The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
Page 5
Laurel wound down until she was whispering. David leaned in close to hear, so close that it seemed like he was going to kiss her. She leaned in, too, until she was kissing him, or maybe they kissed each other. Either way, it was a good kiss. A really good kiss. He didn’t do the oil-drill thing with his tongue that the heartbreaker had thought was such a great idea. She talked more, and then they kissed again. Still good. Kissing turned into making out, and then they broke apart while Laurel talked. He listened, shifting closer and closer until they were kissing again. Every time it started up, it went a little further.
David was good at things. Different at things. Dale had been Laurel’s first “serious” boyfriend, and the sex had been exciting mostly because it seemed like such a grown-up, college thing to do. It was bouncy and friendly and interesting, and Dale was made so helpless by it that Laurel felt proud, like she was pretty and necessary. But it wasn’t something she would have missed Melrose Place for.
This wasn’t like that. When David touched her, he did it like an experiment, bent on finding out what kind of touching worked. It was as if he had hypothesized that the female body had nerve endings in it, and his five-year mission was to seek all of them out. He woke something up when he slipped his hand under Laurel’s shirt, drifting his fingers against the thin nylon of her bra. Laurel’s previous boyfriends had always treated her breasts like knobs or squeezy bath toys. In high school, she’d let boys feel her up because it distracted them from trying to work her jeans off, but David made her want to take them off.
She didn’t decide to have sex with him so much as, at some point, her body decided. Everything he did made her want the next thing without even knowing what the next thing was, but then they’d find it out. She didn’t think they were going to have sex; this was something else, something she and David were inventing as they went. Her body got hungry, and her mind blanked itself into an animal place. She went blind with it, her panties tossed away, her hips pressing up toward him, thoughtless and asking, and he was there, answering. They gave themselves up to it.
Afterward he fell asleep like boys do, sprawled naked on his back with his head propped on a cushion he’d pulled down off the futon. Laurel lay beside him with her blood running through her veins all irregular but sexy, as if it were made out of jazz. She scooted down to align her hip with his and looked at their thighs together. His was a long line, mostly bone. Hers was curved, shorter and paler. She couldn’t be still. Her eyes wouldn’t close. She stood up and pulled on her panties and David’s discarded T-shirt, liking the wood-smoke and cinnamon smell of him on it. She was dying to talk, and she thought about slipping across the hall, but she realized she didn’t want Jeannie to know. She didn’t want any of her friends to know. This thing with David, unpredicted and peculiar, didn’t match them.
David’s apartment had a breakfast bar between his den and the minuscule kitchen. Laurel boosted herself up to sit on the low counter, resting her feet on one of the two stools. His phone hung on the wall beside her, and she picked it up and dialed her sister. Thalia was already living with Gary over in Mobile. They had dropped out of Chapel Hill and were trying to scrape together the cash to open their theater.
Thalia picked up on the fourteenth ring, barking, “What, Jesus Bug, what?” into the phone. She knew only Laurel would let the phone ring on and on past eleven, the same way Laurel knew Thalia would not be sleeping.
Laurel could hear a piano and raucous conversation, distant, from another room. She spoke barely above a whisper. “Dale dumped me, and then I had complete sex with David Hawthorne. On his floor!”
“David Hawthorne?” Thalia said. “I don’t— Wait, is that Lurch?”
“Don’t call him that. You’ve never even met him.” Laurel’s whisper had turned fierce. “Sex is an amazing thing, Thalia.”
Thalia laughed. “Um, doofus, I know.”
Laurel said, “But I didn’t.”
“Dale was bad in bed!” Thalia crowed. “Ha! Gary owes me five bucks.”
“You bet on that? You’ve never met Dale, either.” But Laurel didn’t have the brain space to think about Dale, not an inch. She said, “This changes everything.”
Thalia made a piffling noise and said, “An orgasm doesn’t change things, Bug. It’s just a nice way to end Friday night.”
But Thalia was wrong. It did change everything. While Laurel was whispering with her sister, her body was already busy making Shelby.
Sex with David was a continuing revelation, even while Laurel was pregnant, even after. She’d always been body-shy, the girl who took her gym clothes to a bathroom stall while everyone else stripped off in the locker room. She didn’t want to be like Thalia, who paraded naked from shower to closet and then stood there dripping and glaring at her clothes, saying, “Who do I want to be today?” Dale had visited Laurel’s body briefly and by candlelight, like a tourist, and she had pulled up the sheet the second he rolled away.
With David, she left the lights on and kicked the covers back. Growing Shelby, she ballooned up to what felt like twice her normal size, but in their bedroom, he stayed innovative; she stayed shameless.
The sex held Laurel during that difficult first year when they had only each other and the mixed blessing of Thalia. Mother had dreamed of Laurel in a cap and gown, then a wedding dress. Laurel hadn’t given her either, and she was aloof and overly polite in her disappointment.
David’s mother and grandparents wanted him in tweedy jackets with suede elbow patches, getting paid for understanding string theory and marrying some physicist from Harvard. Instead, he’d taken some computer code, his hobby, to a company all the way down in Florida, near Laurel’s family. He’d traded grad school for Laurel and a high-end corporate job that came with a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and insurance rigged to cover her “preexisting condition.”
David was working crazy hours, proving himself invaluable in the hope that the company would let him work at home, away from all the people. So Laurel was alone, learning to be a mother and the wife of a near-stranger who hardly ever spoke to her.
None of it mattered, not when she secretly felt they did sex different and better than anyone else in the world. And David listened to her. She could talk about sewing or their neighbors or her long, lovely baby days with Shelby or tell rambling stories about her childhood. He pricked up his ears and gave her the same attention that he would have given Albert Einstein, and sex was how he answered back. Sex was where Laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.
Now she said his name softly, and he immediately glanced over his shoulder. His eyes were as empty as hollow glass balls, unseeing, but as she watched, they filled up with her husband.
He turned back to the monitor and depressed a button on his keyboard, saying, “Hold on. I need a couple of minutes.”
His office took up most of the basement, with only the laundry room and a small bathroom walled off behind it. David’s ancient futon was up against the wall behind his desk. Laurel sat down on it, prepared to wait, but almost immediately, he swiveled in his chair to face her.
“I thought you were sleeping,” he said, concerned.
“I was. For a minute,” Laurel said, one finger tracing the ghost of Molly’s blood on her palm. “David, I need Thalia over here.”
“Or for the house to catch fire. That’d be good.”
David’s answer had come so fast it seemed automated. Behind him, on the screen, his plane began spiraling downward. He hadn’t paused his game properly, and the green and brown earth came into view.
“I mean it,” she said.
He gaped at her and said, “Have you met Thalia?” He leaned toward Laurel, bracing his elbows on his knees, long hands dangling, oblivious as his plane hurtled down and crashed behind him. Laurel heard the faint rumble of the impact and explosion. “You can’t be serious,” he added.
“I am, though. This isn’t a regular day. This is the kind of day Thalia is good at.”
David touched the pads of his fingers to his forehead. He sat up and dropped his hand, then pressed his forehead again, as if he had something stuck up there and was pushing at it, trying to manually make it drop down and come out of his mouth. At last he said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“That detective. Moreno. She barely asked us anything, and she treated Shelby like a perp on Law and Order, bad-copping her. We sat there and let her.”
“You think Thalia would have stopped her?”
“Yes,” Laurel said.
No hesitation. After all, it had worked that way before. Daddy had shot Marty, and after, in the bitter dregs of that long day, Thalia had done all the talking. When the deputy had turned to question Laurel, Thalia had taken her thumb out of her mouth and said, “My dumbass sister had her eyes shut. She’s scared of guns. She’s probably scared of deer.”
Laurel hardly had to say a thing after that.
Now Laurel said, “That detective kept saying we had to answer her questions first, but then there never was a turn for us to ask anything. Molly Dufresne is dead, and Moreno is treating Shelby like a criminal. Thalia would make her stop. She’d make Moreno tell us what’s going on. Thalia would—”
“Thalia isn’t magic,” David interrupted.
Laurel had to bite the inside of her lip because she was about to ask him how he knew. There was a tiny piece of her that still believed her big sister had taken Super Glue and put that shattered snail right back together. Maybe he had gone creeping off the garden to live out his life, eating moss and making more snails.
David said, “They’ll tell us what’s going on when they know.”
Laurel didn’t believe that. On the monitor, the game reset, the plane’s windscreen repaired, the controls restored. The view showed a red dirt runway that bisected a grassy field.
Laurel said, “What was Molly doing in our yard? After midnight? All by herself? That’s not like her.”
“It’s not?” he said.
“Of course not,” Laurel said. “What do you remember about Molly? As a person?”
He thought for a moment, his forehead creasing. “She was blond?” he said. “And not loud.”
“That was the wrong question. Never mind. Molly wasn’t a leader in that dance gang of Shelby’s. She did whatever Shelby did. I’m not saying she wouldn’t sneak out to TP a house or maybe even meet a boy, but she wouldn’t do it alone.” Laurel remembered the drowned girl’s ghost landing beside the pool, changing into a moving shadow that faded into the darkness as Laurel’s gaze found Molly in her pool. “What if someone else was there, David? I think I saw someone moving in our yard when I was looking out the window.”
He shook his head. “You were sleepwalking. You could have seen dancing trees. It wouldn’t mean our pines were sentient.”
“There’s more, though. After, when we were walking over to Simon and Mindy Coe’s, I thought I saw Stan Webelow. He was standing in the Deerbolds’ yard.”
“The creepy guy who lives all the way down Queen’s Court? Are you sure?”
“No,” Laurel said. “I only saw curly hair.”
David thought about it. “Rex Deerbold has curly hair.”
“It wasn’t curly like that. Anyway, I think Trish said it was a travel week for him.”
“Wait. Why didn’t you tell that detective?”
Laurel lifted her hands and said, “I don’t know. She didn’t ask who was in the cul-de-sac, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly. All she wanted to do was pry at Shelby.”
The screen saver came up, fish swimming peacefully in an aquarium.
“You have to tell the police,” David said.
“Tell them what? I saw suspicious hair? I was sleepwalking, and there was a shadow that might have been a dream or a fox or a . . .” She stopped before she said the word. Ghost. David knew the name of her every childhood hamster, every boy she’d kissed, every favorite teacher. But she’d never told him that her dead uncle Marty used to visit her at night.
She hadn’t known David very well when they’d married, and since that day, Marty had not come. Not once. Of course, David had heard her family mention Marty’s name. He knew that her daddy had been raised by his older brother and that Marty had died in a hunting accident. But that was all.
At some point early in their marriage, she began to believe that to talk about dead Marty would be to make him real for David, too, to reinvite him, perhaps to reinvent him. So she had tucked all thoughts of him deep away. She slept curled against her husband’s long back with her face buried in the warm corner made by the mattress and his side, and Marty could not penetrate the high, hard wall of David’s rationalism. David did not know her ghost, and she couldn’t explain it to him. He wouldn’t understand; he had never even set foot inside DeLop.
These things were connected; even though Marty had been Daddy’s family, Laurel could see him because of Mother’s people.
Laurel had a cousin just her age who had claimed to see ghosts, too. When he and Laurel were seventeen, he’d “gone all the way to odd,” as Aunt Enid put it, by which she meant he stopped talking and had to be fed by hand. He sat in a rocking chair drooling his days away. Every now and again, he’d stand up and whirl in frenzied circles and then lope back and forth across the room, grabbing and smashing anything he could touch. His daddy or his brother would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until he went limp and could be propped back in his chair. Then he had burned down Uncle Petey-Boy’s shed and gotten arrested. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a state home instead of prison. Petey-Boy had said, “I coulda tol’ them he was ass-rat crazy a year ago and stilla had my shed.”
Laurel had her own diagnosis; her cousin had gone with the ghosts when they wanted to show him things. He had looked too long, was all.
Her great-aunt Moff still read cards for The Folks, and she was spooky-right when she laid them. Hearts for love, diamonds for money, clubs for family and friends, and spades for death. Moff left the ace of spades out of her deck because, she said, “If I dun, that ace drops ever’ time I lay. Shitfire, I dun need uh ace to tell that we’re all gonna die.”
In DeLop, death came sooner rather than later. People who were born there tended to stay there. People who stayed died young and angry. No health insurance, so cancer, when it came, ate them. Too many drugs around too many guns. No jobs, restless young men with knives, drinking in small packs. The walls of the rattletrap houses were soaked in ghosts, all with things to show, all wanting to be seen. They eased into the genes.
David had never seen anything like DeLop. He’d spent his childhood in affluent Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and he probably thought Laurel had grown up poor because her parents’ house had only two small bathrooms and Mother believed Hamburger Helper and a salad was a nice family meal.
If David understood people, she could take his hand, lead him upstairs, and show him a piece of DeLop lying with eyes open, wide and dry, in the small guest bedroom. But people were one of her jobs, like balancing the checkbook was one of his. He couldn’t extrapolate DeLop by looking at Bet Clemmens. Without DeLop, Laurel couldn’t tell him about her ghosts, even though she’d been looking for Marty from the moment the drowned girl had appeared in her room.
A woman’s voice came through the speakers that sat on either side of David’s monitor. “Dave? Are you back yet?”
He turned his chair toward the keyboard and pushed that button again. “I need a few more minutes,” he said into the air.
The voice said, “Okay. I’m going to go make a fresh pot of coffee. I’ll yell when I’m back.”
David swiveled back to face Laurel.
“Someone is talking in your computer,” Laurel said.
“Yeah. That’s Kaitlyn Reese, the coder from Richmond Games.”
“In San Francisco?” Laurel said.
“Yeah. She’s there this week. We’re in TeamSpeak.” At Laurel’s baffled look, he explained, “It’s a voice-over IP application. Gamers use it to coordinate attacks.”
“The San Francisco people call you Dave?” Laurel asked. He shrugged, waving away the question. If they were calling him Dave, he hadn’t noticed. “Can she hear us?”
“Only when I hold down the tilde key.”
“That’s so strange. If we lived in California, I’d be married to someone named Dave,” Laurel said. San Francisco sounded crisply green and temperate, like a place where she’d have fruit trees in a tiny yard with no pool. Her head hurt. “It must be three A.M. there. Did you wake her up?”
David blew air out between his teeth, a quick, dismissive exhale. “She was up. She’s a coder.” He said it as if coders were some strange species of space camel that could walk through an airless desert of ones and zeros for days without water or sleep.
“Coffee’s on,” said the woman’s voice. “Dave? Hello? We’ve got to demo these dogfights this week.”
“Go ahead,” Laurel said. “We can talk about it when you’ve finished.”
Still he didn’t turn away. “I can’t take Thalia here,” he said. “Not right now. It’s too many things. There’s too many things already.”
She nodded. “I know it’s a bad time. It was an awful night, and this week is huge for you at work. But I need help.”
“I’ll help you,” he said. He sounded matter-of-fact, as if not helping her had never been a possibility.
“How?” she said.
“I don’t know. I need to think about what you said. But I will think. And then I’ll help you or get you help. Trust me, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, but even to her, she sounded uncertain.
He leaned in closer and held his rough cheek against hers, turning his face to press his nose into her neck. If he was sniff-testing her for truth, then she passed. He leaned back, pushing with his feet to roll his chair toward his desk, and she had the sense of him moving again, that same underwater feeling; she was drifting down, and he was walking away. She caught his leg before he could swivel. Laurel looked down at her hand on his knee. Washed clean.