Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is the killer, putting his lips on each one of her eyelids as they close and she loses consciousness. Kissing her in, he thinks. The taste of the salt and chlorine on her and the warmth of her skin on his lips is the energy he has been waiting to call all his own.

T his is you at night getting into bed before Thomas does. He stays up with Sofia and teaches her math. I must remember to buy her more sanitary pads, you think to yourself, and you do the math, remembering when your daughter first started her period and when your daughter may get it next, and isn’t it hard enough, you think, to remember your own cycle, and now you have to remember your daughter’s, and in a few years, and maybe even sooner than that, you will have to remember the cycle of your other daughter. You remember your own first period when you were eleven. How your mother, too concerned with your brother, who was just twenty and still angry about your father leaving the family nine years before, hadn’t gotten around to telling you what to expect. You had some vague idea about needing to use sanitary pads, but you were so young you didn’t even realize that your period arrived every month, and so the second time it came you were shocked, thinking you only had to go through the cramps and the blood and the paraphernalia that came with it just once. Your mother was busy helping your brother lick his wounds from a girlfriend who left him. She worried so much that he would hurt himself in his grief that she hid the twenty-two rifle that was in the house and she gave him spending money to go out and have fun, and paid for him to take a college trip with an oceanography class to Bermuda, where he scuba-dived and snorkeled and was chased by hammerhead sharks. The hammerheads came from all directions, and when he tried to climb back into the boat, his classmates were trying to climb up the other side, and they made the boat sink down on their side, and on your brother’s side, the bottom of the boat rolled up and exposed a barnacled underside that your brother had to drag himself up against in order to climb back safely into the boat. He came home with a chest full of cuts from the sharp edges of barnacles and still a bad outlook on life. By then you had accepted the plight of your sex, its horrible regularity, and you questioned for the first time, really, whether your brother would ever get over this girl who dumped him, and realized that if it weren’t for this girl making him miserable, then something else would, because that’s how he was going to be in this world.

Your daughter doesn’t even need for you to explain how or why the body has cycles. She has learned it all through reading some young adult book, or through some swim-team friend. When you offered to explain it to her she said she already knew and for you to go away because she wanted to be left alone to keep reading a book. Well, that was easy, you thought sadly, descending the stairs of her loft where she slept. Not that you really wanted to demonstrate tampon use or describe PMS, but you were almost jealous that she was having such an easy time with the change. She didn’t have to contend with a divorced, financially struggling mother worrying about her emotionally messed up son. Life is peachy for your daughter. She has her books and her swim team and her violin lessons and her beauty. She’s tall and thin, with soft brown hair and high cheekbones. Only the hint of blemishes appear on her nose, and they can only be seen in certain unforgiving forms of light, whereas you and your brother, of course your brother to a terrible extent, suffered acne. On the other hand, your daughter’s shyness is also a point of concern, and maybe her teenhood is not all that ideal. Her dislike of using the phone even to call the local library and ask for a book, or to call and order a meatball grinder at the general store, borders on the extreme, you think. Oh, is this something you have to worry about too? Do you have to watch your girl and make sure she is not the type who will one day end up like your brother on the floor with the bloodstain taking the shape of cauliflower? In the boards on the wall by your bed you see a face in the knots in the wood. You see two eyebrows and two eyes that look happy. No-see-ums fly between the pages of Anna Karenina, the book you are reading, and to kill them you simply close your book and then open it up again to the page you were reading so that now the letters, even though they’re in English, have smashed bug parts on top of them and look like letters in a foreign alphabet, as if you’re reading the original Russian. Thomas’s voice booms up through the floorboards. He is saying polynomials and factoring very loudly, and it is making it difficult for you to read a book where you have to remember all of the characters’ Russian names and nicknames, and you would like to concentrate on the book, on the plight of poor Anna, who has just sneaked back into her former home to visit her son, whom she was forbidden to see, but you can’t concentrate because of the math going on beneath you. Now the children are in bed and you are in bed and the day is finally becoming dark, and the last bit of light can be seen going down in the sky over the back field. Thomas, from the bathroom, where he’s brushing his teeth, starts talking through the foam of paste in his mouth about how he learned from his history book that the Taino Indians, the very natives that Columbus and his men encountered, slayed, and sickened with contagion in Hispaniola, kept ants from climbing up their beds by placing the posts of their beds in pots of water. He says this is further proof that civilization is in decline, since that is such a smart thing to do, and do we do anything today as smart as that? He answers his own question. “No, we pollute everything,” he says. “We cause global warming. We have that horrible radio station.” And you know the horrible radio station he is talking about. It is the one that records conversations of people who are having a joke played on them. It is the one that played the joke on the mother where the eighteen-year-old son calls to tell her that he needs money, that he got drunk and spent the last of it on a tattoo. Where is the tattoo? the mother says, and the tattoo is on the son’s penis. You remember laughing at that one, and now you think you are definitely adding to the decline of civilization.

You turn off the light and wait for Thomas to come to bed. When he does come into bed, he faces the other way. There is not even a patting of your hand tonight. Just before you fall asleep an image of your brother comes into your mind. Your brother was angry. His girlfriend had decided to leave him. He lifted his guitar and smashed it onto the desk and against the wall in his room. The guitar strings resounded. The neck of the guitar broke off. The body was splintered. You yelled at him to stop, but he wasn’t listening to you then. The same way he didn’t listen to you that day at the beach when you told him you didn’t want to go in the water, but he took you there anyway. He just kept banging his guitar, even though all that remained to smash was the neck, and even that broke into pieces so small he could no longer destroy them. All that was left in his hand was the headstock and tuners, some of them still wound with strings that were sticking out in all directions, and bobbing in the air. You want to forget that scene. This is you thinking you can forget if you think about Paul instead. This is you imagining Paul, him leaning over you in order to kiss you. This is you thinking that the way his tongue would feel in your mouth would be an indication of how he would feel inside of you.

T his is Thomas the next morning saying, listen to this. This is you wanting to put your hands over your ears, because you are not in the mood to listen to observations about the decline of civilization or how Alzheimer’s is transmissible or how some people have more chimpanzee DNA than others. You are going up the stairs while he talks to you from down below. You have to put together all of the photos you took of the last wedding you shot. You have to go on your computer and fix and crop what you can. You are known for your portraits, people in this part of New England have asked for you specifically to shoot their weddings, and you have to make sure you have a few that look good up on a wall or on a shelf for a lifetime, even on those long winter days when the snow outside has covered the windows and turned the house dark. When you’re done, you have to send them off to the bride and hope that she likes the photos of herself that you like, but just in case, you will send her some where you think she doesn’t look that attractive. You send her these because you are always surprised how when you just send the women the photos where you think they look their best, they ask if there are any others, and often pick the photo you would never have guessed as their prize portrait. “Listen to this,” Thomas says again from below. He reads to you from the newspaper. “A sixteen-year-old girl named Kim Hood was found outside a rest stop with her throat slit on a stretch of interstate highway close to exit thirteen.” You miss a step and go down, hitting your shin on the stairs with wide stringers. You turn and sit down on a step, rubbing your shin, whose first layer of skin has been peeled off, looking like a sunburn peel. Where you sit, the sun streams in from the window at the top of the stairs, lighting you up with a shaft of light. If you were a bride or groom, or guest at a wedding, it would be the perfect dreamy light to photograph yourself in. “Say the name again,” you say, but you don’t need to hear it again because you heard it right the first time. You are just asking to hear it again because you need a moment to put it all together. The girl is someone you know from the swim team. The interstate rest stop is the place where Paul told you Bobby Chantal was killed. “Kim Hood,” Thomas says, and this time his voice sounds as if it’s coming from far away, but really Thomas is closer to you now, and it is the strange effect of the way the house was designed, making voices sound far away when they’re coming from somewhere close. Thomas is coming around the corner of the stairwell with the paper to show you the picture of Kim Hood. “No suspects have been found,” he reads, and close enough to you now, he places the folded paper in your lap, where the beam of light falls against the words, as well as a droplet of what you think must be milk and must have dropped from his spoon as he slurped up his cereal. This is Kim’s face in the picture. Her smile looking friendly, her clear blue eyes not looking blue but just vaguely clear, since the photograph was reprinted in black-and-white. Her hair looking wet, making you think that perhaps the photograph was taken right after a practice in the pool, the same pool you all swim in.