhaling the leather smell, and would swear it wasn't hers even when the contents revealed photos of him on their honeymoon.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
his is the water, still remembering the way Kim felt moving through it, how her body broke the surface with both her arms being brought forward over the water and pulling back at the same time displaced the water, how it's not just the molecules and atoms of past forms that compose it, but the memory of how bodies once moved through it. The other girls, although they can't name the sensation, can feel the water remembering, and it gives the girls a better sense of how the butterfly is to be swum. The simultaneous up and down movement of the legs and feet. Each turn at the wall on the breast. Each finish double-handed at the wall. This is the coach nodding her head while watching her team swim, noticing how they are better than they were before at the fly, how at least this is something to be grateful for since there has been such a pallor cast over the team since the shocking news of their star flyer's death.

This is Adam, the father of the boys who would rather be playing in the adjacent water park than swimming on the team. He is telling his boys in a voice that never rises, that stays the same, as if he were talking to them in a quiet room rather than a noisy facility with a rushing waterslide and continuous air-exchange vents pumping air, and fifty other small children screaming and splashing, to get out of the lazy river and get on over to the competition pool where their coach is starting practice. His boys don't listen. They continue running up the stairs to the slide and coming down yelling, their feet flexed to increase the surface area when they hit the water and to make as much of a wake as possible cascade over the side of the plastic slide and swoosh onto the cement floor and disappear into the drains. This is Adam shaking his head, wondering how angry he has to become, or wants to become right now. He realizes he could become very angry now, something he never likes to do, so he walks away from his boys and looks out through the glass doors and windows that lead to the foyer, where the tall café tables are set up with their tall chairs, where the drink machines line the wall, and where the snack bar and the front desk are located. What he notices, though not right away, is a man in his midfifties with thick, dark hair and prominent wrinkles on his forehead. Adam has never seen the man before. He seems too old to be a parent who has a young child on the swim team. He doesn't seem like a member of the facility. Members of the facility all look as though they have enough money to afford it. The women wear pricey, casual athletic clothing, and the men wear shiny athletic shoes. Perhaps he's a new janitor, Adam thinks, and he's just changed out of his work clothes and is waiting for a ride. Where the man sits he has a perfect view through the glass windows of the pool, where the swim-team girls and boys are coming onto deck. The girls are adjusting their swimsuit bottoms to cover their rears, and they're piling their hair on top of their heads and then leaning over, asking their friends to help scoop their swim caps over their heads. Adam notices the man watching the girls. For a moment he's glad he just has boys, and no girls to worry about, but then a feeling of protectiveness over the girls on the team comes over him, even though they're not his. He decides that later, after he gets his boys out of the lazy river and onto the competition pool deck where practice is about to begin, he's going to point the man out to the head coach.

But Adam's boys are not cooperating. The youngest starts splashing Adam while Adam's on deck. The warm, chlorine-smelling water drenches Adam's shorts and tee shirt. “Enough now, boys. It's time to get out,” he says. The boys swim away from him, back to where they can get out of the pool and climb up the stairs again to the slide. Adam makes his way to the slide, where his boys will shoot out. He is lucky this time. They have slid down together in the manner of a train, and all he has to do is grab them both up under an arm and drag them to the other pool. He practically holds them off the ground as he walks with them, their small toes suspended in the air, only grazing the wet cement now and then. His boys start howling as he drags them. “I'm going to call social services and report you!” his older boy yells. Adam can feel the other parents on the team trying not to embarrass him, looking away from him and his boys. He's thankful, but still, he's embarrassed. When the assistant coach sees his boys, Adam sighs with relief. She's all smiles and gives them high-fives. “So glad you made it!” she says, and the boys high-five her back as hard as they can. “That's all you've got? Let's see how hard you can really do it.” She has them high-five her again, and now Adam's boys are diving in for their coach, who whoops and hollers for them as they're in midair.

Adam just wants to disappear from the pool deck as quickly as possible, so he goes out to his car and sits with his head back against the headrest listening to the radio. It isn't until later at night when he's in bed, and his boys are asleep after countless requests for glasses of water and hugs, and his wife is asleep beside him, that the image of the man at the pool comes back to him, and Adam remembers now that he forgot to tell the coach about the man. He wishes he hadn't forgotten, because the way the man looked at the girls, Adam thinks, wasn't good. It wasn't good at all.

This is Sofia doing no-breathers during practice. Since Kim's death, Coach has been having them do a lot. She has them do six in a row, swimming the length of the pool and back in freestyle without taking a breath. This is Sofia thinking she has enough time left to do a seventh, even though the coach hasn't asked them to do it, because Sofia thinks the more she does them, then the more she can do them during her one-hundred-free race, at least for the first fifty, and that will definitely make her faster. This is Sofia climbing out of the pool after her seventh no-breather and standing on the deck and beginning to black out. This is Sofia sitting down on deck against the wall made of glass and putting her head between her legs and her hands on her knees and staring at the tiles on deck and thinking how the voices of her teammates sound so far away, as if they were outside even, close to the hillside where the granite rocks, so shear, stick out like chunks of black ice.