Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Your leg is still sore, but you can walk on it now, almost run. There was a point, after the killer left you and after you walked on it for what must have been a mile, that you could not even feel your leg. The man who stopped for you looked more like a killer than the killer. He wore dirty striped overalls and no socks. You could see the hairs at his sharply boned ankles. He asked what in the world you were doing walking so far off the main road at night. You just asked him to take you to the hospital, and he nodded and drove. The glove box slammed open every time the tires hit a bump, and he repeatedly reached his arm over your wounded leg to close the compartment.

After Thomas leaves the room to go start some dinner, you wish you had gone with the girls to practice, to experience the nothingness of the swim team again. What would be better right now than entering the facility and sitting with the other parents in the bleachers and watching your daughters swim and talking to the other parents about swimming, schooling, and food? You would even be glad to see the dancing hippos. You would wave to them as they jogged in the lane with their foam belts attached to their huge waists. You get up to help Thomas. At first you are light-headed and afraid of blacking out and seeing the killer’s face when you do, but when you regain your balance you go downstairs and help cook the dinner. The girls are at the table doing homework, and you would like to turn off the lights, because anyone from the outside standing by your house in the night could see your girls plain as day, considering you don’t have curtains in the windows to obstruct the view. You shepherd them away from the table. You send them to study in the back of the house, where they cannot be seen from the road. They object. They want to know why. You tell them you need the table to set out plates and forks and knives. “Take these books, take your calculators, and go,” you say. They complain about your orders, they make nasty faces, they imitate the words you used in a singsong disrespectful tone, not caring about your leg. That night, when it’s time for bed, Thomas turns to you and hugs you again, holding you the way he did earlier in the day. You hug and hold him back. If it were only this, you think. How easy it is just to hold him. If this were all you had to do and nothing else, not worry about the killer, not worry about the throat of your daughter meeting the blade of that same knife that was thrust into your leg. Why was it so hard just to make the effort to turn and hold Thomas before? You feel as if you could hold him forever now. You do not want to turn your head away from his chest.

B ecause you can drive now, and you are finally feeling better, you can take the girls back to practice. You arrive early, eager to wave to the cleaning lady, who knows you by name. Eager to feel the blast of warmth when you enter the pool area, the air laden with the smell of chlorine. Eager to talk to the other parents and watch how the swimmers swim. You and the other parents know the injuries, the aches and pains the swimmers have. You notice how Emily does breast instead of fly during a fly set, and you and the other parents decide that her shoulder must still be bothering her. You notice how during a fly set, Hannah’s downward stroke smashed Candace in the nose. Candace had sinus surgery only a few months ago, and you hope she’s all right. You notice how India’s wearing a waterproof ankle brace made of rubber, and that her season of track that overlaps with the first few months of swim team made her sprain her ankle again. From up above in the bleachers, you notice even the health of the coaches. You see the head coach looks thinner after a bout with the flu. The juniors’ coach is thinner too, but that’s because she’s in training for a triathlon. Either Chris or Paul must have dropped Cleo off at the pool and then left to run errands. It’s just you and the other parents and the sense of quiet calm you feel when you watch the team swim, as relaxing, if not more so, than watching the flames of a wood fire burning. You and the other parents compliment one another on your clothes, on your hair, on the way your children swim. You notice how Ben’s daughter has really refined her fly. Her body profile is flatter over the water, and she’s not coming up as high as she used to. You notice Eliot has straightened out his breaststroke legs. They kick on the same plane now, and not one and then the other as they did before, which would get him DQ’ed. Kendra can breathe free on both sides now, instead of only on the right. Phoebe’s head is now down in her dives, giving her a better streamline on entry. Sofia’s extra wiggle in her fly, though, still looks like a problem, and you wonder if she’ll ever be able to learn fly the right way so that it looks as though she’s moving forward and not backward with every pull of her arms. Somewhere in the middle of the next-to-last strenuous set, when all of the swimmers are swimming their hardest, you realize it’s going to be all right. You don’t have to uproot the family and move to the equator. You can stay where you are. You can stay like this, coming to practice every day, sitting on the metal bleachers, talking with the other parents, talking about cut times, talking about the best hotels to stay at during a meet, and which pools have the best places for viewing the races, and which have the best concession stands, and which have easy parking, and which are easy to find off the highway. You can keep going on like this as long as you don’t ever tell anyone who the killer is. And that doesn’t have to be so hard, does it? You can keep a secret. You can forget his terrible face with his forehead like steps. You can forget the gleam of his long knife blade. You can forget so much here because it is safe here. It is not a place your brother would have ever gone to, for example. You could never picture him here in the stands. He would never be on deck in a swimsuit. He would never be sitting with the parents you sit with, who at the moment are talking about the perfect food to bring to swim meets to feed to their swimmers.

You have a conversation, in the stands, about the new racing suits. You’ve heard the technology is even more advanced, providing turbo compression for a tighter core and better body positioning while reducing lactic acid build-up with a lightweight hydrophobic micro-filament textile that repels water and reduces drag. There’s also a suit that uses zoned compression and a body stability web, which provides targeted support with a network of seams that are bonded with high-frequency welding instead of being sewn. You have just learned that another advance is the creation of a unified system in which the suit, cap, and goggles all work together to improve water flow around the head and body. Hundreds of heads of athletes were analyzed to come up with the design and to see how water could flow faster over that part of the body. The cap needs to come all the way down to the goggles for seamless transition.

After practice you stand in the foyer with the other parents waiting for your swimmers to come out of the locker room. They are slow because they are talking in the showers, trying out each other’s shampoos and singing songs together that play on the radio. Your leg, you feel, is almost all the way healed. The tip of that killer’s blade did not meet the bone in your leg. You take a poll, who is cooking what for their swimmers for dinner tonight? Stuffed shells, pizza, mac and cheese, they answer. Oh that’s good, you say, the carbs are what they need for the upcoming meet. You feel hungry yourself, when you have not felt hungry in days, not since, of course, you came home that night with a hole in your leg. You tell yourself you will have to remember getting that hole a different way, a way that did not involve the killer. That will be easier. Remember instead that you decided to take a walk in the woods and you fell on what you thought at first was a stick but turned out to be a stake, maybe something farmers in this area long ago used to tie their sheep to in the fields when they needed to be kept apart from the rest of the flock.