Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is Adam, the father of the boys who would rather be playing in the adjacent water park than swimming on the team. He is telling his boys in a voice that never rises, that stays the same, as if he were talking to them in a quiet room rather than a noisy facility with a rushing waterslide and continuous air-exchange vents pumping air, and fifty other small children screaming and splashing, to get out of the lazy river and get on over to the competition pool where their coach is starting practice. His boys don’t listen. They continue running up the stairs to the slide and coming down yelling, their feet flexed to increase the surface area when they hit the water and to make as much of a wake as possible cascade over the side of the plastic slide and swoosh onto the cement floor and disappear into the drains. This is Adam shaking his head, wondering how angry he has to become, or wants to become right now. He realizes he could become very angry now, something he never likes to do, so he walks away from his boys and looks out through the glass doors and windows that lead to the foyer, where the tall café tables are set up with their tall chairs, where the drink machines line the wall, and where the snack bar and the front desk are located. What he notices, though not right away, is a man in his midfifties with thick, dark hair and prominent wrinkles on his forehead. Adam has never seen the man before. He seems too old to be a parent who has a young child on the swim team. He doesn’t seem like a member of the facility. Members of the facility all look as though they have enough money to afford it. The women wear pricey, casual athletic clothing, and the men wear shiny athletic shoes. Perhaps he’s a new janitor, Adam thinks, and he’s just changed out of his work clothes and is waiting for a ride. Where the man sits he has a perfect view through the glass windows of the pool, where the swim-team girls and boys are coming onto deck. The girls are adjusting their swimsuit bottoms to cover their rears, and they’re piling their hair on top of their heads and then leaning over, asking their friends to help scoop their swim caps over their heads. Adam notices the man watching the girls. For a moment he’s glad he just has boys, and no girls to worry about, but then a feeling of protectiveness over the girls on the team comes over him, even though they’re not his. He decides that later, after he gets his boys out of the lazy river and onto the competition pool deck where practice is about to begin, he’s going to point the man out to the head coach.

But Adam’s boys are not cooperating. The youngest starts splashing Adam while Adam’s on deck. The warm, chlorine-smelling water drenches Adam’s shorts and tee shirt. “Enough now, boys. It’s time to get out,” he says. The boys swim away from him, back to where they can get out of the pool and climb up the stairs again to the slide. Adam makes his way to the slide, where his boys will shoot out. He is lucky this time. They have slid down together in the manner of a train, and all he has to do is grab them both up under an arm and drag them to the other pool. He practically holds them off the ground as he walks with them, their small toes suspended in the air, only grazing the wet cement now and then. His boys start howling as he drags them. “I’m going to call social services and report you!” his older boy yells. Adam can feel the other parents on the team trying not to embarrass him, looking away from him and his boys. He’s thankful, but still, he’s embarrassed. When the assistant coach sees his boys, Adam sighs with relief. She’s all smiles and gives them high-fives. “So glad you made it!” she says, and the boys high-five her back as hard as they can. “That’s all you’ve got? Let’s see how hard you can really do it.” She has them high-five her again, and now Adam’s boys are diving in for their coach, who whoops and hollers for them as they’re in midair.

Adam just wants to disappear from the pool deck as quickly as possible, so he goes out to his car and sits with his head back against the headrest listening to the radio. It isn’t until later at night when he’s in bed, and his boys are asleep after countless requests for glasses of water and hugs, and his wife is asleep beside him, that the image of the man at the pool comes back to him, and Adam remembers now that he forgot to tell the coach about the man. He wishes he hadn’t forgotten, because the way the man looked at the girls, Adam thinks, wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.

This is Sofia doing no-breathers during practice. Since Kim’s death, Coach has been having them do a lot. She has them do six in a row, swimming the length of the pool and back in freestyle without taking a breath. This is Sofia thinking she has enough time left to do a seventh, even though the coach hasn’t asked them to do it, because Sofia thinks the more she does them, then the more she can do them during her one-hundred-free race, at least for the first fifty, and that will definitely make her faster. This is Sofia climbing out of the pool after her seventh no-breather and standing on the deck and beginning to black out. This is Sofia sitting down on deck against the wall made of glass and putting her head between her legs and her hands on her knees and staring at the tiles on deck and thinking how the voices of her teammates sound so far away, as if they were outside even, close to the hillside where the granite rocks, so shear, stick out like chunks of black ice.

O n the equator trip you left the air conditioner off and the doors wide open at night, wanting to hear the waves rolling in, not even minding the din of the howler monkeys in the nearby trees that sounded like your front-loading washing machine at home after you have crammed too many towels and jeans into it and it is complaining at a high pitch. If you had bought only organic milk, you wouldn’t have been able to afford the trip, but on the trip you felt pangs of guilt when you looked at Alex, your nine-year-old, whose breasts you could see budding through her swimsuit. Maybe, just maybe, all that highly processed milk was making her hormones kick in prematurely, and what have I done, you think, and now, with all this about the killer, you feel even more often that the earth is sucking you in from below, and if it weren’t for being able to think about Paul instead or the handles on the chair you are sitting in while eating your raisin bran, you’d be all the way sucked in, the image of your brother with his blood running out of his head feeding the vortex, providing the extra whoosh that would make your journey to the center of the earth entirely possible.

Driving to practice, the road is gleaming from an overnight shower, but the sun is lighting up the blacktop in a promising warm glow as you pass by a man who opens his mailbox and hands his newspaper to his collie, who takes the newspaper gingerly in his mouth, and with his tail high trots back toward the house. On the car radio you hear a report from the same trooper with the battered nose who was at the pool and who was pictured in the paper. In a voice that is sonorous and clear and can be heard even through the static you’re encountering because you’re traveling between mountains, he says that unfortunately there are no leads, no leads at all in the murder case, but he knows that in time, a shred of evidence will appear, and when it does, he will act on it. The killer will be caught.

What’s that in the water? you think while swimming your workout. There are stretches of silt at the bottom that cover the tiles like dark scarves settling down to the ground after blowing in a breeze. The filter on the blink again, you think, and wonder if you or your daughters should even be swimming in the water today. Isn’t it bad enough that you’re not protecting them from a killer and that you’re not feeding them organic milk and their breasts are rearing their small heads? Now, on top of everything else, your girls have to swim in dirty water? What if they inhale those bits of silt? What if they have an open cut and the dirt gives them an infection that will never heal?