Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

You check your girls’ swim bags, making sure they have towels and swimsuits and goggles and water bottles, the water bottles being important because the coach, this coach with many all-star athlete commendations under her belt, has told the swimmers that they cannot swim without a water bottle positioned at the end of their lane to drink from now and then during a two-hour practice. You agree with the coach on the drinking of water during practice. You have seen how red in the face your own girls get during a strenuous workout. You have seen other girls, paler girls, get red down their necks and their shoulders and their chests as well, after swimming, for example, ten one-hundred frees on a 1:10 with only a ten-second interval. You do not agree, though, with the swimmers drinking electrolyte drinks during practice. You think all they need is water, even though you have sat in on those parent education meetings the swim team sometimes provides in the spinning room where it smells like sweat, and you have learned that your daughters need more than just water during practice, and that your daughters need to eat right away after they swim, and that the best thing for them after practice is chocolate milk. You just cannot bring yourself to give your daughters sugar water during practice, even if it does have electrolytes, and you cannot bring yourself to give your daughters chocolate milk after practice, because as a girl you yourself never got chocolate milk except on special occasions, and since when did it become okay to have chocolate milk every day?

At the meet, after the anthem is sung by three girls who sound like cats in heat, the meet director asks for a moment of silence for Kim Hood, the swimmer who recently died. You want to yell out, “Murdered! She was murdered!” because to you there are such big differences between just dying, and having been robbed of your life, and even taking your own life. When your brother killed himself, there was no crime committed, and you could not understand why so much taxpayer money had to be spent on cordoning the property off with crime scene tape and starting an investigation. Wasn’t it obvious to everyone around that the cauliflower stain of blood forming by his head, and the gun in his own hand, was not the scene of a crime, but the scene of a jerk, an asshole, a complete idiot who thought only of himself and who was so narrow-minded and devoid of willpower that killing himself was the only solution he could come up with to provide himself with some relief? If only he was one to exercise, then he might not have done it, you think, and you wonder really if that’s true, if there’s some study that’s been done where those who exercise regularly have lower suicide rates, and if so, think of the decline in need for shrinks and pills. Wouldn’t some kind of a mandatory facility membership be just as effective? Or is that just narrow-minded thinking, not taking into consideration chemical imbalances in the brain and genetic predispositions. You close your eyes and, along with everyone else, you remember Kim. You do not want to remember the way she was in the newspaper, out of the water. You remember her in the water, the way she moved up and down, a perfect body moving in perfect fluid rhythm in the shape of a sine curve, a motion that looked as if it could last forever, a motion that seemed more like the real girl than the girl herself did when she was just standing on deck or in the foyer after practice. There are sniffles heard while everyone’s head is lowered and remembering. There are also the hard choking sounds of people trying to keep from sobbing. The head coach makes the sound too, and then the meet announcer announces the first race of the day with a long whistle, and the swimmers in the first heat stand up on the blocks with a weak morning sun breaking over them that makes you think all of what you are seeing you’re seeing through a tropical haze.

I t’s a break-even day. Your girls gain time in some events, and shave time in others. Sofia does well in the first fifty of her two-hundred free, though, going faster than she ever has. Her coach high-fives her on the deck, telling her the no-breathers really paid off. At the end of the day, after the girls have drunk numerous drinks promising to replenish all the electrolytes they lost throughout the day (of which a total of four minutes was spent racing. The rest of the time they were sitting on blankets under tents with their noses in books, or they were racing around on the grassy grounds of the facility, playing tag and ninja with their teammates), you pack up their things and get ready to head back to the hotel. You and Paul had been timers for most of the day, but timing for different lanes, so you didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him except to say hello and to wish Cleo good luck. Now, on the walk back to the parking lot, Paul and Cleo catch up to you. “Can we order pizza again and watch TV in the hotel with Cleo?” your girls plead. You look at Paul to see what he thinks. “It’s okay by me,” he says, and you tell your daughters, “Okay, but we’re not staying up as late this time. You girls still have to race tomorrow.”

It’s funny, really, how you were hoping the girls would request to repeat what they did the last time they stayed in a hotel together. You are the one who, when the door closes behind you and you’re inside Paul’s room, wishes you had all night to be together, because not much time passes before he goes over to you and you start kissing again, and you think, Oh, good, we can finish the kiss that we started in his office. We can finish all of this and I can go back to Thomas and he can go back to Chris. I can lie beside Thomas in bed and listen to him talk about a fifty-thousand-year-old girl whose remains they found and who, they can tell from her DNA, already carried the gene for a speech disorder. I can listen to him tell me about how submarines are really just cylinders welded together at the seam. I can listen to him tell me that feed laced with antibiotics increases growth in farm animals by 15 to 20 percent. When Paul goes back to Chris, he can sit on his tea-stained bed and look at his silver-framed picture of them jumping into the pond on their wedding day. He can watch her in bed on bright nights when the clouds are gone and the moon is high and he can admire her beautiful face and breathe in deeply, smelling something like mint.

But the more you kiss Paul — the more you feel his mouth inside of yours and his hands on your back, pulling you close — the more you know that the kiss is a kiss that can never be finished, and at the same time it is a kiss that never should have been started. When you pull back from him, you immediately wish you hadn’t. The warmth of him, the way he smells of his leather jacket, is something you want to step inside of again. You reach out and hold on to the wall for a moment, and know that the coldness of the hotel room wall is good, even though it feels anything but good, it feels hard and shocking, but at least it is going to wake you up. You won’t have to go up to Paul again and start kissing him as long as the wall is there to hold on to.

“You’re right. You’re right,” he says, and shakes his head at the same time, making you think you were anything but right. Why doesn’t he come back to you? Why doesn’t he take your hand from the wall and start kissing you again? “Ah, we should eat,” he says. He opens a pizza box that is on the desk. He tears off a slice for you and puts it on a paper plate and hands it to you. You don’t want to take a bite. You want to remember the taste of him in your mouth. But neither do you want to hand back the plate, because by holding it you look as if you are in his room for a reason. If another swim-team parent or your girls come knocking on the door, at least you can say you are just there to enjoy a slice topped with mushrooms and sausage.