This is the Water (12 page)

“I'm starving!” you daughters say in unison when they get in the car, and to keep them quiet so that you can think about the kiss and the Illinois plates on the long drive home, you stop and let them buy doughnuts, only briefly thinking about what an unhealthy food they are.

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
homas says the universe is expanding like a balloon, and that every year we are twenty-two miles farther apart from other celestial bodies. You wonder, for a second, if he's making an analogy between you and him—that every year the two of you are drifting farther apart, but of course you know that's not how he thinks. He doesn't think about relationships. He thinks about actual celestial bodies. You want to know, then, why we bother trying to visit other solar systems when it's just going to be harder to do so every year. We should just give up now, you think, while looking down at the goose. The goose is two stories below on the ground and you can see the goose turning her head and looking up at you with one eye while you look out the window. “Hello, there, goose,” you say, and the goose tilts her head some more. The goose, you think, does not care about the universe, or the expansion of it, and neither does she care about the neighbors or the road beyond. The goose maybe cares about the two chickens that eat her food, and the dog that eats her food, and maybe she cares about the fox that trotted off with the rooster in its mouth a while ago. The expanding universe is not on the goose's agenda, you think. This is you thinking that you need to stop thinking about Paul, Bobby Chantal, and the red Corvair, that those things shouldn't be on your agenda, because they are expanding your universe beyond proportions you can understand or are comfortable with. In order to keep your universe small, the way you like it, you start folding the towels. There are always so many towels, and you like to feel the nub of the terry cloth against your dry fingertips because your fingers are always dry from swimming in chlorine. You have to put away your clothes and Thomas's clothes, and then the girls' clothes, and then the rags that go in the rag chest, which are really not rags but just an assortment of napkins and dish towels you keep by the dining room table. Often, a stray sock or a pair of underwear gets thrown into the rag chest too and someone during a meal will go get a rag to wipe their face and dig into the rag chest without looking carefully at what they are picking up and they will end up wiping their face with a gym sock or a flowered panty instead, which gets everyone laughing at the dinner table, but not for long, because the meal has to be finished quickly, you and the girls have come back from swim practice so late and now there is violin to practice and now there is homework, and where are the protractors, the rulers, the colored pencils for filling in landmasses and rivers on maps? And how did this happen, Thomas asks you before bed, that Alex swims more than she studies? How did we let that happen? The swimming won't get her anywhere in life. How is it that our daughter knows nothing about how the plates move? About how magma was formed? About what igneous rocks are? About what sedimentary means? And you don't say so, but you are not so sure yourself. Sedimentary sounding awfully similar to sedentary, and does this mean they are rocks that formed by barely moving, and is such a thing even possible? Thank goodness it is night now, the lights are out, the dog has settled against the door, the engine of the car out in the driveway has finished making its tick-tick-ticking sound, the owls have begun their calling, the swim suits and towels are all hung up, your daughters have practiced their violins and have completely memorized “Perpetual Motion.” And your mind's suddenly able to recall that sedimentary means rocks formed by layers, so now you can go to sleep with one less thing on your mind. This is you thinking what a fine job you're doing keeping Paul and Bobby Chantal and that red Corvair out of your mind.

This is Chris at home, looking through boxes in the attic at three in the morning and finding the handgun her father once owned and kept behind the counter of his store just in case there was trouble. This is Chris remembering Beatrice, the babysitter she had as a girl who was raped. This is Chris finding the box of bullets alongside the handgun. This is Chris remembering Beatrice, how every night she would fall asleep next to Chris. This is Paul asleep downstairs, having a nightmare that he has found Bobby Chantal again. He is holding her in his arms. Her throat is slit. “Oh, Bobby,” he is trying to say in his dream, trying to bring her back to life, but to anyone listening to him it sounds like “Oh, baby” instead, because words you say in a dream sound distorted to others who are awake. In short, it sounds like a dream he'd want to have, not a nightmare. This is Chris in the attic, hearing through the floorboards Paul saying, “Oh, baby,” and thinking to herself that he is dreaming about the woman he's seeing. This is Chris not caring so much now. In a world of ten thousand things, what's more important? Her husband with another woman, or a killer who's killing young girls, girls on the same swim team as Cleo, girls almost as young as Cleo, even? She takes the handgun and the bullets with her down the rickety attic ladder. She hides them in her bedroom, where she keeps her winter sweaters folded up and encased in a plastic garment bag. Again Paul moans in his sleep. She doesn't mind it now. She is thinking of how she will find that killer.

During the day, out your window, you can hear what must be tree limbs rubbing against one another in the wind and squeaking, but it sounds like a new kind of animal, or just an animal you've never heard before.

In the shower, while thinking about how Paul kissed you, you keep saying “water, water, water,” imitating the boy in the wheelchair at the facility whom you often hear showering in the next stall over. Maybe the drain hears everything and Thomas has figured that out already and that's why he does most of his talking in the shower. Someone's listening, someone who gives him the time of day. Someone who says, “Yes, tell me more about quarks, quasars and pulsars. Tell me how we are moving away from other planets at twenty-two miles per day. Tell me how Pluto was sent off course by a stray meteor and now has a wobble.”

 

T
his is Paul asleep while Chris gets up from bed and gets dressed. He is not someone who snores, and Chris often has to go right up to him and watch his breathing in order to tell whether he's asleep or not. She can tell he's sleeping when his lips are slightly parted, as if he's just about to say something, or he has just pulled away from a kiss. He is sleeping now. She knows the rest stop that Kim was killed at, and when she drives by it she can see that there are police barricades blocking the entrance road. This is Chris driving farther up the highway, liking how she has the lanes to herself, liking how she can use her brights and not have to worry about blinding an oncoming driver because there is no one else but her on the highway. This is Chris pulling into a different rest stop, farther up north, in the dark, hearing her tires make a crumbling sound over the blacktop. This is Chris going into the bathroom, where moths fly by the light above the door and where a cricket is chirping in the corner by the sink, whose pipes sweat beneath the basin. This is Chris finished in the stall, and now standing at the sink washing her hands, realizing there are no hand towels and wiping her hands on the skirt of her dress instead. This is her hand sliding over her pocket, sliding over the hard handgun she can feel beneath the cloth. This is Chris looking in the mirror, looking to see who could be standing behind her looking at her looking in the mirror, but there is no one behind her. The door is behind her and it is shut, but not all the way, and wouldn't it be easy, Chris thinks, for someone to just open up that door and find her?

This is the moon shining down so close to the hills Chris thinks something's wrong with Earth's orbit or gravity, and the world is in danger of being struck by the moon. This is the picnic bench she sits on, listening to the filaments in the light buzz above the bathroom door. This is the deep breath she takes that's full of the cool night air and the smell of a dew-filled lawn that in the morning will probably be dotted with mushrooms. This is Chris getting sleepy, knowing that if she lies down on the picnic bench she will fall asleep, but then wake up cold and dew-covered and with her dress probably soiled by whatever wet film the rotting wooden tabletop seems to be coated with. This is Chris driving back down the highway, feeling good, feeling that this was a start in the right direction toward finding the killer or having him find her.

This is Chris imagining the killer. He has a thickly wrinkled forehead, as if the wrinkles were a flight of stairs a very small creature could climb up or down. He has eyes that are small and set wide apart. Their lashes are straight, and sometimes the top lashes stick right into the bottom lashes, or even go under his bottom eyelid, so that he has to open his eye wide and roll it to the side and insert the pad of his finger into his eye to free the top lashes. He has teeth that bits of food become easily caught in, and his breath often smells like the bits of food caught days ago in the spaces of his teeth. He has hangnails he bites off. He has sideburns as thick as Velcro. His straight hair is thick, not showing any signs of thinning even though he is approaching fifty. He is amazed by the thickness of his own hair and often puts his hand through it just to feel how much there is.

This is Chris back home in her bedroom, taking out the handgun from her pocket and putting it on the top shelf of her closet, and then taking off her clothes. Paul doesn't wake up. This is Chris, stepping into Cleo's room to make sure her daughter is covered, even though the night is warm. This is Chris seeing Cleo asleep with her arm stretched out to the side, and wanting to bring her arm back in close to Cleo's side, because her arm looks as though it could be grabbed so easily if someone were to walk into her room and take her away. So as not to wake her, though, Chris just tiptoes backward outside of the room, closing the door in front of her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
n the morning, Thomas, while slurping his cereal and reading his science magazine, tells you that amnesia is actually caused by having too many memories and the brain not knowing what to do with all of that data. So you feel better. You know why you can't remember if you put honey in your tea or not. It's not because you're losing your mind, but because there's so much going on all of the time. The dog, for example, is barking to go out and then, a second later, barking to come back in. The hummingbirds are at the feeder all taking turns sipping at the homemade nectar Thomas made of boiled sugar and water. The goose is honking and flapping her wings in the front yard, ruffled by something you can't see, the dog, perhaps, or a low-flying hawk, or Alex up early searching for caterpillars in the milkweed as tall as she is to bring them in the house and put them in a jar. So, of course, who could remember if honey were in the tea or not with all of that taking place?

The brain can be trained. It is capable of doing much more than we think, Thomas says, reading from another article in his magazine. A child born with a weak eye can put a patch over the strong eye and train the weak eye to do what the strong eye already can. An aging person's failing vision can be corrected by having the person sit for hours of training in a darkly lit room trying to make out blurry lines and shapes. Sounds like torture, you think, because you have become as attached to your dime-store reading glasses as you have to sidling up to your children and having them read small print for you whenever you're confronted with it. The plasticity of the brain can be stretched by a person living in an active environment, with diversions and friends and plenty of time for exercise, Thomas reads. All of this just spells vacation to you, and you realize you are the kind of person who actually really does see the spelling of words when they're spoken, and not just in English. Once on vacation you heard a French man, who had lost his little dog, searching all along the beach for him calling “ici,” and you kept seeing the letters spelled out as he repeated the word, so to you he was calling out “i-c-i, i-c-i, i-c-i,” over and over again.

To you, even Paul's name is sometimes “P-a-u-l” when you think about him, which of course you have continued to do even though you've tried to stop thinking about him because you started to believe that the only reason he kissed you was to make you forget about him being with Bobby Chantal. Now you're not sure what to think. You just know you're afraid you'll say his name when asking at the table for the ketchup to be passed, because after all, you have just learned from Thomas's magazine that the brain is capable of anything, and you're afraid yours will rebel. That like the strong eye covered with a patch allowing the weak eye to grow strong, if you're constantly trying not to think of Paul, then a part of you will compensate and do it anyway. Maybe soon you will be saying his name when you want to say “soap” instead. “Pass the Paul, please,” you're afraid of blurting out in front of your family at the dinner table instead of asking for the salt. You imagine that like some supernatural phenomenon, his name, because you are thinking of him so often, will burn through your skin and show up on your chest with smoke and the smell of your cooking flesh rising up from the burn.

What makes everything suddenly clear about your brother is Thomas reading to you that pain is addictive, that the same pathways that handle addiction handle chronic pain, so the body keeps wanting to feel the pain long after the trauma has occurred. Now, for example, you have been able to stop thinking about your brother by thinking about Paul instead. You've just transferred addictions instead of curing the first one. Until something else comes along and takes its place you'll be doing it indefinitely, and now Thomas is talking about taking the girls to swim practice this afternoon because he will be headed up that way anyway. “No,” you blurt out, “I'll take them,” thinking that if you don't go you'll miss seeing Paul, but then you remind yourself that Paul is an addiction, and that you shouldn't want to see Paul. Probably the best thing for you and for everybody is that you not see Paul, and so you say, “Yes, that's a good idea. You take them instead.”

You know later that day when you're standing with Chris in her studio why you're really there. It's not to visit with Chris, or to see her latest artwork—paintings mostly of dark-colored flowers on dark canvasses that you know have already been bought by a wealthy collector/admirer in Connecticut even though they're not yet completed—but to be standing in Paul's house, touching the pen with the bank logo on it that he might have touched, and touching the door handle he touched and the window sash he might have opened on a hot, restless night after one of his nightmares woke him up. You should turn around and leave. You're ashamed to realize why you've really come. You stand to leave. I will get up and go home. I'm ridiculous, you say to yourself, but you don't go. You know Chris would be offended if you took off and left. Already she has put water on to boil for tea, and started talking again about how there still is no evidence against the killer. She shows you one of her latest paintings. You're surprised. It's not one of her usual dark ones of dark flowers painted on an even darker background. It's a portrait of what she thinks the killer looks like. He has a forehead that hangs across his eyes like a ledge and wrinkles on his forehead so pronounced they look like rolls of flab. “I don't get it. How do you know he looks like this?” you ask. Chris shrugs. She sips her tea and looks at her painting as if she were seeing it for the first time. “I don't know,” she says. “I only feel that he looks like this, but it's such a strong feeling I think maybe I should show it to the police. What do you think?” You shake your head. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” she says. “They'd think I was crazy. But it's the first time I've started painting anything in weeks. I was just so upset about Paul that I couldn't. Now, though, I can't stop painting this guy's face.” She shows you multiple sketches she's done of the killer's face. She shows you his profile and she shows you him head on. Each time you wish you could turn away or push the sketches away, or better yet that she'd move the papers for you so you wouldn't have to put your hands near him. “I think somehow me painting his face over and over again will help the guy get caught,” she says.

When the phone rings and Chris goes to answer it, you're relieved. She takes the sketches with her to the kitchen, where the phone is, and you don't have to look at them any longer. You wander around her house sipping your tea. You go into their bedroom. On the shelf is a picture of Paul and Chris on their wedding day in their wedding clothes holding hands and jumping off a dock and into a pond. Midflight, they are smiling, and the sun is shining so brightly the water looks white. You wish you had been at their wedding. You bet it was fun. You wonder which side of the bed Paul lies on. The right side looks just as rumpled as the left, the covers are peeled back on either side, and there's a glass of water on a table on one side, but of course there is no way to tell if it is Chris's, because you have never seen Chris wear lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. You wonder if you held the glass up and just saw the imprint of the lips on the glass if you could tell whose they were. Would you know by just having felt Paul's lips on your own what the shape of them could actually look like? The picture of them on their wedding day has a silver frame. One side of the frame looks smudged with fingerprints, as if Chris had picked it up time and time again just to stare at it, remembering how they once were.

You look out the window. Is this the view Paul sees every day? It's a windy day. The kind of day that makes you think that colder weather will come back for sure and that you shouldn't be fooled by the bright sunshine, because the wind brings down some dried leaves off a nearby gardenia bush, making you think of maples losing their leaves in the autumn. There is a hedge of American Beauty and a small cherry tree that looks newly planted, with wood chips circling its base. There is a robin pecking at the ground. There is an old wooden playhouse that must have been Cleo's when she was younger. The shutters by the playhouse's window look as though they could fall off in the next breeze.

The tea has been served in mugs without handles that look like Japanese teacups. They are beautiful, like most of the things in Chris's house. Even the plate surrounding the wall switch is a beautiful scene of a mountainside with a pink sunset painted on ceramic. You think of your own house. You have barely decorated it. You believe the knots in the wood form enough pictures on their own, and you don't want to put up anything on the walls to detract from them. You haven't even planted flowers outside of the house. The layering of the rocks on the rounded stone wall that garden snakes sometimes slither out from is artistry enough for you. How nice it must be for Paul to come home to this house, where the photographs are framed in silver frames, and where the windows have curtains.

You take another sip of the tea. Holding the mug without handles is comforting. It warms your hands. After Chris gets off the phone, she shows you articles and a website she found that talk about the past murder victims of the rest-stop killer who probably killed Kim.

“I've read through all this information, and I can't find any link between them all,” Chris says. “Some were very young, and some were just young. What they all had in common was the slit in their necks when they arrived at the morgue, and of course the fact that they were killed outside of a rest stop. All of them were women alone. Some lived in the state, some lived in a neighboring state and were just passing through. I don't think the cops had a thing to go on. There wasn't the science back then to figure out the identity of the guy, but now we can look at the DNA. We can see who did it. Hell, we can even dig up a body and look at the old DNA and get an identity match. I think the police should be asked to dig up the bodies. I've even talked to the families about it.”

“You've what?”

“There's one who's all for it. It's the daughter of one of the victims. Her name is Pam Chantal. Her mother was a nurse named Bobby Chantal. At the time of the murder, Pam was only five. Her father was a Vietnam vet, but he never married Bobby Chantal, and he disappeared not long after Pam was born. Now Pam wants to know who killed her mother, the only relative she ever knew. I told her I'd help her talk to the police and tell them they have permission to exhume the body and test it for DNA samples. She seems to need someone to go through it with her.”

“Chris, are you that obsessed by this case?” you say. “It sounds like quite a job to take on. Are you serious?”

“Yes, I am,” Chris says. “This guy killed a girl on our team, Annie. It could have been one of our girls. It still could be.”

This is you, sitting on either Paul's side of the bed or Chris's, not believing what you're hearing, and by accident letting tea from your cup pour off to one side and stain the foot of the bed. This is Chris coming up to you and taking the teacup from you, telling you with a small laugh that it's all right, that it's Paul's side of the bed and he'll never notice the stain. This is you saying out loud, “I think you made more sense when you were convinced Paul was cheating on you,” and this is you wishing you hadn't said anything out loud and then immediately saying, “I'm sorry.” This is the bed, the tea stain now shaped like a puffy cloud. This is the room getting darker, the sun going down behind the other side of the house. This is the way the bed feels to you, as though it's the floor beneath your chair at your kitchen table that threatens to suck you down to the center of the earth every time you think about your brother, but you are not thinking about your brother now. Maybe thinking about him would be better than thinking about Paul and Bobby Chantal. Maybe imagining your brother's chipped front tooth, and his long fingers, and the way it sounded almost silent when he laughed is better than thinking about Paul. This is you standing up from the bed and getting your purse, which you left on the table in the entryway. This is you saying you hadn't realized it was so late, saying there is dinner to get started before the girls come home. They always come home starving. Isn't it the same with Cleo after a practice? you ask.

“Yes, she's ravenous when she gets in the door,” Chris says.

“What about the swim meet this weekend—will you be going?” you ask, standing in the doorway to be polite instead of just leaving right away as you'd like to.

Chris shakes her head. “I'm not. I'm just not cut out for those swim meets. I can't stand to watch them. Even if Cleo's winning a race, I'm nervous for her. I feel it like a knife in my stomach. Where does it say in the parent's handbook that swimming has anything to do with your gut? There are only pages about getting your kid to practice on time and feeding them a healthy meal, nothing about acute ulcers on race day afflicting the parents.”