The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  But Laurel could not stop thinking of Thalia now. She imagined her striding across their backyard, her gimlet eye piercing the chaos. Thalia would grab that brisk detective by the ponytail, yank it sideways off its perfect axis, and shake her until her head bobbled loose on her neck and she explained why there was blood at the scene of a drowning.

  Moreno had questioned the Hawthornes for what felt like hours, but she’d avoided telling them anything. She’d directed most of her questions at Bet and Shelby. She’d started by asking Bet if she knew why Molly would have sneaked out and visited the Hawthornes’ yard. Laurel had wanted to ask Bet that very question; Bet wasn’t charismatic enough to be a leader, but Laurel had been worried about the DeLop influence ever since the day Shelby invited her. But Bet was genuinely clueless. She’d answered with a guileless “I dun know,” then looked to Shelby. Shelby’s cheeks had pinked, just barely, and her lids had dropped.

  Thalia would have taken one look at Shelby’s exhausted face, the lavender shadows under her eyes the size and shape of thumbprints, and stepped in. Stepped in hard. But Moreno’s next question seemed so innocuous. She’d lulled Laurel, following up by asking Shelby if she had planned to meet Molly, perhaps to play a trick on someone?

  That sounded plausible to Laurel. Only two months ago, she’d caught Shelby and Molly trying to sneak out during a sleepover with a bag of Charmin double rolls, bent on mayhem. But then Moreno had stepped it up, slowly, inching forward, and she’d focused on the girls more and more while David and Laurel sat silent. As it became obvious that Bet had not known Molly very well, Moreno zeroed in on Shelby. She pushed and bullied, asking if Molly ever talked about running away, if Molly was unhappy at home, if Molly was having trouble at school.

  Shelby, shrinking into Bet Clemmens’s side as they sat on Mindy’s love seat, kept saying she didn’t know in a scared, small voice so unlike her own that it sounded borrowed. Real Shelby trilled and yawped and gabbled dramatically and waved her arms around. She didn’t fold herself up into an unhappy packet and stare at her feet. Thalia would have knocked that bitch Moreno into next week. But Laurel, shell-shocked, sat dumb and let it happen.

  The police had released Laurel and David’s house at around four A.M., and now only the backyard was wound in yellow tape. It might have been more proper to go to a hotel, but both girls were nodding off, and Laurel had wanted the comfort of her own things more than she had wanted to be proper.

  Back in their bed, Laurel and David lay curled into S-shapes that faced each other, listening to the clatter and the voices of policemen and techs working in the yard. The CSIs were trying to process the scene before the rain came. They’d put huge floodlights all around the pool, and a hard white slice of artificial light came through a crack in the drapes. David watched Laurel steadily, but she felt her own lids drooping. She was sinking into sleep, drifting down, almost against her will.

  From the surface, she heard David say, “I can’t sleep. I’m going downstairs to do some work.”

  He got up, and it was as if he took the light with him. It reflected away before it reached her, as if she were deep under dark water. Somewhere, above her, in the safe, dry place she could not reach, David walked away. Laurel’s lungs ached for breath, but she could not reach the surface. She realized she could kick only one foot. She looked down and saw her mother squatting in some water weeds, her fluffy hair waving in the currents. Mother had a calm grip on Laurel’s other ankle.

  She woke up halfway out of bed, both feet on the floor, choking for the air that was all around her. She had one hand on the phone beside the bed. She jerked her hand away as if the phone were hot. The clock told her she hadn’t been asleep longer than a few minutes. She got all the way up, knowing she would not sleep again until she had checked on Shelby.

  She walked to Shelby’s doorway, and again, the bed was empty. Laurel’s heart stuttered. She whirled and peered across the hall into the small guest room. Shelby was there. She’d moved to the trundle bed, one level down from Bet Clemmens. Laurel got a full breath at last.

  Shelby was on her back with her arm flung up onto the daybed, her fingers loosely curled around a piece of Bet’s sleeve. The veins of Shelby’s arm glowed pale blue through her skin even in the hallway light. Freak veins, Shelby called them, and begged for tanning-bed sessions or those self-activating lotions that turned a person orange. “You’re too young,” Laurel told her, and that was true, but the secret truth beneath was that Laurel loved the prominent veins. When Shelby was a baby, Laurel would map them with her fingers, following the trail that spent blood took from Shelby’s beating heart, heading to her lungs to renew itself.

  The small guest room acted as a catchall. The overspill of Laurel’s fabric collection and the stash of toys and shoes she collected all year for DeLop ended up here. Laurel navigated her way around the stockpiles and Bet Clemmens’s Hefty bag. Bet’s mouth gaped open, and her breathing sounded thick. Shelby was breathing through her nose, quick and shallow.

  Laurel knelt by the trundle, taking Shelby’s arm down and tucking it under the quilt. Her daughter’s arm felt too light, as if it had a will of its own. As if Shelby were moving it with her.

  “Shel?” Laurel whispered. “You awake?”

  No answer.

  “Shelby,” Laurel urged, her voice growing louder, and then started when she saw that Bet Clemmens’s eyes were open and glittering in the hallway light. “Sorry, Bet. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I dun care,” Bet said. After a moment she added in a wistful voice, “Do I gotta leave?”

  Laurel swallowed hard and said, “I think if Shelby were at your house and something like this happened, I would want her home.”

  Bet said, “Mama won’t mind none. I only been here four days this time.”

  Bet stared unblinking into Laurel’s eyes, her mouth turned slightly down. Bet’s mother, Sissi, had the grayed-out skin of a longtime meth user and a mouth so chapped it cracked and bled at the corners. She’d waved one lazy hand and said, “Bye, then,” when Laurel took Bet away, but blood was blood, and surely any mammal would want her child home under the circumstances.

  “You can come back another time. Soon. I promise.”

  Bet nodded. Her rounded eyes had a downward tilt that matched her mouth. She looked like a little beef cow being led off toward an unfamiliar building. She hadn’t blinked in so long that Laurel’s own eyes began to itch.

  “Good night,” Laurel said, and Bet rolled onto her back to stare up at the ceiling. Shelby’s eyes were closed and moving under her lids, as if she were dreaming. Maybe she wasn’t playing possum. Moreno had obviously exhausted her.

  No matter how many times Shelby said she didn’t know whether Molly had been unhappy at home, at school, Moreno had come back to it. Moreno had also asked several times if Molly had a boyfriend. Shelby had been definite on that one, shaking her head, eyes down, shaking her head again when Moreno asked if there was a boy Molly liked.

  But there had to be a boy she’d liked. Molly was a thirteen-year-old girl. She and Shelby had talked constantly about which of them liked what boy in an endless round-robin as Laurel ferried them from school to dance and home again. Yet Shelby had shaken her head, a definite no, no boy, and Laurel had seen someone who didn’t belong standing in her cul-de-sac. He’d been short, but not middle-school short. An adult with curly, tousled hair like Stan Webelow’s, and as always when she thought of him, her blood chilled and ran a little slower.

  Stan had moved to Victorianna about three years ago, when his mother died and he inherited the house. Cookie Webelow had been a neighborhood fixture, always out digging in her flower beds. She kept gum in her apron pockets, and the neighborhood kids adored her, but she raised the hairs on the back of Laurel’s neck.

  All of Victorianna had turned out for her funeral. It was open-casket, so Laurel had left ten-year-old Shelby with Mother. She thought the funeral-home people had lost their minds; they’d put Cookie in a full face of
makeup, though she’d never so much as powdered her nose in the decade Laurel had known her. Her hands looked white and strange without her gardening gloves.

  Trish Deerbold had stood in line ahead of David, putting one hand dramatically over her heart and exclaiming, “She looks so natural.”

  The standard southern funeral response was “Lord, yes, she looks exactly like herself,” but David hadn’t recognized it as ritual, and his eyes widened at the blatant falsehood. He stared at Cookie’s round brown face, powdered pale around the lips with a big red mouth drawn on, as overblown as a rose four days past prime.

  He whispered to Laurel, “Natural? She looks like a sock monkey.”

  Trish gave him a fast glare, but his description was both so horrible and so accurate that Laurel had to quash an inappropriate spray of laughter that was rushing her throat. She forced herself to look away from Cookie, focusing instead on the small, dapper man in the black suit standing by the head of the coffin. He was passing out handshakes as if they were the prize a person won for viewing. Laurel assumed he was the funeral director, but as she reached the front of the receiving line, he took her hand and introduced himself as Stan Webelow, Cookie’s son.

  Laurel murmured her condolences, but her spine went all a-shiver in his oily presence. His fine-boned hand felt as waxy and inanimate as his mother’s looked. Cookie had never mentioned a son, and in her house, there were only pictures of her late husband and her corgis.

  The next week, Stan Webelow had moved into Cookie’s peach-colored house. Laurel wondered why a young single man wanted to live in a four-bedroom, three-bath home in a family neighborhood. He had no visible means of support, though Mindy believed Cookie’s estate was substantial, and Edie had heard he owned a Web-based business of some sort.

  He’d stayed, and stayed unemployed and single. He’d never brought a date to neighborhood potlucks, but he had an unctuous, touchy-feely way with the ladies that made Laurel doubt he was gay. He was around thirty, and most of the neighborhood women considered him attractive, though he gravitated toward women a good ten or even twenty years older than he was. Laurel found it puzzling before it occurred to her that these women had something besides their age in common: They had teenagers.

  Laurel watched him closely after that, especially with Shelby. Although she never saw him do anything untoward, she couldn’t shake her uneasy dislike of him, so she’d warned Shelby to steer clear. Now she was pretty sure he’d been in her cul-de-sac, way off his turf, and Molly had led Laurel to her small body as if it were a message.

  If so, Molly had chosen the wrong woman to interpret it. Laurel wasn’t Joan of Arc, with a team of helpful angels to light her up a path to truth. She wasn’t even a poor man’s Nancy Drew.

  Still, Molly had chosen Laurel to pull her from the water. She’d put her blood on Laurel’s hands, and since the moment Laurel had seen it, she hadn’t stopped thinking of her sister. She’d heard Thalia’s voice, and she’d woken up with her hand on the phone. Now, staring down at Shelby’s wan face, she knew the number she needed to dial.

  She had to talk to David first. He thought of Thalia’s name as a synonym for all hell breaking loose. He wouldn’t want her. Laurel would have to make him see that Thalia could do no harm. Here on their pretty street, hell had broken loose already.

  CHAPTER 3

  David was down in his office in the basement, sitting in one of the two leather rolling chairs. He had three worktables set in an L-shape that he used like an enormous desk, and the monitor sat centered in the longer leg. His game was running, so looking at his monitor was like looking through the cockpit of a plane with the controls all at the bottom of the screen. He leaned in toward the flat-screen LCD he had hooked up to his multi-box system.

  Laurel saw another plane flash by. David muttered, “Gotcha,” and began firing. He spun after it, zooming through an endlessly unfolding blue sky. The sound effects were on low, but he still had no idea she had entered the room. He probably didn’t know he was in the room, either. David was in the zone.

  She could call him out of it. After thirteen years of marriage, all she had to do was say his name, and he would come to her, beaming himself in from the foreign place he lived when she was silent. When she first met him, in her freshman year at NC State, he’d seemed strange and closed, as if he lived buttoned up inside his brain. He was weird, and Laurel hadn’t liked him. She had about enough weird to last her, thank you.

  Growing up two years behind Thalia had been like going to Strange boot camp for eighteen years straight. By the time Laurel started ninth grade, Thalia had already infiltrated every nook and cranny of Pace High. She’d been a cheerleader and a stoner, and she’d made and dropped track team, student council, and the twirling majorettes in quick succession before joining—and as rapidly unjoining—debate squad, band, and chorus. Finally, she’d defaulted to hanging out with the five geek-lunatics who called themselves the Drama Club.

  Thalia had entertained herself on Laurel’s high school orientation day by spreading a rumor that she’d been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome over the summer. Thalia calibrated her performance carefully, operating well below teacher radar, but her small, controlled twitches, head tics, and soft squeals and profanities were convincing. Even the most Thalia-jaded members of the student body became true believers, and kids Laurel didn’t know kept stopping by her locker and her lunch table to ask about Thalia’s “condition.”

  Laurel had gone shopping with Mother in August for Chic jeans with tapered legs, and strawberry lip gloss, and brown mascara. She kept her shiny hair in a thick French braid and was quiet and smart but not too smart. She should have been allowed to blend.

  Instead, she found herself saying over and over, “I don’t want to talk about it,” while staring down at her pink Converse high-tops. Every third girl in her class had those same colored sneakers, but rather than easing her into the scenery, hers seemed to glow like bright and shameful beacons.

  Thalia closed the show three weeks later by squawking, “Fuck-a-poo, birdy!” during bio class every time Mrs. Simon turned her back to write on the board. It earned her yet another suspension, and for the rest of high school, even after her sister had graduated, Laurel was known as “Thalia Gray’s sister, poor thing.”

  Away at college, Thalia-free for the first time in her life, Laurel immediately took up with a group of bouncy-ponytail girls, mostly education majors, pretty enough, smart enough, but not too . . . anything. They looked like the pictures that had so entranced Mother in the college brochures. They had an equal and opposing bunch of boys whom they traded around, jocky business-major types, round-faced and cheerful and about as complicated as a bunch of puppies. Not one of them had ever met Thalia, and if Laurel had her way, they never would.

  David was twenty and already a grad student at Duke, Big Brain on Campus. He was the star of the math and science hybrid classes, tall and skinny as a pipe cleaner, but cute enough, if he hadn’t been so weird. He had the apartment across the hall from Laurel’s friend Jeannie. Laurel never would have met him if he had lived anywhere else.

  He didn’t fit with her set, but when Laurel was a freshman, he kept happening into them. They’d be doing the kind of perfect-snapshot college things that had attracted Laurel to this crowd in the first place: plumping hot dogs on the grill in the apartment complex’s pavilion, sunning on Jeannie’s deck. He’d come up and say hello and then simply stay.

  By the time Laurel was a sophomore, he’d grown on her. He was like Jeannie’s bright orange paisley sofa, a strange hand-me-down that became so familiar it seemed like it belonged in the room. He sat through the games with them and paid his share for pizza, watching Laurel and her friends like Mr. Spock watched the humans. He didn’t get a lot of the jokes or know the teams, and he once stood up and started out in the middle of a tight World Series game without saying a word.

  “Where’re you going, Lurch?” Jeannie called after him.

  Jeannie’s current
boyfriend had named him after the silent butler from the Addams Family. David didn’t seem to mind, or maybe he didn’t get it. Laurel minded for him, though. She always called him David.

  David pulled his watch out of his pocket, checked it, and said, “PBS has an all-night NOVA marathon starting at nine.”

  Jeannie managed to keep a straight face until he closed the door, and then she and her boyfriend both cackled like two of Macbeth’s witches while Laurel said, “Guys. Be nice,” and tried not to be the third.

  His quiet presence was such a constant that she hardly noticed him, and he didn’t truly become a person to her until the day he found her weeping in the hallway near his door. She was waiting for Jeannie to come home and let her in so she could cry far away from the fishbowl interest of the girls in her dorm; her boyfriend, Dale, had broken her pink heart that day.

  When David saw her sitting in a miserable pile on the floor, he set down his grocery bags and folded his body into an awkward crouch beside her. Laurel had cried all her bones out and was too floppy to worry that she was red-nosed and puffy-eyed in front of a boy. It was, after all, only David Hawthorne.

  “I’m having a bad day,” she said.

  “I see that. Come in out of the hall,” he said.

  He had some white wine in one of his grocery bags. It was the big-bottle kind, but with a real cork, the glass frosted because he’d bought it cold. In his apartment, he had real wineglasses, too, mismatched but pretty. They sat sipping with their backs propped against his futon, and if Jeannie got home, Laurel didn’t hear her.

  Laurel spilled out her tale of woe, and he kept his eyes steady on her. She’d never had a boy listen to her blather on about love troubles, but David acted like her every word was interesting and important.