Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

T he meet this weekend is a home meet and you have signed up to time. Your girls are in many individual events because the coach has decided there will be no relays, which, by the official rules, lets the swimmers swim in more events. You are thankful for this because it means there will be plenty of individual races to watch your girls in. What’s new are energy drinks in the form of a gel, and your girls, of course, want you to buy some for the meet. You sit in on the required timers’ meeting before the race begins. You have heard the talk that is given at this meeting maybe a hundred times before, but still you are required to attend the meeting and listen. The assistant coach, when describing the stopwatch to parents who have never timed before, likes to tell them that the right button starts and stops the watch, the left button clears the watch, and the middle button will blow the whole place up. New parents always laugh at this joke and you smile, not wanting to send the message that you think the joke is tired, not wanting to offend the assistant coach, who you are sure is paid very little and puts in long hours. The assistant coach then describes the other timing device, the plunger. One of the parents asks what the plunger looks like, and the assistant coach says, “It looks like a detonator,” and suddenly you are wondering how something as mundane as a home swim meet for school-age children keeps having references to explosions. You are relieved when the topic turns to rubber-ducky prizes for heat winners, and how the timers will not be responsible for distributing the prizes because a heat-winner volunteer will keep track of that.

Paul is timing also, only you’re not in his lane. He waves to you when he sees you at the meeting, and you smile and nod, and you make yourself not reach up to your hair and smooth it down, even though you can see out of the top corner of your eye that it’s messy, because you are no longer in the business of making yourself attractive for him, you are in the business of every day making sure you save your daughter’s life. The kissing and the touching you did with Paul are no longer important. So many things are in the past now, even your brother and his blood and his brains on his carpet are gone. No longer will the thoughts of him seem to suck you down into crevices in your house, through floorboards and chair seats.

You are in a lane with Dinah, and when her daughter swims in your lane Dinah screams, “Go, Baby, go!” and stands on the gutter, her toes in her sandals almost dipping into the pool water. You think how Dinah, if the killer ever threatened her daughter, would probably never let him get near her daughter. You think how you should be a little bit more Dinah, a little tougher, a little louder, a little more almost in the water with your daughter, pushing her along. Dinah, thankfully, is not talking to you about Paul or anything else except the meet. Her daughter has a chance to qualify for age groups at this meet, and that’s all she’s concerned with. She has agreed to work the plunger, and you write down the times. You are in an end lane, where, in a heat, the slower swimmers are placed, and these swimmers are not as good as others at making streamlined dives, so as an end-lane timer, you are wetter than the middle-lane timers from being splashed so many times by near belly flops and sloppy entries. The pages on the clipboard where you record the times are also very wet, and even the pencil is hard to write with. A Gunga Din, at least that’s what you call them — volunteers who pass out plastic water bottles to the timers and officials who can’t step away from their posts — comes by with a water bottle. You always need water to drink when timing because the air in the pool is hot and makes you thirsty. You store the bottle under the block, and hope that a swimmer doesn’t accidentally kick it into the water.

Dinah’s daughter, Jessie, competes in her one-hundred breast, and while she swims, Dinah yells, “Go, Baby, go!” Dinah is yelling, “Finish it! Finish it!” so loudly when her daughter is approaching the wall that you’re momentarily deaf in one ear. Jessie’s time is fast enough to take her to age groups, the next division. Dinah leaves her post as a timer screaming, “You did it!” and runs to hug her daughter when her daughter comes out of the pool. When Dinah runs back to your side to start the timer for the next race, her front is soaking wet from the hug, and she’s so red in the face you worry she’s going to collapse.

Alex pokes you from behind. “I’m in heat ten, lane five,” she says. You give her the thumbs-up as she walks off to her lane. When she races you don’t watch the swimmer racing in your lane, you watch only Alex, whose entry is tight, whose splash is so light it could be that of a wishing rock thrown into a pond. You start to yell like Dinah yells when Alex comes to do a flip by your end. “Go, Ba—” you yell, catching yourself just in time before you say, “Go, Baby, go!” like Dinah. You yell at the top of your lungs now, because there is another swimmer gaining on your Alex. You can’t remember having yelled this loud before. You think how maybe you should have yelled like this when the killer had you in the car, that if you had yelled this loud, it wouldn’t have mattered how loud the wind was, or how far away you were from a house. Someone surely would have heard you. You think you are yelling this loud to make up for all the yelling you didn’t do with the killer. It feels good to yell so loud. You think it’s even making your arms feel better. You can’t feel the intense itching. After your daughter wins her heat and you raise both your hands in the air, one holding the clipboard, the other holding the pencil, you feel a hand on your back. You think it’s your other daughter, Sofia, come to tell you which heat and lane her next race is in, but when you turn around you see that it’s the assistant coach. “Annie, as a timer, it’s actually not acceptable to yell so loud for your children,” he says. You apologize to him, and when he leaves Dinah says, “Fuck him. Yell all you want to. I’d like to see in the parent handbooks where it says you can’t cheer for your own kid. All the money we spend, all the time we spend volunteering — yell till your lungs burst, Annie. Can you believe we made it to age groups? I didn’t think Jessie was going to do it there for a second. If she had taken one more stroke, instead of gliding into the wall, we wouldn’t have made it. Oh, and sorry about Paul. I can see he’s back with his wife. That must be rough for you, but you look like you’re holding up just fine. You’re lucky you have Thomas. He’s a great guy.” You nod. You can’t believe Dinah is telling you this. Is she that ecstatic about her daughter making it into age groups? I guess she is, you think. “Hey, after the meet, why don’t you and the girls join us at the sushi place?” she says. You stammer, “Thanks, but I have to get back and let the dog out. Maybe another time.”

When you ask the girls in the car ride home how well they think they did, your youngest says, “Mom, what were you doing all that yelling for while I was racing? I thought I was doing something wrong and you wanted me to get out. I thought I was in the wrong race or something, you were yelling so loud.”

“Sorry,” you say, and then, “Hey, I thought you said you could never hear people when they cheered for you.”

“I’d have to be dead not to hear you in that race!” she says, and you almost wince when she says the word dead. You wish she hadn’t, because suddenly you picture her dead, her throat slit, and you holding her in your arms, trying to support her head to keep it from falling off all the way.