Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is the director, looking right at you when Paul is trying to talk to you. This is Paul whispering in your ear, “You’re not going to believe this, but the exhumation already took place. Sure enough, they found my DNA on her, or in her, I should say. They found a bunch of hairs and one of them was mine. My lawyer tells me I’ll do fine if I have to testify in front of a jury, though. I’ve got an honest face, he says.”

“Didn’t you tell him about the red Corvair? About the license plate?”

“Sure, but like I said, those leads were so old they meant nothing.”

You leave the meeting early, not wanting to have to listen to Paul anymore. You were hoping there would be some other evidence on Bobby Chantal that would incriminate the killer.

You pass by the swimmers practicing diving off the blocks, their splashes coming up and getting you wet. In the foyer, waiting for your daughters, you feel the need to scratch at your arms again. You lift up your sleeves and examine them. A lifeguard walks by. You see him so often you both smile at each other, even though you don’t know his name. He stops when he sees the blisters on your arm. “Oooh, that looks bad. Poison ivy?” You nod. “That’s been going around here. A guy who swims here has it in the same place. He says he got it from sheep!”

You cannot believe what he just said. The killer has been swimming here?

“When does he swim?” you ask.

“He comes at night, after swim practice. He should be here soon. Why?”

“Maybe I know him — does he have black hair? About so high? A wrinkled, wide forehead?”

“That’s the guy. You know him?”

You look at the clock on the wall behind the front desk. “What’s taking my girls so long? I better go check on them,” you say to the lifeguard. “See you later.” You walk off to the locker room so that you don’t have to answer the lifeguard’s question about you knowing the killer.

Your girls can’t understand why you’re having them leave the facility through the side door. You have never left that way before. It doesn’t lead out to the parking lot. It leads to a side yard where metal ventilation ducts stick out from the lawn. Of course, you are hoping to avoid seeing the killer or, more precisely, having the killer see your girls. Your girls are rosy cheeked from having just swum. Your girls smell like flowery shampoo and almond lotion, and the usual faint tinge of chlorine. The killer would be drawn to your girls. Who wouldn’t be? They chatter happily about their workout. They talk bathing suits. They say the racing suits long in the leg are meant to shave time off in distance, but not in sprints. For sprints you need a cut-out leg for the sake of mobility, especially for a breaststroke kick. You look left and right once you’re outside the facility. Maybe the killer is waiting for you out here in the dark. Suddenly, your poison ivy itches violently. Maybe it senses how near the killer might be. You get to the car without being seen, or so you hope. You’re tempted to tell the girls to scrunch down in their seats, to keep their heads from being seen through the windows. Anything to keep the killer at bay.

Driving home, you’re speeding. On the turns of the dark, backcountry road, the car feels as if it’s going to tip over. “What’s the rush?” your girls say. If you had let them read with the light on they wouldn’t have noticed, but you have not let them turn the light on, afraid someone will be able to see them. “It’s late and you have homework to do,” you tell the girls. “Right, so race us home, risking our lives, so we can do it,” Sofia says, and you can almost feel her rolling her eyes in the passenger seat next to you. You can almost hear the click her eyeballs make as they turn in their sockets. Listen, I’m saving you from getting your throat cut, you want to tell her, and wipe the sarcasm off her face, but of course you don’t. You look straight out onto the road. There is the house that has been burning a brush fire all day, the smoke rising up high and thick behind it, making it look as if the house is on fire. There are the glowing eyes of a raccoon. There are the outlines of horses on the hillside, some owner having not yet put them in their stalls for the night. There are dark clouds speeding by, small ones with one end that tapers into thin strips like a tail, so that the clouds look like rats scurrying by in the sky.

This is the news on the radio. Another woman, a girl still, really, only seventeen, was killed at another rest stop a few exits south. Her throat slashed with a knife. This is you turning the radio off quickly. “Enough, this is enough,” you think.

This is Chris in her house, watching the news and listening to the story about the seventeen-year-old girl being killed. She puts her head in her hands. When Paul comes in and hears the news too, she lifts her head and looks at him and says, “I almost wish you were Bobby’s killer. Then at least these killings wouldn’t still be happening.” Paul takes Chris in his arms and they hold each other until Cleo walks in and says, “I guess you’re not divorcing. I was kind of hoping you would. I wanted to choose the other house I’d be living in. I was thinking Dad could buy a farm with a pony, a trampoline, and an outdoor swimming pool, with a slide of course.”

T his is you swimming the next day at the pool by yourself. You told the girls they needed the day off to rest because you didn’t want them anywhere near the pool, where the killer might see them. You swim because you have something to think about, and you know you cannot think at home. You swim because you have a feeling the water will tell you what to do. This is you after having swum enough laps that you are finally beginning to relax, and your mind is wandering and you are not even counting your laps any longer. This is the water telling you what to do. The shushing sound the water makes by your ears sounds like so many voices. It sounds like Kim’s voice and those of other girls on the team. It sounds like women’s voices, like those of the dancing hippos, and men’s voices, like those of the trooper and Thomas, and it sounds like the voice of the coach, and the voice of Mandy, and the voice of Pam Chantal. All the voices are telling you the same thing. You understand what they want. When you get out of the pool, it’s as if the water is lifting itself up higher so that you can climb out of the pool more easily and go forth and do what you have to do.

This is the water, watching you leave, hoping it’s done all it can to convince you. This is the water, winking at you, or so it seems as it glistens and flashes in bright afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows when you turn your head over your shoulder to look at it one more time to be sure you understand what it wants you to do.

This is the next afternoon. The sounds of cars going up your road are louder now because so few leaves are left on the trees. There are more cars than usual, mostly pickup trucks, it being hunting season, when men make their way up to hunting camps far up your dirt road and stay for a few days in small cabins off the grid, walking the old logging trails, trying their luck in the quiet woods.

If the men in those trucks were to turn their heads and, through the thin maples that border your pond, look up to your house, with its cedar siding turning dark with age from the foundation upward and its copper roof turning green from the base of the chimney, they would see you not sinking into the floorboards and thinking of your brother. They would see you thinking of what’s alive. Sofia and Alex.

This is you thinking you’ll do anything to keep them alive. It’s bad enough that suicides can take place. Those are things you might never be able to stop, but murders, you realize, that’s something you can control. That’s something you can take care of. This is you rising out of your chair, the menacing floorboards not so menacing now. They are just like the patchwork of land seen from high above, from a flying plane’s window, they are that far away, their power to suck you down infinitesimal, nearly gone. This is your walk up to your room with the gun cabinet as if there were some phenomenon taking place that Thomas has read about, some particle attraction in which not only are you walking toward the gun cabinet, but it’s coming toward you just as quickly.