Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

“Yes, I am,” Chris says. “This guy killed a girl on our team, Annie. It could have been one of our girls. It still could be.”

This is you, sitting on either Paul’s side of the bed or Chris’s, not believing what you’re hearing, and by accident letting tea from your cup pour off to one side and stain the foot of the bed. This is Chris coming up to you and taking the teacup from you, telling you with a small laugh that it’s all right, that it’s Paul’s side of the bed and he’ll never notice the stain. This is you saying out loud, “I think you made more sense when you were convinced Paul was cheating on you,” and this is you wishing you hadn’t said anything out loud and then immediately saying, “I’m sorry.” This is the bed, the tea stain now shaped like a puffy cloud. This is the room getting darker, the sun going down behind the other side of the house. This is the way the bed feels to you, as though it’s the floor beneath your chair at your kitchen table that threatens to suck you down to the center of the earth every time you think about your brother, but you are not thinking about your brother now. Maybe thinking about him would be better than thinking about Paul and Bobby Chantal. Maybe imagining your brother’s chipped front tooth, and his long fingers, and the way it sounded almost silent when he laughed is better than thinking about Paul. This is you standing up from the bed and getting your purse, which you left on the table in the entryway. This is you saying you hadn’t realized it was so late, saying there is dinner to get started before the girls come home. They always come home starving. Isn’t it the same with Cleo after a practice? you ask.

“Yes, she’s ravenous when she gets in the door,” Chris says.

“What about the swim meet this weekend — will you be going?” you ask, standing in the doorway to be polite instead of just leaving right away as you’d like to.

Chris shakes her head. “I’m not. I’m just not cut out for those swim meets. I can’t stand to watch them. Even if Cleo’s winning a race, I’m nervous for her. I feel it like a knife in my stomach. Where does it say in the parent’s handbook that swimming has anything to do with your gut? There are only pages about getting your kid to practice on time and feeding them a healthy meal, nothing about acute ulcers on race day afflicting the parents.”

T his is you shaking your head while driving home, thinking of Chris, thinking you’ve got to hand it to her. How many women would bother to help find a serial killer? You realize you’re almost jealous of her for being so involved.

When you get home and the telephone is ringing and the girls are practicing violin and the dog is barking and Thomas is standing on the log pile chainsawing, you think about the place you stayed in at the equator. At the equator, beaches stretched on for what could have been miles and there were no other people on them. There were a few caves you could walk into and hear your voice echo. At the bottom of the caves there were pools of water where small fish swam and sea urchins lay shored against rocks. In the water one day there were jellyfish. The sting of the jellyfish was not so bad, and you could pick up the jellyfish by holding your palm over their tops and then turning your hand over, and you could throw jellyfish at one another for fun. Your children liked this game, and Thomas liked to hold a jellyfish up to his eye and say, “Oh, darn, I lost my contact,” or put the jellyfish on the top of his head and say, “I think the water’s lovely today, don’t you?” Thomas also liked putting two jellyfish over his chest and asking, “Do you like my new bikini?” You wish that you were back at the equator and swimming in the ocean and riding the waves. You wish you hadn’t met Paul and didn’t think about him every night right before falling asleep. You should be thinking about your girls instead. Sofia’s been reading too many YA books that are poorly written. You want to go through your own books and find one that’s a classic, one you know she’d like, but lately you haven’t had the time or the energy, the wherewithal to get up from your chair and do it. You’d like to take Sofia for a haircut. It’s getting so long now and she keeps hiding behind it. Some days she pulls it so far in front of her face it seems as if it’s just the tip of her nose that peeks out. How can you make her feel good about herself and at the same time suggest that she’s got to change the way she wears her hair? You remember how at her age your brother also hid behind his hair and wore it so long that a big swath of it covered his eyes. If he ever wanted to see something he had to spasmodically jerk his head to make it flap away from his eyes. If only your father would have stayed with the family and been there those years to watch your brother switch from playing trumpet to guitar, how easily your brother did it, how beautiful he sounded in no time at all, then maybe your brother wouldn’t have killed himself, you think. This is you thinking how Alex’s birthday is only a few days away and you haven’t begun to think of what to get her. Does she really need new sneakers? Can’t she just wear the old pair another few months? She keeps telling you she needs a new racing suit, but you refuse to believe it. You bought one only a few months ago, right before the summer swim season. Could she have possibly grown so much? Shouldn’t there be some kind of balance between the rate of their growth and the rate of how much the suits stretch out each time they wear them to race? The suit she has now, you’re sure, fits fine. It fits the way it’s supposed to. It digs into her shoulders and leaves a raw-looking red mark as much as it ever did, but not any more so. It cuts into her thighs as much as it ever did. It makes it as hard for her to breathe as it ever did, and it hurts your fingers as much as it ever did, but not more than usual, to squeeze her into the suit when you’re standing in a bathroom stall, banging your elbows against the metal wall every time you get a good grip on the sides of the suit and heave your arms up to try and lift it over her rear.

That night you watch a movie with Thomas and the girls. In the movie a man is about to kill himself by putting a pistol into his mouth. Your daughters know what your brother did to himself. They came with you to your brother’s funeral just two years ago. You were so thankful they were there. You slept with them in the same bed at your sister’s house, and held them to you in the night. It didn’t matter that Thomas thought your brother was an asshole, and that he didn’t come with you to the funeral. You didn’t think he could have provided as much comfort as your two girls did at that time. Nothing was more comforting than feeling your girls in your arms, watching them in their sleep, and seeing the smoothness of their skin, the perfect arch of their eyebrows, their high cheekbones slightly colored from the summer sun. “What a jerk. Why does he want to do that?” Alex says, watching the man on the television with the gun in his mouth, but it is not a question she is looking for an answer to. You are glad your daughter can say that killing yourself is stupid. You are glad she will not end up like your brother, with her blood forming another head like the head of a cauliflower. You want to tell Thomas that genetics isn’t everything, that maybe, just maybe, this idea of killing yourself doesn’t run in the family the way he thinks it does.

It’s fungus we should worry about, Thomas tells you at night while you’re reading in bed. The bats, the corn, the frogs, they’re all dying from it. We know much more about viruses and bacteria than we do fungus, and it’s the one thing that we should really be worried about. Out the window, you see the moon, and the way it lights up the field by the pond as bright as a searchlight. You are more worried about the killer than you are about fungus.