This is the Water (23 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

T
his is Thomas coming into the room while you are sleeping, your eyes probably moving back and forth in a dream. He thinks he should wake you. The dream seems disturbing. It's no wonder, of course, that you're in turmoil. When he picked you up from the hospital a few nights ago you were almost catatonic, only telling him in a monotone voice how you fell in the woods on a stick after you and Chris stopped at a rest stop, and you ended up with a hole in your leg that required ten stitches. You probably passed out for a minute, you said, and that's when Chris's car was stolen. The doctors wanted you to stay in the hospital longer, but you refused. You said you wanted to get home and be with your children. This is you turning your head left and right on the pillow, and it sounds as though you're trying to talk in your sleep but can't make the words come out. Thomas lies down next to you and puts his hand on your shoulder. “Annie?” he says, and you wake up so suddenly he thinks it's impossible that you were just sound asleep. You turn to him and hold on to him and he holds you back. It's been a long time since you've turned to him and wanted to be in his arms. He kisses you on the top of your head and smoothes your hair away from your face. “Bad dream?” he asks. “I didn't talk in my sleep, did I?” you ask. “You tried to, but nothing came out. What are you afraid of saying?” Thomas asks, and you notice how he's been looking at you the whole time, not turning away as he usually does or picking up a magazine to read at the same time you talk to him. “Keep waking me up if you think I'm about to talk in my sleep, okay?” you ask. “Sure,” Thomas says. He begins to rub your back, and it feels good, a little of the tension you've been feeling is worked out with his hands. You've always liked Thomas's hands. They're strong and big and when he holds your hand, his hand nearly covers all of yours. Maybe this is all you have wanted for so long now, just to have Thomas hold you and run his hands on your back and look at you. You think of Paul, and how you have not thought of him for a few days, ever since the killer. You do not feel yourself wanting to be with Paul or have him kiss you. You want to be as far away from Paul now as you can be.

In the periods during which you half-slept and dozed and dreamed fitfully, you considered moving from your home. You and your family would move to another state, another country. The killer would not travel to find your daughter thousands of miles away, would he? You picture living down by the equator. Your children could go to the local school. They would become fluent in Spanish. They would become dark from the daily sun. They would become unrecognizable to people they once knew. They could surf in the waves every day. They could eat fresh fruit and fish. What was the point, really, of living here? Things were hard here. The summers were bug-ridden. If you spent any time outdoors, your skin would raise in welts from deerflies. From time to time you would find your fingers at your scalp, feeling crusted blood from insect bites. In winter the roads, muddy from fall rains, dried in rigid ruts that grabbed your tires and made your car drive in hard frozen tracks other vehicles had left, and you had no choice but to follow them. You could see your children living down there by the ocean. Everyone so heavy on land, taking to the water and racing down the clear faces of waves. Your daughters learning to be ocean-brave, paddling far out, ignoring days of jellyfish tides, and jumping from cliffs to the blue depths far down below. Thomas and you sleeping with the French doors open and a breeze skimming over you both as you slept naked and still in a white-sheeted bed.

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.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

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.

Paul and Chris walk in together, and they make a beautiful pair. Paul with his hair pulled back in his ponytail, wearing his leather jacket, and Chris wearing an oversized sweater the color of light-green sea glass. They are smiling at everyone as they enter, as if they've just arrived at an awards ceremony and not the foyer of the facility. They look at you and smile and wave, and you do the same back, and isn't this wonderful, you think. None of what's been happening has ever happened and here the king and queen of the swim team have arrived, arm in arm, happy again. When Chris does catch you alone for a moment while you're in the ladies' room before your long drive home, she puts her hands squarely on your shoulders. She wants you to look at her. “Tell me you're all right?” she says. You nod. “I know you'll never tell me what happened that night, but I have a feeling it almost got you killed. You sure you're all right?” she says. “Yes,” you say and then, even louder, “Yes.” You are all right. The nothingness is back. Chris is relieved, you can tell. She looks more beautiful than ever. You can't believe she doesn't catch sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and stop to stare. The mintiness of her is so strong you expect to see mint on her body somewhere, pinned to her breast or adorning her hair. “Just so you know,” she says, “things are better now between Paul and me. Even though Pam Chantal's going through with the exhumation, it's going to be all right. Paul's lawyer is going to be involved every step of the way, and who knows, it might not even come to that. Maybe the killer will strike again and be caught this time, and Paul's DNA won't matter.”

“What's he going to tell the police?” you say. Suddenly you feel the fear rising up inside you like blood rising in your face because what if somehow the killer thinks that because you know Paul you are working with him to have the killer caught.

“Whatever he knows, that's all,” Chris says. When she turns to leave you want to reach out and grab on to her. Don't let him, you want to say, but you know it won't work. Paul has to save himself and his family first.

 

T
his is the killer on the pool deck, standing in his swimsuit. This is the killer lowering himself in. This is the water wanting to part when he turns and enters the water, wishing it didn't have to let him in, but it can't do anything to stop him. This is the water sighing, having to close up around the killer, having to enter and sit in his ear as he swims a poor sidestroke crooked down the lane, having to meet the burn of the rash on his arms with its coolness and its chlorine.

 

T
his is the drive home. Your arms itching and you trying to scratch them with one hand on the wheel. You see the red streaks up and down your forearms the way you saw them on the killer's arms, and now you also feel small bumps on them, and you know what they are because you have had poison ivy before. This is strange, of course, because you haven't been near poison ivy recently, unless of course the killer walked you through it in the woods. You do know that you can get it from clothes that have the rash-producing oil on them, and you guess that when the killer grabbed you and pushed you, the oil rubbed off on you. Your body's always been slow to react to poison ivy, sometimes taking a week before it appears. You've even gotten it weeks later from clothes you wore while walking through it, the oil rubbing off onto the material of your pants, for instance. It's horrible, thinking that something of the killer's has physically transferred to you. You scratch even harder, thinking you don't care if you scar your skin. You already will have the scar on your leg. “Mom, stop scratching,” Sofia says without looking up from the book she's reading. You grip the steering wheel with both hands, holding on tight so you don't scratch. When you get to the house, you wish you could take the steering wheel inside with you, because holding on to it helps.

That evening Thomas takes out the rifles and fits one against Alex's shoulder and says, “It fits fine.” He shows her the safety, how to load, how to use the German Zeiss scope that he says is such a strong lens, and how to eject the bullets. Tomorrow is the first day of youth hunting season, and Alex wants to go up high on the ridge at the back of the house and hunt deer. You know how to use the rifle yourself. You have hunted before with Thomas, but now is a good time to listen to him give Alex the lesson, because you may need to refresh your memory. Thomas has Alex focus on the hillside out your living room window, adjusting the scope on what must be one of the few remaining leaves left on the trees. “Don't worry about the kick,” he says, and you know that the kick of the rifle is not anything to think about at first. It never hurts at first. It's later, when you are walking into the house that seems so warm compared to the tree you were leaning up against for hours waiting for a buck to walk through the woods, that you feel the ache in your arm. You wish Sofia wanted to hunt also. Anything that might help to protect her. She does not know how to hold the rifle. She doesn't want to learn. Thomas tells her that even if she doesn't want to hunt, she should know how to use a gun, since we have guns in the house, but every time he tries to teach her she goes up to her room and reads a book, and he can't talk her into coming back down.

What startles you isn't the explosive sound of the shot Alex takes, but the ringing phone. You see that it's a call from Paul's cell phone, and you stare at the number on the small screen, but you don't answer it. Avoiding him is best, especially for the safety of your family. You're afraid you may tell Paul something about the killer if you talk to him again.

That night you think you've been talking in your sleep, and you wake up sweating with fear, thinking you have given away details about the killer and Thomas has heard them and will tell the police. You look over, and Thomas is sleeping, so maybe you're still safe. Maybe you haven't said anything. Maybe Sofia is still safe and the killer won't ever touch her. After all, you have been holding up your end of the deal. Haven't you? Even when Sofia was being mean to Alex, grabbing a book she was reading out of her hands, you didn't tell Sofia she was being mean. Instead you told Sofia that you were pleased to know the two of them had an interest in the same reading material, that you thought it was sweet that Sofia wanted to read what her sister, three years younger, was reading. Very big-sisterly of you, you said to Sofia, and Sofia groaned, handing the book back to Alex—it was more like she threw it back at her, but at least it was you keeping up your end of the deal. It was the new positive you, and you were seeing what you thought were results. Sofia seems to be standing straighter these days. She isn't as shy. She even asked a salesperson for help when she was buying a battery for her watch the other day, not expecting you to ask for her. When you go to the bathroom and then go back into bed, the sweat in your sheets has already turned cold. The coyotes outside seem as if they're sitting strategically around your house in a circle. Their calls coming from all sides, and you and Thomas and the children at the center. Wide awake now, you scratch at your arms.

You read that some use gasoline on poison ivy rashes and some use juniper leaves. Some use a paste made from aspirin and some use bleach. Some slide into bathwater sprinkled with raw oats. Some use nail-polish remover, some use aloe, some use motor oil. Some get a shot from the doctor. Some use extremely hot water, some use extremely cold. Some swear by toothpaste, some by roll-on deodorant. You swear by the knife. You do not mind the cuts you have made up and down your arm. Anything to gouge out the rash. When Thomas sees you he yells, “What have you done?” and he gets the gauze and the Betadine and leans close to you and you realize the season of the wood is over and that hunting season has begun. He does not smell like the chainsaw oil anymore, instead he smells like the gun oil he uses to clean the rifles. This is a good smell, you think to yourself. Makes you think of the refreshing cold air of fall. He leans so close you can see how his hair is graying at the temples and thinning at the top, where you can see he has a small brown birthmark in the shape of the state you live in. “Amazing,” you say, and he asks what, and you tell him about the birthmark, and he says it's always been there and how was it you have never noticed before. Seeing the birthmark you feel closer to him. You suppose it's because it probably makes him look more like he did when he was first born. You like to picture him as a boy sometimes, because then he is easier to talk to and you are not so worried he will make fun of your everyday observations. The Betadine paste is brown and translucent and makes you look as though you've been seriously hurt. After he screws the top back on the paste, he tells you the best thing for the rash is time. Of course, he is right, and you nod. You stand up and take the Betadine and put it away on the shelf in the bathroom. He still stands and looks at you, but after a while he walks away. You can hear his feet on the staircase and his footsteps are so familiar you think how you could never mistake them for anyone else's. You know everyone's footsteps in the house. You know the sound of Sofia, who wears slippers that are too big for her feet and drag on the floor. You know the sound of Alex, the way she walks quickly and lightly. You can hear Thomas sitting down at the kitchen table, opening up a magazine, entering, probably, the universe, the solar system, the human body, the mind.