Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is the phone ringing and Chris wanting to come visit, and you knowing she’s suspicious and doesn’t believe the story you told her, how at the rest stop you got restless and stretched your legs and went for a walk in the woods and got lost, and while you were gone, someone saw the keys in the ignition and took off, probably a teenager on a joyride with his friends (the car was found the next day on a side road near the rest stop, the keys still in the ignition), and how, while on that walk in the woods, you fell on a stick and that’s how your leg got such a deep cut. You tell Thomas to tell her you’re just too tired right now to talk. Thomas comes up to check on you later. When he sees you’re awake he tells you that Earth is made from the sun, and they’ve done measurements. They have checked our sun and what makes up our sun isn’t what makes up other stars in our universe. “In other words, they don’t know where we come from,” he says. “Pretty cool,” he says. It makes sense to you then that we have people like killers, because where we’re from isn’t like anywhere else. “Yes, pretty cool,” you say to Thomas, and you smile because you want him to know you are all right and that soon you will be able to get out of the bed and drive the car and go back to taking the girls to swim practice, and you will not have to think about the killer. You will be caught up in the next big meet. You will talk to the other mothers about the latest racing suits. You will talk to the other mothers about aging up. You will be told the birthdays of kids who are not your own. You will remember Phoebe is younger than Alex by three months. You will remember Ellen’s birthday is three days after Alex’s birthday. You will remember that Dana, who even though she ages up a month before age groups, is such a fast swimmer that she already qualifies for the next cuts. You know that Michele has the best birthday, the week after state championships, the week after winter practice ends and meets don’t resume until summer.

Already the parents are planning the next away meet. You lie back on the pillows, sighing. If only you could think about swimming and the swim team, about all their associated mundane details, which you call the “nothingness,” and not about the killer whom you see every time you close your eyes. It’s as if he’s taken over the insides of your eyelids, and there’s no such thing as darkness anymore. It’s worse than darkness. It’s his face.

This is the killer at school looking down at his forearms, which are huge and oozing and puffy from his reaction to the poison ivy. The students are calling him the Incredible Hulk, because his swelling looks like muscle mass. The puss from his arms leaks onto the newsletter he’s printed and forms a ring of yellow crust on the heading’s picture of the school logo — a happy little red schoolhouse with cartoon children standing out front holding hands. At least he won’t have to take care of the sheep again. The teachers and the principal at the school feel terrible that he came down with such a bad case, and the principal went to the store himself to buy him a bottle of calamine lotion and cotton balls. The killer thinks about how he’ll go swimming later, and how the cool water might relieve the burning itch. He can’t tell if the sensation to scratch his arms and the adrenaline rush that comes with it are what’s been keeping him up at night or if it’s him reliving how he killed Mindy Reynolds. Killing her was more satisfying than killing all the others, for some reason. He can still hear her pleading for help when he cut her throat and felt the breath of her words forming against his face through the newly made slit. This time he was able to make the cut while facing his victim, and he could see her eyes shoot forth that light of wanting to live mixed with terror, and he thought he could feel that feeling too and that his eyes somehow absorbed it and he was now walking around with it inside himself — the light of Mindy Reynolds as he read over the school newsletter typos he’d have to fix, the light of Mindy Reynolds as he watched through the window the children on the geodesic play structure hanging by their knees, the girls’ hair hanging like upside-down flames, almost licking the ground. Thank goodness I didn’t bother killing that fifty-year-old woman, he thinks. If he had he wouldn’t have been at the rest stop at the right time to come upon Mindy Reynolds as she walked out of her car, and to hear her singing a pop song and hear her charm bracelet jangling as she headed toward the bathrooms.

T his is Thomas coming into the room while you are sleeping, your eyes probably moving back and forth in a dream. He thinks he should wake you. The dream seems disturbing. It’s no wonder, of course, that you’re in turmoil. When he picked you up from the hospital a few nights ago you were almost catatonic, only telling him in a monotone voice how you fell in the woods on a stick after you and Chris stopped at a rest stop, and you ended up with a hole in your leg that required ten stitches. You probably passed out for a minute, you said, and that’s when Chris’s car was stolen. The doctors wanted you to stay in the hospital longer, but you refused. You said you wanted to get home and be with your children. This is you turning your head left and right on the pillow, and it sounds as though you’re trying to talk in your sleep but can’t make the words come out. Thomas lies down next to you and puts his hand on your shoulder. “Annie?” he says, and you wake up so suddenly he thinks it’s impossible that you were just sound asleep. You turn to him and hold on to him and he holds you back. It’s been a long time since you’ve turned to him and wanted to be in his arms. He kisses you on the top of your head and smoothes your hair away from your face. “Bad dream?” he asks. “I didn’t talk in my sleep, did I?” you ask. “You tried to, but nothing came out. What are you afraid of saying?” Thomas asks, and you notice how he’s been looking at you the whole time, not turning away as he usually does or picking up a magazine to read at the same time you talk to him. “Keep waking me up if you think I’m about to talk in my sleep, okay?” you ask. “Sure,” Thomas says. He begins to rub your back, and it feels good, a little of the tension you’ve been feeling is worked out with his hands. You’ve always liked Thomas’s hands. They’re strong and big and when he holds your hand, his hand nearly covers all of yours. Maybe this is all you have wanted for so long now, just to have Thomas hold you and run his hands on your back and look at you. You think of Paul, and how you have not thought of him for a few days, ever since the killer. You do not feel yourself wanting to be with Paul or have him kiss you. You want to be as far away from Paul now as you can be.

In the periods during which you half-slept and dozed and dreamed fitfully, you considered moving from your home. You and your family would move to another state, another country. The killer would not travel to find your daughter thousands of miles away, would he? You picture living down by the equator. Your children could go to the local school. They would become fluent in Spanish. They would become dark from the daily sun. They would become unrecognizable to people they once knew. They could surf in the waves every day. They could eat fresh fruit and fish. What was the point, really, of living here? Things were hard here. The summers were bug-ridden. If you spent any time outdoors, your skin would raise in welts from deerflies. From time to time you would find your fingers at your scalp, feeling crusted blood from insect bites. In winter the roads, muddy from fall rains, dried in rigid ruts that grabbed your tires and made your car drive in hard frozen tracks other vehicles had left, and you had no choice but to follow them. You could see your children living down there by the ocean. Everyone so heavy on land, taking to the water and racing down the clear faces of waves. Your daughters learning to be ocean-brave, paddling far out, ignoring days of jellyfish tides, and jumping from cliffs to the blue depths far down below. Thomas and you sleeping with the French doors open and a breeze skimming over you both as you slept naked and still in a white-sheeted bed.