This is the Water (20 page)

 

T
his is Chris driving to Bobby Chantal's daughter's house. It has glass on the front door that looks as if cold weather has frosted it, as if it were already winter instead of the start of fall. When Pam Chantal opens the door she's eating a yogurt cup with a plastic spoon. Chris tells her she's come to the house to tell Pam something amazing, and after Chris tells Pam Chantal that her husband, Paul, was once her mother's lover, the yogurt cup Pam Chantal is holding falls, spoon and all, to the carpeted floor. Chris tells her what she knows about that night, how the picnic table was their bed for only a short time before Bobby Chantal went to the ladies' room and was killed. Chris tells Pam how sorry she is. Chris, wanting to protect Cleo from a scandal, asks Pam Chantal to think twice about exhuming her mother's body, saying that if the body is exhumed, it may actually keep the case from being solved, because so much time would be spent on finding a DNA match for Paul, and he is not the killer.

This is Pam Chantal shaking her head. “I'm not stopping now. You're the one who gave me the strength to do it. I've already made the arrangements. Someone killed my mother, Chris. Someone's still out there thinking he's gotten away with it.” When Chris leaves Pam Chantal's house she's thinking only of Cleo and how to protect her from being swept up in the biggest crime story in their area's history, something that could happen simply because her husband slept with a murder victim on a rest-stop picnic table twenty-eight years ago.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

T
his is the fall night. A coyote's call quick to pierce the darkness with such a high pitch you startle under the covers. Then a hemlock beam in your timber-frame home cracks. The man who built your house told you the house would do that. He called it “checking,” but you did not know at the time how loud it would sound. It is as if the house were being ripped apart, and you can hear the ringing sound of it in your ears for a moment afterward. But you like the word “checking.” You like to think the house was always making sure of itself, recalibrating, stepping back, getting a perspective so that it could go on, continue being the house it should be. Thomas breathes next to you and you are struck by the thought of all of your family in the house, how each is dreaming a different dream and how even though the house seems still and quiet, each is dreaming of doing things and going places—maybe Alex is flying, maybe Thomas is surfing, maybe Sofia is walking the hallways of her school looking for a classroom she cannot find. You find it surprising that even during the day, when everyone is so close together in the house, in the kitchen for instance, they can't hear each other's thoughts. You are floored by how many people there are in the world, and how many different thoughts are taking place at one time. Surely there must be a scientist in some science article Thomas has read who addresses this thought, who has studied it, quantified it, or even just guessed at it, the way they have figured the grains of sand to equal the number of stars in the universe. The moon on the grass makes it look as if your lawn is lit by stage lights, and you would not be surprised if actors came out onto the lawn and held out their arms, gesturing and emoting beneath your window. Who would the actors be? You imagine you and Paul and Thomas and Chris, all standing out there. Thomas set off in the corner of the stage closest to the woods where the coyote calls, alone and quiet, reading his science magazine. Paul at the feet of Chris, pleading with her. And your own likeness, your own Annie actress standing behind Paul, tapping his shoulder the whole time, trying to get his attention, but Paul never turns to her.

 

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his is Kim's mother at a home meet, watching Kim's younger sister race. She cannot bear to watch this daughter, though; it reminds her too much of watching Kim race. Kim's sister will grow up to look like Kim. Kim's sister has the same wispy blond hair that looks almost white. Kim's sister's butterfly stroke even seems to have the same rhythm. This is Kim's mother leaving the bleachers, walking out to her car and sitting in the driver's seat with her hands draped over the wheel and her head down, hating herself for not being in the bleachers to cheer for her younger daughter, the one who still lives.

This is Sofia at the same home meet looking around her at all the other swimmers. Before races, some swimmers are goggle-adjusters and some are heat-sheet freaks and some are bathroom-goers and some are visualizers. The goggle-adjusters can't stop adjusting their goggles while they're up on the blocks waiting for the start whistle. They pull their goggles away from their eyes and put them back on again, and then they tighten their straps and tighten them again. The heat-sheet freaks, before their race, check the sheets taped on the wall, making sure they know their correct heat and lane, even though they have checked it ten times before. The bathroom-goers do just that. The visualizers, Sofia thinks, look the most foolish. She sees one now behind the block. She's a girl about Sofia's height and build. She's waiting for her event with her eyes closed and moving her hands in the air as if the air were the water and she were already swimming her race. Sofia knows that the girl is visualizing her entry, she knows she is visualizing how many strokes she will take until she gets to the wall, she knows she is feeling the wall under her feet at the turn and seeing herself winning the heat. Either the girl read about using visualizing as a technique or her coach encouraged her to do it. Either way, Sofia thinks, it looks ridiculous. I will not be a visualizer, Sofia says to herself. No matter how much I want to win for the team, to win for Kim, to win for myself, I will be a no-breather, a goggle-adjuster, a heat-sheet freak, a bathroom-goer, but never a visualizer. I just can't do that. She dives in at the start of her one-hundred free, feeling good and knowing that she didn't visualize the race at all. She has no idea how it will end. She has no idea if she'll win or not. She's just going to try her best, and enjoy it. When she's finished and out of breath, taking her goggles off at the wall, she looks up at the board. Whoever the girl was in lane four came in first, she thinks, and then she remembers, Oh, I was in lane four. She smiles and says thank you after she pulls herself up out of the pool and the timer in her lane says, “Great race!” In the warm-down pool she hears the shouts of children playing, going down the slide in the water park that connects to the warm-down lane. Out the windows, clouds are passing quickly in front of the sun, and she is enjoying watching herself underwater, the light at play, turning her arms from dark to brightly lit with each stroke.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

F
loyd can still do as many chin-ups as he did thirty years ago. He stays in shape. He has a metal bar in his doorway that he bought at a sporting goods store and attached to the doorframe. When he first put the bar up, and tried his first chin-up, he fell. He had made the mistake of screwing it into what he thought was solid wood, but was really a composite wood the previous owner had used to fix the rotting doorframe. When he fell he hit his head, and blood poured from where he had cut it on the sharp corner of the base molding. He was surprised at the blood that poured down his forehead and into his eye. He thought it strange that with all the blood he had seen pour from his victims' throats before, the sight of his own blood still made him queasy. He immediately began to take off his bloodied tee shirt and went to reach for a plastic bag, ready to dispose of it the way he did his other bloodied clothes. He would weight it down with a rock and throw it into a nearby lake, or burn it in a campfire, far out in woods that were not near his house, such as the wooded land owned by the state, where the occasional black bears lived, and where hunters baited them by dumping feed corn in piles on the ground near wild blackberry bushes or near the occasional wizened apple tree that no longer bore sweet fruit, but had been left unpruned for so long its fruit was sour and worm-holed. He sat back down and laughed at himself. There was no reason to hide traces of his own blood from a cut he had received from a fall in his own house.

He has been asked by the principal to look in on the sheep this weekend. Everyone who works at the school is taking turns on weekends watering them and tossing them a flake of hay over the electric fence. He wants to tell the principal no, because he has chosen this weekend to do what he has really wanted to do lately. He wants to kill again. It has been weeks since the last time, and this is how it goes for him usually, when he has a killing spree, a word he likes because it reminds him of “free,” which is exactly how he feels afterward, free for some reason that he doesn't care to explore or explain. There are some things, he believes, that should not be questioned. He doesn't know how he will have time to water and feed the sheep, when he will be busy, of course, cleaning up after having just killed. “Floyd, please, could you do it?” the principal asks, and Floyd, not wanting to be asked why he can't do it, says, “Yes.”

So this killing weekend will have a slight twist to it, Floyd thinks. There will be a shadow of something hanging over him because it will be something he will have to do for the school, and usually when he has a killing weekend he does not have to think about anything except the killing, and in this way it is like a vacation for him. He does not even cook for himself on a killing weekend. He likes to go to restaurants. He sometimes goes to a movie. He does not behave like his usual self on those weekends. He will not shave. He will wear clothes he would never wear otherwise—polo shirts and khakis. He will even buy a bottle of cologne on those weekends and put it on outside of the drugstore where he bought it, and then he will throw the bottle away so it cannot be traced to him. He feels different on those weekends. He feels younger and stronger. If he catches sight of his reflection in a restaurant window, he can see how the short sleeve hem of the polo shirt he's wearing clings to his bicep muscle, which is firm and defined from his labors at his chin-up bar in his doorway at home.

He can't wait to do it another weekend, when he would not be asked to feed and water the sheep, because his spree is on. The time is now. Because it is a weekend, he knows that no one else will be at the school, and it will be dark, and no one will see that he is dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. Stopping at the school and taking care of the sheep will be on his way to the roads he will take whose woods border the back of a rest stop he has been planning on going to. Contrary to popular belief, Floyd is not predatory, as most people think serial killers are. He does not need to select a woman to follow for weeks beforehand. Kim was an exception. He is content to just wait in the woods until a lone woman drives up into the parking lot of the rest stop to use the bathrooms. He likes the young women, he must confess, because they seem the most surprised when they realize they are going to die. The older women, in the space of a second, seem to come to terms with their death, and tell themselves that at least they have lived the best years of their lives. He hopes he will encounter another young woman like Kim. One who has just begun driving, who has listened to the advice to stop every now and then when you're driving at night so that you don't fall asleep at the wheel. It is in a woman's eyes this young that he seems to see the injustice so acutely. Floyd wishes, at times, that he could capture that look with a camera.

 

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his is Chris working on a painting in her studio. It is a painting of the killer. She makes his earlobes thicker. She is sure he has thick earlobes. Possibly, they're the size of the pads of her thumbs. She holds up her thumb to the portrait to use as a model for his earlobe, and when she closes one of her eye's, she sees she can wipe out the killer's entire face.

 

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his is the water. The temperature warm for some reason, even though the days have become colder and the winds have started blowing, carrying yellow and gold leaves off trees in great gusts that remind you of swirling drifts of snow. The pool water, though, is warm, and you think after swimming only a few hundred yards you are already so warm and relaxed you might be able to fall asleep in the water, if only you didn't have so much to think about. Alongside you the team is having an intrasquad mock meet, and every now and then you feel a surge of water from a swimmer who has just dived into the pool. It gives you a crooked stroke, eventually disturbing your path to the point that you reach in for the pull and hit your hand on the plastic lane line. It jams your fingers so hard that in turn you kick harder, responding to the pain. When the swimmers on the deck first start to cheer one another on, you think something's the matter, and that people are shouting because there's an emergency. Maybe they've noticed that the stands with the bleachers are about to come crashing down, and everyone's yelling, trying to get out of the way. You stop midstroke to tread water for a moment and look up to see what's going on. When you realize it's just the team cheering, you go back to swimming, but you can feel your heart beating faster now, pounding really, and you imagine your heart is creating small wave pulses that radiate from your chest, and that the pool is just one large body of water with pulses pushing up against one another. You hear the heart of the water now. You didn't know it even had one. But of course it has one. It can talk to you so naturally it's alive. It isn't speaking now, though. It's allowing you to hear its heart more distinctly. You hear the throbbing, the
voom, voom, voom
sound of its soft pulses. The pulses seem to push all of the swimmers closer to one another to form one heart, to form one beat. You know you're jumpy because in the morning Thomas told you that Dinah had called him. He thought the phone call was for you. “For a moment, I couldn't even remember who she was,” he said. “She wants to meet with me. What do you think that's all about?” You shrugged and shook your head. “No idea,” you said. “Well, I'm not going to meet with her,” he said. “I told her you'd see her at practice probably later, and she could relay whatever information she wanted to you. If it's about conscripting volunteers to work extra meets that my kids aren't even going to be in, I'm not doing that. You can tell her that right off.” In front of Thomas was a science magazine.

“Anything good in that issue?” you said, pointing to it.

Thomas picked it up. “Oh, yes, listen to this,” he started saying, but you didn't listen. You couldn't listen. All that you heard was a roaring in your ears, the sound of your blood rushing to your head, the fear and embarrassment of what could happen if Dinah told Thomas about you and Paul.