Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Driving home your girls ask about Kim. You decide that what is best is that you answer them as truthfully as you can. You are so thankful they are not old enough to drive yet, not while this killer is still at large. Alex wants to know if Kim knew the man who killed her, and Sofia wants to know what Kim was doing at a highway rest stop at night, anyway. Didn’t everyone know they were dangerous and you weren’t supposed to stop at those things? “Really, they should rename them kill stops,” Sofia says. That night Alex wants you to snuggle with her in bed. You move the assortment of books off her bed and climb in next to her. You slide Alex inside the space you make when you are curled on your side and you stroke your girl’s hair and together you stare out at the sky and the trees that are lit up by the light of the stars. Alex says their coach kept making mistakes that day. She would assign them six fifties to practice and then stop them after the fifth fifty, or she would assign them eight one-hundred IMs and then insist they hadn’t done all eight of them and make them do an extra.

“It’s hard on her,” you say. “She was close to Kim. She coached her for years, and now she’s gone.”

“Mom,” Alex says, “she’s not just gone. She was murdered. She had her throat slit. Do you think when your throat’s slit and you’re bleeding to death that you can still see and hear and think?”

“Maybe, for a second, but that’s a lot of blood to lose very quickly. I’m sure she just passed out.”

Alex shuts her eyes and then opens them and says, “You know how you can see the silver outlines of shapes under your eyelids even after you’ve closed your eyes? You know how it looks like a photo? Do you think the police can get that image off the insides of Kim’s eyelids? I mean, maybe from her eyes they can get a picture of what Kim last saw. Maybe it was a picture of the guy standing over her, making sure she was really dead. Wouldn’t that be cool?” You agree it would be cool. “We’d be rich if we could figure out that process,” Alex says, sounding just like Thomas. You wonder what the last thing was that your brother probably saw. The telephone in his room, where the last phone call was to a friend? The stereo system knobs before they were splattered with blood? A picture of himself on a shelf as a boy holding on to his favorite stuffed animal? It was a dog he named Doggy Dear and its coat was bald in patches from her brother plucking the fur and twirling it between his thumb and forefinger in order to comfort himself.

A week later there is a memorial for Kim in the auditorium at her school. Students are invited, the coach, as well as a few older girls from the swim team. Kim’s mother wishes the girls from the team weren’t there, only because seeing them reminds her so much of Kim, and also because they look so strange wearing clothes and not their swimsuits. Kim’s mother hardly recognizes some of the girls with their hair brushed and dry. They also wear dark dresses and are crying, their heads lowered. The girls she’s used to seeing on the team hold their heads high and laugh, but these girls are bent over as their shoulders shake with their sobs. Kim’s mother wishes the coach, who is also shaking with sobs, would just do what she does best, and go down the line, facing these girls, telling them they’ve got to dig in and push themselves harder than ever before. The coach should be high-fiving the girls and wearing her athletic shorts and her team shirt, not this heavy dark dress just past her knees and covering her arms, her hands low in front of her clasped tightly together. Who is this woman? thinks Kim’s mother, and then Kim’s mother is also lowering her head, the sobs coming again as they have been coming for days, her shoulders even sore from them. Kim’s father puts his arm around Kim’s mother, but instead of it feeling comforting, it feels weightless, as if he were a small bird just alighting on her for a moment, and she can sense how any moment he will remove his arm, and fly off, and she will be left feeling only the absence of warmth.

This is an evening at home. This is one of Alex’s violin strings breaking in the middle of an étude, and Thomas helping her feed a new one in through the peg holes. This is Sofia curled in her bed, using a stuffed bear as a pillow and reading and rolling her eyes every time Thomas tells her to come downstairs and start doing math work. This is you staring at the photos you took at your latest wedding shoot, thinking how if it weren’t your camera the photos came from you would say the photos weren’t yours. You barely remember taking them. It seems so long ago because everything prior to the death of Kim seems long ago. This is a strong wind coming up, and the old sheets of aluminum that Thomas uses to cover the stacked woodpiles sail off and sound like thunder, startling everyone, making Sofia look up from her book, making Thomas and Alex turn their heads to look out the window, making you lift your head from looking at photos you could almost swear you never took.

This is the night, when you first close your eyes after turning off the light. This is you in the dark asking Thomas how his work was at the lab today, and this is Thomas not even answering, but falling asleep so quickly you can’t believe it when you start to hear him snore. This is you thinking about your brother. That time at the beach when he scooped you up and ran. Why did he do it? you wonder. What was the rush? Why did he run so fast? What was he running away from? You don’t know, but you think maybe it holds the key that will unlock answers for you as to why he killed himself years later. You push the thoughts of your brother aside. You remember Paul at the pool instead. You are thankful you’ve been running into Paul at the pool these past few weeks since you last saw the trooper at the pool. This is you seeing his face at the pool the last time you saw him at practice. He was smiling at you. You want to keep the image there a while, but then Thomas turns on his side, facing away from you, and you are reminded you share your bed with Thomas, and the image of Paul fades, and you are just left with sleep. Sleep is rolling over you, closing off images and voices you have seen and listened to throughout the day. The last voice you hear, though, is Paul’s, from that day a few weeks ago when he was saying, “It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.” You can’t believe how his words are coming back to you now. It’s as if after the first time he said them, you deliberately forgot them. But now you remember, and it jolts you awake.

In the morning, while the girls are still sleeping and Thomas has left for work, you don’t even sit down to eat your cereal. You hold it standing at the counter. The voice of Paul saying it was a red Corvair plays over and over again in your mind. You stand because you don’t want to have the feeling of the floor beneath the chair sucking you down and you having to hold on to the armrests just to keep yourself from sinking. And what if I just call the police and tell them that information? you think to yourself. Aren’t there anonymous tip lines? A tip that’s not going to implicate Paul? But no, he should be the one to leave the tip. It would only be right. It could be helpful, really helpful. Maybe this is the same guy, and maybe years ago he owned that red Corvair and there’s a record of it and his name could be discovered. Before you realize it, you have finished your cereal. You don’t even remember eating it. You’ve been so lost in thought. You don’t remember if you fed the dog either, so you feed her again, even though Thomas always says the dog is fat enough, and that if anything you should let her skip a meal.