This is the Water (22 page)

“Yeah,” you say.

“I've never killed a man,” he says. You don't have a response for that one. Are you supposed to say, “Hey, let's try killing one now?” so that the killer forgets about you and moves on? If you said, “I know you only kill women who are weaker than you,” then would he kill you for saying it?

The killer scratches the inside of his arm. He scratches it hard. His nails make red raised lines up and down his skin.

He sees you looking at him scratching. “Did you know sheep eat poison ivy?” he asks. You don't answer this either. You think he is the lion talking to you now. He is talking about something so strange it is not anything you can begin to understand. You try to move your leg a little, just to see how badly it hurts when you do. You suck in your breath. There is as much pain as before, but it's not worse. You think you might be able to walk on it, but you would not be able to run.

Your phone rings. It is probably Chris or the police. Chris has told them about you being driven away, stolen in her car. What would you say to Chris anyway if the killer did let you pick up the phone? Hi, I'm somewhere on a dirt road miles into the woods. I'll give you a reference point—a thousand trees blowing in the wind. I'm fine, except I'm bleeding all over your seat. I'm fine, and by the way, your husband's story isn't that good. The killer says he's glad you didn't answer that because he didn't think you wanted the tip of his knife in your other leg as well. You think he is beginning to sound more like a killer now. That is something you think a killer might say. You try to think of books and movies in which someone was in the same position as you are. You try to remember how they escaped, but nothing comes to mind. All you can think of is how your brother escaped by putting a gun in his mouth. You don't even have a gun to grab from the killer and turn on yourself. If you tried to grab his knife, the tip would land in your other knee and you would not be free, you would be miles from free, as far away from free as you are far away from another person out here in the thick woods where the tree limbs creak and the wind whooshes around the frame of the car.

CHAPTER FORTY

Y
ou can't believe you are hungry. Aren't you supposed to feel nauseous instead? Locked in a car with a throat-slasher? Bleeding? It must be nerves emptying acid into your stomach and making you think you are hungry. Where does it say in those books and movies that the victim felt hungry while they were in grave danger? You'd like to complain. Letters should be sent to writers of thrillers everywhere. You never mention hunger, the letters should say. You are wrong. You haven't done your research. You yourselves haven't let yourself be victims so that you know exactly what's going on inside the head of one. Go out and be victims, the letter would say. Real ones, you'd add. The killer shakes his head. “What's the matter?” you say.

“You're too old,” he says, and he stops the car. You've been feeling this way anyway, lately. Your daughter keeps laughing, telling you that you are on the doorstep of fifty. You wonder what that doorstep looks like. Is it a large sheet of granite like the doorstep to your home that continually has green splats of goose poop on it from the goose who likes to stand on the granite and peck at your glass door, wanting in? The flesh around your face has been feeling looser. You were hoping while kissing Paul the last time that he didn't notice. You think you even tried to think of kissing “firmly” last time, so that he would not notice. You used to tell yourself that your hair, with its gray, sometimes made you look blond in certain light or from a distance, but now it really looks as gray as a sad cloudy day, as bleak as crows calling in a fallow field on a sad cloudy day, as miserable as cold rain beginning to fall on that sad cloudy day in that fallow field with the crows wheeling overhead, calling their faraway call that reaches into your heart and splays it open.

Too old for what? you think to ask, but don't. There's no point in hearing an answer you wouldn't understand. He answers you anyway, even though you never voiced the question. “For killing you. When I kill people too old, they are more ready for it and the energy doesn't come out from their eyes.” You don't say anything. You hold your breath. If he isn't going to kill you, then what is he going to do with you? Is he telling you to get out of the car on your own? That now is your chance? You begin to reach for the door handle, and think maybe when you try to open it he will press the button that unlocks it.

You are so amazed when he does unlock it that for a second you don't pull the handle to open the door. You look at him out of the corner of your eye. He is scratching both his arms again. He is shaking his head. You get out of the car. You step out on the side of the road onto fallen pine needles. You start heading down the road. The road, of course, must lead to somewhere. You will come to a house. You will come to a bigger road. Your leg with the wound wants to stay behind. Your leg with the wound wants to stay seated in the car without weight on it and without the cold wind touching it. Your leg with the wound doesn't care about the killer seated in the car with you. Your leg could stand that killer a little longer. You grab your leg from behind, lifting up on it to help it take the steps it needs to take in order for you to get away. Up ahead, it is so dark that you imagine you could walk off the road and into the forest and not even know it.

Then the sound you are dreading to hear you hear. It is the killer opening the car door. It is the killer's footsteps coming up behind you. You imagine he is going to grab you from behind and kill you here, instead of in the car, where it would be too hard to extract your body once you were dead. You start to run, of course, but your leg, the one that would rather be sitting back in the car, doesn't let you run. You hobble forward. You scream for help. You can hear your voice getting carried off by the wind, traveling behind you. He catches up to you and grabs you by the arm. “This way,” he says, and he pushes you into the forest holding a flashlight in front of him, lighting up the fallen red and gold leaves. He puts you up against a tree. “Sit down,” he says.

Great, it's about time, your wounded leg says. Your other leg, your good leg, could kick your wounded leg for being so stupid.

“You must be about fifty,” he says, pointing the flashlight in your face. “Do you have daughters? Is one a teenager?” The face of your oldest girl flashes before your eyes. You see her long hair and her perfect eyebrows and her pointy elbows that seem to jut out all the time. “Is she?” he says. He kicks your wounded leg now with the heel of his shoe. You scream, and roll forward, then you nod. It is your bad leg making you nod, not wanting the pain to happen again. “If you tell anyone what happened, or what I look like, I will find your daughter. I will cut her throat,” he says. You think about your brother. His death was enough. Enough, enough, you want to say. This many members of my family can't kill themselves or be killed. There has to be a limit, you want to say. Isn't there some kind of limit? Isn't one tragic death per lifetime enough? Oh, no, you think. you can't kill her. She doesn't want to die. And realizing this you are relieved. You know now that Sofia, despite her sagging shoulders, despite her hair hanging in front of her face, is not like your brother at all. She wants to live. You see it in how she fights to regain her speed in that last twenty-five of her one-hundred free, how her shoulders power through the water, how she slowly, steadily gains on the field as if she imagines her former slow self is there in another lane and she will beat it. You make a deal, with God of course, because the killer is an animal and won't listen anyway. You tell God you'll remember to compliment Sofia from now on. You won't make the same mistake your father did with your brother. You'll stop yourself from saying, “Fix your hair,” or “Keep your back straight,” and instead you'll say things like, “Your first twenty-five was so fast!” “That swimsuit looks good on you!” “You got an A in English? That's terrific.” Just let her live, you think. Deal?

“I read your identification in your wallet,” the killer says. He recites your name, your address. He recites your driver's license number, which you haven't even memorized yourself, but it sounds right, as if he has memorized it. He throws your purse at you, and it hits you in the chest. You did not think your purse was so heavy. You did not think there was that much in there that could cause so much pain. Does your hairbrush with your hair and your daughters' hair in it really weigh so much? Does your ChapStick you never use weigh that much? Do your coins? And suddenly you remember how to say coins in Spanish,
monedas,
and you wonder why you couldn't remember that before when you were helping Alex with her homework and she asked you what the word meant. How is it that you remember this word when a killer is standing over you holding a long-bladed knife, and his arms, up and down, are covered in scratch marks, and your leg is throbbing and your mouth is so dry? Is this another thing to write and tell these writers of thrillers about, that even when you are faced with possibly losing life, with the lives of your family being lost, you remember stupid things you could not remember before?
Monedas
sounds heavier than coins, and now you are not surprised that for a moment you cannot breathe when your purse is thrown at your chest. All the
monedas
in Spain seems to have been thrown at your ribcage at once. The killer turns and leaves. He is not going to kill you. You will live. He is off to kill someone else. Someone young. You are too old to be killed. What good fortune, you think. But it is not something you want to tell others. I was spared because of wrinkles like rakes beside my eyes, and loose skin at my neck. You hear Chris's car drive off, and when it's gone you look up. A thin sliver of a moon in the shape of a curved sewing needle hangs up there, providing a bit of light, though not really enough to see much more than the leaves, which no longer appear warm red and gold, as they did under the beam of the flashlight, but look frosted, as if suddenly the temperature's dropped and everything's become white and crisp to the touch. You feel inside your purse, but your phone is not there. You do not have a way of letting anyone else know where you are. You think about what Thomas told you, that there is a zoo in Miami that uses iPads so that orangutans can order food by pointing at their choices on a screen. They have all the intelligence they need to speak, but their vocal cords aren't developed like ours. And here you are, you think, a human in the woods without your old-model flip phone to call for help. You use your vocal cords, but your voice just gets thrown around like a loser in a wrestling match landing hard on a gym mat. You can hear the wind take your scream and slam it back down when another crosscurrent of wind intersects it, and your cries for help end up by your feet.

You start walking toward where you think the road is. At least there you won't get as lost as you would deeper in between the pines and maples and bushes with thorns that embed themselves in your pants and continue to prick you long after you've left the place where they've grown up in tangles and thickets. You think how you will probably never remember where this spot off the road in the woods is, and how if you were in the woods by your house, or anywhere else, it would seem like the same woods. You would never be able to bring anyone back here to show them the blood that dripped from your leg and onto the leaf-covered ground. You would never be able to show them where the killer stood over you and threatened to kill your teenage daughter if you turned him in. Only the woods can talk for you now. The tree you leaned up against remembers the feel of the warmth of your back on its deeply lined bark. The sapling you grabbed onto so you wouldn't fall as the killer pushed you forward on your wounded leg remembers your weak grasp. Only those things know, and like the orangutan without the right vocal cords, they really can't speak.

The moon lights up the flat expanse of the road more brightly than the woods. You feel something shore up against your leg in the wind and reach down to find a page of Paul's story. The killer must have thrown it out the window before he left, unimpressed by the metaphors, the inexact images, the turn the writing took at the end. You can hear more pages fluttering around you, but you only keep this one page, because it happens to be the first page, and so much possibility lies in the first page when the final pages aren't there to end it. Bobby Chantal, for example, could still be alive. And you could end up not being here on this dark road, walking for what seems like forever, wishing you had never met Paul or Chris, wishing your bad leg would just remove itself from your hip and try walking on its own, because it's slowing you down. You don't look forward to not telling the story of the killer you cannot identify because he knows about your teenage daughter.

This is the tree in the woods cooling off after you lean up against it. This is the wind taking the warmth and sending it over the deer sleeping in a small valley on tall grass bent by their bodies now bedded down. These are the other pages of Paul's story mixing with leaves, acting like leaves, blowing up in currents, sailing down and wafting side to side. This is rain coming days later, dropping on the printed words, magnifying briefly the B for blood Paul wrote when describing the first moments he found Bobby Chantal with her throat slit.

This is more rain, sopping the page, and this is even harder rain, able to tear the paper because of its force. This is the paper, not even as hardy as the thin fallen leaves it's mixed with, crumbling, losing its whiteness, and becoming unrecognizable after the season's first snow.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

T
his is days later when you open the paper and see the picture of your killer standing in front of a fence at a school where sheep are penned to keep down the growth of poison ivy. He is not wearing the polo shirt and khakis. He is wearing blue jeans and a button-up-the-front shirt. He is smiling, and so for a moment you're not sure if it's really him, but then you notice the unmistakable wrinkles on his forehead that are so deep and look like steps you could actually climb. The newspaper headline reads, “Even School Secretary Pitches In to Stop the Itch,” and the article describes how faculty, staff, and students alike all take turns on weekdays and weekends watering the sheep named Cindy, Happy, and Iris, who eat the hardy poison weed with gusto in addition to occasional flakes of hay. Under the killer's picture is his name, Floyd Arneson. This is the other headline on the same page of the newspaper: “College Student Mindy Reynolds Missing for Five Days Straight—Last Seen at a Gas Station on I-91 on Her Way to Her Parent's Home for a Visit.” This is the picture of Mindy Reynolds smiling, holding up her fingers in a peace sign to whoever is behind the camera.

This is Thomas walking toward you with a cup of tea while you're reading the article, and this is you quickly folding the paper over so he can't see. This is the fireplace door being opened and you stuffing the paper inside, watching the smoke rise, and this is Thomas telling you to sit and have your tea before it gets cold. This is Thomas taking the cup from you when you're done and telling you to go upstairs and sleep. You look tired, and your leg, which you told him was pierced by a stick when you took a nasty fall in the woods, will never heal. This is your dream where the killer comes to your house and starts asking for your teenage daughter, and this is you screaming in your sleep for the killer to get out, and this is Thomas coming into the room smelling like chainsaw oil, shaking your shoulder, telling you it's okay, it's just a dream. This is Sofia at the dinner table, feeling your mother eyes all over her, feeling you staring at the way she brings the fork to her mouth and lifts her head back to drink from a glass. “Mom, what?” Sofia says, and you lower your eyes and say, “Your hair looks so pretty. The chlorine must be giving it highlights.” And this is Sofia ignoring your remark and then complaining about how she ages up and has her birthday right before age group championships this year, and she'll never make the new cut times, and why couldn't you have had her a week later? she asks, and you answer, “You were premature. You were the one who wanted to come out early,” you say, and your daughter says, “Right, it's always my fault.” “No, it was probably mine. I did too much that day. I washed the windows in the house. I took too long a walk with the dog. It wasn't your fault.”

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.

 

T
his 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.