Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

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.

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.