This is Dinah deciding to lose weight. She’s tired of seeing her daughter grow as large as she is even though her daughter swims a two-hour practice every day. Dinah decides she’ll set an example for her daughter. She learns of a new regimen to lose weight that requires human chorionic gonadotropin. She’s not sure what that is, but thinks it has something to do with babies, and every day she pours drops of this stuff on her yogurt and she lifts the spoon to her mouth thinking she’s eating failed pregnancies and intended abortions. The taste isn’t so bad, especially since she mixes maple syrup on top of the yogurt as well. She starts losing weight, but the down side to that is her husband is becoming more attracted to her, and because he is losing his hearing, he talks to her loudly in the night, pleading with Dinah for love, while Jessie, who shares a bedroom wall with them, can probably hear what he’s saying.
Dinah knits in the bleachers, the needles swishing together, as her daughter swims her practice. Dinah has, by accident, knit some of her hair into a pink-and-brown-striped scarf, but she leaves the hair in the scarf anyway, wishing she knew of a person who would want such a personalized gift from her. She can’t think of anyone right now, except her husband of course. Right now she wouldn’t want to give any gift to him. Dinah’s husband blames his going deaf on one day—the day he shot a buck and the rifle report in his ear was much louder than usual, because at the exact same time another hunter shot the same buck. It was never decided who made the kill shot, and Dinah’s husband didn’t take up the other hunter’s offer to split the buck, because he didn’t want to partake in the venison anyway. “I just want the antlers,” he told the other hunter, and so the rack of six points was given to him and it now hangs above his bed and Dinah tells him how the antlers drive her nuts because the board they are mounted on bangs against the wall, making a rattling sound every time her husband rolls over, and making her think the buck has come alive and is ready to trample her with its cloven hooves in her sleep. “I can’t hear the rattling sound,” Dinah’s husband tells her. “I’m going deaf, remember?” Then he walks away, knowing that if she answers him he will not hear her anyway. Dinah’s husband hates going deaf. He tells everyone that at least he won’t have to hear his daughter’s pop music and he won’t have to hear all the loud, obnoxious mothers who cheer for their children from the bleachers during a race, but then he also tells everyone that what’s terrible about going deaf is that not everything is tuned out, you still hear muffled sounds that make you think you’re going insane because you’re always trying to make sense of them, as if they’re everyone’s voices telling you secrets or telling you what to do, but you can’t understand them.
This is Dinah, who has put down her knitting and is now looking through her opera glasses at her daughter swimming, or not swimming, really, she thinks. Her daughter is a cheater, as she can see through the lenses smeared with what must be her own oils, from her hands and her face. Her daughter pulls on the lane line to drag herself through the water when she’s tired. Her daughter is not doing the entire set. Dinah can tell because she’s been counting, she’s even ticked off on a sheet of paper how many two-hundred IMs her daughter has done and she has only done seven and the coach told them to do eight. Dinah thinks she should go down there on deck and tell her daughter to knock it off, to finish the set like the rest of the girls or she’ll never get faster. She’ll threaten to take away her novels if she doesn’t. Dinah then realizes she doesn’t want to go down on deck. She doesn’t want to burst through the double glass doors and have everyone notice her, even though she has lost weight, a lot of weight. She’s still not sure she wants to be seen crouching by the end of the lane and admonishing her daughter while the other swimmers and the coach look at her. She doesn’t want the coach to see her and then later call her into her office and give her a talking-to, because she has been called into the office a few times before, for various actions that the coach said were over the top, not necessarily against the rules the way Annie would go against the rules, but they were not how a swim-team parent was expected to behave. Once Dinah ran through crowds on deck before a race to get to her daughter and scream at her to get up to the blocks because her heat was about to begin, and she pushed her daughter from behind to get her up on the blocks, and she was wrong. It was not her daughter’s heat. She has been called into the coach’s office for calling the director of an away swim meet and entering her daughter into a meet that her daughter’s team, as a whole, was not going to attend, and therefore her daughter wouldn’t have the coaches there representing her. She didn’t know it was against the rules. She just wanted her daughter to attend the meet because Jessie had a good chance of winning some of the events there. She has been called into the coach’s office for sending too many e-mails telling the coaches what events she thinks her daughter should be swimming, which is not against the rules, but, she was informed, was uncalled for and meddlesome. She has been called into the coach’s office after a swim meet at which she organized the concessions stand and then—when she felt there weren’t enough people helping her sell the gooey mac and cheese, the brownies in baggies, and the cold tasteless pasta salads—she sent a mass e-mail to all of the parents telling them that they weren’t pulling their fair share, that the proverbial scales had been tipped, and not in her favor, and that they had better volunteer more and harder next time or there would be no concessions stand. She wrote that it would be a devastating disappointment to their team as well as the other teams who came to the meet. Imagine, she said, arriving at a meet and having nothing to buy for your child. Imagine no Ring Pops, sodas, bagels, or oat granola bars to tide them over throughout the long grueling day. The e-mail was lengthy, at least a page. She did not check it first. She did not think the other parents deserved that much consideration. Let them be assaulted by bad grammar and typos, she thought while emphatically hitting the send key.
Of course, there are a few parents in particular she doesn’t care for. No, that’s wrong. There are a few parents she doesn’t like at all. There’s Annie, whose daughters often lead the practice lanes and are always ahead of her daughter. Annie, who doesn’t entirely play by the rules. Annie, who went off with Paul and hung out in his hotel room while their kids watched TV together in another room. And what was that remark she made to her about her bathing suit being very Marilyn Monroe? On the surface, you’d think Annie was being nice, but Dinah wasn’t fooled. Marilyn Monroe had killed herself. More likely Annie was hinting that the suit made Dinah look pale, and corpselike. She’s probably sleeping with Paul, Dinah thinks to herself. I should tell her husband she’s having an affair. People think it’s not their business to tell other people things like that, but it is. If you see blatant injustice like that staring you in the face, it’s your duty, your obligation to report it. She told her husband, Joseph, that she was going to tell Annie’s husband, Thomas, that his wife was having an affair. Joseph rarely becomes angry, but when she told him she planned to tell Thomas about Annie’s affair, he promised her that if she told him anything, he would tell Thomas not to pay any attention to her. He would tell Thomas, he said, that Dinah had finally come “undone, unhinged, in-fucking-sane.” In that moment, Dinah felt that she could honestly say that she didn’t love Joseph anymore, so she told him so and asked for a divorce in the same breath. She felt that telling the truth to those who least wanted to hear it was what she was probably best at. Even to herself, she was good at telling the truth. When she first got the idea to lose weight, she stood naked in front of the mirror. She made herself look at her reflection for a solid hour. She started with her feet, the flab on her ankles that hung over her ankle bones, that made her look like a doll made of nylon stockings and stuffed with pillow filling. She made her way up to her legs, which were riddled with varicose veins, and then to her waist, where the fat hung over her hips, and then up to her neck, with its three rolls. She held up her fingers to the mirror, and they were so swollen it looked as if her wedding ring would never come off. And it didn’t with just her pulling on it, so then she went to the kitchen sink and squirted dish soap onto it and ran warm water over it, but even then the ring would not twist off. She would need a jeweler’s saw for that task, or better yet she would need to lose weight. So she did. It was when she reached the twenty-five-pound goal after seven weeks that the ring fell off by itself while she was washing her hands in the restroom at the facility. She could hear it clink its way down the spiraling pipe for the first few seconds, and then she could hear nothing but the water running and the distant sound of children playing in the current of the lazy river and the coach on the main pool deck yelling, encouraging her swimmers in practice to “Pick it up, pick it up,” and quicken their pace.
But that mother and the father of that poor girl Kim, who was murdered, Dinah liked them. At away meets, the mother, Gina, would always save seats on the bleachers for the other parents by putting down extra sweaters or jackets. Poor Gina. Dinah can’t imagine what she’s going through, having a daughter who was murdered. Dinah feels glad she doesn’t know what Gina is going through. At the moment, it’s hard enough to be going through what Dinah is going through herself, watching her daughter cheat in her workout. Her daughter is getting out of the water and heading toward the bathrooms, though she just visited them not even half an hour ago. This is another tactic Dinah knows her daughter uses to get out of doing the complete workout. Dinah, not having her daughter to look at through her binoculars, uses them to look at the other parents sitting in the bleachers. She doesn’t see the usual suspects. Where are Paul and Annie? She thought for sure they’d be sitting together, their knees touching, Annie tossing her graying hair behind her shoulder like a teenager, and Paul the whole time not looking at anything else but Annie. They are not here tonight. Neither of them. Dinah is tempted to go out and see if they are together in the lobby, talking at one of the high café tables with the high chairs that once took such an effort for her to lift herself up onto. Or maybe they are sitting outside in one of their cars. Dinah has noticed how many parents do that. They sit in each other’s cars with the lights on and chat with each other until their children are finished with practice. She can see them in the dark some nights, lit up by their overhead ceiling lights, eerily glowing from within, laughing, talking, sharing snacks that are meant for their children but that they can’t resist partaking of themselves, the dinner they will eat still a long way off considering how far they live from the facility. Dinah is almost ready to go outside and check to see if Paul and Annie are in a car together, when her daughter comes back from the bathroom and dives into the pool to finish her workout. Dinah fixes her binoculars on her daughter now. The set is a breaststroke, her daughter’s best. She is gaining on the girl who has already taken off from the wall and is ahead of her daughter in the next lane over. Dinah wants to call out her daughter’s name, and then she wants to call out, “Go, Baby, go!” and she almost does, until she remembers that this is not a meet and this is not a race, but only a practice, on a rainy Monday night, just hours after she has told her husband, very loudly so that he could hear, that she is through with being married. “Done,” she said. She wanted to add, “Up to here,” and motion to her neck with a hand that looked as if it were slicing her head off, but really it is higher, where she is fed up. It is way past her neck. It is as high as the bit of stray hair that stands up from her head, and then some, that she is fed up. It is up to the rafters of the facility, where the ventilation ducts cross. It is through the sliding-glass roof that is opened on warm, stultifying days caustic with the smell of chlorine, and it is all the way up to where the glorious china-blue sky can be seen. Dinah puts down the binoculars now and slumps slightly in the bleachers. The practice isn’t even halfway over, and she is so tired. She just wants to go home and sleep, but the first thing she will do before going to bed will be to take those antlers off the wall above her four-poster. Tonight, she swears, she will sleep for once without hearing deer trampling through her dreams.
This is Paul trying to decide what to do. He is sitting with his hands on the sides of his face looking at a painting of the man his wife calls the killer. It has been months since he has been in her studio, but he is in her studio now, wanting to ask about who is going to drive Cleo to the next meet coming up. No one told him when he was standing before the priest on his wedding day that someday he might have to consider whether or not she needed mental help. “This is insane,” he says, and gestures toward the painting. He doesn’t like how the eyes of the man in the painting stare at him. What has gotten into her? “It’s him. I know it’s him,” she says. “Chris, what’s gotten into you?” he says. It’s so difficult talking to her these days. She doesn’t seem to answer him when he asks simple questions. She almost imperceptibly inclines her head toward her shoulder, as if there’s a small person perched there whom she’s acknowledging, but she doesn’t open her mouth to speak. If only it were Annie he was talking to instead. From her he knows he could get a straight answer, and Annie, at least, would be looking directly at him when he asked the question. He thinks of Annie as his muse. It was after he met her that he started writing the Bobby Chantal story in earnest. Before that he was just staying late at his office toying with a way to approach it. The actual writing of the story didn’t start until after he met Annie. Annie’s gray hair, almost white, framing a face that seems younger than the hair surrounding it, reminds him of his own mortality, reminds him he only has a finite time in this world to write fiction that matters before he too starts to turn gray and, eventually, dies. Annie is also so grounded and strong, so much the opposite of Chris, who right now is grabbing her car keys, saying she just needs to go for a drive.
When he walks back to the house from the studio, Cleo is standing in the doorway. “What was that all about?” she asks. Paul can only shake his head. “Your mother will be back later. It’s time for you to go to bed,” Paul says. He puts his arm around Cleo as they walk back into the house. He notices how strong and round her shoulder muscle feels beneath his hand. “My God, you’re getting fit,” he says. Cleo smiles. “Coach is working us harder than ever. She says it’s her tribute to Kim. She says if we all swim harder then it’s as if Kim didn’t die in vain. And guess what? I’m leading my lane now.” Paul says, “No, really? Well, that’s great, Cleo.”
This is Paul, alone in bed, remembering all too vividly that night he spent with Bobby Chantal and how they kissed and had sex on the picnic table that was up on the hill.
This is Paul’s computer in his office. It holds the first few pages of the story he’s writing about that night with Bobby Chantal. It is not a story he thinks he will ever try to publish. It is a story filled with too many personal details that would implicate him in the murder. First of all, it describes Bobby Chantal to a T. From the freckles on her nose, and her soft light-brown hair, down to her white-soled nurse’s shoes, which she said she kept looking white by covering the smudges with Wite-Out. It also describes Paul, a first year college student, with hair that was so dark it almost looked black, hair tied behind his head in a ponytail. It details the rest stop, with its picnic table, and with its view that had the ability to send Vietnam vets back in time with flashes of recognition so striking that sometimes they were left staring into the darkness of a deep depression. The story is like a written confession by a man who cannot help embellishing the facts and turning them into a story. It was when he first started staying late at his office, trying to plan the story, that Chris started accusing him of cheating. Maybe, in a way, he is cheating on her. He comes to the office most evenings after dinner to work on it. He sometimes even wakens with an idea or a detail for the story he hadn’t remembered, and rolls away from Chris’s warm body and gets into his car and drives to his office to write it down. He knows that reading the news article about the serial killer in Colorado, who was finally caught after strangling his last victim, and the news of Kim being murdered are the reasons he has been thinking about Bobby Chantal so much again. He knows it is the reason his nightmares are more frequent, and why in them he keeps trying to bring Bobby Chantal back over and over again. In truth, his memory of Bobby Chantal and his writing the story have been consuming him. He is not concentrating well in his teaching. He is reading students’ work without even leaving a constructive comment. He writes “Fine job” on the last page of their work, or something just as nondescript, when really their writing could use helpful criticism throughout. What do I really know about writing anyway? he thinks. He is doubting his own ability to tell the story. He feels that if he can get the story right, then somehow he’ll be rid of the guilt. I’m not stupid enough to go to the police and tell them I was there the night of her murder, he tells himself. That could ruin my life, and the lives of Chris and Cleo as well. But writing the story in a way that exposes the humanity within him, that might help. It might redirect his thoughts, so that while he is eating dinner with his family he might have a conversation with them instead of staring at the salt shaker and thinking of how small leaves and blades of grass were mixed in with Bobby Chantal’s blood on her face and the front of her dress when he turned her over and saw the slit in her neck that ran from ear to ear, like the proverbial second smile that so many other victims murdered by having their throats cut are described as having. And best of all, getting past writing the Bobby Chantal story might just get him back to writing work that can be published again. There are stories inside him he wants to tell, only right now it’s as if Bobby Chantal isn’t going to let him write them unless he writes her story first.