Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

At 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?”

“Yes, I suppose that could be right. I hope it’s true for you, at least,” Thomas says, and then you see how when he says it he brings your girls closer to him, hugging them tighter under each arm.

T his is you days later taking the girls to a league meet an hour away, pulling out of your dirt driveway in the cool dusk, turning on the heat that won’t kick in for two miles, and seeing a coyote the size of a German shepherd jogging in a slant on thin legs in front of your headlights. Look, you say to your girls, but it is too late. The coyote is gone, and is now probably hunting somewhere in your front field, where a lone tall pine grows and where there is cover by a falling rock wall for small chipmunks and rabbits to hide. This is you, forty minutes into the drive and still on back roads before you can get on the highway. That’s how far back you live in the country. You can see families in homes on the sides of the road. People turning on their televisions, working in the kitchen, some just walking across the room and shutting a window. The people you happen to see outside are closing barn doors and putting horses in for the night, or standing in front of their doors in triangles of light cast from lamps in the hallways and calling for their dogs out in the fields to come home. This is you finally on the highway, your mind wandering. Although wander is completely the wrong word, you think, because it always seems to go back to you thinking about how Thomas hasn’t been touching you at night and how your brother shot himself in the head. These are guilty thoughts of how maybe you weren’t even close enough to your brother to be mourning him for so long. You were eight years apart. You had gone to his room as a girl and talked to him often. You listened to him play guitar, the same refrains over and over again, trying to get them right, but he never seemed satisfied. You sometimes looked at yourself in his mirror, seeing him there too, sitting on the bed bent over his guitar, his back in the shape of a C as if he were melting and would end up like silly putty stretched out over the strings and the neck and the frets. Sometimes in summer you just stood in front of his air conditioner, his was the only room that had one, and lifted your arms, letting the wind flutter the wisps of hair by your temples wet with sweat. You sometimes heard him talk on the phone, but he said very little, and he still held his guitar on his lap while holding the phone to his ear, every once in a while strumming a chord softly. His was a conversation of yeses and nos. You assumed he was talking to girlfriends, because sometimes he would smile saying yes, and sometimes he would smile saying no.

This is your brother with the gun in his mouth. This is your brother forming a cauliflower head on the carpet with his blood. This is his wife, hearing the shot downstairs in his office set up with sound mixers and stereos and computers. This is your brother’s teenage son, hearing the shot too, colliding with his mother as both of them try to run down the stairs together, barely fitting that way, abreast in the stairwell as they run. This is the mother using all of her force to hold her teenage son back from opening up the door. This is the teenage son calling out for his father and banging on the closed door. This is the father answering with just the sound of his blood as it pours out of him. This is the crime-scene tape being looped around the beech trees in front of the house, a yellow web forming that will keep people out.