This is the water the next afternoon at the pool looking cloudier, partly because it is mirroring the overcast sky of a hot late summer’s day gathering storm clouds, and partly because it’s dirtier from so many hundreds of kids swimming in it and having unknowingly taken into the water with them bits of grass that clung to the sides of their feet, and bits of dirt, and traces of sports energy drinks, and traces of body lotion used without success to moisturize skin that stews for hours every day in water treated with chlorine. This is Paul cheering Cleo on. He watches her race a one-hundred IM in the next lane even as he’s timing for another swimmer in his own lane. When she hits the wall he stops his stopwatch instead of stopping it when the swimmer in his own lane touches two-tenths of a second later. Paul writes in a time he thinks the kid in his lane might have gotten, but is not worrying about it too much, because after all the kid didn’t come in first or second or even third, but maybe second-to-last.
Driving home, Paul keeps telling Cleo how proud he is of her for winning her heat. He tells her so many times that she says, “Dad, can we just listen to the radio now?” and he turns it on to some popular station where she knows all the words to all the songs and he wants to know how she knows them all when he hardly lets her listen to that station in the car. The songs are all songs he listened to growing up, only now, after a few lines, the poetic lyrics are rudely stopped, interrupted by riffs of rapping and the disjointed telltale mechanized bass beats of dubstep.
This is Paul passing by rest stops along the way, unable to keep from craning his neck back to watch them a little longer as he wonders if the rest-stop killer is there, sitting in his red Corvair, or probably some newer car by now, thinking about who his next victim will be.
This is Paul entering his driveway, seeing that Chris’s car isn’t there, thinking how she’s probably off with Bobby Chantal’s daughter, Chris putting her hand on the daughter’s shoulder, helping her deal with the upheaval of having to exhume her mother. He doesn’t feel there’s any stopping Chris now. He could have done something before, maybe, if he’d known this is what she’d be up to. Maybe he could have called Chris’s parents and asked them to come for a visit and try to talk to Chris and explain to her how she was getting caught up in a world that wasn’t her own, but now it is too late. Bobby Chantal’s body is on its way to seeing the light of day once again after so many years, and Paul is on his way to facing months and maybe years of a legal nightmare that he can only hope turns out in his favor.
When Chris comes home later he is in bed, but not asleep. He reaches out to her when she comes into the bed, and he can feel her tense up immediately. She quickly turns to face him, as if she thinks he is going to hurt her, or that she wants to hurt him. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s just me, your husband,” he says. But he does not feel her breathing relax and her body still seems tense and her skin is cold, as if she has been outside for a while without a jacket or sweater.
“Can we talk?” he says. She shakes her head. He can hear her hair rasping on the pillowcase she shakes it so firmly. “But I’ve got to tell you something,” he says.
“Can it wait until tomorrow? I’m tired,” she says.
“No, it can’t wait. It’s a story I think you’ll want to hear,” he says. He leaves the bed and goes and gets his briefcase. He printed out the story the last time he was in his office, and now he sits beside her on the bed and reads it to her. The light from the moon is strong enough that he doesn’t even have to turn the light on, and he likes reading his words better that way, without even a pen in his hand to stop and make corrections to the writing. When he is finished Chris says, “That was you, in the story?” He nods. “You could have told me,” she says. “You had so many years to tell me.”
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he says. “It wasn’t like I could make Bobby Chantal come back. It wasn’t like I took her away. I wasn’t part of the equation.”
“How could you say that? You were! You saw the car. You saw the license plate. You knew what Bobby Chantal was doing up until minutes before her throat was slit.”
“If I had gone to the police they would have focused on me, Chris. They would have spent time, everyone’s time, trying to figure out if I was the killer or not. It was better that I didn’t come forth. Don’t you realize that when this happened we had just decided to start seriously seeing each other again? It’s not exactly information I was going to share with you to get you to date me.”
“No, you’re right. If I had known how you were just watching out for your own self, I wouldn’t have dated you at all. How do I even know you aren’t really the killer?”
Paul knew this was coming, but still, to hear it from Chris at that moment makes him so angry.
“I am not the fucking killer!” he yells, and of course he realizes at the moment he yells it that he yelled too loud, his voice too high, even the moonlight seems to cringe from how loud he was and seems to dim, or is it just a passing cloud in front of the moon that makes it look as though Chris’s face is darkening?
Cleo opens their door then. “What’s going on? Why’s Dad yelling?” she says. Paul steers her back to her room, to where the mobile of the planets swings and glows. “It’s nothing. I’ll tell you in the morning,” he says. “You and Mom are fighting, aren’t you?” she says. “Yes, we are having an argument,” he says. “Are you going to get a divorce?” Cleo asks as he brings the blankets up to her chin and smoothes her hair away from her forehead. He shakes his head in the dark.