This is a qualifier meet weeks later when the weather is warmer. Driving two hours south to the away meet, you pass trees on the sides of the highway that look faintly green, the buds on the ends of their branches brand-new. You think how in a week’s time there will be leaves on the trees up by where you live too. No longer will people driving in cars on your road be able to turn their heads and look up at your house as it sits high on a hill, the copper roof like the buds on these trees, just starting to turn faint green with age. Once again, the trees will grow leaves and the bushes and the blond, tall grass will grow, and no one will be able to see you and your family walking through the rooms of your house: Thomas on the phone with the lab that he runs arguing with a staff member because for months now, almost a year, batches of bacteria he’s been growing to target a gene are failing and he can’t figure out if it’s due to a virus, contaminated water, or a temperature problem, and it’s driving Thomas crazy. You at the sink staring at your face in the mirror thinking if you were a bride you had to photograph, then you would have a hard time finding the right light to photograph yourself in—you would have to pull far back with the lens in order to capture the slightest hint of youth, of beauty, of any camera-worthiness at all. Those people in the cars below your hill on your road on a sunny summer’s day with the leaves and the blossoms in full riot would not be able to see your girls bent over homework, or standing tall, practicing, holding small chins over the warmly colored wood of old violins.
This is the dead pool at the away meet, a huge affair built years ago and named after a man who has been dead for years in a town that looks like it’s dead, located on a college campus that looks like it’s dead, where the people shuffling into the store at the gas station to buy weak coffee look like they’re near dead. The dead pool, the moment you enter it, is so hot you feel your blood evaporating and your tongue thickening, and you’re already wanting a drink of water. The course is long, twice as long as the swimmers are used to. This is the national anthem. Who can hear it being played over a sound system so old?
You eat grapes. The grapes have already become warm because the facility is so warm. You talk to the other parents. “Aren’t we lucky,” you tell each other. “We don’t have to time today. The home team has enough timers.” But you don’t feel lucky. You like to time. You like to be down on deck doing something. The children, the young ones, need to be asked their names. They need to be in the right order. You cannot have someone diving off the blocks who is not in the right order on the heat sheet. The swimmers are nervous and they are bored standing on line at the same time. They play with their goggles. They put them on and take them off so many times. On line, the girls give each other back massages or they spell letters with their fingers on each other’s backs and make each other guess what word they are spelling. They play a game called ninja, which you don’t understand even though your daughters have explained it to you. The girls all jump together and then end up with their hands in different poses as if they were karate-chopping the air. It reminds you of the game of statues you played as a girl, only these statues always end up in a fighting stance.
Since you are not timing today, you have time to think, which is not always a good thing. The first races are the five-hundred frees, and Sofia and Alex are not in this event, and it is a long event. You look around at the crowd in the bleachers, and as usual there is someone who reminds you of your brother. You notice a man with a chipped front tooth and it reminds you of your brother, but your brother only had a chipped tooth for so long. When he was older, after he married, he had the tooth fixed, but still when you picture your brother, it’s always with that chipped front tooth. Maybe it’s because when you played chase with your brother, that tooth looked sharp, like it could tear the skin on your back, on your neck, if he caught you. You try to stop thinking about your brother. You are always thinking about him when you are alone, when Thomas isn’t there talking to you about something he’s read in a magazine, when your girls aren’t there asking you questions, asking you to help with their homework, to tell them the difference between to, too, and two. You are alone because Thomas is too busy with work to come to most of these meets. He works weekend days at the lab, bent over proteins, fussing over radioactive isotopes, hearing outside his window the screech of plane wheels grabbing tarmac, the roaring of engines, the voices of people in a hurry, trundling suitcases with wheels over long distances of asphalt from car trunk to check-in. You lower your head while sitting in the bleachers, looking down at your hands, your signature veins popping out as if you just had too much blood running through you and the walls of your veins were on the verge of bursting. You remember what Thomas told you about a phenomenon, that of all the matter in the universe, we only see 4 percent of it. “Does that include air?” you asked. “Yes, it includes air,” he said. “We know what air is. We can see it. But there is so much we can’t see, and we don’t even know what it is. It’s invisible to us.” You knew you were supposed to be impressed by only being able to see 4 percent of what was around you and in front of you, but you couldn’t help thinking that for you it was less than 4 percent, because you couldn’t see air the way Thomas could see air. He could probably visualize water vapor and oxygen and CO2, but you could not.
These are your fingers, sore at the ends from trying to pull up the competitive swim-team suit over Sofia’s body when you first arrived at the facility and you stood in the stall in the bathroom. This is you, dialing Thomas, who you think by now has left his work at the lab and gone home. This is you telling him you have arrived at the meet, telling him you guess you are lucky, you don’t have to time, and Thomas tells you he has been home already an hour and split wood, and that he has seen a fox come up close to the chickens. Already you have lost the duck and the rooster and a few hens to a fox.
This is the fox, down in the woods that are not so thick, but the maples grow thin, and the pines only reach up to the waist, and the sun has a clear path to hit strong and full on the fox’s cinnamon-colored back. This is you telling Thomas that the girls here on the other swim teams look like Amazons, and that you are afraid for your girls, who are just of average weight and height, and the youngest, maybe not even average yet, maybe below average. This is the fox moving his ears from side to side, listening to Thomas’s deep voice as Thomas stands out on the porch talking to you, smelling on Thomas the chainsaw oil that dripped on the knees of his pants. This is one of the Amazon girls diving into the water, going down, so far down, on her dive, as if she is too heavy to control it, and then she comes up, breaches, is what you think, and you’re glad one of your children is not next to you, because if she were, you might say “breaches” out loud, and then your child would say, “Oh, Mom, how could you say that? You’re not supposed to say things like that.” Your children have been schooled in schools where guidance counselors give weekly lessons on bullying. Bullying is not what bullying was when I was a kid, you think. When you were a kid bullies were kids who threw another kid against the chain-link fence at recess and took the lunch money out of his pockets. Today, bullying is calling another kid a name, and bullies are kids who simply don’t want to play with another kid because they don’t like them. You know because Alex, your younger daughter, recently came home from school with a note saying her actions that day were considered bullying, because she and another girl openly agreed they did not want to play with another girl. The girls were overheard by a teacher. You felt then that you were only seeing a mere 1 percent of the universe. You reprimanded your daughter, and explained how that wasn’t nice, but then later that night, talking to Thomas, you told him you needed clarification. Since when did all this become bullying? you asked. Thomas shook his head while reading his science magazine. You thought he was shaking his head with you, telling you he didn’t know either when all of the rules changed, when what we could see in the universe started shrinking, but then he said, “Listen to this,” but you didn’t. You left the room. Some of his words, though, chased you down the stairs. You made out the words “quarks” and “particles” and “gluons.” Your house is like one big ventriloquist. There are open parts everywhere, so that you often don’t really know where a voice is coming from. You’d think a person was talking to you from the bathroom, when they were really in the rec room, or in the girls’ loft. His words chased you downstairs, and seemed to get louder as you entered the kitchen, even though he hadn’t moved from the bed. You had no idea what he was talking about and doubted that if you had read the article yourself you’d understand it any better.
You remembered to take a vitamin, and then felt guilty remembering, because you hadn’t remembered earlier to give your children their vitamins, and they were the ones who needed them the most. All the growing of the bones, the laying down of the platelets, and your older girl, Sofia, who recently started her period, she would need more iron now, you thought. You thought of the other things she might need, things not for purchase, but intangible things like compliments, and feeling the eyes of others on her, noticing how she looks good in a dress. She might need you and Thomas to tell her how pretty she is, how strands in her hair in the summer sun look gold. You once had these things yourself, these compliments, and maybe it was not so long ago, but now they are gone, and you think maybe that is not so bad, because in a way it’s as if you have given them to your daughter. They are hers now. You wonder what it was that your father once gave to your brother when he was a teenager, or was that the problem, he gave nothing to your brother at all, and your brother walked through his teenage years without this kind of passed-on gift from your father. Your brother did not take on the posture of a man who was proud. His shoulders stayed rounded. His eyes darted in conversation rather than frankly holding someone’s gaze. His voice, even, still broke, rather than taking on a mellow, basslike tone.
This is the killer, our killer, at the meet watching Kim. He holds a heat sheet that he bought for three dollars from a parent sitting at a desk at the entrance to the bleachers. On the heat sheet he can see that her fastest time for her hundred fly was 1:08.74. He watches Kim behind the blocks. She is not like the other girls. She does not turn around and high-five other swimmers. She does not wave to someone who may be watching her from the stands. She stares straight out while waiting for her race, and she jogs in place and loosens up her arms, not seeming to look at anyone, not even when she hears her name being called by her teammates, who cheer her on before she gets ready for her dive. When she’s on the blocks, she easily bends the top half of her body over and holds on tight to the edge of the block, so tight our killer is surprised that when she dives in the platform of the block doesn’t come off in her hands and end up with her in the water. He watches how she moves, how her slender neck reaches up and out with every upswing of her arms. He wonders if today will be the day she beats her record, because that is what he is waiting for. He is confident she will do it soon. No one else focuses as hard as she does before her race. On her last lap, though, it is obvious this isn’t the day. She seems to tire, either that or the other girls swimming with her get a burst of energy. She ends up touching the wall with a 1:09.75. She has gained time. When she gets out of the water she does not even go up to her coach for a bit of advice. Instead she goes right into the warm-down lane, her head sunk low between her shoulders. The killer sighs. He was looking forward to the way the blade of his knife would cut through that throat, sending all of that red blood that would be pulsing so hard from her athlete’s strong heart down her shirtfront. (He couldn’t understand why that strangler out west bothered to strangle. What a waste of an experience, not seeing the blood, not letting the blood do what it most wants to do—flow.) Especially, though, he was looking forward to how she would look, all of the excitement and satisfaction and energy in her eyes from having beat her record suddenly leaving, suddenly his for the taking.