Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

She imagined how fun it would be to be a painter, and to have those colors to work with all of the time and be able to paint anything you see before your eyes. Those evenings with Beatrice were some of the reasons Chris became an artist. Afterward, Beatrice would do her own toes, and the two of them would dance on the sloping farm kitchen floor with wads of cotton stuffed between their toes so that the nail polish would dry evenly. Then, at night, Beatrice would climb into bed with Chris. They’d pull the blankets up above their ankles and lift their feet up into the air so they could admire their nail-polish artistry and how their toes flashed jittery specks of metallic light when they moved them side to side in the falling darkness. It wasn’t until later, when Chris’s parents would finally come home, having finished closing up the store and making all the egg and tuna salads for the next day, that Beatrice would slide out from under the covers and leave Chris’s side. One evening, though, Beatrice did not show up at Chris’s house. Some men in their early twenties had followed Beatrice in a van while she was jogging on a dirt road. They slowed down alongside her, matching her pace, and slid the van door open. They pulled her inside, where she thrashed and tried to escape, and where they kept her for three days with tape on her mouth and over her eyes. When they were done with her, they shoved her back outside the van’s sliding door and onto the same dirt road where they had first found her jogging. After that, Beatrice didn’t come over anymore. Even after the men were caught and convicted of her rape as well as others before hers, Beatrice still didn’t come over. The last Chris heard of Beatrice she had dropped out of school, and her family had moved, taking her with them, but no one knew where. Chris was alone then in the evenings. Her parents decided she was old enough to stay by herself and put herself to bed, but sleep never came easily. She would think about Beatrice and how much she missed her.

I have felt tired since then, Chris thinks. And my husband now too, makes me feel tired. Lately, Paul has being waking her up in the middle of the night because he’s been coming home late from work. Yes, ever since Beatrice and ever since Paul I’ve been tired, she thinks. But it’s not the kind of tired that sleep could cure, it’s the kind of tired that gets in your bones and becomes a part of you, a thing you carry around, Chris thinks while she’s on the seat in the bathroom, still not wanting to get up even though she’s finished.

This is you, Annie, mother of two swim-team girls, Sofia and Alex, wife of Thomas. This is you at the facility, walking in the crowded foyer because a meet is taking place and there are swimmers and families of swimmers from teams all over New England lined up to buy tee shirts with the name of the swim meet on them, and there is the hot machine that presses and glues the letters of the names of the swimmer onto a tee shirt and it stinks up the foyer so that it smells like rubber burning. This is you checking the time, knowing that in half an hour you will have to go on deck and help time the racers alongside Adam, the father of two boys on the team. This is you looking around the foyer, seeing other parents and other swimmers talking to each other, buying snacks, and using the restroom. This is you looking for a second at the newspaper lying on the cheery Moroccan-blue front desk of the facility. There is an article about a woman found dead out west in Denver. The police were triumphant, though. They caught the man and he confessed to strangling five women in the city over the past ten years. You are thankful you don’t live out west, with the smog, and the craggy dry mountains, and the stranglers. You are thankful your children are raised here, where they can walk down the backcountry roads any time of day without feeling scared. Where the air is crisp with cold in winter and smells of moist green grass in the summer, where the mountains are covered in maple and pine, and where there are almost no strangers. Here is a place where the UPS man knows you and gives your dog a biscuit and lets your chickens hop onto the steps of his truck, where they peck at the bumps in the corrugated metal. Here, if your car is parked at the market, the UPS man knows it’s okay to open up the back and put your package in there to save himself the trip on the dirt roads to your house. You are glad you live in a place where everyone leaves their cars and their houses unlocked, where the librarian calls you at home to let you know the book you have on hold is available, or if she doesn’t call, she might swing by your house and leave it on your porch, along with a book that is new to the library and that she also thought you might like.

You don’t read the entire article about the strangler in Denver. It’s too grisly, too far away, and too foreign. Not like the facility, where right now there are so many youths looking well fed and fit, so many boys with perfect complexions and girls dressed in brightly colored suits, standing and talking to parents who wear fashionably understated and relaxed looking clothes.

You look around the facility. There is Kim’s mother, who is nervous but tries not to show it, even though she is pacing in front of the glass window with a view onto the pool because she is scared that Kim won’t win her event in her fly. Kim has wanted to win an event in the fly because it has been so long since she has won and she used to win her fly so often. Oh, and look, there is Sofia, your eldest, your pretty thirteen-year-old, running up to you before her event and telling you she is starving and that you have to buy her something to eat or she’ll die. This is you telling Sofia that if she’s hungry then she should eat part of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you packed for her, and this is Sofia scrunching up her face so that her thinly tapered perfect eyebrows, which look as if they’re painted on and which you wish you had yourself, form peaks so that now it looks as though two small mountains are perched on top of each one of her soft brown eyes. This is you looking into the pool through the glass windows and seeing the display board in the pool area that tells in bright lights which event the swimmers are on, and then this is you saying, “Don’t you have the two-hundred IM soon?” even though you know her event isn’t for a while. This is Sofia also knowing she doesn’t have her event soon — but knowing your answer means she can’t buy something to eat — turning on her barefoot heel, going back inside the pool area with her head raised, and holding her towel on her shoulders as if it’s a stole and she’s striding off into the cold air of night instead of entering a hot, steamy, and very crowded pool deck.

This is you, Annie, in the foyer, the smell of the burning rubber from the hot tee-shirt machine making you feel sick, making you wish for a moment you were back home instead, almost an hour away, taking a walk through your fields, noticing how the moss was already coming up in soft mounds in the shade by the stream where a layer of thinning ice, thin as a sheet of plastic wrap, still covered the small trout below.

This is you in the foyer, thinking about how the burnt rubber smells almost like gunpowder after a shot has been fired, and this leads to you thinking about how your older brother, who was fifty-four, shot himself in the head two years ago because his wife had told him that week that she wanted to leave him. This is you wondering how he was able to do it, having teenage children he would leave behind, and how much blood there was, and how fucking stupid he was. His family never guessed he was capable of it, but maybe there were previous signs. Your brother could not stand it when your father left your mother for another woman. He could not stand it that your father never visited you or your brother. Your father never came by or called, and your brother, being the only son in the family, thought it was up to him to be the man now. But he could not be the man. He was still a boy. He played baseball on a team called the Cougars and collected buffalo nickels inside of binders filled with blue-colored cardboard pages, fitting the coins into rigid slots shaped like half moons. He played trumpet, his lips after practice puffy and red, and your ears ringing with the brassy notes of “The Carnival of Venice” long after he stopped his practice session. He played monster in chase, you would scream when he ran after you, because he had that chipped tooth that looked like a fang, and he was so much bigger than you, you knew he could catch you. It was just a matter of time before he grabbed you and threw you down and tickled you until you cried. Now you are not so young, and being not so young, you think you shouldn’t be thinking about milk that can’t be unpoured, so you stop thinking about your brother, and think about the bathing suits for sale at the facility instead. There are suits so low in the back they look as if the dog from the Coppertone ad on the billboards were biting and pulling down on them.

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