Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

They stopped the car at the rest stop parking lot and hiked up a short path to the lookout; as they walked, he held her hand. At the top they sat on a picnic table. She told him to close his eyes and imagine he was in Nam, even though he’d never been there. At first it was difficult. A woodpecker was pecking a beech tree nearby, as rhythmically as if he were pounding nails, but then somehow the noise faded, and when he opened his eyes again, he really was in Nam. He could almost make out helicopters flying over the ridgeline, and huts with straw roofs, and thin threads of smoke rose from the ground that he could imagine were from cook fires. “Unbelievable,” he said to Bobby. They stayed sitting on the picnic table until dark, and then he kissed her. She drew him down on her as she lay flat on the table as if it were a bed. And well, Paul says, one thing led to another. Afterward, she excused herself and said she was going to use the rest stop bathroom. “I don’t think she ever made it through the door,” Paul says. While he waited, he could see the black outlines of the mountains, and he imagined again that he was a soldier in Nam, only now it was night and the enemy was all around. At first when he heard a scream he figured that he had let himself imagine for too long that he really was in Nam and that what he had heard was just an owl screeching in a nearby tree and not a human screaming for his or her life. When Bobby didn’t come back, and the owl never called again, he went down the path toward the restroom to check on her. When he found her she was facedown, the white of her hospital dress easy to see in the light coming from the entrance to the restroom and making it look as if her dress were glowing. He called her name, but there was no answer. He turned her over by her shoulder, and the front of her white hospital dress was anything but white now. It was stained with blood and dirt, and even her face and her forehead were covered in a mixture of blood and clods of dirt and bits of grass. He felt for a pulse, but there was none. There was no point in even calling an ambulance. He could see, as he held her, that her neck had been slit. He looked in the parking lot, but there were no other cars aside from his. He ran around the back of the restroom and along the edge of the woods, but no one was there either.

While standing at the edge of the woods, and looking into the darkness, he realized that if he called the police, he would become a prime suspect. They would check for signs of rape. They would want to know how he knew her. How was it that he had just met her that evening and then she was killed? “It was not like I could help them with the case,” Paul says. “I hadn’t seen or heard anybody. I figured the best thing, the least complicated thing, was for me to get out of there, so I left. I took off. I left her there all covered in blood.” Paul puts his hands over his face in the dark hotel room. You feel like maybe you missed something. Wasn’t it just a second ago that the both of you were laughing about a silly college anecdote you were telling him about the time you ate brownies and didn’t know they were laced with pot, and you had never even smoked pot, and you were so hungry and ate so many that it was as if you were tripping and the EMTs had to come and calm you down and then everyone on campus the next day knew what had happened. Wasn’t it just a second ago you were feeling overwhelmed by his body leaning over yours? Weren’t you just thinking about him touching you?

And now he is talking about unimaginable things, horrible things, blood and rape and a throat being slit. It feels as though you are being sucked down into that evil abyss you always seem to fall into whenever you think about your brother and his suicide. You are standing now. You are heading out the door. You feel a strong urge to check on your daughters, no, to be with them, to hold them. How reassuring it will be to have them in your arms and smell the shampoo in their hair and the faint smell of chlorine that lingers no matter how many times they shower after swimming. When Paul stands and grabs your arm as you are going, you almost let out a scream, but he lets go, so you stop. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve never told anyone before. I should have guessed your first reaction would be to run away.”

“Turn on the light,” you say, and Paul mutters, “Sure,” and flicks the wall switch. You are relieved to see it is still him. You had the strange feeling that after telling that terrifying story, he would have changed. You would be looking at someone with a disfigured face, someone totally unrecognizable, but he is the same. Handsome, and tall, his gray eyes looking into yours, obviously wanting very much for you to understand him, and to stay. “Don’t go yet. The girls are fine,” he says. And, as if on cue, the girls’ laughter is heard again through the wall of the hotel room, confirming that they are fine, if not better. Then he reaches up and touches your face, moving some hair away from your eyes. You back away when he does. “I’m sorry. I have to go,” you say, and you do, entering the hallway at the same time the ice machine makes a crashing sound while emptying its ice into its bin.

T his is you in your hotel bed waking up from a dream where Paul and you are having sex, and you not believing you just had that dream, not after the story he told you about Bobby Chantal and how he left her and never told anyone he was there at the scene of the crime. You realize as you get up from the bed and go to the bathroom, not turning the light on so as not to wake your girls, that it doesn’t matter what Paul might have done so long ago when he was so young, you still like him. It would even be tempting right now to go knock on his hotel room door, because he was just inside of you in your dream, and you feel like you’re humming down there. Thank goodness, you think, Cleo is sharing a room with him, otherwise you just might really find yourself knocking on his door.

This is the rest stop on the highway. This is the grass on the lawn. It remembers the feel of Bobby Chantal’s body, how hard she fell and smashed its slender blades, releasing a just-cut smell the way a going-over with the blades of a lawn mower would. This is the light above the restroom entrance. It remembers lighting up the face of the man who held the knife to Bobby Chantal’s throat. This is the metal doorknob on the restroom door. It remembers reflecting the murderer’s face, and every time someone comes and uses the restroom, the doorknob wishes it could show that person the murderer’s face again so that the man, who was never caught, would be caught.

When Dinah says to you the next morning, “I saw that you and Cleo’s dad stayed up late talking last night,” you’re not sure if you should respond or not.

Do you say, “Why, yes, and talking’s not all we did — we also fucked our brains out,” to shut her up, or do you remember Dinah is another swim-team parent and if the coaches expect the swimmers to be civil to each other, then you should be civil to Dinah as well? Do you just smile at Dinah and let her think what she wants about you staying up late talking to Paul in his hotel room, or do you say nothing because her husband’s going deaf and she’s overweight and you feel sorry for her? Do you say, “He’s an interesting guy,” letting her know you’re defending yourself, and letting her know that maybe she too should have been staying up late talking to Paul? Do you say, “It wasn’t really that late,” and then launch into a conversation about how terrible the waffles are at the free buffet breakfast? Do you talk about Dinah’s daughter instead, because you know that Dinah loves talking about her daughter’s racing and that she would talk to you for the next thirty minutes about her daughter if you gave her the chance? Do you decide you couldn’t possibly listen to Dinah talk that long about her daughter? Does a part of you feel good that someone noticed you and Paul becoming close, and does that make it somehow clear that Paul likes you as much as you like him? Instead, do you fix your eyes on your daughters, who are already on deck for their afternoon events and take note of how they look? i.e., do they look alert, are their backs straight, are they arranging the straps of their racing suits so that no bit of material interferes and increases their time, are they standing playing ninjas or giving other girls back rubs, or are they curled up in a corner with a book? Do you jump when your own cell phone rings even though you’ve had the same ring for years and you shouldn’t be surprised by it? Do you answer, in front of Dinah, knowing it’s Thomas, as if you know it’s Thomas, or do you answer as if you don’t know who it is and say, “Hello,” and not, “What’s going on?” which is what you would usually say to Thomas when you know it’s him calling? Do you tell Thomas the meet is going fine, that everyone slept as well as could be expected in the hotel room that felt more like a fish tank because the windows didn’t open? Do you tell him the waffles tasted like cardboard, that one girl, from a team you don’t know, lost a tooth while biting into one of the hotel’s lousy, hard bagels? Do you let Thomas tell you all about the history book he is reading that he keeps saying is the world’s best history book because it explores history not through the usual lens of religion or wars, but through agriculture? Did you know, he has told you, that during the Industrial Revolution, the natives living in the Amazon jungle were eating a healthier diet than we were? Do you let Thomas tell you more about how the Chinese depleted their soils and couldn’t grow crops, and that the primitive Andeans, in comparison, were better farmers and knew to place troughs of water around their raised garden beds because the water regulated the temperature and extended their growing season by months? Or do you just tell Thomas the girls are about to race and you have to get off the phone even when the girls are not quite up in the bull pen yet, where they will wait to be sorted into their lanes, which would really, essentially, basically, be lying to Thomas? Do you prepare answers for Thomas asking you about the meet so far, about who is attending and which parents showed up? Do you prepare to tell him Cleo showed up, but fail to mention the fact that just Paul came with her and that you and Paul stayed up late talking about things that you and Thomas either never talked about with each other, or talked about together long ago, before Thomas became the head of the lab at work? Do you think how you should be prepared to tell him you don’t blame him for the distance that has grown between you, that either you’re both to blame, or it’s not worth the blame?