Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Some of the swimmers stay and practice their dives and their strokes after practice, asking the coaches for extra help. Kim is usually one of these girls, and today after practice she says, “What am I doing wrong?” to Coach, and Coach tells her what she’s been telling her for a while now: “Your rhythm is off, that’s all. You’ll get it back.” Kim wants to stay longer and practice with Coach, but she has to go home. She’s taking an online advanced chemistry course this summer, and she has an exam to study for. At home, after studying, she replays a race in her mind. She remembers all of her races and sees them as clearly as if she were racing them again at that moment. She replays a race that she won, trying to see what it was she was doing right at the time. She cannot figure out why it was such a good race. She wasn’t doing anything that different from what she’s doing now. She begins to think it’s the water itself. Her chemistry teacher posted a video lecture on how all molecules were once parts of something else. He held up an orange. “What you see here could have been the molecules that made up George Washington’s hat.” She imagines the water at that pool she won the race in was made up of the molecules that maybe once made up her relatives, people who would have a reason to care for her and help usher her along the lane as speedily as possible. Other pools where her times were slow had water molecules floating in them from people who maybe were not so nice. Lizzie Borden and her ax, maybe, are making up the water in those pools, she thinks before drifting off to sleep, wondering whose molecules are in the pillow she rests her head upon now.

This is the killer watching Kim again at a dual meet against a team from the southern part of the state. She swims her hundred fly and she breaks her record. She comes in with a 1:08.72. He wants to shout. He wants to call down to her and yell her name. She has given him such a gift. He looks to see what she looks like coming out of the water. He wishes he had brought binoculars so he could see her eyes more closely. Why isn’t she smiling? Why isn’t she raising her fist up in the air the way he has seen other girls do when they have beaten their times? And her eyes, why do they look dull from up in the bleachers?

This is Kim, who has just swum her hundred fly again, and she thinks she saw an official raise their hand while she turned at the wall. Did she DQ because she was submerged on the start longer than fifteen meters before she took the required pull with both hands that brought her to the surface? After all these years doing it correctly, could she really have misjudged it? Has she grown in height and that’s why? What’s changed about me? she thinks, and she looks at herself in the reflection of the windows of the pool and she sees her waist and thinks she looks thick, as thick as the old maple that used to be in her yard, and she looks at her legs and thinks they look fat, as fat as the logs cut from that old maple in her yard after it was struck by lightning. She looks at her hair and it looks as if she doesn’t have any. It’s so pale around her face she might as well have been struck by lightning, and she’s a ghost at this meet who doesn’t even ripple the water’s surface or have enough weight to set off the touchpad so that it reads her finals time. When she goes up to Coach, Coach tells her that she DQ’ed after the start, that she stayed submerged underwater way past the first flags, and that it might have been sixteen meters that she stayed underwater instead of fifteen.

“What was it you were thinking, or were you thinking?” the coach says, and affectionately puts her hand on top of Kim’s head. Kim shakes her head. It’s hard to tell if her eyes are red from the chlorine or from crying or from just being tired after staying up late at night studying, but then when the coach sees the tears welling up in Kim’s beautiful light-blue eyes, she wants to put her arms around her but knows she should not. If she puts her arms around Kim then she will be encouraging Kim to cry and there is no crying at swim meets. We don’t get upset or get too excited. We don’t throw our goggles down in rage if we lose. We don’t jump up and down for joy if we win. We don’t run up and let our teammates hug us. We don’t curse or kick the post that supports the balcony with the bleachers with all the parents and the grandparents sitting up in them who are knitting or talking or yelling out their children’s or their grand children’s names. We don’t run to the locker room and wish we were still small enough to squeeze ourselves into a locker and hide. We don’t run into the shower and let the water course down our faces as we cry, letting the shower water take our tears down the drain. We don’t lash out at our parents and say, “No, I won’t!” when they tell us that we will do better next time. We don’t run outside into the parking lot in our swimsuits and gulp in the cold air to get away from those inside who are staring at us and not believing how we could have gained so much time in a stroke we thought was our best. We don’t do these things, but of course, we have all seen them done. Every big meet there is someone who cries, there is someone who drops their head after they get out of the water, there is someone who whoops for joy, there is someone who proudly raises their fist toward the sky.

This is Kim at the meet the next day. She is less stressed about her butterfly being rhythmic enough because she has been thinking about driving. Being sixteen, she can now drive a car. Her parents have just bought her a new compact car, and she drove it to the meet by herself. She drove for two hours with her own music coming out from the speakers, and she sang to her own music the whole time without anyone telling her to lower the volume. She drove with all the windows down and her hair flying behind her because the summer wind on her face felt great, and made her feel just as good as when she’d last achieved her personal best time in the hundred fly. Now, at the meet, she stands on the blocks, ready to try the hundred fly in a time-trial just to see if she can come close to the time she could have had yesterday if she hadn’t DQ’ed. This is Kim registering how the blocks are a different height than the blocks at the home team’s pool, and realizing that her dive will have to be different to compensate for them.

This is Kim on the takeoff, exploding and then extending up and out over the water. This is Kim in the lead, this is Kim thinking of herself as a rock skipping over water, this is Kim at the turn, feeling her feet touch the wall and plant themselves firmly, but not for too long, just enough to get the turbo boost from the wall that she needs to dolphin-kick and shoot to the surface. This is Kim at the finish, jamming her fingers into the wall, not feeling the pain in them until later, after she’s seen her time of 1:08.62 posted on the board, not until she’s gotten a high-five from her coach and hugs from all of her teammates, not until she has called her mother from the pool, telling her through tears how she broke the pool record, not to mention her own personal best record. And it’s not until later, a few days later, that the mortician who will be looking at her fingertips will wonder why they almost look as if they were burned by a flame.

This is Kim, stopped at a rest stop on the way back from the meet thinking as she is being grabbed from behind and feeling the knife at her throat that it isn’t fair. She wants to live because she knows if she does she could beat her personal best time once again. She knows she could increase her speed. It was as if her new car had been her coach. Just driving down the highway with all the windows open had shown her the feel of the speed she would need to go faster than she had ever gone before.