Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Floyd Arneson likes the children. He likes hearing their small hands rap on the sliding glass window when they come up to deliver the attendance list. He likes opening the sliding glass window and peering down to where they are standing up on tiptoes trying to see him and pass him the list. He likes how yellow like corn silk the little girls’ hair can be, and he likes how long the boys’ lashes can be. He doesn’t like how at recess he can always hear the teachers telling the children to stop climbing the trees and to stop playing with sticks and to stop playing by the stream where the poison ivy grows. He wishes the teachers would just let the children have fun.

He knows that if he wanted to, he could easily kill the blond woman he sees at the rest stops, but he doesn’t want to stop seeing her when he goes and parks his car on a dirt logging road on the other side of a rest stop and walks through the woods to get to the rest stop. He likes how she keeps patting the pocket where her handgun is located right before she walks into the restroom. He likes how a few times he has looked through the door and seen how she stands at the mirror and washes her hands, hardly looking up at her reflection, when you would think a woman that attractive would be drawn to looking at herself all of the time.

T his is you at home hanging up your suit after your workout, noticing how it’s stretching out, how it now looks as if it could fit one of the dancing hippos. This is you listening to rain falling on the copper roof and Thomas going around the house shutting the windows, the rubber stripping in the windows making a sucking sound as they’re closed, sounding vacuum-packed, as though the house is being sealed in for good. This is you thinking maybe it’s for the best, that you shouldn’t be let out of the house again anyway. Locked inside, you won’t be talking to swim-team husbands you shouldn’t be talking to. Locked inside, maybe you will finally clean out the pantry, arrange the myriad of spice containers and sponge off the shelves, wiping away the overlapping circular stains the bottoms of the containers have left on the wood and making it look as if your pantry were some kind of an official Olympic item, sporting the signature interlocking rings. This is you in the evening looking out your office window at a lilac bush getting its leaves battered by the heavy rain. This is you hearing your girls fighting over something in the other part of the house. Sofia is shaking the carpet from her loft bedroom down to the level below where Alex has her bed. Alex is shrieking about the dust and dirt falling on top of her covers and Sofia is telling her she’s imagining things, nothing is really falling from her carpet. This is you debating whether to go and mediate and tell Sofia to knock it off, or whether it’s best if you stay out of this one. Your girls can’t always expect you to be there when they fight. They will have to learn how to stand up for themselves and be strong. This is you thinking you have to be strong too. You have to keep away from the facility for a few days. The facility is no longer safe, not with Paul there, or Chris there to remind you of Paul. Not with the both of them reminding you of Kim and Bobby Chantal. You could always visit with another friend at the facility, one who could make you laugh, one who could talk to you about the swim team and get your mind off whatever that feeling is that grabs you from the bottom of your chair at the breakfast table and wants to drag you down, but now you have to stay away and lay low. This is you lying in bed with Thomas, and the rain outside is still coming down, and the wind is shaking the treetops back and forth as if it is trying its hardest to uproot them. This is you listening to Thomas asking you how Foucault made his pendulum, and how he accounted for the movement of the earth when he did. This is you not understanding what Thomas’s question means in the least, but knowing he doesn’t really expect you to have an answer anyway, he just asked the question in order to say it aloud and help himself answer it. This is Thomas falling asleep. Snoring when he’s just drifted off. This is you taking the pillow and laying it on top of his face so that he stops. This is Thomas rolling over, showing his back to you. How many moles and spots are there on Thomas’s back? Too many to count, you think. These are the calls of the coyotes down by the hollow near the stream — they are short and overlapping, and then there is one last long call that sounds as if it were a wolf’s instead. This is the smell in the air, the rain smelling like a pond. This is you thinking that even if you don’t have any wife energy, and you search inside yourself and find there is none, that you will have to start finding some wife energy pronto, because it seems so much hinges on this wife energy. Even if Thomas didn’t respond to this energy before, you have to try again. This is you waking Thomas up with your touching, having found some shred of wife energy somewhere in the marrow of you. This is Thomas turning away from you and toward the closet where your clothes hang. You dislike all of them. They are so unflattering, the blouses that make you look pregnant. The jeans that are too tight and have been for a couple of years now, but that you refuse to get rid of because you think it’s a waste to toss a perfectly good pair of jeans. This is Thomas falling asleep again, facing all the clothes that hold the shape of you that you don’t like.

This is the next week. This is you seeing Paul in a knot in the wood in the hallway. You stand there with the laundry in your arms staring at the wall, not believing your endless ability to see shapes in everything, and how the knots in the wood remind you of his eyes. They’re small knots, and what would seem to be the outside parts of the eyes are tapering upward, as if they were smiling. You try not to stare for too long at the knots in the wood, especially since Sofia is walking behind you wanting to go downstairs as well. “Speed the plow,” she says, passing you, and you think how you never would have used certain expressions around your children when they were young if you had known they were going to start using the same ones with you when they got older.

You have not seen Paul in a few days, almost a week. To avoid seeing him, you have not taken the girls to practice, but let Thomas take them instead. For the best, you told yourself. But you aren’t feeling the better for it. You are sullen and don’t feel like doing anything. You can’t even bring yourself to brush the dog, and you have been looking at the dog every day for the past few weeks thinking, I really must brush you, what a mess of matted hair you have become! Twigs are wound up in her sweeping tail hair, and she licks and chews her hind legs to free the sticky nettles clinging to them. You wonder if Chris has told Paul that she has met Bobby Chantal’s daughter. If he does know, you are sure Paul will stop Chris from trying to exhume Bobby Chantal’s body. His DNA would be on her. But what does it matter? The police don’t have Paul as a suspect. No one would even approach Paul for a sample to match the DNA because no one ever saw Paul and Bobby Chantal together. Unless, of course, someone from the coffee shop or the restaurant they went to recognized Paul because he was a regular, and recognized Bobby Chantal’s face in the newspaper the next day. But if that were the case, then Paul would have been questioned long ago. So no one remembers seeing them together. Paul is safe, and you are relieved you have come to this conclusion. It’s as if you’ve been carrying the weight of his possible implication in the murder on your shoulders ever since you visited Chris and learned she knew Bobby Chantal’s daughter. You go upstairs and begin to pack for you and the girls. The next morning you are leaving for a big swim meet and Paul will be there. The weather will be warm, so you pack short skirts and tank tops to wear. As you put them into your bag, you wonder if the skirts are too short. Do they show off too much of your legs, which, at your age, might be better off covered? Do the sleeveless tops reveal too much of your arms, which you call bingo arms, because when you lift them up in the air the wings of fat that have started to hang from them remind you of the flabby arms of old women playing bingo in unair-conditioned halls and raising their cards and shouting out “Bingo!” when they win.