Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Just as well, you think on the drive home about not having talked to Paul. It’s for the best, really. You start thinking about a man too much, you can’t get anything else done, and there is much to be done now that it’s September. There are the September weddings you have to shoot, and you have to have final meetings with the clients. The clients of the September weddings are always perfectionists, because they’ve had all summer long to plan exactly what they want. They tell you the shots they want, down to small details. One year a bride wanted one shot of her hand resting on her fiancé’s shoulder taken with just the diamond engagement ring, and then, after the vows were said, another shot that was to be exactly the same, but taken with her wedding ring now on her finger alongside her engagement ring. The only problem was that the sun, unaware of its role in the shot, was farther down after the vows were said, and the shots did not look the same. In the first shot, the diamond ring sparkled, sending rays of light all around it. In the second shot, the sun didn’t cooperate. There were no rays of light, just the diamond ring looking opaque, almost like rock candy, and the wedding ring looking too tight, too close to the knuckle of the woman’s finger and accentuating the thickness of the knuckle and its wrinkles. There was the woman afterward, complaining to you about the disparity between the two shots after you had sent her the bill for the shoot. You offered to retake the photo at the same time of day, but she had said the moment was lost now. It was irretrievable. You assured her the sun would shine again and those rays cast from the diamond ring would be there again. No, you misunderstand, the woman said. You made a mistake you can’t fix. That moment is forever gone, she said. You tell yourself that next time you meet with a client you will have to explain the rotation of the sun, the changes in daylight, the simple passage of time, and that even though they want a picture to look just so, it may not look that way at all. There is still more to do now that school has started up. You have to bake pies for a bake sale to raise money for playground equipment. You have to meet with teachers who will tell you things about your children you already know. You have to remember to give Alex five dollars for the empanada festival. You have to sign the forms for the school pictures and choose a colored background and choose whether you want, for extra money, the blemishes on your children’s faces airbrushed so that they’re invisible, or whether you want to leave them, a reminder of how they really look — not a bad thing, but a thing more real. You want to stop the car. Your brain is working faster than your body. If you could just pull over and not have to do so many things at once, like hand your daughters their snack of apples and cheese where they sit in the backseat, and remember this is the stretch of road where the cop always sits and you better slow down, and this is where the bump in the road is that always scrapes your undercarriage if you drive over it too quickly, and this is where there always seems to be a deer crossing the road, and the leaves, my God, are already starting to turn from green to bits of orange, gold, and red, and how can this be, you think, when I’m still in my summer shorts and a faded tee?

You stop the car, just for a moment. You pull over, hearing newly fallen leaves crunching under your tires, and Sofia wants to know right away what’s going on, why are we stopping? You just shake your head. You don’t think you can begin to describe that you just needed your brain to slow down. Your practical daughter would want a real reason. “I need to pee,” you say. “Oh, brother!” your daughters say. “Can’t you wait until we get home?” You open up the door and go to the side of the road, pulling down your pants, not worried that anyone will see you, because so few cars are ever on this stretch, there are just rows of corn, the stalks tall, the tops brown, soon to be threshed. When you’re done you walk a little down the road. “Where are you going?” Sofia yells. “Just moving my legs,” you say. “Can we get home already? I have homework to do,” Alex yells out the window. And you think: These swim team girls, do they all have to be such good students? Such achievers?

I will tell Thomas about Paul and me, you think, or is it Paul and I? Or is it just I because Paul is not walking around all the time thinking of our kiss while in the shower, while feeding the goose, while turning burritos in a pan. Paul is only thinking of himself appearing as a would-be, could-be kind of a murderer in a jury’s tired, hotel-slept eyes. This is you staring at dried brown stalks of corn taller than yourself whose leaves make a scratching sound in the wind. You get back in the car and drive home.

“Thomas,” you say at night before bed while he’s brushing his teeth. “Ah-ha?” he says while still brushing, his wrist moving energetically up and down and toothpaste lather dripping out of his open mouth and into the sink. “Can I talk to you?” you say. You imagine yourself saying a sentence whose first words begin “Paul and I.” He spits out the toothpaste and lifts handfuls of water into his mouth, rinsing, and then he dries himself with the corner of a towel that has your last name written on its bumpy terry in Sharpie. The towel has been to overnight camp with one of your children. It has sat rolled up in the corner in a bunk, molding and wet. It has been down to grassy shores and spread out on the ground beside canoes and kayaks. It has heard the shrill whistle of a counselor. A summer wind off a mountain has blown back its edges. “You know, I read we’re losing our polar ice cap faster than they could have ever imagined,” Thomas says. “The melting water absorbs more heat than the ice ever radiated. It’s changing the jet stream. Where we live now may become a desert in ten years’ time.” He doesn’t say, “What do you want to talk about?”

When you’re both in bed your daughters come running into the room and jump on Thomas. It has been a while since they’ve frolicked this way, and you love that they’re doing it now. They pretend to give him CPR, and hammer at his chest with their fists. He coughs and yells and he laughs while they do it. “Oh, maybe, just maybe, he’s got appendicitis too. Let’s check!” Sofia says and pokes at Thomas’s side so that he’s laughing and kicking. It’s not until someone gets hurt, of course — Alex kicked by accident in the mouth so that her lip is bleeding and the bedcover spattered in small blood drops — that they finally leave the room and go to bed. By that time, Thomas has forgotten that you wanted to talk to him. He falls asleep quickly beside you, not even patting your hand before falling asleep. You look up at Fred, the moon that is a perfect half-circle and that scares you because even just half full it’s so bright that looking down on the lawn, if there were an animal there walking by, you would be able to see it clearly, and you wonder what you will be able to see when it’s really full, in just a couple weeks.

W inter State Championships is months away, six months to be exact, but already the coaches of all the teams are considering where it should be hosted. Some like the facility near the seashore, where if families only have children swimming in one session a day, they can go to the beach and brave the winds, and breathe in the salt air, and maybe even run barefoot in the sand, letting the water creep up between toes still sporting sock lint. Some like the home facility for the meets — the travel is easy, and the facility is one of the best around. The water never too chlorinated, the blocks not slippery, and the timing board so new it even shows videos in addition to the names of the swimmers and their heats and lanes. You like the away facility. You like the Mexican restaurant in the town. You like it when your family can make it to the beach and watch the waves. Your daughters don’t like the away facility’s freezing cold water, or the way the start horn is hard to hear because there’s only one speaker by the starter instead of a speaker under each one of the blocks, as there is at the home facility.