Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is you at night trying to sleep in the hotel, hearing the elevator reach your floor occasionally and ding when its doors open, hearing the ice machine down the hall clunk while perpetually making ice. This is you thinking how Paul’s head is probably on the other side of the wall from your head. When you hear a faint ringing of a cell phone coming from his room, and then hear his voice, you imagine he’s talking to Chris, though you aren’t able to hear exactly what he’s saying. Maybe there is a rise in the volume of his voice, you think, and he is angry with her for taking on the plight of Bobby Chantal’s daughter, for getting involved in something she has no business getting involved in. You think you can hear quiet then, coming from Paul’s room, so he must have hung up. Suddenly your phone rings, and you grab it quickly from the bedside table so as not to wake up the girls. You take the phone to the bathroom and shut the door before saying hello. It’s Chris. She’s excited and talking so loudly you think her voice carries through the phone and could wake up the girls, who need their sleep, who have to wake up early and eat the hotel’s lousy breakfast bagels, and pack their bags, and then ride to the meet and squeeze into their cold swimsuits that are still not dry from the day before, and then dive into the cold water and do warm-ups in a pool that only a short time ago reflected the moon through a chilly morning mist that clung close to its surface. “Did you watch the news?” Chris is saying, her voice high and breathy and loud. You can picture Chris’s cheeks flushed over her tan, smooth skin. “I did,” you say, but so quietly that Chris says, “What? Speak up. I can’t hear you. Annie, are you there? Are you there?” and this is you not wanting to be there for Chris at all. This is you closing the phone, because you have an old-style phone that disconnects when it closes, and you like how quietly you can close it. This is you turning your phone off, thinking if there’s really an emergency at home that Thomas needs to call you for, then it will have to be an emergency he can handle by himself, and you know he will, because really even when sometimes he says he needs you to stack wood, or help with some project, he doesn’t really need your help at all. You know that if something happens, if he hurts himself or gets sick, he will either tough it out or drive himself to the hospital, and so really, there is no need to keep the phone on ever. You think of how much battery you would save then with your old-style phone if you only ever used it to call out and never left it on for people to call in. Maybe a phone, in its metal and plastic lifetime, is not capable of transmitting bad news more than once. The news of your brother’s suicide, for instance. Maybe a phone only gets so many tragedies it can pass on, and then its phone personality, its karma, its existential self, blocks or keeps at bay all other tragedies from ever being received.

T his is the water the next afternoon at the pool looking cloudier, partly because it is mirroring the overcast sky of a hot late summer’s day gathering storm clouds, and partly because it’s dirtier from so many hundreds of kids swimming in it and having unknowingly taken into the water with them bits of grass that clung to the sides of their feet, and bits of dirt, and traces of sports energy drinks, and traces of body lotion used without success to moisturize skin that stews for hours every day in water treated with chlorine. This is Paul cheering Cleo on. He watches her race a one-hundred IM in the next lane even as he’s timing for another swimmer in his own lane. When she hits the wall he stops his stopwatch instead of stopping it when the swimmer in his own lane touches two-tenths of a second later. Paul writes in a time he thinks the kid in his lane might have gotten, but is not worrying about it too much, because after all the kid didn’t come in first or second or even third, but maybe second-to-last.

Driving home, Paul keeps telling Cleo how proud he is of her for winning her heat. He tells her so many times that she says, “Dad, can we just listen to the radio now?” and he turns it on to some popular station where she knows all the words to all the songs and he wants to know how she knows them all when he hardly lets her listen to that station in the car. The songs are all songs he listened to growing up, only now, after a few lines, the poetic lyrics are rudely stopped, interrupted by riffs of rapping and the disjointed telltale mechanized bass beats of dubstep.

This is Paul passing by rest stops along the way, unable to keep from craning his neck back to watch them a little longer as he wonders if the rest-stop killer is there, sitting in his red Corvair, or probably some newer car by now, thinking about who his next victim will be.

This is Paul entering his driveway, seeing that Chris’s car isn’t there, thinking how she’s probably off with Bobby Chantal’s daughter, Chris putting her hand on the daughter’s shoulder, helping her deal with the upheaval of having to exhume her mother. He doesn’t feel there’s any stopping Chris now. He could have done something before, maybe, if he’d known this is what she’d be up to. Maybe he could have called Chris’s parents and asked them to come for a visit and try to talk to Chris and explain to her how she was getting caught up in a world that wasn’t her own, but now it is too late. Bobby Chantal’s body is on its way to seeing the light of day once again after so many years, and Paul is on his way to facing months and maybe years of a legal nightmare that he can only hope turns out in his favor.

When Chris comes home later he is in bed, but not asleep. He reaches out to her when she comes into the bed, and he can feel her tense up immediately. She quickly turns to face him, as if she thinks he is going to hurt her, or that she wants to hurt him. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s just me, your husband,” he says. But he does not feel her breathing relax and her body still seems tense and her skin is cold, as if she has been outside for a while without a jacket or sweater.

“Can we talk?” he says. She shakes her head. He can hear her hair rasping on the pillowcase she shakes it so firmly. “But I’ve got to tell you something,” he says.

“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m tired,” she says.

“No, it can’t wait. It’s a story I think you’ll want to hear,” he says. He leaves the bed and goes and gets his briefcase. He printed out the story the last time he was in his office, and now he sits beside her on the bed and reads it to her. The light from the moon is strong enough that he doesn’t even have to turn the light on, and he likes reading his words better that way, without even a pen in his hand to stop and make corrections to the writing. When he is finished Chris says, “That was you, in the story?” He nods. “You could have told me,” she says. “You had so many years to tell me.”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” he says. “It wasn’t like I could make Bobby Chantal come back. It wasn’t like I took her away. I wasn’t part of the equation.”

“How could you say that? You were! You saw the car. You saw the license plate. You knew what Bobby Chantal was doing up until minutes before her throat was slit.”

“If I had gone to the police they would have focused on me, Chris. They would have spent time, everyone’s time, trying to figure out if I was the killer or not. It was better that I didn’t come forth. Don’t you realize that when this happened we had just decided to start seriously seeing each other again? It’s not exactly information I was going to share with you to get you to date me.”

“No, you’re right. If I had known how you were just watching out for your own self, I wouldn’t have dated you at all. How do I even know you aren’t really the killer?”