Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

That evening you drive the girls quickly to practice. When you’re going past the house that looks as if it’s folded in half, you forget you’re in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone and go forty-five instead. You’re all set to tell Paul what he should do. Call the police tip hotline. You even copied the number down on a Post-it note for him. Your daughters look up from the books they are reading. “Jeez-um,” says Sofia. “We’re almost at the pool already. You must have speeded all the way here.”

“Look at this booger, Mom,” Alex says as you pull up in front of the pool.

“Do I have to?” you say.

“Yes, look, it’s got three of my hairs in it!” Alex says.

“Oh my God, she is not my sister,” Sofia says. “You’re all not related to me. Tell me I was adopted, please. Anything but knowing we share the same gene pool.”

“Not only do we share the same gene pool, Sofia, we share the same swimming pool!” Alex says.

“Yuck, I am not looking at your hairy booger,” you say to Alex, laughing. “Go, go, get out of the car and get to practice.”

After the girls leave the car, you wait in the parking lot for Paul to pull up so you can talk to him outside the facility, away from the eyes of the other parents, such as Dinah, who you see has now taken to bringing small binoculars with her to practice, supposedly to be able to watch her daughter, but every now and again you see the lenses of the binoculars focused on you when you’re talking to Paul. Usually some parents park and let their kids walk up to the facility, but now you notice that more are dropping their children off at the entrance, afraid the killer might just grab them and force them into his car. Some parents are even getting out of the car and walking their children into the facility and helping them undress in the locker room. In small groups in the foyer, parents talk to each other about the death of Kim. You have seen them hugging each other more often. You have overheard the words “terrible” and “tragic” and “such a beautiful girl” so many times in the past few weeks. You have said those same words yourself when talking to the parents while you are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring in at your children through the glass window and watching them swim, almost afraid to take your eyes off them for minute, not even daring to run errands while they’re practicing, because what if? What if one of your own was now in the grave?

It’s Chris who drives into the parking lot after dropping off the girls at the facility’s front entrance, not Paul.

“Hi. What happened to Paul?” you ask.

“He had work to do at his office, so I brought Cleo instead,” Chris says.

This is you in the parking lot with a slight breeze blowing by, blowing through your hair and making it come up around your face so that it gets in your mouth and your eyes, but blowing through Chris’s hair and making it blow back behind her head as if she were an actress on some movie set and not in the facility’s parking lot where there are stains on the asphalt from members dumping out the remains of their morning coffee. This is Chris asking you if you’ve heard any more about Kim’s murder. This is Chris saying all she’s heard on the news is that the cops don’t have a clue, but that they think it may be the same murderer who killed a few nurses at rest stops years ago. “I hope that bastard gets caught,” she says. “I have a feeling he’s not done killing young girls, and the next one could be one of ours.” This is you thinking this is the first time you’ve ever heard Chris say a curse word. This is Chris saying she’s tempted to go and hunt the guy down herself. This is you laughing, because she must be kidding. This is her laughing too, saying, “Right, I can’t even catch my husband cheating on me when I know he is. How could I possibly catch a murderer?”

This is the wind blowing so that strands of your hair are thick in your mouth, while Chris’s hair is still blown back perfectly behind her. These are the mountains around you, storm clouds gathering at their peaks, and next to them there is a hillside of exposed black granite that looks slick with rain, even though it isn’t.

This is Kim’s mother, at home in Kim’s room, touching the silky ribbons on the curtain Kim created with all of the ribbons she ever won. This is Kim’s mother wishing she had never asked Kim to take the wall down because she thought it made Kim think winning was more important than improving her technique. This is Kim’s mother touching each and every silky ribbon on that homemade curtain because she knows at one time her daughter touched each one of them and maybe touching the ribbons is like touching Kim again.

This is Sofia about to practice with not one, not two, but three suits on for optimum drag. They are three of her oldest suits, the elastic giving way and the inside linings giving out. She has decided that if she swims with three on, then, come the next meet, when she’s only wearing her skintight racing suit, she’ll be that much faster, and maybe she’ll be able to go faster in her first fifty the way Coach has wanted her to do. Everyone on the team is trying to swim harder now that Kim is gone, and now that Coach reminds them so often of how Kim was such a dedicated swimmer and how they should all follow her example. The coach has been reminding them so often that Sofia thinks to herself that it’s not the swim team she’s on any longer, but the “Kim team,” with the swimmers’ every stroke, every breath, every turn, and every kick taken in memory of Kim.

In the pool, the water gets trapped in the stretched-out seat of Sofia’s outermost suit and makes a balloon. Swimming the practice and making the intervals is difficult with all of the suits on, but Sofia manages to do it. When she’s finished with practice, she goes into the locker room to change, and when Mandy, who is cleaning the sinks in the locker room, sees Sofia walking in, she thinks how there are so many straps crossing over Sofia’s back that it looks as though she’s wearing a lattice fence. She’s wearing a wing back, a fly back, and a vortex back all at once. It takes her five minutes in the bathroom stall to peel all of the straps off her shoulders. She breathes loudly when she does it, and even grunts and whimpers a few times. “Everything all right in there?” Mandy says on the other side of the stall, but Sofia is too shy to answer and maybe, just maybe, Mandy isn’t talking to her but to someone else in the locker room.

T his is you at the indoor facility, swimming in the water that’s cold today, and slightly bumpy from the dancing hippos swimming in the lane beside you. You see Chris up in the bleachers, and you’re glad it’s not Paul up there watching you swim. You feel out of shape, even after swimming so often. You feel that besides the rest of your body starting to sag, your eyelids are starting to droop, and maybe it’s reducing how much people can see of your eyes. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re only seeing 4 percent of the universe without looking as though you’re seeing even less of it? This is you getting such a strong whiff of the hair spray from one of the dancing hippos that you feel it going down your throat and causing a burning sensation. These are Chris’s words coming back to you, as your throat burns, and you feel a headache coming on from the perfume of the hair spray, that the next girl he kills could be one of yours. Something has to be done. The water seems to say it too. Some-thing-has-to-be-done , it says over and over while you kick a six-beat free-style kick. The police have to know what Paul knows. This is you getting out of the pool early, not finishing your warm-down of a two-hundred free that you like to do after a speed set. You’re out early, rushing through your shower, putting conditioner in your hair even before all the shampoo’s completely rinsed out, just so you can get to the phone and call the police hotline. You hate leaving your girls in, but you know they’ll be fine while the coaches are there, and this is something you have to do because in the end it just might save another girl’s life. You don’t want to use your own phone. You want the call to be anonymous. You decide to drive to a nearby gas station where you remember seeing a payphone. You can’t remember the last time you were in a payphone booth, but the one you’re standing in now feels as though it was just set there this morning. It wobbles back and forth as you shift your weight, nervous and impatient while you hear the phone ringing. When you start retelling the story, that you know someone who was at the rest stop that night Bobby Chantal was murdered so many years ago, the woman taking the information starts talking to someone else. “I’ll take a Homewrecker,” the woman says, and a man’s voice says, “You want chicken or beef in it?”