This is the Water (5 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

C
ontrary 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 school 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.”

 

T
his 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

T
his 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.

This is you in the water. You swim in a lane reserved for swimmers who are not on the swim team. You swim while the swim team swims alongside you. This is you thinking as you're swimming that it sounds as if the water is whispering to you. Swimming always calms you. You rarely think about Thomas or your brother while you're swimming. In fact, you started to swim more seriously to forget about your brother after his death. It's as if the water embraces you, lets you know that here is a place you can be without getting hurt. I will buoy you. I will caress you. I will soothe you and whisper to you, it seems to say. You hear the faint shush of the water going by your ears as you freestyle forward. You wonder what the water, if it could talk, could possibly be telling you about your stroke. Could it be telling you to lift your arms up higher, as if you were reaching over a barrel, the way you have heard swim coaches do when describing the stroke? Could it be telling you to kick harder? After all, your kick is barely a splash, barely a flutter. After you take a swim yourself, just a mile of freestyle, a two-hundred individual medley, and an IM kick, not even a quarter of the workout that the swim team will do, you look at your toes in the shower. They look like toes on a child. They are fat and rounded, and not slender and long, the way Chris's are. You wiggle them, letting them send up a happy hello to you from where they are on the tiled floor. You wash your hair that is thinning, thinking maybe your brother wasn't so dumb after all, maybe doing yourself in before you're really old and useless is the right way to go. A boy who is allowed in the women's locker room because there is something wrong with the boy and he is in a wheelchair and has a woman who helps wash him, is in the next shower stall. The boy says the word “water” over and over again. “Yes, you like the water,” the woman says. You can hear soap or shampoo going through the boy's hair in the next shower stall, as if the woman were playing with the boy's hair, lifting it up into peaks like a troll, or creating a long blade of it through the center, like a foamy Mohawk.

 

W
hen Paul, Chris's husband, shows up after practice to pick Cleo up, you decide you'll go and talk to him. Maybe there's a way you can tell just by talking to him if he's really cheating on Chris. “Hello, Paul,” you say, coming up to him, getting his attention as he's turned away from you looking out the door. When he turns toward you smiling, you feel as though a light is shining back at you. Even the facility seems brighter, as if up above through the high skylights clouds have made way for sun, but it's not the sun. The sun is on its way down. “Hi, Annie,” he says, his whole face opening up to you, as if the sole purpose of him standing there and waiting were for you to come by and talk to him. Has he always been this good-looking? you think to yourself. You don't remember ever standing this close to him before. Usually it's the mothers who have the kinds of jobs they can leave early to pick up the kids and drive them from school to practice whom you regularly see, not the fathers. You see Kim's father sometimes waiting at practices, he's always working on his computer, or you see Keith's father at practices, always reading a war novel. You see Catherine's father, a man who watches the entire practice attentively as if it were as exciting as a meet. You've seen Jonathan's father sometimes driving up in his pickup with the lawn care logo on the side and driving off again after Jonathan's gotten out of the truck with his swim bag, but again, it's mostly the mothers you see. Maybe it's because it's been so long since Thomas, your own husband, has touched you in the night, and because when you tried to touch him last he patted your hand instead, that Paul suddenly seems attractive. But you are no spring chicken, and you would be very surprised if Paul even looked at you twice. You decide he will probably notice your graying hair first and then the wrinkles by your eyes that are so pronounced they look more like the head of a serious garden rake than the proverbial crow's feet in lines of three, which to you sound almost dainty in comparison. You decide, when he looks at you, still smiling, that you can see why Chris, his beautiful wife, married him, and why any student of his would probably lean over his desk a little too far, revealing a little too much, in order to get his attention, and to get him to smile at her the way he has just smiled at you. You decide your friend Chris should maybe be more worried than you thought. You realize a few things.

You realize it has been a long time since you have met another man who you thought was attractive. You realize how you are probably a good wife, never talking to men other than your husband, never thinking maybe there are men you could flirt with, men who would talk to you about things other than the decline of civilization, and particles in the air you can't see. You realize your eyeliner may be smudged and that you should run the tip of your finger under your eye so you don't look as though you've been crying. You realize that when you speak, your voice sounds gravelly, as if all these years you've been smoking cigarettes instead of exercising almost daily, eating healthy food, and drinking from BPA-free containers. You realize that when he, Paul, smiles back at you it seems as if his eyes are twinkling, and as if they're sending out points of light you can feel animating your face, making you smile back. You realize you have the urge to toss your hair out from where it lies on your shoulders, to give it fullness. You realize that you hold back that urge to toss your hair out from your shoulders because you realize it would be sending a type of signal you haven't sent in a long time, a signal that you can be attractive if you want to. You realize that the sun is really down outside the facility, and that the pavement is turning dark, almost as dark as India ink. You realize you are thinking that maybe without the sunlight shining on you, you might not appear to have lines like garden rakes at the corners of your eyes. You realize you are staring at Paul's lips as he talks. They are sensual. You realize now that you are standing close to him that he is taller than you previously thought, and that you have always been attracted to tall men. You realize you are asking Paul how he is enjoying being the parent of such a good swimmer on the swim team, and you realize he is answering you, and choosing his words carefully, saying he likes it just fine, that he thinks Cleo is the one who is really enjoying it, which is the way it should be. You realize you like the sound of his voice. It's a deep voice that makes you look at the skin on his chest that you can see between the collars of his shirt, where the top three buttons are open. You look at his chest after hearing his voice, wondering what his voice would sound like if he were talking softly and you were laying your head against him. You realize you are stepping back, telling him you are glad you met him. You're afraid of how much you're imagining being closer to this man. You wonder where Thomas is. He came with you to the facility. He does come sometimes to work out or to watch the girls swim, but it's rare these days, his work being more important. Even though you've asked Thomas to come more often to help at the meets, he says he'd rather work on the wood at home or spend extra hours at the lab. Now when you see Thomas coming down the hall from the men's locker room, after having just showered and changed, you realize that you are relieved. You wish that Thomas, in his infinite wisdom about space and particles, could speed up and get to you faster. You realize Thomas is tall too, and has a deep voice, and eyes that sparkle, and that you are lucky he is all of the things that Paul is, and that you don't have to toss your hair for Thomas. All that you have to do is go get in the car with Thomas, and go home, and at night, after he has patted your hand, and after images of your brother have paraded in front of you, all you have to do is sleep.

 

A
t breakfast alone the next morning when Thomas has left for work and the girls are upstairs, you are bent over. Hunched, you are folding in on yourself while you eat your raisin bran, thinking about how you aren't supposed to think about the death of your brother since there's no forgiving him and no getting mad at him, there's just no more him. You don't have the energy to lift your head up. It's not the weight of the world pressing down you feel so much. It's more like the weight of the world is sucking you down from below, pulling you into its fiery reaches, its melting core. The raisin bran tastes like cigar ash, and you think you've swallowed a bug.

This is you calling Chris, feeling bad that she's upset about Paul, and asking if she'll be driving to the next swim meet, and wanting her to come, telling her how nice the facility is, how even the hotel is nice. You know because you've been there before, for meets in the previous years. This is Chris saying, “No, I'm letting Paul take Cleo. At least he'll be with Cleo, so seeing the woman he's having an affair with won't be an option.”

This is you coming home that evening after picking up the girls from practice and after a meeting with a potential client in a café to discuss her wedding-day photo shoot. You tell Thomas, while the girls go upstairs, and he's reading at the kitchen table because there he can bask in the last light of the day, how this client wants all of her photos done in black-and-white, even if it's a bright sunny day and even though her wedding sounds riotous with color—tangerine-colored bridesmaids dresses and tiger lily centerpieces on all of the tables and ring bearers in fuchsia. “Isn't black-and-white cheaper? She sounds practical to me,” Thomas says, and then he tells you about the article he's reading, about people who are hypersensitive. The slightest touch hurts them. The slightest noise deafens them, and they can't help it. It's in their genes. You wonder, while Thomas reads to you from the article, if he's ever noticed the picture of your own wedding day framed on the wall in your bedroom, in direct view from where you lie on the bed, where it can be seen first thing when you both open your eyes, and last thing before you turn off the light. In the picture your bridesmaids are in red, holding bright red bouquets of roses, everything contrasting nicely against the white lace of your dress and Thomas's black tux. In the picture your lips are the same red as the bridesmaids' dresses and your cheeks are flushed red from all the excitement of the day. You think how much of the color would be lost if the photo were in black-and-white. The red of the bridesmaids' dresses just looking dark, and the white of your dress looking colder, not as warm as it does beside the red dresses. In black-and-white Thomas's tux would just be dark like the red dresses, nothing setting him apart from the bridesmaids at all, as if Thomas matched them, as if he had been more connected to them than he was to you on that day. This is you noticing how when the sun has gone down completely, Thomas still works at the kitchen table. In the growing dark, his outline becomes more solid, his light-brown hair now almost black, a different man altogether than the one you married. These are the girls coming into the room, Alex whistling and Sofia turning on lights, changing the mood very quickly. Thomas's hair now light brown again, his eyes flecked with sparkling green. Pans get banged around in the shelves because Sofia is starving as usual and wants to bake herself cookies. Alex turns the radio on loud. The dog comes to walk between everybody, brushing you with the end of her tail, reminding all of you that soon she's to be fed. This is Thomas telling you the girls should stay home and study instead of going off to the swim meet, and this is Sofia banging a tray on the countertop, saying no. This is Alex saying forget it, saying she wants to go to the meet. She's at the top of her age group and doing well in breast, beating out almost everyone else in the fifty and hundred. This is you thinking, as Sofia preheats the oven, how it will warm up the house, and how soon, in a few weeks when summer's fully arrived, it will be almost too warm outside to want to bake cookies inside and the dessert of choice, as it does every summer, will turn to ice cream and smoothies. This is Thomas later, telling the girls to grab their jackets and come out and see the stars. They take out a sleeping bag and lay it on the front lawn, and from the open window upstairs you see how with one girl up under each of his arms Thomas points out how stars don't really twinkle, it's our atmosphere deflecting their light that makes them appear as though they are changing in color and intensity. He tells the girls that almost every star we see is really two stars, and that from so far away they look like one. Sofia says, “Does that mean when I wish upon a star I'm really wishing on two and that my wish has double the chance of coming true?”