This is the Water (9 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
his is Thomas the next morning saying, listen to this. This is you wanting to put your hands over your ears, because you are not in the mood to listen to observations about the decline of civilization or how Alzheimer's is transmissible or how some people have more chimpanzee DNA than others. You are going up the stairs while he talks to you from down below. You have to put together all of the photos you took of the last wedding you shot. You have to go on your computer and fix and crop what you can. You are known for your portraits, people in this part of New England have asked for you specifically to shoot their weddings, and you have to make sure you have a few that look good up on a wall or on a shelf for a lifetime, even on those long winter days when the snow outside has covered the windows and turned the house dark. When you're done, you have to send them off to the bride and hope that she likes the photos of herself that you like, but just in case, you will send her some where you think she doesn't look that attractive. You send her these because you are always surprised how when you just send the women the photos where you think they look their best, they ask if there are any others, and often pick the photo you would never have guessed as their prize portrait. “Listen to this,” Thomas says again from below. He reads to you from the newspaper. “A sixteen-year-old girl named Kim Hood was found outside a rest stop with her throat slit on a stretch of interstate highway close to exit thirteen.” You miss a step and go down, hitting your shin on the stairs with wide stringers. You turn and sit down on a step, rubbing your shin, whose first layer of skin has been peeled off, looking like a sunburn peel. Where you sit, the sun streams in from the window at the top of the stairs, lighting you up with a shaft of light. If you were a bride or groom, or guest at a wedding, it would be the perfect dreamy light to photograph yourself in. “Say the name again,” you say, but you don't need to hear it again because you heard it right the first time. You are just asking to hear it again because you need a moment to put it all together. The girl is someone you know from the swim team. The interstate rest stop is the place where Paul told you Bobby Chantal was killed. “Kim Hood,” Thomas says, and this time his voice sounds as if it's coming from far away, but really Thomas is closer to you now, and it is the strange effect of the way the house was designed, making voices sound far away when they're coming from somewhere close. Thomas is coming around the corner of the stairwell with the paper to show you the picture of Kim Hood. “No suspects have been found,” he reads, and close enough to you now, he places the folded paper in your lap, where the beam of light falls against the words, as well as a droplet of what you think must be milk and must have dropped from his spoon as he slurped up his cereal. This is Kim's face in the picture. Her smile looking friendly, her clear blue eyes not looking blue but just vaguely clear, since the photograph was reprinted in black-and-white. Her hair looking wet, making you think that perhaps the photograph was taken right after a practice in the pool, the same pool you all swim in.

 

T
his is the coach, a woman who, when she hears about Kim's death, almost falls out of her chair in her office with the big windows that look out over the pool. She grabs onto the armrest of her chair as if she's about to take off on a plane and doesn't like flying. She says “oh, no” so many times while she listens to someone tell her the story on the phone. Mandy, who is mopping the deck, sees the coach saying “oh, no” and holding her hand to her head, and thinks she will go inside once Coach is off the phone and ask her if she's all right. When she is off the phone, Coach thinks of canceling practice that day, and then she thinks she will have a mindful practice for the team instead, a practice where the swimmers are mindful of what they're doing. Only today they will not be mindful of how they are kicking or stroking or breathing. They will have a practice where they think continuously of Kim. They will think of her generosity, her team spirit, a time when they talked to her, a time when she made them feel good, because Kim was always making her teammates feel good and cheering for them. They will think of how hard she swam, how much she tried in practice to get the strokes right. They will be mindful of how she was such a good student. When Coach comes out of her office and onto the deck, Mandy asks her if everything's all right, and when Coach starts to tell her, she starts crying and Mandy hugs Coach and Coach says, “I think I better just go for a walk,” and Mandy walks with her to the front entrance of the facility and pats her shoulder before Coach heads for the dirt path that loops around the facility and meets up with a dirt road that has deep holes in it filled with standing water and hovering mosquitoes.

 

T
his is our killer. He has no interest in going to jail, or being punished for his crimes, or being recognized and publicized. I am the most dangerous kind of killer, he thinks to himself while using a paper towel to slowly wipe his face of the crumbs that have collected there from eating his turkey-and-sweet-pickle sandwich. So many experts would hypothesize, he's sure, that he kills young women because of some deep-seeded psychological reason. Perhaps he had a mother who beat him. But none of that's accurate. He simply likes to kill young women. The last girl, Kim, was strong. He could feel her fighting against him, the muscles in her back toned as hard as wire cables from doing the butterfly. He liked how her hair smelled like a mix of chlorine and shampoo, the smell of both those things coming through his nose and trying to compete with each other to define her overall scent. He liked how young Kim was. He especially enjoyed watching the light go out of Kim's eyes when she died in his arms. He feels he has that light inside of him now because he kissed her eyes. He feels special because of it, and growing up, he never felt special. He always felt anything but special. His parents were addicted to heroin. The only thing special to them was their fix. They would get high on the couch together in their trailer home that was on stilts and did not have a foundation. Beneath their home there was garbage—empty bags of snack-size chips and beer bottles with faded, peeling labels. Watching his parents, he would notice how dull their eyes became when they were high. Sometimes he would go up to them on the couch, next to the coffee table with the syringes and the spoon and the lighter, and he would tug on his mother's hiked up skirt or his father's loose jeans. “What's to eat?” he would ask. “Are you really hungry?” they would say, and they would let their heads fall on the back of the couch while they smiled, their eyes cloudy, looking as if they were swimming in milk. I'll never be that way, he thought to himself, and still does.

He stands and puts his clothes in the dryer after they're done with the wash cycle. I am just like any other man, he thinks. I perform domestic duties. I have a job. I pay my taxes. I curse in heavy traffic. I floss my teeth with floss that glides. I will never be caught. My last thought, before I die, will be congratulatory—I will say to myself, How clever you were. No one ever found out. There is something reassuring about knowing what your last thought will be right before you die. As if, somehow, you have cheated death. All those women I have killed, they had lives ahead of them they looked forward to living, but I cheated death by taking them before natural death could. Doesn't that make me just as powerful as death itself?

 

T
his is night at Chris and Paul's house. Chris can hear cars on the road because their house is on a main stretch. Their road leads to the shopping malls and to the facility, about twenty minutes away, but after a certain hour, no one travels the road and you can only hear the sounds of animals, sometimes the chattering and trilling of a raccoon in a treetop talking to a mate, sometimes the grunt or hoot of a black bear come to bat at the hanging bird feeder to knock it down with its sharp claws and eat the seeds. This is Chris, when Paul gets home late at night, lying awake in bed and listening to the door swing open and closed, listening to the dog's nails clack on the floor as she goes up to him, probably stretching first and yawning, the dog going in for a pat on the head before returning to the corner and falling back asleep. This is Chris wondering if Paul's going to stay in the kitchen or the living room for a while and read before he comes to bed. This is Chris wondering if she should get up and put her robe on and walk out of the bedroom to wherever he is and ask him where he was. This is Chris wondering if she really wants to know where he was and if maybe, as she's standing there with her robe on, she should just go into Cleo's room and check on her, or maybe she should go into Cleo's room and lie down next to her and fall back asleep with her arm wrapped around her daughter's side and the outline of a mobile of our solar system clearly visible as it turns slowly above their heads. This is Chris already knowing the answer she will get from Paul if she asks him where he was, because it is the answer he has been giving her for weeks now. “I've been writing in my office at the college,” he says. He doesn't explain any more than that. He doesn't say he really works better there and that's why he's doing it. This is Chris turning over when Paul finally does come into bed so that she is not facing him. This is Chris closing her eyes and breathing in deeply, thinking that what she's smelling could very well be the smell of another woman, or the smell of his office, or the smell of the air freshener that dangles from his rearview. This is Chris thinking that most likely what she's smelling is not even him, but herself, the garlic on her fingertips from when she sliced it to put in the pasta sauce she made for herself and Cleo for dinner, or the conditioner she used on her hair, or the lilac bush she brushed against when she went for a walk. This is the night, getting darker and quieter, and the moon and the stars hiding behind clouds so thick they seem more like walls and not mere water droplets you're supposed to be able to walk through. This is Chris listening to Paul's breathing beside her, wondering now as he falls into sleep what or whom he'll be dreaming of. She remembers how when they were first married they would fall asleep on their sides, her front facing his back. The only way she could fall sleep was if her arm was draped over him, hugging him. Now she can't fall asleep if their legs are even grazing each other. Tonight, though, it doesn't matter that she's all the way over on her side of the bed and not even close to him. She can't sleep at all. She has read the paper, about the girl named Kim on the team who was killed. She is so angry with the killer. She is angrier with him than she is at Paul, who she thinks might be cheating on her. It is an old anger that she feels. Anger with a history. From what? she thinks, and then she knows. Anger with having Beatrice taken away from her when she was a young girl. Anger with those horrid rapists. It's what's inside of her. It's what Chris mistakenly thought all this time was a feeling of tiredness she couldn't get rid of. Suddenly she realizes what the feeling is: pure anger. It's almost a relief now, not to be angry with Paul any longer and just to be angry with this killer, but in the same moment she fears for Cleo, hoping the killer doesn't decide to target another girl on the team. What would she do if Cleo were murdered? She doesn't even want to consider it, but her mind, going too fast for her to control, throws images together, almost all at once, of Cleo running from the killer, her blond hair flashing white in the dark, of Cleo with blood pouring out of her neck, of Cleo being lowered into a grave white with frost. That killer better be caught, she thinks, and it isn't until she goes to wipe a tear from her eye that she realizes she's been grabbing her blankets the whole time, keeping a corner of them clenched in a ball in her fist while imaginary images of the death of her daughter keep coming at her.

Part Two

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Y
ou can lie in bed after Thomas wakes up and goes downstairs to eat breakfast, and think about all that has happened. You can look around your room at the knotty pinewood that resembles, in some places, faces of people who are laughing, or a bird looking up, its beak raised. You can put your hands behind your head and say to yourself you don't understand how it came to be that you are smitten, and, yes, this is the word that you think is appropriate, smitten with another man. You'd like to call Paul and ask him if he's heard about Kim, the girl from the swim team who was killed on the highway. You wonder if he thinks that, after all these years, it could be the same man who killed Bobby Chantal. You get yourself up and then you get your girls up, it's getting late now, and you have to be at practice at seven a.m. and it is now 5:50 and it takes you at least forty-five minutes to drive there. At this rate, the girls will end up having to take their cereal bowls into the car, and they will most likely spill their cereal as you go around the tight curves and over the potholes the flood left from the year before, and as you try to avoid the roadkill that seem to be everywhere these days. You wonder, as you're getting into the car and reminding your daughters at the same time to make sure they have their swimsuits and goggles in their swim bags, if Chris would have married Paul if she had known he left a woman for dead at a rest stop. You wonder how come you're so forgiving yourself. You can't believe you're so smitten. What happened to maturing with age and placing the family first? Is this what Anna Karenina felt when she was cheating on her husband with Vronksy? Did she feel that it was beyond her control, that a pursuit of love and emotional honesty overrode her obligation to be dutiful, and that if she didn't follow her heart then she just wasn't being true to herself and would rather die than live a lie? Or did she not think at all, was she not capable of analyzing her situation, but only able to act and react? All you know is that when you last saw Paul at the pool at a practice you felt light and giddy, your heart skipped, and you think even your feet felt elevated off the ground. You talked quickly and you laughed often and you gestured using broad, embarrassing strokes with your hands. When you caught sight of your reflection in a window glass while talking to him, you saw that you were flushed and your mouth was curved up in a smile, even if what you might have been talking about wasn't funny at all.

Paul leaving that woman at the rest stop was so long ago, you think maybe it doesn't matter. You think how it is easy to make mistakes when you're young. You remind yourself of mistakes you made yourself—things you said to people you wish you hadn't. When you get to the pool and you see Chris with puffy eyes coming up to you wanting to talk, you wish it were Paul instead. You wish you could talk to Paul and not Chris, who says, “Can I talk to you a minute?” and you know it will be much longer than a minute. You sit with her at the tall café table with the tall stools that are by the windows looking into the pool. In the pool, when you're swimming, you're not thinking about your brother at least. It's as if the water is trying to protect you from those thoughts. When you swim, you are thinking about swimming. Whether your arms are straight enough out in front of you after a flip turn. Whether your kick is strong enough. Whether your head should be tucked lower on your entry with the fly. You sit with your swim bag on your lap because you would like to jump in the water soon, and by holding it on your lap you think you will be that much closer to feeling the cool water waking you up.

You don't know how to keep Chris from crying. Her tears slide down her cheeks. You see things in her eyes you've never seen before. Rods and pie shapes and flecks in her irises. It's as if her eyes were in the middle of exploding, and you were seeing all the bits and pieces shooting off in all directions. She tells you it's not about Paul, it's about Kim. She can't believe how awful she feels. She didn't know the girl well. You tell her, of course, she's been going through a lot lately, and after all, it is tragic. It's all only normal, you say. You feel your swim bag in your lap now feeling very heavy, as if it just got heavier to remind you that you should jump in the pool and do some laps, and work on your fly, and work on your free, and work on your breast, and work on your back. There is so much to remember. With the fly, keep from diving deep. With the free, keep your kick strong. With your breast, remember to glide. With your back, move your body, not your head, from side to side. With Chris, keep telling her everything will be all right. You watch Chris shaking her head. You wonder why she's smiling. You think it is maybe because she is trying to be strong, but she can't, and she knows it, and so all she can do is smile, laughing at herself. You reach out and grab her hand and cover it with yours. You tell her to go on up to the bleachers and watch her daughter in practice. Tell her you've noticed how Cleo has improved her breast. She's using the rocking motion much like the motion she uses in butterfly to give her the forward thrust. Tell her you've noticed that the girls who do that are the ones who seem to win all of their races, mention other girls on the team who do this, lower your head when Kim comes to mind, but don't mention the name Kim because it's just too sad right now to think of the poor girl who was killed at the rest stop.

While swimming an easy five-hundred free to warm up, you see Chris in the bleachers watching the team. There's a sad smile on her face and even from far away you can see how beautiful Chris is. You can also see how men sitting in the bleachers just reading books or working on their computers while waiting for their daughters to finish practice glance up from what they're doing once in a while to look at Chris and smile at her. You feel slow in the water. You must be tired. You remember waking up in the night when Thomas woke to shut the windows, and you remember flashes of lightning breaking up the darkness over the hillside. You remember the dog barking for a little while, a bark that made you think there was someone coming up to the house, but then you fell back asleep, telling yourself it was probably just a deer. You live far out in the country. You live so far out in the country that a while back your dog had run to the low kitchen windows and barked at a moose that was a few hundred feet away, standing by an old burn pile where Thomas had set some brush on fire to get rid of it. The moose was a cow, and did not have the signature antlers, but she was big, and the barking did not send her tearing off through the woods back to where she had come from, as a skittish deer would have done. Instead the moose stumbled around for a while, grazing, and then she lifted her head in the air and turned to the left, ambling off. Through the window you could hear the clomp of hooves the size of dinner plates as she tread over the burnt ground.

You break into fly. It feels good to feel your heart pumping faster. You swim two laps without taking a breath every time you bring out your hands, but then you switch to taking a breath every time. Fly was always a challenge. The swim-team girls practicing in the lane over from you make it look easy, though. You try to watch them underwater while you swim next to them. How was it they could kick while their hands entered the water, and then kick again as their hands exited the water, without looking spastic, the way you knew you looked when you did it? You think you hear the water sigh. You wonder if it was you sighing instead. Then you wonder if it could possibly be the water sighing, and you wonder what it was sighing about. Was it a sad sigh? Did it miss the streamlined body of Kim Hood moving through it? Then you think you hear the water whispering again, only it's more like the sound of a strong wind that has been recorded through a microphone and played back. The sound whips about your ears as you swim, sounding as if it is repeating one word with each gust. It sounds as if it is saying “stop, stop, stop,” and you wonder why. What exactly should you stop? But that is not so difficult to figure out. There are so many things you should stop. You should stop bringing your right arm in close to your body on your pull in the freestyle. You should stop kicking as if you weren't really kicking at all. You should keep your head higher. You should stop diving so deep in the fly. You should stop thinking about Paul. You used to think about your brother too much, and you'd swim to forget him. Now you think about Paul in order to forget your brother, and thinking about Paul is like diving too deep in the fly. It makes the recovery that much harder, you have that much more water to lift yourself out of, that much more time wasted before you can lift up your head and breathe. Instead you should be thinking about your girls. You should be making sure Sofia really doesn't need your help getting used to menstruation. How can you assume that everything she needs to know she read in a book or she learned from her friends? You think how you should be trying harder to listen to Thomas when he tells you about articles he has read in magazines. You think how it's his way of talking to you, and it's always been his way of talking to you. It's not as if there were a time when you were first married or before you were married that he sat down with you and asked you to tell him all your deepest feelings. Even before you were married he would say, “Hey, listen to this,” and he would tell you an idea of his or about some article he was reading. When you responded, or just understood what he was trying to tell you, you knew he felt closer to you because you now shared a common language with him, and it was his favorite language. For him it was better than intimacy. You tell yourself you will stop thinking about your brother and Paul and then you do stop, because the susurrations you hear from the water telling you to stop aren't stopping. You get out and think that if you just go to the bathroom and jump back into the pool, maybe then the sounds will stop. When you go into the locker room, you see Alex sitting on the bench. She is holding her head and crying. “It hurts, Mom,” she says. Ah, this is why the water told me to stop, you think. She hit her head coming up for a turn at the wall on the pole that extends under the blocks to hold onto before taking off on a backstroke start. There is a little blood, but she will be all right. You hold her. You get her an ice pack. You tell her to sit out the rest of the practice.

When you go back into the water to finish your swim, the water no longer tells you to stop. You have a good workout, doing a set of ten fifties on the fifty easily, until you see state troopers walk onto the pool deck. They look stiff in their uniforms and overly dressed compared to the swimmers on the team, who wear their low-backed practice suits, and compared to the coach, who wears a team tee shirt and shorts. You see the coach tell the swimmers to keep going on with their set, and then she talks to the troopers. You wish you could hear what they are saying, but of course you cannot. Swimming in the pool with everyone now doing a kick set makes it difficult to hear anything but splashing, and also the music is blaring away. It isn't until you are out of the water and grabbing your bag to go into the showers that you overhear one gray-haired trooper, with a nose that looks as if it has been bashed in more than once, say that he was on the original case years ago when a young nurse was murdered at the same rest stop, and since then, he says, there have been several other women murdered, and he thinks the cases are all related. Even though you are warmed up from doing your swimming, you suddenly feel cold, as if the facility's skylights have opened up suddenly, letting in a cold draft that runs over your wet skin and makes you shiver and makes you walk quickly to the locker room and into the warm showers. The boy in the wheelchair is in the next shower again. He is repeating “water, water, water,” and his aide is telling him again, “Yes, you're right. We're in the shower. This is the water.” You close your eyes under the hot shower, and an image of Paul comes to you, and then you know you must wipe the image away. I will not think of him anymore, you tell yourself. “Water, water, water,” you hear the boy in the wheelchair say, and then to stop yourself from thinking of Paul you say to yourself, Stop, stop, stop, and somehow, for a while, it works, and you do not think of Paul.