Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is her house. Nearby is a small town with a gas station and a convenience store that sells all the usual drinks and chips and gum, but also homemade chocolate cream pie by the slice. The house is on a main road twenty minutes away from the facility, but behind the house there is a winding trail where Chris and Cleo sometimes cross-country ski in the winter, and in the summer they ride their bikes on it or they run down it, chasing each other for fun, their bodies brushing up against the leaves and branches of the gooseberry bushes as they go. This is what they have seen on the trail — garter snakes, baby chipmunks in a group of three, a snowshoe rabbit who looked too skinny to survive winter, a deer with twin fawns, and a black bear with his nose to the ground.

This is her childhood. A mother and father who owned a general store up north. She did homework behind the counter, and whenever she was stuck for an answer to a question, she’d ask a customer rather than her parents, who never seemed to know the answer or who were too busy slicing cold cuts or restocking beer onto shelves. This is where she learned how to skip stones, in a wide stream where after she swam she would lie down on flat rocks warmed by the sun. This is the owl she heard every night from her bedroom window. It’s a barn owl with a white face that she liked to think of as being the ghost of her grandfather, who had a white beard and mustache. This is the length of her hair when she cut it for women who had cancer. Halfway down her back. This is her back. The shoulders are square and flat. She could rest a book on one of her shoulders and the book would not fall off. She has many muscles that can be seen on her back, even small ones that show up distinctly when she just raises her hair up to put it in a hair tie. This is her mouth. She has never had a cavity. This is the story you already know, the one of her babysitter named Beatrice and how she was raped. This is how Chris sometimes sleeps, with one arm rising in the air, and staying there as if she’s holding it up for someone to come and grab it and bring her up from the deep. This is her in her studio, painting over and over again the face of the killer she has never even seen, while thinking of Beatrice. If only those rapists had been stopped beforehand, then Beatrice would have been spared, she thinks.

This is the lawyer Paul knows he has to hire eventually, but cannot bring himself to meet because he knows it means a huge chunk of his life will be destroyed. Paul passes by the lawyer’s office, which looks like a bed and breakfast, and probably was at some point, and Paul thinks how could a lawyer who practices out of an office with lace curtains and window boxes be the lawyer who stands up in front of a jury and explains that even though Paul’s semen was inside the exhumed body of Bobby Chantal, and Paul never came forth in all these years to tell the police that he had been with her the night of the murder, he is still innocent? Paul stops in his tracks and sits on the rock wall outside the office with his back facing the lace curtains and the window boxes. He doesn’t believe in God, but he wants one to know, if one exists, that he prays it will never come to him sitting in a courtroom facing a jury. He prays that there’s no way to find out it’s his DNA. He prays that Chris doesn’t decide to report him to the police and tell them he was with Bobby Chantal the day she was murdered. He prays she understands how it would derail their lives forever.

T his is Mandy at the facility, scowling. Cold rain is coming down hard outside, and the floor at the entrance is quickly becoming wet from water dripping off the clothes of everyone who comes through the doors. She mops the puddles up and then goes on to start cleaning the restrooms, but the minute she gets her cleaning cart to the ladies’ room door, the director comes up to her and asks her to mop the entrance floor again, saying it’s a hazard, a child or an old person may slip and fall. She already knows she’ll have to stay at the facility later than her usual quitting time if she’s going to get the restrooms clean. She starts mopping up the floor again when a man she’s never seen before walks in. Mandy thinks she knows just about everybody who’s a regular. She knows the overweight mother and the overweight daughter who always work out on the elliptical machines together and always seem to have matching sweat stains appear at the same time on their shirts, under the arms and below their breasts. She knows the man who lifts his legs strangely and walks as though he’s walking on the moon. She knows the young man who has a muscled chest but legs like matchsticks, which to Mandy look so out of place, as if the man were one of those drawings where one person drew the top half and then folded over the paper and had someone else draw the bottom half. She knows the swimmers, of course. There’s Joy, who always smiles at her. There’s Maya, whose pale complexion reminds Mandy of the inside of a just-cut potato. There’s the big kid named Carl, who moves his arms like windmills through the water but doesn’t seem to go faster than anyone else. But this new guy, who is he? Mandy moves the mop near the check-in desk even though there’s not much water there, just to see if the receptionist says his name when she scans his card. The receptionist doesn’t say his name, though, and just says hello. The man, who wears slacks and a button-up-the-front shirt and tennis shoes, and is carrying a gym bag, doesn’t head for the locker rooms first. Instead he heads for the tall tables located in front of the big windows that look onto the pool. He sits on a tall stool and watches the swimmers on the team swimming. Mandy can see that when the swimmers are asked to dive in, sprint, get out at the other end, and then walk the perimeter of the pool with their arms extended and their hands together in a streamline, the man watches intently, every once in a while running his hand through his thick black hair. While mopping the entrance, Mandy keeps an eye on the man. Why isn’t he changing out of his clothes and working out? she thinks. It isn’t until the swim practice is over, and the girls have pulled off their caps and let their wet hair fall darkly to their shoulders, that the man gets up and finally goes into the locker room. When he comes out he’s ready for swimming. Mandy can see him through the glass window wearing baggy swim trunks and goggles that hang around his neck. Unlike most lap-swimmers, who dive right in, he holds onto the edge of the pool and lowers himself in. Once he’s in, and sliding down under the water, he’s smiling as if he were lowering himself into a warm Jacuzzi instead of a bracing competition pool that is regulated at a precise temperature of seventy degrees so the swimmers don’t warm up too quickly and become overheated. The man, Mandy thinks, has a strange smile, as if he’s not smiling at all, but ready to start crying. “Mandy,” the director says over her shoulder. “The mop. We need the mop again in the foyer.”

In cyberspace, Sofia is heading home, rounding Florida and coming up past the Keys, she has estimated, after she tallies up the miles she has swum since she last tallied them up and she was in Saint Kitts. In the facility’s foyer she shows you an avatar of herself in the water on the screen. The first thing you think is that it’s a poor avatar. Sofia is prettier, and Sofia in real life does not sport such ridiculously huge breasts and such a narrow, pinched-looking waist.

This is you wishing you were in the Keys or, better yet, back at the equator. The water warm, not smelling of chlorine, and the waves rolling in. This is you seeing Paul outside the facility standing under the awning to stay out of the rain while talking on his phone. He is turned away from the doors, he is turned away from other people, the phone call obviously not one he wants others to hear. This is you trying to read Paul’s lips, even though you have never been able to read lips before and know you will probably never be able to. Still, you think that maybe because you have kissed these lips of Paul’s, you will somehow read them more easily, and then you look at your thirteen-year-old daughter and think how she probably has more mature thoughts than you have. And oh, crap, I hope she has more mature thoughts than I have, you think, because really, lately your thoughts have been so childish. Daydreams of Paul leaving Chris to be with you have begun to crop up throughout the day. You have had them while rinsing your hair in the shower, while feeding the goose a bit of banana on the porch, while heating burrito shells in a pan. You think how when you were a teenager you probably didn’t even daydream as much as you’ve been daydreaming lately. When you were a teenager you were more like your daughter is now — reading books whenever you could, especially seeking them out when your brother was upset for days because his girlfriend had left him. He was busy smashing his guitar, and a few days after that sending every one of the dining room chairs down the staircase. From the bathroom where you were hiding, and reading, you could hear them tumbling, striking the steps as they fell, the slats of the cherrywood backs and the cross rails and spindles on the legs breaking, sounding wood-on-wood. “Come on, girls, let’s go home,” you say to your daughters, and going out the door, they pass by Paul, who does not see you because he is facing the other direction, facing the grounds of the facility where there is a sheer face of granite exposed in a cliff.