This is the Water (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

T
his is you swimming the next day at the pool by yourself. You told the girls they needed the day off to rest because you didn't want them anywhere near the pool, where the killer might see them. You swim because you have something to think about, and you know you cannot think at home. You swim because you have a feeling the water will tell you what to do. This is you after having swum enough laps that you are finally beginning to relax, and your mind is wandering and you are not even counting your laps any longer. This is the water telling you what to do. The shushing sound the water makes by your ears sounds like so many voices. It sounds like Kim's voice and those of other girls on the team. It sounds like women's voices, like those of the dancing hippos, and men's voices, like those of the trooper and Thomas, and it sounds like the voice of the coach, and the voice of Mandy, and the voice of Pam Chantal. All the voices are telling you the same thing. You understand what they want. When you get out of the pool, it's as if the water is lifting itself up higher so that you can climb out of the pool more easily and go forth and do what you have to do.

This is the water, watching you leave, hoping it's done all it can to convince you. This is the water, winking at you, or so it seems as it glistens and flashes in bright afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows when you turn your head over your shoulder to look at it one more time to be sure you understand what it wants you to do.

 

T
his is the next afternoon. The sounds of cars going up your road are louder now because so few leaves are left on the trees. There are more cars than usual, mostly pickup trucks, it being hunting season, when men make their way up to hunting camps far up your dirt road and stay for a few days in small cabins off the grid, walking the old logging trails, trying their luck in the quiet woods.

If the men in those trucks were to turn their heads and, through the thin maples that border your pond, look up to your house, with its cedar siding turning dark with age from the foundation upward and its copper roof turning green from the base of the chimney, they would see you not sinking into the floorboards and thinking of your brother. They would see you thinking of what's alive. Sofia and Alex.

This is you thinking you'll do anything to keep them alive. It's bad enough that suicides can take place. Those are things you might never be able to stop, but murders, you realize, that's something you can control. That's something you can take care of. This is you rising out of your chair, the menacing floorboards not so menacing now. They are just like the patchwork of land seen from high above, from a flying plane's window, they are that far away, their power to suck you down infinitesimal, nearly gone. This is your walk up to your room with the gun cabinet as if there were some phenomenon taking place that Thomas has read about, some particle attraction in which not only are you walking toward the gun cabinet, but it's coming toward you just as quickly.

This is the rifle you know how to use. Here is where the clip can be taken out and placed beneath the bolt so that when you slide back the bolt, a bullet can be loaded into the chamber. This is the composite Steyr tactical rifle—which feels lighter than it does when you hunt with it in the woods—as you walk to the car to slide it onto the backseat. This is the hunting cap you wear that is Day-Glo orange, and this is the warm coat you wear, with the hunting license you recently renewed folded inside the breast pocket. This is the school the killer works at. This is the large parking lot where at the end of the day the killer gets into his car, a model much newer than his old red Corvair with the Illinois plates, and drives home, and this is your car pulling out after his, following him home. These are the roads, wanting you to follow him, helping you speed along after him. These are the cut fields of corn, just sharp, short stalks left that in the sunlight glow like metal knife blades, so many of them sticking up from the furrowed fields in shining rows. These are other hunters you pass on the road. They drive pickups and wear the same orange caps and nod to you from inside their cabs as you drive by, fellow hunter that you are.

This is the killer pulling into his driveway, a house divided in two so that two families share one inner wall. This is you out of your car that you have parked down the road. This is you with your rifle in your hand as you climb to the top of a ridgeline and look down at him walking through the rooms of his house, starting a load of laundry. This is the hillside, still grassy from summer and comfortable, happy to provide a comfortable place for you to sit and watch. These are the crosshairs in the Zeiss scope of the rifle with the killer at the center of them. These are the crosshairs fixed on his head as he grasps a bar in a doorframe and begins to do pull-ups. This is the safety you switch off with your thumb so that a red dot now shows. This is you exhaling at the same time your forefinger squeezes the trigger. This is you thinking how it is just like using your camera and pressing the shutter to take a portrait of the bride. You want a good shot. This is the bullet that enters his forehead, exploding the wrinkles that look like steps. These are your ears ringing. This is you still looking through the scope, watching the blood begin to flow and soak into his carpet in a long curvy line, as if a snake were coming out from inside his head. This is you walking down from the ridge, the leaves beneath your boots crunching, and the twigs snapping loudly. This is you shaking as you slide your warm rifle into the seat beside you. This is you hearing your name being called. “Annie? Annie is that you? Lord, I didn't know you hunted. Catch anything?” Dinah says, pulling up alongside you in her car.

“No, not a thing,” you say.

“Did you know we just moved into that house right there?” Dinah points to the two-family home where you just shot the killer. “It's a two-family home. We have the one on the left, and some other man who's been living there for years has the one on the right. It's so nice to be closer to the pool. I just dropped Jessie off for practice. We're trying to get her time down for age groups so she's in a faster heat. Why don't you come inside for a drink? You look cold. You're shaking.”

“Sorry, I've got to get back home to start dinner. Thomas took the girls to practice tonight, and it's my turn to cook.”

“Another time, then,” Dinah says.

This is you driving away in the pink glow of twilight, a few stars coming out high overhead.

This is the rifle in the seat beside you still giving off heat. You can feel it when you get out of the car and walk toward the house. This is your shoulder, feeling sore now from the kick of the rifle when you took the shot, as you walk in the door and into your warm home. This is Thomas and Sofia doing homework upstairs. This is Alex asking if you saw any deer. This is you saying, “No, not a one.” This is Alex removing the clip from beneath the chamber and looking at the bullets.

“You must have shot something. You're missing a bullet,” she says.

“No, that clip wasn't full, I checked before I left,” you say.

“It was so full. I was the last one to use it. I know.”

“Check the chamber, maybe I left one in there,” you say, even though you know you haven't left one in there.

This is Alex peering down the chamber. “No, nothing,” she says.

“What would you like for dinner?” you ask her. “We can have steak, if you'd like. Hey, how did you do on that history quiz?”

She doesn't answer. You hear her walking up the stairs with your rifle, on her way to putting it back into the gun cabinet. You get out the steaks. You stab potatoes with a knife tip and put them to bake in the oven. You chop broccoli florets from their stalks. Alex comes back downstairs.

“Mom, you shot at something,” she says. “I know you did. What did you shoot?”

“Oh, all right, I'll tell you.” you say. “I saw a coyote running by—well, actually, I saw what I thought was a buck running by. I think I imagined his antlers even. I took the shot. It turned out to be a coyote. I feel so bad about it, I didn't want to tell anyone. I guess I'm not much of a hunter after all.”

“Good thing it wasn't a person you thought was a buck.”

“Yes, absolutely. But it shook me up a bit. Just the thought that I could make such a stupid mistake.”

“You've got buck fever, Mom. That's what it is. You're dying to shoot one.” She speaks in an accent that sounds very New England, and the word “fever” comes out as “fevah.”

You laugh. “Yes, I've got the buck ‘fevah,' all right.” You place the steaks on tinfoil, and your wavy reflection in it makes you look as if you're underwater.

At dinner you are laughing. Your children are funny. They tell good stories about what happened at school and at practice. You are so happy they are safe. You let them turn on all the lights in the living room. It doesn't matter now. No one will be looking in at you. You allow yourself to look at Sofia and imagine what she will look like when she's older. You see her with her braces off and her shoulders back, more confident with age.

That night, in bed, you lean over and start kissing Thomas. The kissing is better than it was with Paul. You know your husband's lips and mouth. You like how when he kisses you in return he strokes your back at the same time. You like how it feels okay to be kissing your husband. You remember your wedding day, how he told you behind the barn to remember that kiss as being the real wedding kiss. It is the same great kiss now. You are free now to go further with him. There is no stopping what the two of you can do together. You hear the howling of the coyotes out there and it is beautiful. You are so glad that it is not really true, that you did not kill one of them with its ruffed silver neck and its dark shining eyes.

 

T
his is you a few days later at practice, where Dinah tells you about her neighbor being killed. “Imagine, I was living next to the guy and he was dead for four days before they found him,” she says. “I smelled him. Imagine if that shot missed? My daughter or I could have been killed. It's too scary. I'm thinking of moving again. Poor guy, though, he was a school secretary. Who would want to kill him? Probably his ex-wife.” She laughs. “I should know,” she adds.

“You look great, Dinah,” you say. “I can't believe how much weight you've lost, and so quickly. Hey, how did your daughter do in that last meet?” Now you have opened up the floodgates and Dinah begins to talk about every single one of her daughter's events and how she did and how many seconds she took off and how she has been practicing her touches by rolling her hand into the wall for that extra corkscrew momentum. Like the trajectory of a bullet, you think. And Dinah tells you how she has been feeding her daughter those energy blocks, the gels made by Gatorade, and she really thinks those make the difference. She tells you she has looked into colleges already, even though Jessie is a solid four years away from applying. She's been scoping out ones with the best swim teams, the ones that have Division I teams. She tells you she doesn't know which would be better for her daughter, to join a team where she's a big fish in a little pond or one where she's a little fish in a big pond. You sit back against the wall on your bench on the bleachers and let her words cascade over you as you watch the swimmers practicing, swimming back and forth in their lanes. They do a serpentine warm-down. They line up on deck and dive one at a time into one lane, and when they get to the other end they go under the lane line and swim back down a new lane. They wind their way through the entire pool this way, and when they are done they get out of the pool and grab their gym bags and head off to the locker rooms.

This is you in that wobbly phone booth again, calling the police hotline. This is you telling the cop who answers that you've got a tip for him: The killer is the same man who was found dead in his apartment not long ago. Follow the lead, you tell the cop, and hang up.

This is Mandy, at night, after swim practice, mopping the ladies' room and wondering whatever happened to the new member, the man with the dark hair who would watch the swimmers during practice, the one who, when he went into the water himself, lowered himself in with a smile. Perhaps he quit. It happens sometimes—a person joins the facility and then leaves. Maybe they received the membership as a gift and didn't really want it in the first place, or maybe they just preferred to stay at home and run on their own treadmill, or maybe they were too embarrassed by their own body and didn't want to be seen by so many other people every day. Whatever the case, Mandy is glad. The man scared her. She didn't like how he watched the girls. She felt justified in being leery of him. Too much has happened around here lately, especially with those murders taking place. She was on the verge of reporting him to the director herself, because she didn't like how he watched the girls through the glass wall, but she never felt like the director would have listened to her if she told him. What would she have said anyway? There's a man watching the swimmers in the pool? That would have been absurd. Everyone watches through the glass wall. Even she sometimes stops in the middle of her mopping and leans her hands on her mop and rests her chin on her hands and watches the team workout. The team is impressive to watch. The swimmers unflagging in their two hour swim. The coaches walking up and down the deck, following every lap of their swimmers and stopping at the end of the lanes to give comments and directions. It's like looking into an ant farm where the ants are always moving and working. Mandy scrubs the grout hard on the ladies' room floor. It's satisfying to see the dirt come up, and to see her mop reveal the bright whiteness. Yes, she says to herself, what a relief that man isn't here anymore. She thinks of going up to the lake with her husband this weekend. They would have to dress warmly to sit in the boat, but she doesn't mind. She looks forward to seeing the migrating geese that she knows will fly overhead. She looks forward to hearing the loon's call and seeing the trees onshore, now bare, leaving their jagged images on the water's surface.