This is the Water (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I
t's a break-even day. Your girls gain time in some events, and shave time in others. Sofia does well in the first fifty of her two-hundred free, though, going faster than she ever has. Her coach high-fives her on the deck, telling her the no-breathers really paid off. At the end of the day, after the girls have drunk numerous drinks promising to replenish all the electrolytes they lost throughout the day (of which a total of four minutes was spent racing. The rest of the time they were sitting on blankets under tents with their noses in books, or they were racing around on the grassy grounds of the facility, playing tag and ninja with their teammates), you pack up their things and get ready to head back to the hotel. You and Paul had been timers for most of the day, but timing for different lanes, so you didn't get much of a chance to talk to him except to say hello and to wish Cleo good luck. Now, on the walk back to the parking lot, Paul and Cleo catch up to you. “Can we order pizza again and watch TV in the hotel with Cleo?” your girls plead. You look at Paul to see what he thinks. “It's okay by me,” he says, and you tell your daughters, “Okay, but we're not staying up as late this time. You girls still have to race tomorrow.”

It's funny, really, how you were hoping the girls would request to repeat what they did the last time they stayed in a hotel together. You are the one who, when the door closes behind you and you're inside Paul's room, wishes you had all night to be together, because not much time passes before he goes over to you and you start kissing again, and you think, Oh, good, we can finish the kiss that we started in his office. We can finish all of this and I can go back to Thomas and he can go back to Chris. I can lie beside Thomas in bed and listen to him talk about a fifty-thousand-year-old girl whose remains they found and who, they can tell from her DNA, already carried the gene for a speech disorder. I can listen to him tell me about how submarines are really just cylinders welded together at the seam. I can listen to him tell me that feed laced with antibiotics increases growth in farm animals by 15 to 20 percent. When Paul goes back to Chris, he can sit on his tea-stained bed and look at his silver-framed picture of them jumping into the pond on their wedding day. He can watch her in bed on bright nights when the clouds are gone and the moon is high and he can admire her beautiful face and breathe in deeply, smelling something like mint.

But the more you kiss Paul—the more you feel his mouth inside of yours and his hands on your back, pulling you close—the more you know that the kiss is a kiss that can never be finished, and at the same time it is a kiss that never should have been started. When you pull back from him, you immediately wish you hadn't. The warmth of him, the way he smells of his leather jacket, is something you want to step inside of again. You reach out and hold on to the wall for a moment, and know that the coldness of the hotel room wall is good, even though it feels anything but good, it feels hard and shocking, but at least it is going to wake you up. You won't have to go up to Paul again and start kissing him as long as the wall is there to hold on to.

“You're right. You're right,” he says, and shakes his head at the same time, making you think you were anything but right. Why doesn't he come back to you? Why doesn't he take your hand from the wall and start kissing you again? “Ah, we should eat,” he says. He opens a pizza box that is on the desk. He tears off a slice for you and puts it on a paper plate and hands it to you. You don't want to take a bite. You want to remember the taste of him in your mouth. But neither do you want to hand back the plate, because by holding it you look as if you are in his room for a reason. If another swim-team parent or your girls come knocking on the door, at least you can say you are just there to enjoy a slice topped with mushrooms and sausage.

Now he's telling you about Cleo's race day. How she hit the lane lines on backstroke because, he is sure, the sun was in her eyes. He is looking forward, almost, to the fall season, when the indoor meets will start up again and true backstroke times can be counted. He says that in the middle of the day he finally wised up and bought Cleo some tinted goggles at the facility's front desk. They helped, but still, Cleo didn't do as well as she usually does in the back. The front-facing strokes were a different story. Cleo shaved off time in every one of those.

You take a few bites of the pizza. Paul isn't even eating himself. He is sitting on the end of the other bed. How can we keep from touching each other again? you think. “Can we watch TV?” you say. In a second Paul is grabbing the remote to turn it on.

You don't have a television at home because where you live there is no service to receive the major stations. You are amazed by how many cuts to commercials there are and how loud they are. The pace of the images and the loud, fast music accompanying them makes you eat more quickly, and before you know it Paul has placed another slice on your plate. You pick up the remote and change the channel. When you find the news, you stop and watch. Kim Hood's face takes up the screen. They still have no leads, no clues as to who killed her, but they have established through measurements taken of the other victims' throat wounds that he could be the same man who killed other women at other rest stops around this part of the country. The same state trooper with the battered nose is now being interviewed live. “Yes, that's right,” he says. “We've had a request from Bobby Chantal's daughter to exhume the body of her mother. If we think it will aid in the investigation, we will certainly comply, but there was a thorough examination of the body at the time of the murder.” The news program then cuts to a beautiful blond-haired woman. It takes you a moment to realize it's Chris. You are so surprised you can't say anything, and just watch the TV with your mouth open. The reporter puts the mike in front of Chris, so close to her lips it's as if she wants her to eat it. “Is it true that your client has agreed to exhuming her mother's body? How does she feel about that after all these years?”

“First of all, I'm not her lawyer. She's not my client. I'm just someone who supports her. Exhuming her mother will be emotionally difficult, of course, but she's prepared to go forward and do that if it means putting a stop to the murders. The examination, twenty-eight years ago, can't be considered a thorough one by today's standards, not when scientific testing has advanced so much. Take for instance DNA testing, which wasn't even used in criminal investigations back—”

Paul grabs the remote and shuts off the television. “I can't believe this. What does she think she's doing? Who does she think she is?” He's standing now, staring at you, waiting for some kind of an answer, when there's a knock at the door. Paul doesn't even look as though he's heard it. The knock comes again. It doesn't sound like one of your girls knocking. If your girls were on the other side of the door, they would knock about thirty times in a row and kick the bottom of the door and call out your name, or call you a name even, and demand to be let inside the room. This was an adult knock. “I'll get it,” you say.

Dinah doesn't wait to be asked in. She marches into the room, taking everything in—the condition of the beds, the pizza on the desk, the clothes that are still on the backs of you and Paul.

“Well, what do we have here?” she asks. “A romantic dinner for two? I came by to let you know a bunch of us other swim parents on the floor are ordering in from the nearby Chinese place, but I can see you two have already taken care of your needs.”

“Get out, Dinah,” Paul says, and as he does, he pushes her backward out of the room.

“Hey, hey, didn't mean to interrupt your wild night with Thomas's wife!” Dinah yells, but you can hear she's not yelling it into the room at you or Paul. She is yelling it so that it carries up and down the hotel floor, so that all of the other swim-team parents can hear. You stand up to leave.

“I'd better go,” you say.

“No. No, please don't go. I need you,” Paul says. You play back in your head what Paul just said. They are words Thomas has never spoken to you. He may have told you he needed you for something utilitarian—to help stack the wood, for example—but he has never told you he needed you for anything emotional. Then again, you have never asked Thomas for anything emotional either. When you received the phone call telling you your brother had shot himself, and you stood leaning over the counter, feeling as if your legs would not hold you up any longer, and you started to cry, it was the dog who came to you first, whining beside you, wanting to jump up and lick your face, to see what was the matter. Thomas stood off to the side and watched you, and later that night when you questioned aloud why your brother had done it, why he had shot himself, Thomas told you it was because he was an asshole, and there was no need to waste any more energy discussing it. “Why is he an asshole?” you asked Thomas, and he answered that anyone who leaves three kids without a father is a jerk. You wondered if Thomas was right about your brother being an asshole. You didn't sleep that night, crying intermittently while Thomas slept beside you. You were surprised that grief could cause such insomnia. In the past it had always been worries or anticipation that had made you stay awake.

Now, in this hotel room, Paul is reaching out to you. “It's all right, I'm not going anywhere,” you say, taking him in your arms as you rub his back and stroke his hair. You stay that way until he leads you to the bed, and still in bed you hold him, and you can hear his breathing in your ear. It is sending up the hairs on the back of your neck, and you want him to start kissing you again. You feel ashamed by the desire. The man is obviously devastated. He has just seen his wife on television declaring that she is intent on getting involved in the biggest drama of his entire life, one that he has been trying to keep secret for so many years.

“What if they connect me to the murder?” he whispers in your ear.

“They won't,” you say. “They can't. They don't have your DNA on file. It's not like you're a criminal with a record.”

“I can't believe this is happening. Maybe it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't started spending all that time working in my office on a story about the whole thing. Maybe in a way writing those words down put it out there again, as if the killer himself sensed the words were written and it prompted him to strike again.”

This is you thinking how sometimes you feel as if you're living in a world not where things aren't what they seem, but where things are real that you never knew were real, and every day you're discovering something new—like the possibility of the mere writing down of words making something happen. Even the idea your younger daughter had that the image of a murderer could still be seen on the victim's eyelids seemed possible to you. Maybe when they exhume the body they should pull back what's left of Bobby Chantal's eyelids and see if the image of the killer is still there.

This is you going back into your hotel room after a little while because it's getting late and your girls need to go to bed and Cleo needs to go to bed. These are the girls all under the covers of one bed watching a movie in the dark and asking for just five more minutes and this is you saying, “No, tomorrow's a big day. Off to bed.”

This is you at night trying to sleep in the hotel, hearing the elevator reach your floor occasionally and ding when its doors open, hearing the ice machine down the hall clunk while perpetually making ice. This is you thinking how Paul's head is probably on the other side of the wall from your head. When you hear a faint ringing of a cell phone coming from his room, and then hear his voice, you imagine he's talking to Chris, though you aren't able to hear exactly what he's saying. Maybe there is a rise in the volume of his voice, you think, and he is angry with her for taking on the plight of Bobby Chantal's daughter, for getting involved in something she has no business getting involved in. You think you can hear quiet then, coming from Paul's room, so he must have hung up. Suddenly your phone rings, and you grab it quickly from the bedside table so as not to wake up the girls. You take the phone to the bathroom and shut the door before saying hello. It's Chris. She's excited and talking so loudly you think her voice carries through the phone and could wake up the girls, who need their sleep, who have to wake up early and eat the hotel's lousy breakfast bagels, and pack their bags, and then ride to the meet and squeeze into their cold swimsuits that are still not dry from the day before, and then dive into the cold water and do warm-ups in a pool that only a short time ago reflected the moon through a chilly morning mist that clung close to its surface. “Did you watch the news?” Chris is saying, her voice high and breathy and loud. You can picture Chris's cheeks flushed over her tan, smooth skin. “I did,” you say, but so quietly that Chris says, “What? Speak up. I can't hear you. Annie, are you there? Are you there?” and this is you not wanting to be there for Chris at all. This is you closing the phone, because you have an old-style phone that disconnects when it closes, and you like how quietly you can close it. This is you turning your phone off, thinking if there's really an emergency at home that Thomas needs to call you for, then it will have to be an emergency he can handle by himself, and you know he will, because really even when sometimes he says he needs you to stack wood, or help with some project, he doesn't really need your help at all. You know that if something happens, if he hurts himself or gets sick, he will either tough it out or drive himself to the hospital, and so really, there is no need to keep the phone on ever. You think of how much battery you would save then with your old-style phone if you only ever used it to call out and never left it on for people to call in. Maybe a phone, in its metal and plastic lifetime, is not capable of transmitting bad news more than once. The news of your brother's suicide, for instance. Maybe a phone only gets so many tragedies it can pass on, and then its phone personality, its karma, its existential self, blocks or keeps at bay all other tragedies from ever being received.