This is the killer. Our killer, not the killer from out west. He is in the stands watching Kim. He is a man with dark, wavy hair and a forehead with wrinkles so thick they look like steps. He has also read the article about the strangler out west. He thinks the killer was stupid to be caught, but he is also jealous of the strangler because it has been a long time since he himself has killed. He notices how even from far away he can see Kim’s heart beating through her swimsuit. He can see how her cheeks are flushed from breathing so hard. He looks to see if her neck flutters. Can her pulse be that strong beneath her ivory skin? He notices how bright her eyes are, how the tears welling up in them have made her look so alive. Is there a way to have this light for my own? he thinks. This is Kim not noticing the killer. Not many people do. He is quiet. He does not cheer. He just watches what’s down on the pool deck.
This is Kim thinking how much she wanted to win the race, how if she had won she could go home and place the blue ribbon on the string that she has strung from one wall to the other across her room. She could hang it beside all of the other ribbons strung up on that string from all of her six years as a swimmer. After only her first year she was able to cover the length of the string with ribbons, and now she has so many that she tapes them to the bottoms of the ribbons already hanging. Her mother refers to it as her “wall of ribbons,” and thinks that if Kim cared less about the ribbons and more about improving her technique, then she’d actually win more ribbons. To Kim it’s not a wall of ribbons but more like a curtain of ribbons, because when the window is open, letting in a breeze carried across the tall grass and daisies that dot her side yard, the curtain of ribbons shudders and flaps. Kim likes the curtain, thinking how one day, when the ribbons reach down to her bedroom floor, then she might pull the curtain aside, step out from behind it, show the world who she is, but right now she likes hiding behind it because all that it says about her is that she’s a champion swimmer, and maybe that’s all she wants people to know about her because right now she’s not even sure herself about who she is, and she learned long ago that you don’t make the mistake of telling anyone how you feel. Once, when she was a girl of ten, she told an older girl she knew that she liked the girl’s brother. Kim and the brother were friends. They lived down the road from each other and played in the stream for hours at a time, creating dams and waterfalls with rocks that fed into crystal clear pools where she could see the reflection of the two of them working, their knobby, scuffed knees sometimes touching. When the older girl told her brother that Kim liked him, he stopped coming over. After a big rain, the rocks they had moved to create the waterfalls fell out of place, and white water whooshed by full force, without stopping, without creating calm pools of water Kim could see her face in. It was then she joined a swim team and swam as hard as she could to forget.
Do you know how the strokes are performed? There are officials who know if you don’t. They will tell you the rules. A child doing breaststroke has to double-hand touch at the wall. A child doing butterfly cannot kick like a frog. A glide to the wall in the backstroke can’t start before the flags. A wiggling foot on the blocks at the start is a false start and allowed only once. A fall where the swimmer enters the water is also a false start and allowed only once. One false start in a relay is a DQ for the entire team, a disqualification.
This is you, Annie, at the facility, looking in through the glass windows at the pool where a boys’ race is being swum. The swim team is coed, but there are not as many boys as girls, so the boys’ heats are fewer in number. It must be a first heat you are watching, because so many of the swimmers are inexperienced and swimming poorly, and you see at least three officials in their white polo shirts and their blue shorts raising a hand in the air, letting the judges know a swimmer performed a stroke incorrectly. This is you with your thoughts wandering while watching the boys. This is you remembering how hard your brother laughed days before he shot himself when you saw him on his birthday at his house. Your parents, both dead a few years now, of course weren’t there, but his children were, and you noticed how it was easy to see how your kids and his were related. They shared the same dark features and olive skin. Their laughter even sounded similar to you, their voices sounding in the same range. But whose laughter was like yours now? you thought. Your parents were gone and now your brother. You realized then you were the last one left in your family, and in that moment, where you were completely feeling sorry for yourself, you felt like an orphan.
This is you now bent over the water fountain at the facility. The hot air makes you so thirsty. You wish the water could enter your mouth more quickly. You wonder why water fountains have to move from the bottom up and why they can’t come from the ceiling down, straight into your mouth, where gravity would probably be on your side and help quench your thirst that much faster.
This is you minutes later up in the bleachers, the boys’ heats are over, and now you are watching your daughter Sofia swim a one-hundred free. You notice how she still isn’t using her walls and streamlines, and those turns that when you straighten out and push off the wall you are not breathing, and it isn’t until you are at the flags again that you come up for a breath. The turns are hard to do, but the coaches want the swimmers to use them because they save so much time. Even though Sofia isn’t using those turns, she still has a faster time. You write her time down on the heat sheet you bought that lists all the entries and heats of the swimmers. The heats are being run with the slowest girls first and the fastest girls last, so that for example if you have sixty girls in the race and a ten-lane pool, you’ll have six heats of ten girls each, the last heat being the fastest and the overall winner most likely coming out of that race. You like watching your daughters swim, but if they don’t swim well in a race, you don’t mention it. You are always proud of them, even when they don’t lose time, because they always work hard in practice and try to swim their fastest in a race. Thomas, your husband, thinks that you have the girls on the swim team as much for your benefit as for theirs. This is true. You like being able to swim when your girls swim and you like talking to the other parents on the team. It’s a social place for you. You also like seeing your girls progress and cheering them on at a meet and being involved in their lives and speaking their language about workouts and strokes and technique. You’re even in their social sphere a little more because you know the other girls on the swim team they come home and talk about. You know Hayley’s mother’s a rock singer in a band and that Hayley can sing pretty well herself and takes chorus and that her class was invited to D.C. to sing on the Capitol steps. You know that Kali’s mom gets migraines and that she’s allergic to gluten. You know that Chris, Cleo’s mother, is a professional artist, because your girls are friends with Cleo and you’ve been to Chris’s house to drop off the girls and she’s shown you her studio and her canvasses heavy with oil paints depicting dark assemblages of wildflowers sprawling on the surface without reference points, as if the flowers were stars almost, growing without being tied to the earth, and floating in space. When you want to talk about how you freelance as a wedding photographer in order to supplement the family income and be able to afford the family vacations, you can talk with Kali’s mom. You can talk to her about how it’s sometimes difficult to deal with soon-to-be brides and their families because Kali’s mom is the owner of a five-star inn that hosts weddings and serves organic fiddleheads. When you want to talk about how the skiing was great over the weekend after a huge snowfall of heavenly powder, you talk to Emma’s dad, who also skis. When you want to talk about the new curriculum the state is adopting for the school system, and the new assessment test they’ll use that has to be taken on a computer and how you’re nervous your girls don’t type well enough, you can talk to Nick’s mom, who’s a middle school teacher. And of course, if you want to talk about swimming and your own children, you can talk to anyone around you, even the mothers and fathers you don’t think you have anything in common with, because every parent there can talk swimming. They understand what a fast fly time might be. They can make a remark about how a certain stroke-and-turn official might be inattentive during a race and never catch a DQ. They can look at a set of twenty-one one-hundred frees on a 1:20 that the coach wrote on the board for her swimmers to swim and know that is a tough workout.
This is Dinah, seeing how your daughter Sofia out-touched her daughter Jessie in the one-hundred free, even though Jessie used her streamlines and turns. This is Dinah coming up to you while you’re about to go down the stairs to the foyer saying that she did not see your Sofia using her streamlines and turns, and that she thought all the girls were supposed to be using them now. This is you shrugging, saying, “I suppose she’ll start using them one day, but can you blame her? That’s a long time to hold your breath and swim hard at the same time.” This is Dinah thinking how when she talks to the coach after the meet, she will let the coach know that she noticed Sofia is not using her walls and streamlines. This is Dinah thinking how she hates it when others don’t do what they’re supposed to do, and how Annie and her daughters always seem to be doing what they’re not supposed to do. For example, Annie, because she couldn’t afford all the equipment, never bought her girls the required fins they need for workouts, and instead, before a kick set, lets them dig through the bin on deck filled with ones that were left behind from swimmers years before. Dinah thinks how that’s not right, especially when it says right there in the handbook that the required equipment to purchase is a water bottle, a kickboard, and fins. Then there are the instances, Dinah thinks, when Annie asks the coach for special permission to age her youngest daughter up at a meet so that her youngest daughter can swim in the same session as her oldest daughter, just for convenience’s sake, so that Annie won’t have to be at a swim meet for two five-hour sessions back to back. This is frowned upon, of course, because it means Annie’s youngest is swimming with older swimmers, and usually, therefore, faster swimmers. Dinah doesn’t approve of this at all, since it means the afternoon session goes that much slower because there is a slower swimmer entered. Then there are the required parent meetings that Annie doesn’t go to some of the time. Instead, on those days, Dinah sees Annie swimming in a lane in the pool, while almost all the other parents are packed into a stuffy utility room off the pool, sitting on folding chairs and listening to a lecture by the coaches about volunteering for the team, or listening to a guest lecturer about the importance of feeding your swimmer carbohydrates and avocado the day before a meet, when that’s the last thing Dinah wants to serve her daughter, Jessie, who, like herself, is already carrying too many pounds. Dinah once told the coach afterward that she saw Annie in the pool swimming while the rest of them were in the meeting. The coach sighed. “There’s not much I can do,” she said. Dinah told the coach maybe there was something she could do. “Maybe you could kick her kids off the team,” Dinah said, to which the coach replied, “Dinah, it’s been a long night and I am going home now.”