This is the Water (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

T
his is Mandy at the facility, scowling. Cold rain is coming down hard outside, and the floor at the entrance is quickly becoming wet from water dripping off the clothes of everyone who comes through the doors. She mops the puddles up and then goes on to start cleaning the restrooms, but the minute she gets her cleaning cart to the ladies' room door, the director comes up to her and asks her to mop the entrance floor again, saying it's a hazard, a child or an old person may slip and fall. She already knows she'll have to stay at the facility later than her usual quitting time if she's going to get the restrooms clean. She starts mopping up the floor again when a man she's never seen before walks in. Mandy thinks she knows just about everybody who's a regular. She knows the overweight mother and the overweight daughter who always work out on the elliptical machines together and always seem to have matching sweat stains appear at the same time on their shirts, under the arms and below their breasts. She knows the man who lifts his legs strangely and walks as though he's walking on the moon. She knows the young man who has a muscled chest but legs like matchsticks, which to Mandy look so out of place, as if the man were one of those drawings where one person drew the top half and then folded over the paper and had someone else draw the bottom half. She knows the swimmers, of course. There's Joy, who always smiles at her. There's Maya, whose pale complexion reminds Mandy of the inside of a just-cut potato. There's the big kid named Carl, who moves his arms like windmills through the water but doesn't seem to go faster than anyone else. But this new guy, who is he? Mandy moves the mop near the check-in desk even though there's not much water there, just to see if the receptionist says his name when she scans his card. The receptionist doesn't say his name, though, and just says hello. The man, who wears slacks and a button-up-the-front shirt and tennis shoes, and is carrying a gym bag, doesn't head for the locker rooms first. Instead he heads for the tall tables located in front of the big windows that look onto the pool. He sits on a tall stool and watches the swimmers on the team swimming. Mandy can see that when the swimmers are asked to dive in, sprint, get out at the other end, and then walk the perimeter of the pool with their arms extended and their hands together in a streamline, the man watches intently, every once in a while running his hand through his thick black hair. While mopping the entrance, Mandy keeps an eye on the man. Why isn't he changing out of his clothes and working out? she thinks. It isn't until the swim practice is over, and the girls have pulled off their caps and let their wet hair fall darkly to their shoulders, that the man gets up and finally goes into the locker room. When he comes out he's ready for swimming. Mandy can see him through the glass window wearing baggy swim trunks and goggles that hang around his neck. Unlike most lap-swimmers, who dive right in, he holds onto the edge of the pool and lowers himself in. Once he's in, and sliding down under the water, he's smiling as if he were lowering himself into a warm Jacuzzi instead of a bracing competition pool that is regulated at a precise temperature of seventy degrees so the swimmers don't warm up too quickly and become overheated. The man, Mandy thinks, has a strange smile, as if he's not smiling at all, but ready to start crying. “Mandy,” the director says over her shoulder. “The mop. We need the mop again in the foyer.”

 

I
n cyberspace, Sofia is heading home, rounding Florida and coming up past the Keys, she has estimated, after she tallies up the miles she has swum since she last tallied them up and she was in Saint Kitts. In the facility's foyer she shows you an avatar of herself in the water on the screen. The first thing you think is that it's a poor avatar. Sofia is prettier, and Sofia in real life does not sport such ridiculously huge breasts and such a narrow, pinched-looking waist.

This is you wishing you were in the Keys or, better yet, back at the equator. The water warm, not smelling of chlorine, and the waves rolling in. This is you seeing Paul outside the facility standing under the awning to stay out of the rain while talking on his phone. He is turned away from the doors, he is turned away from other people, the phone call obviously not one he wants others to hear. This is you trying to read Paul's lips, even though you have never been able to read lips before and know you will probably never be able to. Still, you think that maybe because you have kissed these lips of Paul's, you will somehow read them more easily, and then you look at your thirteen-year-old daughter and think how she probably has more mature thoughts than you have. And oh, crap, I hope she has more mature thoughts than I have, you think, because really, lately your thoughts have been so childish. Daydreams of Paul leaving Chris to be with you have begun to crop up throughout the day. You have had them while rinsing your hair in the shower, while feeding the goose a bit of banana on the porch, while heating burrito shells in a pan. You think how when you were a teenager you probably didn't even daydream as much as you've been daydreaming lately. When you were a teenager you were more like your daughter is now—reading books whenever you could, especially seeking them out when your brother was upset for days because his girlfriend had left him. He was busy smashing his guitar, and a few days after that sending every one of the dining room chairs down the staircase. From the bathroom where you were hiding, and reading, you could hear them tumbling, striking the steps as they fell, the slats of the cherrywood backs and the cross rails and spindles on the legs breaking, sounding wood-on-wood. “Come on, girls, let's go home,” you say to your daughters, and going out the door, they pass by Paul, who does not see you because he is facing the other direction, facing the grounds of the facility where there is a sheer face of granite exposed in a cliff.

Just as well, you think on the drive home about not having talked to Paul. It's for the best, really. You start thinking about a man too much, you can't get anything else done, and there is much to be done now that it's September. There are the September weddings you have to shoot, and you have to have final meetings with the clients. The clients of the September weddings are always perfectionists, because they've had all summer long to plan exactly what they want. They tell you the shots they want, down to small details. One year a bride wanted one shot of her hand resting on her fiancé's shoulder taken with just the diamond engagement ring, and then, after the vows were said, another shot that was to be exactly the same, but taken with her wedding ring now on her finger alongside her engagement ring. The only problem was that the sun, unaware of its role in the shot, was farther down after the vows were said, and the shots did not look the same. In the first shot, the diamond ring sparkled, sending rays of light all around it. In the second shot, the sun didn't cooperate. There were no rays of light, just the diamond ring looking opaque, almost like rock candy, and the wedding ring looking too tight, too close to the knuckle of the woman's finger and accentuating the thickness of the knuckle and its wrinkles. There was the woman afterward, complaining to you about the disparity between the two shots after you had sent her the bill for the shoot. You offered to retake the photo at the same time of day, but she had said the moment was lost now. It was irretrievable. You assured her the sun would shine again and those rays cast from the diamond ring would be there again. No, you misunderstand, the woman said. You made a mistake you can't fix. That moment is forever gone, she said. You tell yourself that next time you meet with a client you will have to explain the rotation of the sun, the changes in daylight, the simple passage of time, and that even though they want a picture to look just so, it may not look that way at all. There is still more to do now that school has started up. You have to bake pies for a bake sale to raise money for playground equipment. You have to meet with teachers who will tell you things about your children you already know. You have to remember to give Alex five dollars for the empanada festival. You have to sign the forms for the school pictures and choose a colored background and choose whether you want, for extra money, the blemishes on your children's faces airbrushed so that they're invisible, or whether you want to leave them, a reminder of how they really look—not a bad thing, but a thing more real. You want to stop the car. Your brain is working faster than your body. If you could just pull over and not have to do so many things at once, like hand your daughters their snack of apples and cheese where they sit in the backseat, and remember this is the stretch of road where the cop always sits and you better slow down, and this is where the bump in the road is that always scrapes your undercarriage if you drive over it too quickly, and this is where there always seems to be a deer crossing the road, and the leaves, my God, are already starting to turn from green to bits of orange, gold, and red, and how can this be, you think, when I'm still in my summer shorts and a faded tee?

You stop the car, just for a moment. You pull over, hearing newly fallen leaves crunching under your tires, and Sofia wants to know right away what's going on, why are we stopping? You just shake your head. You don't think you can begin to describe that you just needed your brain to slow down. Your practical daughter would want a real reason. “I need to pee,” you say. “Oh, brother!” your daughters say. “Can't you wait until we get home?” You open up the door and go to the side of the road, pulling down your pants, not worried that anyone will see you, because so few cars are ever on this stretch, there are just rows of corn, the stalks tall, the tops brown, soon to be threshed. When you're done you walk a little down the road. “Where are you going?” Sofia yells. “Just moving my legs,” you say. “Can we get home already? I have homework to do,” Alex yells out the window. And you think: These swim team girls, do they all have to be such good students? Such achievers?

I will tell Thomas about Paul and me, you think, or is it Paul and I? Or is it just I because Paul is not walking around all the time thinking of our kiss while in the shower, while feeding the goose, while turning burritos in a pan. Paul is only thinking of himself appearing as a would-be, could-be kind of a murderer in a jury's tired, hotel-slept eyes. This is you staring at dried brown stalks of corn taller than yourself whose leaves make a scratching sound in the wind. You get back in the car and drive home.

“Thomas,” you say at night before bed while he's brushing his teeth. “Ah-ha?” he says while still brushing, his wrist moving energetically up and down and toothpaste lather dripping out of his open mouth and into the sink. “Can I talk to you?” you say. You imagine yourself saying a sentence whose first words begin “Paul and I.” He spits out the toothpaste and lifts handfuls of water into his mouth, rinsing, and then he dries himself with the corner of a towel that has your last name written on its bumpy terry in Sharpie. The towel has been to overnight camp with one of your children. It has sat rolled up in the corner in a bunk, molding and wet. It has been down to grassy shores and spread out on the ground beside canoes and kayaks. It has heard the shrill whistle of a counselor. A summer wind off a mountain has blown back its edges. “You know, I read we're losing our polar ice cap faster than they could have ever imagined,” Thomas says. “The melting water absorbs more heat than the ice ever radiated. It's changing the jet stream. Where we live now may become a desert in ten years' time.” He doesn't say, “What do you want to talk about?”

When you're both in bed your daughters come running into the room and jump on Thomas. It has been a while since they've frolicked this way, and you love that they're doing it now. They pretend to give him CPR, and hammer at his chest with their fists. He coughs and yells and he laughs while they do it. “Oh, maybe, just maybe, he's got appendicitis too. Let's check!” Sofia says and pokes at Thomas's side so that he's laughing and kicking. It's not until someone gets hurt, of course—Alex kicked by accident in the mouth so that her lip is bleeding and the bedcover spattered in small blood drops—that they finally leave the room and go to bed. By that time, Thomas has forgotten that you wanted to talk to him. He falls asleep quickly beside you, not even patting your hand before falling asleep. You look up at Fred, the moon that is a perfect half-circle and that scares you because even just half full it's so bright that looking down on the lawn, if there were an animal there walking by, you would be able to see it clearly, and you wonder what you will be able to see when it's really full, in just a couple weeks.

Part Three

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

W
inter State Championships is months away, six months to be exact, but already the coaches of all the teams are considering where it should be hosted. Some like the facility near the seashore, where if families only have children swimming in one session a day, they can go to the beach and brave the winds, and breathe in the salt air, and maybe even run barefoot in the sand, letting the water creep up between toes still sporting sock lint. Some like the home facility for the meets—the travel is easy, and the facility is one of the best around. The water never too chlorinated, the blocks not slippery, and the timing board so new it even shows videos in addition to the names of the swimmers and their heats and lanes. You like the away facility. You like the Mexican restaurant in the town. You like it when your family can make it to the beach and watch the waves. Your daughters don't like the away facility's freezing cold water, or the way the start horn is hard to hear because there's only one speaker by the starter instead of a speaker under each one of the blocks, as there is at the home facility.

Mandy, who of course doesn't even go to the meets, likes the away facility too, since it means she doesn't have to clean up after hundreds of people who come for the home meet and stop up the toilets with their constant flushing and get the locker room floor sopping wet. Dinah has already compared the two pools, and has learned from her research that the away pool is a slower pool than the home pool. The away pool's gutters are deeper, making more turbulence, creating more resistance against the swimmers' bodies, and slowing down their times. The home pool also keeps its lane lines tighter so that it's less likely a lane line will float into swimmers and cause them to jam their hands into one of the hard plastic cuffs. At practice, Dinah lets everyone know what she's learned. She suggests all the parents sign a petition so that the coaches know they all want to swim at the home pool. You don't want to sign it. You figure the coaches have their own reasons for voting where States should be swam, and you don't want to get involved. “You just like staying at the hotels and staying up late talking to other women's husbands—that's why you want it to be away,” Dinah says to you in front of some of the other parents, trying to sound as if she's joking. Thankfully Chris isn't at this practice.

 

W
e kill because we hear voices that tell us to kill. We kill because we feel we are on a mission to rid the world of a certain type of person. We kill for lust, for sexual motivation. We kill for the thrill of killing. We kill for power and to have total control over someone else's fate. We kill to gain money. (The killer, our killer, laughs. He has checked the wallets and the pockets of the women he's killed, and there has been hardly enough money to replace the clothes he was wearing at the scene of the crime.) Once we kill, we can keep killing, or we can stop killing. We can kill again after years of not having killed. We can go on a spree. We can do all of our killing in two weeks or less. We can kill all of our lives. We can have had parents who were divorced, or parents who pecked each other on the cheek every time one walked in the door, and said “I love you” multiple times throughout the day.

You never know how many we really killed. You can blame us for three or four, but you never really know.

Our killer minimizes the screen on the computer. A teacher has come into his office to use his fax machine. “Hey, Floyd,” the teacher says while she's feeding in the document. “I came in early this morning and heard coyotes howling at the edge of the woods near the playground. I think we'd better let the other teachers know not to let kids play too close to the woods during recess.”

“Coyotes?” Floyd says. “Do you know how many coyotes actually attack people throughout the year? It's about one person, in the entire United States, every ten years. I think the poison ivy by the stream is more of a hazard than the coyotes.”

“You didn't hear? We're getting sheep to eat the poison ivy,” the teacher says.

“Sheep?”

“They love it. We pen them in and they eat it. The only thing is, the kids can't pet the sheep, or they may get the poison ivy.”

Floyd laughs. “I wouldn't have thought of sheep.”

After the teacher leaves the room, Floyd doesn't have time to go back and read the rest of his article. He has lunchroom duty and has to sit with the kids while they eat. We the killers, Floyd thinks as he descends the stairs to the lunchroom, past walls lined with children's depictions of human organs. A roll of toilet paper, cut in half lengthwise and with Cheerios stuck inside it, clings to a poster board, held by smears of glue stick. It is meant to be the esophagus, and the Cheerios are what the person just ate. Floyd makes a slicing motion against the toilet paper roll with his forefinger. If only a real neck were as easy to slit, he thinks, but no, we the killers have to make sure our knives are extremely sharp. We the killers have to stay in shape to overtake our victims. We the killers do push-ups at night, our sweat beading at our nose tips and falling to our carpeted floors. We the killers even have to join gyms. We exercise to keep limber and strong, because it would be a mistake to let your body grow too weak to fight a woman who fights back. It would be a mistake to pull a muscle, a tendon, while in the middle of killing someone, because then you could be caught, and we the killers, contrary to popular belief, have no desire to be caught. We just want to keep killing.

When the sheep come, and are fenced in with electric fencing, Floyd watches them from the window. Up on the fencing there are hand-painted signs the children made that read, “Poison Ivy Sheep, Do not Touch!!” The paint they used was bright red, and very watery, so it dried with drip marks extending down each letter. While typing up the school newsletter, Floyd hears the sheep call to one another. Baaaa-baaaa. A photographer from the town's newspaper rings the school doorbell. Floyd can see him on the screen that projects the images from the video camera situated right outside the front door. From the reporter's neck, a long strap hangs with a camera attached. The principal told Floyd the photographer would be coming. “He'll come to shoot the sheep,” the principal said. The photographer wants Floyd to take him to the fenced-in area where the sheep and the poison ivy are. He wants Floyd to be in the picture. He wants Floyd standing by the dripping sign painted in red. He wants Floyd to smile. Floyd asks not to be in the picture. He says he will gladly find a student from a classroom who could be in the picture instead, but the photographer does not have time for Floyd to pull a student from a classroom. The photographer is on his way to shoot a small circus that has come to a neighboring town, and so the photographer must work fast, before the evening takes its toll, and the clown's makeup washes away, and the color of the coats of the dancing horses turns from white to smoke with their sweat. “Perfect,” the photographer says after taking a picture of Floyd in front of the sheep. “It will be in the next issue of the paper. They'll probably give the article some catchy title, something like, ‘Sheep Save School!' ”

Before the photographer leaves, Floyd points at the red marks forming around the photographer's neck from the strap that holds the weight of the camera. “It's cutting into your neck. You should do something about that,” Floyd tells him. “You could fasten a foam pad to it. That might help. Unless you like walking around looking like someone tried to strangle you.”

“Yes, that's exactly how I want to look when I show up to shoot a circus where children are in the audience,” the photographer says as he gets into his car to drive out. “Thanks for the advice.”

Floyd doesn't go right back up to his office. Instead he goes back to the sheep. He wonders if they're really eating the poison ivy, or if it just looks as though they are. He feels sorry for them when they near the electric fence, thinking he has food for them, and they receive a shock. Baaa-baaa, they say plaintively. To Floyd, they don't seem happy to be fenced in and living on a diet of poison ivy. He imagines they would much rather be roaming the field and feeding on sweet grass.