This is the Water by Yannick Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

Swimmers can’t wear the suit during warm-ups and then also for their events that day, because that’s too long to keep on a suit that sadistically tight and uncomfortable. “Welcome to the torture club,” you say. Chris laughs. Her teeth are very white, in perfect rows. It is not a full-hearted laugh. It is a polite laugh. You’ve heard Chris make it before. She does it when she’s not really listening, when she’s worried, for example, about where Cleo is, if she has taken too long in the locker rooms and hasn’t yet come out. But what did I expect? you think to yourself. That wasn’t very funny what I just said. You pull out grapes and offer some to Chris. “They’re already warm,” you say. “It’s so hot in here I think they’re turning into wine.” Chris nods, but she does not look hot at all. She is not sweating at the temples the way you are. Chris takes one grape, and then doesn’t take any more. “Where’s Paul today?” you ask.
    â€œHe couldn’t make it,” Chris says. “He’s got papers to correct.” You nod. Chris doesn’t ask you where Thomas is, even though you are ready to tell her that he’s cutting wood and splitting wood and stacking wood, and that really, for all you know, he could be eating the wood, because on any given day that he comes home from the lab, if he’s not mowing the lawn, then he’s doing the wood, because in the winter, all you heat with is the wood because wood heat feels warmer and saves money. This was Thomas’s idea, not yours, as most things to do with the house and the family usually are, except the swim team, of course, and joining the facility, which were your ideas. Concerning the wood, you would have been happy with walking over to a dial and turning up the heat. You could have done without hauling in wood at six in the morning in the dark while trying not to slip over ice-encrusted snow. You could have done without always having splinters and small bits of wood embedded in the weave of your sweater fronts from holding the logs to your chest on your way to the woodstove. Who knew that your wrists would hurt from picking up the wood at one end and tossing it on a pile to be stacked after it was split, that it would make them inflamed, and that swellings the size of robin’s eggs would appear on the inside of them? You could have done without never having the chance to read the entire paper because its pages were needed to start the fire every—
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” you ask Chris, because you have just noticed that Chris has a tear sliding down her cheek. Instinctively, you look toward the water, to see if it’s Chris’s daughter, to see if Chris’s daughter, Cleo, has lost her race and that’s why Chris is crying, because you remember from past meets how you have seen tears in parents’ eyes. You have seen tears in the eyes of Dinah, for example, who cried with joy a few years ago when her daughter made it to age groups, a more competitive division, in the fifty breast. You thought then that for Dinah Jessie’s success was more about her than her daughter. You’ve seen plenty of girls cry too, and even boys, when they’ve lost races. You have seen parents cry when their children who have lost a race cry. You have seen parents cry because the coaches have yelled at them, telling them they have not honored the swim-parent’s code, that they have overstepped their boundaries and taken the sacred job of coaching into their own hands. The parents, apparently, were guilty of telling little Mary that she has to bring her arms up out of the water faster in fly. They told her in the car ride home that her rhythm was off, they told her that her legs were spread wide on the entry, they told her before a race to not forget the two-hand touch, they told her to keep her hands in prayer position for the pull out, and