Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is the coach, a woman who, when she hears about Kim’s death, almost falls out of her chair in her office with the big windows that look out over the pool. She grabs onto the armrest of her chair as if she’s about to take off on a plane and doesn’t like flying. She says “oh, no” so many times while she listens to someone tell her the story on the phone. Mandy, who is mopping the deck, sees the coach saying “oh, no” and holding her hand to her head, and thinks she will go inside once Coach is off the phone and ask her if she’s all right. When she is off the phone, Coach thinks of canceling practice that day, and then she thinks she will have a mindful practice for the team instead, a practice where the swimmers are mindful of what they’re doing. Only today they will not be mindful of how they are kicking or stroking or breathing. They will have a practice where they think continuously of Kim. They will think of her generosity, her team spirit, a time when they talked to her, a time when she made them feel good, because Kim was always making her teammates feel good and cheering for them. They will think of how hard she swam, how much she tried in practice to get the strokes right. They will be mindful of how she was such a good student. When Coach comes out of her office and onto the deck, Mandy asks her if everything’s all right, and when Coach starts to tell her, she starts crying and Mandy hugs Coach and Coach says, “I think I better just go for a walk,” and Mandy walks with her to the front entrance of the facility and pats her shoulder before Coach heads for the dirt path that loops around the facility and meets up with a dirt road that has deep holes in it filled with standing water and hovering mosquitoes.

This is our killer. He has no interest in going to jail, or being punished for his crimes, or being recognized and publicized. I am the most dangerous kind of killer, he thinks to himself while using a paper towel to slowly wipe his face of the crumbs that have collected there from eating his turkey-and-sweet-pickle sandwich. So many experts would hypothesize, he’s sure, that he kills young women because of some deep-seeded psychological reason. Perhaps he had a mother who beat him. But none of that’s accurate. He simply likes to kill young women. The last girl, Kim, was strong. He could feel her fighting against him, the muscles in her back toned as hard as wire cables from doing the butterfly. He liked how her hair smelled like a mix of chlorine and shampoo, the smell of both those things coming through his nose and trying to compete with each other to define her overall scent. He liked how young Kim was. He especially enjoyed watching the light go out of Kim’s eyes when she died in his arms. He feels he has that light inside of him now because he kissed her eyes. He feels special because of it, and growing up, he never felt special. He always felt anything but special. His parents were addicted to heroin. The only thing special to them was their fix. They would get high on the couch together in their trailer home that was on stilts and did not have a foundation. Beneath their home there was garbage — empty bags of snack-size chips and beer bottles with faded, peeling labels. Watching his parents, he would notice how dull their eyes became when they were high. Sometimes he would go up to them on the couch, next to the coffee table with the syringes and the spoon and the lighter, and he would tug on his mother’s hiked up skirt or his father’s loose jeans. “What’s to eat?” he would ask. “Are you really hungry?” they would say, and they would let their heads fall on the back of the couch while they smiled, their eyes cloudy, looking as if they were swimming in milk. I’ll never be that way, he thought to himself, and still does.

He stands and puts his clothes in the dryer after they’re done with the wash cycle. I am just like any other man, he thinks. I perform domestic duties. I have a job. I pay my taxes. I curse in heavy traffic. I floss my teeth with floss that glides. I will never be caught. My last thought, before I die, will be congratulatory — I will say to myself, How clever you were. No one ever found out. There is something reassuring about knowing what your last thought will be right before you die. As if, somehow, you have cheated death. All those women I have killed, they had lives ahead of them they looked forward to living, but I cheated death by taking them before natural death could. Doesn’t that make me just as powerful as death itself?

This is night at Chris and Paul’s house. Chris can hear cars on the road because their house is on a main stretch. Their road leads to the shopping malls and to the facility, about twenty minutes away, but after a certain hour, no one travels the road and you can only hear the sounds of animals, sometimes the chattering and trilling of a raccoon in a treetop talking to a mate, sometimes the grunt or hoot of a black bear come to bat at the hanging bird feeder to knock it down with its sharp claws and eat the seeds. This is Chris, when Paul gets home late at night, lying awake in bed and listening to the door swing open and closed, listening to the dog’s nails clack on the floor as she goes up to him, probably stretching first and yawning, the dog going in for a pat on the head before returning to the corner and falling back asleep. This is Chris wondering if Paul’s going to stay in the kitchen or the living room for a while and read before he comes to bed. This is Chris wondering if she should get up and put her robe on and walk out of the bedroom to wherever he is and ask him where he was. This is Chris wondering if she really wants to know where he was and if maybe, as she’s standing there with her robe on, she should just go into Cleo’s room and check on her, or maybe she should go into Cleo’s room and lie down next to her and fall back asleep with her arm wrapped around her daughter’s side and the outline of a mobile of our solar system clearly visible as it turns slowly above their heads. This is Chris already knowing the answer she will get from Paul if she asks him where he was, because it is the answer he has been giving her for weeks now. “I’ve been writing in my office at the college,” he says. He doesn’t explain any more than that. He doesn’t say he really works better there and that’s why he’s doing it. This is Chris turning over when Paul finally does come into bed so that she is not facing him. This is Chris closing her eyes and breathing in deeply, thinking that what she’s smelling could very well be the smell of another woman, or the smell of his office, or the smell of the air freshener that dangles from his rearview. This is Chris thinking that most likely what she’s smelling is not even him, but herself, the garlic on her fingertips from when she sliced it to put in the pasta sauce she made for herself and Cleo for dinner, or the conditioner she used on her hair, or the lilac bush she brushed against when she went for a walk. This is the night, getting darker and quieter, and the moon and the stars hiding behind clouds so thick they seem more like walls and not mere water droplets you’re supposed to be able to walk through. This is Chris listening to Paul’s breathing beside her, wondering now as he falls into sleep what or whom he’ll be dreaming of. She remembers how when they were first married they would fall asleep on their sides, her front facing his back. The only way she could fall sleep was if her arm was draped over him, hugging him. Now she can’t fall asleep if their legs are even grazing each other. Tonight, though, it doesn’t matter that she’s all the way over on her side of the bed and not even close to him. She can’t sleep at all. She has read the paper, about the girl named Kim on the team who was killed. She is so angry with the killer. She is angrier with him than she is at Paul, who she thinks might be cheating on her. It is an old anger that she feels. Anger with a history. From what? she thinks, and then she knows. Anger with having Beatrice taken away from her when she was a young girl. Anger with those horrid rapists. It’s what’s inside of her. It’s what Chris mistakenly thought all this time was a feeling of tiredness she couldn’t get rid of. Suddenly she realizes what the feeling is: pure anger. It’s almost a relief now, not to be angry with Paul any longer and just to be angry with this killer, but in the same moment she fears for Cleo, hoping the killer doesn’t decide to target another girl on the team. What would she do if Cleo were murdered? She doesn’t even want to consider it, but her mind, going too fast for her to control, throws images together, almost all at once, of Cleo running from the killer, her blond hair flashing white in the dark, of Cleo with blood pouring out of her neck, of Cleo being lowered into a grave white with frost. That killer better be caught, she thinks, and it isn’t until she goes to wipe a tear from her eye that she realizes she’s been grabbing her blankets the whole time, keeping a corner of them clenched in a ball in her fist while imaginary images of the death of her daughter keep coming at her.