Free This is the Water by Yannick Murphy

think about Thomas or your brother while you’re swimming. In fact, you started to swim more seriously to forget about your brother after his death. It’s as if the water embraces you, lets you know that here is a place you can be without getting hurt. I will buoy you. I will caress you. I will soothe you and whisper to you, it seems to say. You hear the faint shush of the water going by your ears as you freestyle forward. You wonder what the water, if it could talk, could possibly be telling you about your stroke. Could it be telling you to lift your arms up higher, as if you were reaching over a barrel, the way you have heard swim coaches do when describing the stroke? Could it be telling you to kick harder? After all, your kick is barely a splash, barely a flutter. After you take a swim yourself, just a mile of freestyle, a two-hundred individual medley, and an IM kick, not even a quarter of the workout that the swim team will do, you look at your toes in the shower. They look like toes on a child. They are fat and rounded, and not slender and long, the way Chris’s are. You wiggle them, letting them send up a happy hello to you from where they are on the tiled floor. You wash your hair that is thinning, thinking maybe your brother wasn’t so dumb after all, maybe doing yourself in before you’re really old and useless is the right way to go. A boy who is allowed in the women’s locker room because there is something wrong with the boy and he is in a wheelchair and has a woman who helps wash him, is in the next shower stall. The boy says the word “water” over and over again. “Yes, you like the water,” the woman says. You can hear soap or shampoo going through the boy’s hair in the next shower stall, as if the woman were playing with the boy’s hair, lifting it up into peaks like a troll, or creating a long blade of it through the center, like a foamy Mohawk.
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    W hen Paul, Chris’s husband, shows up after practice to pick Cleo up, you decide you’ll go and talk to him. Maybe there’s a way you can tell just by talking to him if he’s really cheating on Chris. “Hello, Paul,” you say, coming up to him, getting his attention as he’s turned away from you looking out the door. When he turns toward you smiling, you feel as though a light is shining back at you. Even the facility seems brighter, as if up above through the high skylights clouds have made way for sun, but it’s not the sun. The sun is on its way down. “Hi, Annie,” he says, his whole face opening up to you, as if the sole purpose of him standing there and waiting were for you to come by and talk to him. Has he always been this good-looking? you think to yourself. You don’t remember ever standing this close to him before. Usually it’s the mothers who have the kinds of jobs they can leave early to pick up the kids and drive them from school to practice whom you regularly see, not the fathers. You see Kim’s father sometimes waiting at practices, he’s always working on his computer, or you see Keith’s father at practices, always reading a war novel. You see Catherine’s father, a man who watches the entire practice attentively as if it were as exciting as a meet. You’ve seen Jonathan’s father sometimes driving up in his pickup with the lawn care logo on the side and driving off again after Jonathan’s gotten out of the truck with his swim bag, but again, it’s mostly the mothers you see. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since Thomas, your own husband, has touched you in the night, and because when you tried to touch him last he patted your hand instead, that Paul suddenly seems attractive. But you are no spring chicken, and you would be very surprised if Paul even looked at you twice. You decide he will probably notice your graying hair first and then the wrinkles by your eyes that are so pronounced they look