This is the Water (11 page)

Driving home your girls ask about Kim. You decide that what is best is that you answer them as truthfully as you can. You are so thankful they are not old enough to drive yet, not while this killer is still at large. Alex wants to know if Kim knew the man who killed her, and Sofia wants to know what Kim was doing at a highway rest stop at night, anyway. Didn't everyone know they were dangerous and you weren't supposed to stop at those things? “Really, they should rename them kill stops,” Sofia says. That night Alex wants you to snuggle with her in bed. You move the assortment of books off her bed and climb in next to her. You slide Alex inside the space you make when you are curled on your side and you stroke your girl's hair and together you stare out at the sky and the trees that are lit up by the light of the stars. Alex says their coach kept making mistakes that day. She would assign them six fifties to practice and then stop them after the fifth fifty, or she would assign them eight one-hundred IMs and then insist they hadn't done all eight of them and make them do an extra.

“It's hard on her,” you say. “She was close to Kim. She coached her for years, and now she's gone.”

“Mom,” Alex says, “she's not just gone. She was murdered. She had her throat slit. Do you think when your throat's slit and you're bleeding to death that you can still see and hear and think?”

“Maybe, for a second, but that's a lot of blood to lose very quickly. I'm sure she just passed out.”

Alex shuts her eyes and then opens them and says, “You know how you can see the silver outlines of shapes under your eyelids even after you've closed your eyes? You know how it looks like a photo? Do you think the police can get that image off the insides of Kim's eyelids? I mean, maybe from her eyes they can get a picture of what Kim last saw. Maybe it was a picture of the guy standing over her, making sure she was really dead. Wouldn't that be cool?” You agree it would be cool. “We'd be rich if we could figure out that process,” Alex says, sounding just like Thomas. You wonder what the last thing was that your brother probably saw. The telephone in his room, where the last phone call was to a friend? The stereo system knobs before they were splattered with blood? A picture of himself on a shelf as a boy holding on to his favorite stuffed animal? It was a dog he named Doggy Dear and its coat was bald in patches from her brother plucking the fur and twirling it between his thumb and forefinger in order to comfort himself.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
week later there is a memorial for Kim in the auditorium at her school. Students are invited, the coach, as well as a few older girls from the swim team. Kim's mother wishes the girls from the team weren't there, only because seeing them reminds her so much of Kim, and also because they look so strange wearing clothes and not their swimsuits. Kim's mother hardly recognizes some of the girls with their hair brushed and dry. They also wear dark dresses and are crying, their heads lowered. The girls she's used to seeing on the team hold their heads high and laugh, but these girls are bent over as their shoulders shake with their sobs. Kim's mother wishes the coach, who is also shaking with sobs, would just do what she does best, and go down the line, facing these girls, telling them they've got to dig in and push themselves harder than ever before. The coach should be high-fiving the girls and wearing her athletic shorts and her team shirt, not this heavy dark dress just past her knees and covering her arms, her hands low in front of her clasped tightly together. Who is this woman? thinks Kim's mother, and then Kim's mother is also lowering her head, the sobs coming again as they have been coming for days, her shoulders even sore from them. Kim's father puts his arm around Kim's mother, but instead of it feeling comforting, it feels weightless, as if he were a small bird just alighting on her for a moment, and she can sense how any moment he will remove his arm, and fly off, and she will be left feeling only the absence of warmth.

 

T
his is an evening at home. This is one of Alex's violin strings breaking in the middle of an étude, and Thomas helping her feed a new one in through the peg holes. This is Sofia curled in her bed, using a stuffed bear as a pillow and reading and rolling her eyes every time Thomas tells her to come downstairs and start doing math work. This is you staring at the photos you took at your latest wedding shoot, thinking how if it weren't your camera the photos came from you would say the photos weren't yours. You barely remember taking them. It seems so long ago because everything prior to the death of Kim seems long ago. This is a strong wind coming up, and the old sheets of aluminum that Thomas uses to cover the stacked woodpiles sail off and sound like thunder, startling everyone, making Sofia look up from her book, making Thomas and Alex turn their heads to look out the window, making you lift your head from looking at photos you could almost swear you never took.

This is the night, when you first close your eyes after turning off the light. This is you in the dark asking Thomas how his work was at the lab today, and this is Thomas not even answering, but falling asleep so quickly you can't believe it when you start to hear him snore. This is you thinking about your brother. That time at the beach when he scooped you up and ran. Why did he do it? you wonder. What was the rush? Why did he run so fast? What was he running away from? You don't know, but you think maybe it holds the key that will unlock answers for you as to why he killed himself years later. You push the thoughts of your brother aside. You remember Paul at the pool instead. You are thankful you've been running into Paul at the pool these past few weeks since you last saw the trooper at the pool. This is you seeing his face at the pool the last time you saw him at practice. He was smiling at you. You want to keep the image there a while, but then Thomas turns on his side, facing away from you, and you are reminded you share your bed with Thomas, and the image of Paul fades, and you are just left with sleep. Sleep is rolling over you, closing off images and voices you have seen and listened to throughout the day. The last voice you hear, though, is Paul's, from that day a few weeks ago when he was saying, “It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.” You can't believe how his words are coming back to you now. It's as if after the first time he said them, you deliberately forgot them. But now you remember, and it jolts you awake.

In the morning, while the girls are still sleeping and Thomas has left for work, you don't even sit down to eat your cereal. You hold it standing at the counter. The voice of Paul saying it was a red Corvair plays over and over again in your mind. You stand because you don't want to have the feeling of the floor beneath the chair sucking you down and you having to hold on to the armrests just to keep yourself from sinking. And what if I just call the police and tell them that information? you think to yourself. Aren't there anonymous tip lines? A tip that's not going to implicate Paul? But no, he should be the one to leave the tip. It would only be right. It could be helpful, really helpful. Maybe this is the same guy, and maybe years ago he owned that red Corvair and there's a record of it and his name could be discovered. Before you realize it, you have finished your cereal. You don't even remember eating it. You've been so lost in thought. You don't remember if you fed the dog either, so you feed her again, even though Thomas always says the dog is fat enough, and that if anything you should let her skip a meal.

That evening you drive the girls quickly to practice. When you're going past the house that looks as if it's folded in half, you forget you're in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone and go forty-five instead. You're all set to tell Paul what he should do. Call the police tip hotline. You even copied the number down on a Post-it note for him. Your daughters look up from the books they are reading. “Jeez-um,” says Sofia. “We're almost at the pool already. You must have speeded all the way here.”

“Look at this booger, Mom,” Alex says as you pull up in front of the pool.

“Do I have to?” you say.

“Yes, look, it's got three of my hairs in it!” Alex says.

“Oh my God, she is not my sister,” Sofia says. “You're all not related to me. Tell me I was adopted, please. Anything but knowing we share the same gene pool.”

“Not only do we share the same gene pool, Sofia, we share the same swimming pool!” Alex says.

“Yuck, I am not looking at your hairy booger,” you say to Alex, laughing. “Go, go, get out of the car and get to practice.”

After the girls leave the car, you wait in the parking lot for Paul to pull up so you can talk to him outside the facility, away from the eyes of the other parents, such as Dinah, who you see has now taken to bringing small binoculars with her to practice, supposedly to be able to watch her daughter, but every now and again you see the lenses of the binoculars focused on you when you're talking to Paul. Usually some parents park and let their kids walk up to the facility, but now you notice that more are dropping their children off at the entrance, afraid the killer might just grab them and force them into his car. Some parents are even getting out of the car and walking their children into the facility and helping them undress in the locker room. In small groups in the foyer, parents talk to each other about the death of Kim. You have seen them hugging each other more often. You have overheard the words “terrible” and “tragic” and “such a beautiful girl” so many times in the past few weeks. You have said those same words yourself when talking to the parents while you are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring in at your children through the glass window and watching them swim, almost afraid to take your eyes off them for minute, not even daring to run errands while they're practicing, because what if? What if one of your own was now in the grave?

It's Chris who drives into the parking lot after dropping off the girls at the facility's front entrance, not Paul.

“Hi. What happened to Paul?” you ask.

“He had work to do at his office, so I brought Cleo instead,” Chris says.

This is you in the parking lot with a slight breeze blowing by, blowing through your hair and making it come up around your face so that it gets in your mouth and your eyes, but blowing through Chris's hair and making it blow back behind her head as if she were an actress on some movie set and not in the facility's parking lot where there are stains on the asphalt from members dumping out the remains of their morning coffee. This is Chris asking you if you've heard any more about Kim's murder. This is Chris saying all she's heard on the news is that the cops don't have a clue, but that they think it may be the same murderer who killed a few nurses at rest stops years ago. “I hope that bastard gets caught,” she says. “I have a feeling he's not done killing young girls, and the next one could be one of ours.” This is you thinking this is the first time you've ever heard Chris say a curse word. This is Chris saying she's tempted to go and hunt the guy down herself. This is you laughing, because she must be kidding. This is her laughing too, saying, “Right, I can't even catch my husband cheating on me when I know he is. How could I possibly catch a murderer?”

This is the wind blowing so that strands of your hair are thick in your mouth, while Chris's hair is still blown back perfectly behind her. These are the mountains around you, storm clouds gathering at their peaks, and next to them there is a hillside of exposed black granite that looks slick with rain, even though it isn't.

This is Kim's mother, at home in Kim's room, touching the silky ribbons on the curtain Kim created with all of the ribbons she ever won. This is Kim's mother wishing she had never asked Kim to take the wall down because she thought it made Kim think winning was more important than improving her technique. This is Kim's mother touching each and every silky ribbon on that homemade curtain because she knows at one time her daughter touched each one of them and maybe touching the ribbons is like touching Kim again.

This is Sofia about to practice with not one, not two, but three suits on for optimum drag. They are three of her oldest suits, the elastic giving way and the inside linings giving out. She has decided that if she swims with three on, then, come the next meet, when she's only wearing her skintight racing suit, she'll be that much faster, and maybe she'll be able to go faster in her first fifty the way Coach has wanted her to do. Everyone on the team is trying to swim harder now that Kim is gone, and now that Coach reminds them so often of how Kim was such a dedicated swimmer and how they should all follow her example. The coach has been reminding them so often that Sofia thinks to herself that it's not the swim team she's on any longer, but the “Kim team,” with the swimmers' every stroke, every breath, every turn, and every kick taken in memory of Kim.

In the pool, the water gets trapped in the stretched-out seat of Sofia's outermost suit and makes a balloon. Swimming the practice and making the intervals is difficult with all of the suits on, but Sofia manages to do it. When she's finished with practice, she goes into the locker room to change, and when Mandy, who is cleaning the sinks in the locker room, sees Sofia walking in, she thinks how there are so many straps crossing over Sofia's back that it looks as though she's wearing a lattice fence. She's wearing a wing back, a fly back, and a vortex back all at once. It takes her five minutes in the bathroom stall to peel all of the straps off her shoulders. She breathes loudly when she does it, and even grunts and whimpers a few times. “Everything all right in there?” Mandy says on the other side of the stall, but Sofia is too shy to answer and maybe, just maybe, Mandy isn't talking to her but to someone else in the locker room.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
his is you at the indoor facility, swimming in the water that's cold today, and slightly bumpy from the dancing hippos swimming in the lane beside you. You see Chris up in the bleachers, and you're glad it's not Paul up there watching you swim. You feel out of shape, even after swimming so often. You feel that besides the rest of your body starting to sag, your eyelids are starting to droop, and maybe it's reducing how much people can see of your eyes. Isn't it bad enough that you're only seeing 4 percent of the universe without looking as though you're seeing even less of it? This is you getting such a strong whiff of the hair spray from one of the dancing hippos that you feel it going down your throat and causing a burning sensation. These are Chris's words coming back to you, as your throat burns, and you feel a headache coming on from the perfume of the hair spray, that the next girl he kills could be one of yours. Something has to be done. The water seems to say it too.
Some-thing-has-to-be-done
, it says over and over while you kick a six-beat free-style kick. The police have to know what Paul knows. This is you getting out of the pool early, not finishing your warm-down of a two-hundred free that you like to do after a speed set. You're out early, rushing through your shower, putting conditioner in your hair even before all the shampoo's completely rinsed out, just so you can get to the phone and call the police hotline. You hate leaving your girls in, but you know they'll be fine while the coaches are there, and this is something you have to do because in the end it just might save another girl's life. You don't want to use your own phone. You want the call to be anonymous. You decide to drive to a nearby gas station where you remember seeing a payphone. You can't remember the last time you were in a payphone booth, but the one you're standing in now feels as though it was just set there this morning. It wobbles back and forth as you shift your weight, nervous and impatient while you hear the phone ringing. When you start retelling the story, that you know someone who was at the rest stop that night Bobby Chantal was murdered so many years ago, the woman taking the information starts talking to someone else. “I'll take a Homewrecker,” the woman says, and a man's voice says, “You want chicken or beef in it?”

“Beef, here, take some money,” the woman says.

“Are you listening to me?” you say. “Isn't this a police tip hotline? This is important.”

“Yeah, sure, go on, oh, and Jimmy, get me a Coke with that Homewrecker too,” the woman says.

Slamming a hard plastic phone back on a payphone's metal cradle is much more satisfying than pushing a button on a cell phone, you think to yourself as you slam the phone down. You've heard about tip hotlines before, how half the time the person taking the call is spinning their finger by their ear as if the person giving them information is crazy and can't be believed. What you really must do is get Paul to go in and give a detective the information that he knows.

Since you're out early from practice, you decide to go see if Paul's in his office at the college. He's not hard to find. You know which department he teaches in and his office address is listed. You wish you weren't going to his office but someplace else, someplace quiet, maybe even to the beach where you vacationed near the equator. You imagine watching incoming waves with Paul and sparks of phosphorescence in the water at night. You'd like to ask him more about his teaching. You know he teaches writing, but what exactly about writing does he teach? Does he have suggested methods? You once taught a class for students who were studying for college entrance exams, and in the training for the class you taught them tricks. You taught them that guessing is always better than leaving the answers blank. Does he have that sort of thing for his students? A checklist of sorts they can go through that helps them write well? You want to know what exercises he gives them to get their juices flowing. Does he tell them to keep a hat filled with favorite lines they have heard and then to close their eyes and pull one of the lines out and start with that? Does he tell them to triple-space their lines so they can see their mistakes more easily? You once had a teacher in a college composition class who told you to do this, but you had to stop after a while because you couldn't afford the paper it was using up.

When you're standing at Paul's office door, you can hear him talking to a student. The student is asking what Paul means by writing from the heart, and he says it means a lot of things, but the thing it means the most is to write something that she feels strongly about. Something that if she were denied the opportunity to write about, she would feel she couldn't go on. You slide down against the wall next to the door. This could be a long meeting, you think. You start thinking how you would do if you were a student in Paul's class. Would you even know what writing from the heart means? The only things you think of writing down are things that are not easy to describe. You want to write down how a sunset looks sometimes, but it is impossible for you to put it into words. Some sunsets to you feel different from other ones. The way the clouds sometimes pass quickly over the setting sun gives you a feeling of sadness, but how boring would that be to put on paper, and it's really not an image at all, is it? you think. Sometimes you want to describe the stars, how their incessant shining can make you feel claustrophobic. Where you live there is no other source of light from buildings or houses to diminish their glow, and sometimes you'd like them to stop winking. Sometimes you'd like to describe how the sound of a loon feels as though it enters through your chest, as if that's where you hear it first instead of through your ears. You realize why you take photographs for a living instead. It's so much easier when you don't have to describe what you feel and can just take a picture of it. You remember how when you first took a photography class in college, you were so excited to see what stories you could tell just with the shots you took. The teacher assigned everyone the task of putting captions of what the people were saying beneath the photos, and you couldn't bring yourself to do it. You received a poor grade for that class, but it made you want to become a professional photographer. You realized how much you wanted to be able to tell a story without words, and you realized you never wanted anyone to come along and ask of your photos, “And what is that person feeling?” You wanted them to be able to feel an emotion from just looking at the photo, and if they couldn't do it, then the photo wasn't worth taking in the first place. From then on you majored in photography. When graduation day arrived, you didn't even sit in the audience so you could take photos of your classmates, the bright sun shining down on their mortarboards and making the silky cloth look from up above like waves sparkling on a rippling sea. Oh, no, I would be a horrible student in Paul's class, you think, and you begin to feel sorry for the student too, until the door swings open and out comes this young, beautiful girl with long brown hair in tendrils that curl far past her shoulders and brush the hem of her shorts, which are so short they look more like bikini bottoms. A scent of jasmine seems to be coming from her skin as she walks by.

You can still smell the jasmine in Paul's office when you knock on the doorframe.

“Prof, I've got a problem,” you say. “I can't write from the heart. It's all closed up. Can you help me?”

Paul smiles. “Hey, look who's here!” he says. “What brings you here? Aren't you supposed to be at practice? Sit down.” He pulls out the chair that the beautiful student must have sat in. The seat is still warm.

“Practice isn't over yet. I still have time to pick the girls up. I, I . . .” Paul is leaning in close, and the smell of the jasmine seems to be surrounding you now. You start thinking maybe he's drawn to you because he just had the beautiful student in his office, and now he's aroused. “Paul, you've got to do something. You've got to talk to the police about what you know about that red Corvair. It could mean something to them, and that poor girl Kim from the swim team, well, in a few years that could be Cleo or my girls.”

You notice while you're talking that Paul's office is decorated with different plaques. There are framed diplomas and framed awards, all with his name on them. You didn't realize how academic he was. He wears a white tee shirt and blue jeans most of the time, and for crying out loud, he wears his hair in a ponytail! How would anyone believe from meeting him outside of the college that he wasn't just some house painter or bartender?

“Have you been talking to Chris?” Paul says. “That's the same thing she said to me, that in a few years it could be Cleo that this man goes after. I don't think either of you realize what a huge coincidence that would be. It's just not going to happen to our girls. The odds have it.”

“But it could happen to some other woman, and very soon.”

“Listen, the incident just occurred a few weeks ago. We don't know, there may be plenty of witnesses who come forth in the coming weeks and who remember something suspicious from that night. Let's give them a chance to come forward with relevant information. The information I have is over twenty-eight years old. Whatever I tell them about a red Corvair with Illinois plates could even be a red herring and keep them from following a solid lead.”

“You don't want to dig this all up, do you? Be honest, you're just covering your ass.” You wish for an instant that you had swum your entire workout earlier, because right now you feel tense, and you don't have that dreamy feeling you usually have after you've swum a full hour and change.

Paul doesn't answer you. He covers his face with his hands, but just for an instant, letting his long fingers slide down his aquiline nose until the tips of his fingers rest over his lips. You stand up, ready to go. You know the answers now to your questions. Paul stands up with you. You think he's stood up to open the door for you, being just as anxious to have you out of there as you are to leave, as if somehow you're putting to shame all the plaques that line his walls, but instead he pulls you close to him and kisses you. You're overcome by how good it feels to kiss someone. It's like being handed a glass of water and drinking it all down, not realizing how thirsty you were when the glass was first handed to you. It has been so long. It has been too long. His lips are smooth and his tongue exerts just the right amount of pressure against your own. You'd like to go on kissing for a long time, because what's the harm in kissing? You'd like it to be this way forever because you never want it to go farther than this. When you start thinking of Thomas, you force him out of your mind. If Thomas kissed you more often, you'd never be here in this jasmine-smelling office in the first place. You will not let Thomas take away this moment, this one kiss, because that's all it will ever be, and its memory will have to last such a long time.

It's the ringing of your cell phone that interrupts the moment. It's not a number you know. When you answer the phone it's Sofia's voice. She must have borrowed a phone from a friend. “Mom, where are you? We've been waiting ten minutes. Practice ended early,” she says.

“I'm coming. I'll be there soon,” you say. “Oh, and be safe. Don't go outside. Wait for me in the foyer.”

Paul locks up his office and walks out with you to your car. “Have a good night,” he says, before you get in. You cannot look at his face. You're afraid if you do then you might want to continue with the kiss, right here in the parking lot, where someone might see him who knows him and knows he's married. Funny, you think while driving, that you consider the kiss interrupted and not ended, as if it were a thing to be continued at a later time.

Before Kim was murdered, some parents would drive their cars up to the entrance of the facility and wait for their swimmers to hop in the back. Some parents would sit in the parking lot and wait while reading a book. Some parents would park their cars and go into the facility and wait in the foyer, talking to other parents, about swimming or about school, or about anything, considering how they are all friends and see each other so often they can talk about anything, or sometimes they would just complain about how long it takes their swimmers to get out of the shower and get dressed. Some parents would barge right into the locker rooms and yell at their swimmers to hurry it up, while their swimmers were drying off and struggling to put on socks over wet feet, or while their swimmers were fooling around, the little ones hiding inside the metal lockers, bursting out like jack-in-the-boxes and screaming, “Surprise!” and the older ones chatting away with other girls about books and clothes and teachers. But now, since Kim has been killed, all the mothers have been going into the locker rooms and making sure their children are escorted into their cars. You would usually wait in the foyer for your children, but today Sofia and Alex are waiting outside for you as you drive up, and waving you down frantically, annoyed with you because you happen to be late, when recently, ever since Kim's death, you have picked them up straight from the locker room. You're annoyed with them too. You told them to wait inside and not go outside. It's then, when you see them waving as if they've been marooned on an island, that you remember what Paul said to you in his office, that the red Corvair had Illinois plates. He hadn't told you that before, you are almost sure of it. Wouldn't you have remembered that they were Illinois plates? Why is it that he keeps layering on the details about something that he at first said he knew nothing about at all? And why did he kiss you then, right after he said it? Was it to make you stop thinking about Bobby Chantal? You realize that the kiss made it difficult for you to understand what really happened that night he was with her. The kiss was like a layer of fog that crept inside of you, clouding up what might otherwise be clear, and masking whatever you heard.