The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Baby,” he said, “you need to rest. I’ll figure out what to do. Lie down, okay?”

  There was an old quilt that Laurel had thrown over the back of the futon, three rows of identical Sunbonnet Sues watering flowers in a nine-patch garden. Mother had made it with her when she was a girl, teaching her to sew. Laurel put her head down on one of the throw pillows, and David pulled Mother’s quilt up around her. Then he turned back to his monitor. He put on a headset and turned off his speakers, so she could no longer hear the shooting or the whoosh of the planes or the voice of the woman all the way across the country.

  She lay quietly, listening to him telling the woman to bank left, to try upping the difficulty level, to switch to keyboard controls. The whole night felt like it had happened in pieces, so she was left with scraps, their edges shredded so she could not fit them into a seamless whole. She was sinking again, and still his voice went on, only this time it was sinking with her. He’d said he would think about it. Maybe he’d realize they needed Thalia after all. Through the thin film of her sleep, she heard it happening.

  He was saying, “Sorry to wake you, but I do think you should come. Laurel needs you.”

  It was a warm invitation, issued in a tone she hadn’t heard him use with her sister in years. Maybe not ever. Laurel found herself relaxing into a deep and peaceful darkness.

  Thalia was on the way.

  CHAPTER 4

  Laurel dreamed her parents’ house, half an hour away in Pace. It was in the center of the block, on a busy street lined with brick ranches that squatted low under the wind. The rain was falling, and Marty’s ghost stood by the porch, lurking in the faint gray-on-gray shadows of a drizzling sunrise.

  Marty tied his tether to her father’s bumper, and then Laurel’s parents were on the move. As their car pulled out, the warm backwash of air pushed Marty high, sent him rising up until the identical black slate roofs camouflaged the one that had been his. The small yards were brown with summer grass, perfectly square and all the same. The Buick towed Marty like a pale kite on an endless string toward Laurel’s house in Pensacola.

  The gargoyles in the eaves saw him coming, and the weathervane spun as he passed over. The Buick pulled in to the driveway, and Marty drifted down to settle by the backyard fence. He found himself a knothole in the wood and oozed inside it, seeping down into the buried part of the post until he was an abscess at the root of it.

  He’d come to stay.

  Laurel woke to the sound of her mother’s low heels tapping across the hardwood floors above. The pleasant hum of Mother’s voice drifted down the stairs. Laurel couldn’t make out the words, but already the house felt blanketed, cozy with decorum.

  She sat bolt upright, saying, “David, you didn’t!”

  But David was gone. There was a note duct-taped to the backside of his leather chair that said, Had to get file from office. Back ASAP.

  He’d promised he would help her, and she’d heard him make that call. To Mother? She was dizzy with disbelief. She put her hands down flat on either side of her, pressing into the worn cloth cover, and tried to calm her ragged breathing. Mother and Thalia were not the same thing. Not even close. Even David should know that. When she watched her mother and sister exchange their ritual stiff kiss at Christmas, Laurel always held her breath, waiting to see if matter touching antimatter really would make the universe explode.

  Then Laurel heard her daddy say, “Water can call a person.”

  Of course, Daddy was here, too. Whither Mother went, there Daddy was also. There was no mistaking the sound of his voice. It had a single blaring timbre, large and low. He dredged words up from the bottom of his narrow tube of a chest and sent them on a side trip through his nose before releasing them.

  Daddy’s voice came from up the stairs in the keeping room, and Mother answered him. Laurel recognized her tone, sharpness coated with sweet indulgence, designed especially to pull Howard Gray down off flights of fancy.

  When Mother’s voice stopped, Daddy said, “That’s how stories about mermaids and sirens got started, Junie. Sailors know.”

  Mother must have passed close by the stairs, because Laurel heard her clearly. “I’ll put that on my to-do list for today. Ask some sailors how mermaids got invented . . .”

  Her parents’ voices went back and forth, peppering the house with their own odd music. It was the soothing lullaby of Laurel’s childhood, Daddy’s trumpet blaring between long refrains on Mother’s sweet viola, but Laurel didn’t want to be soothed this morning. She had to be sharp. If Mother was David’s idea of help, then she was truly on her own.

  She got up, running her hands through her hair, trying to smooth it. She wished she weren’t wearing silly green pajamas with pink umbrellas on them. She’d borrowed them from tiny Mindy Coe, and the bottoms fit her like capri pants, the loose hems flapping around her calves. She wished she had a toothbrush in the downstairs bathroom, and slim black pants to put on with her sleekest deep blue sweater. Even a hairbrush would help. Mother’s hair would be immaculate, her clothes pressed, and her shoes would match her handbag.

  Worse, Mother had come to Laurel’s house blindly bearing more than familial support. She’d brought Marty, sailing him effortlessly over the gate that had kept him out for thirteen years. Laurel couldn’t even yell at her. Ghosts, like family squabbles, bad manners, and other people’s dirty houses, rendered Mother oblivious. She flat refused to see them, although she was the one who had come out of DeLop, a town so haunted that every tin shed and ’fraidy hole housed its own dark spirit.

  Long before Uncle Marty began visiting, before he died, even, Mother unwittingly introduced Laurel to her first ghost: Uncle Poot’s foot.

  Poot lived in DeLop with his common-law wife, Enid, his “no-account” brother, and two grandbabies whom his daughter had abandoned. She’d peeled them off her body and dropped them at Poot’s like they were laundry the year that Laurel turned six. The babies added his house to Mother’s Christmas route.

  Poot was a spindly man with a big belly and a tittery laugh that made him sound like a girl hyena. He was sprawled on a cot in the den of his two-bedroom tract home. He’d angled the cot on the downslope of the sagging floor, so he could see the TV over his belly without having to sit up too much. His stump had been sticking out from under his blanket, covered by a thin and graying sock.

  The foot was gone, but Laurel could still see the foot.

  Not when she looked directly. But if she looked away, there was the foot in her peripheral vision, with an old man’s yellowed toenails and calluses as thick as horn. The foot twitched from side to side as if it were listening to polka music. It was the happiest part of Poot, and Laurel couldn’t blame it; it had escaped him. For months after that first visit, the sour smell of Poot and his cot and the dirty sock with no foot in it, the ghost foot bobbing cheerfully in the corner of her eye, woke her up screaming.

  From then on, Christmas by Christmas, up until the year she turned ten, Mother smiled and nodded and passed out presents, unseeing, while Laurel and Thalia watched their uncle Poot get eaten.

  The next year, when Daddy pulled up in front of Poot’s house and shut off the engine, Laurel hung back in the car with him. Daddy was more than willing to drive them all over DeLop, but he never went inside.

  Laurel whispered, “Can I stay here with you, Daddy? For this one house?”

  He didn’t hear her. His bird eyes had already focused sharply on something invisible floating three feet above the solid roof of the car. “Visiting sprites in Daddy-land,” Thalia called it.

  Mother, arms already full of bags, bumped at the window with her elbow and called, “Laurel, come on now,” through the glass.

  The three of them picked a path through Poot’s rocky yard, toe-stepping from one tip-tilty slide of gravel to the next: Mother, then Thalia, Laurel trailing behind. Aunt Enid had the door open before Mother knocked. Once inside, Laurel saw that the whole lower half of Poot’s leg was gone, even the knee. Uncle
Poot had his new, higher stump right there in plain sight, as if he were giving it an airing. It was a knob-shaped object with dry skin webbing the tip and curling off in little peels. Underneath the skin he was sloughing, the flesh looked waxy and wattled.

  The stump had a long, curved scar on the end, and Thalia whispered, “Holy goats. It’s smiling at us.”

  It was. Laurel couldn’t look away. Part of her didn’t want to, because she didn’t want to see if the ghost foot had been joined by a ghost calf. Would it be attached? Or a separate entity? It was all she could do to keep her eyes from squinching shut entirely, but Mother looked Poot right in his face and said, “Merry Christmas, Uncle,” in a firm voice, unmindful that another goodly chunk of Poot had left the building.

  Laurel turned her back and found herself facing the broken end table with Poot’s glass Christmas tree on it. The tree was hollow, and it had an electrical cord, so the cheap bulbs dotting its surface had probably worked at one time. An undisturbed layer of grime coated its green glass spikes, testifying that no one had moved it in years. Laurel snaked one hand out and pulled a red bulb from its socket, curling her fist around it, tight, tight, not looking.

  The next year, Poot’s other foot was gone, too, and the following year, the remaining leg joined it. A scant year later, Poot, his phantom foot, and even his sour cot had been taken away.

  Mother told Enid, “I was sorry to hear of your loss.”

  Aunt Enid answered, “Yeah. I tol’ Poot that the sugar diabetes would get him in the end if he didn’t stop with the drinkin’. But he kept him a bottle of—”

  “Please pass on my condolences to Doodle,” Mother interrupted. Doodle was the no-account brother.

  Nothing more was said.

  Back at home, Laurel asked Thalia, “Do you think Mother’s sad that Uncle Poot is gone?”

  Laurel was plaiting a hundred tiny braids all over Thalia’s head. When she finished, Thalia would wet her hair down in the sink and sleep on it, and in the morning, she’d take out the braids and have the Pace, Florida, girl’s version of a hundred-dollar spiral perm.

  “Are you sad?” Thalia asked, incredulous.

  “No,” said Laurel. “But Mother might be.” Poot had let Mother sleep on his couch and had fed her some after her mama passed out holding a cigarette and burned herself up.

  Thalia snorted. “Mother doesn’t even know he’s dead.”

  “Oh, come on, Thalia. She can’t say condolences and not know Uncle Poot’s dead.”

  “Sure she can.” Thalia shook Laurel’s hands out of her hair and crossed the room to her bookshelf. She ran her fingers across the spines of her paperbacks and then pulled one out and passed it to Laurel. It was Watership Down. “Mother is Cowslip,” Thalia said.

  It was a thick book, intimidating, but Laurel had to know what Thalia meant, and once she’d begun it, she couldn’t put it down. Cowslip turned out to be a fat healthy rabbit in a warren of equally fat and healthy rabbits. Laurel thought the whole bunch of them were smug. They had things the regular rabbits didn’t have: feasts and poetry and art. But she ended up feeling sorry for Cowslip. The feasts, the poems, all turned out to be distractions. A farmer was putting out the food and, every now and again, setting a trap and having rabbit supper. Underneath, Cowslip knew, but he loved his peaceful life. So he willfully stopped knowing, and he made every other rabbit in the warren stop knowing, too. Laurel read that part of the book with a faint shock of recognition.

  Thalia was right: Mother was Cowslip.

  From then on, Thalia used it as a verb, whispering “She’s Cowslipping” whenever they saw their mother’s face blank itself, her closed lips stretching into a wide smile, quelling whole rooms into submission with her mighty blindness and her will.

  And this was the person David had called in to help her. Laurel buried her head in her hands. There had been a day, just one, when Mother had taken a stand for Laurel, but she’d done it covertly, in her own sly way. Mother would not want to hear that Molly Dufresne had walked through walls to visit Laurel’s bedroom. She would not be interested in getting Thalia to come over and soak that detective in words, then twist her and wring out answers. She wouldn’t want Laurel to run around asking her neighbors if they could confirm the presence of a pervert lurking on the Deerbolds’ lawn last night, and Laurel could not remember a single time in her life when she’d pitted herself against her mother’s love of decorum and won.

  Still wishing for a toothbrush, Laurel squared her shoulders and went on upstairs.

  Shelby and Bet Clemmens sat side by side on the sofa, watching a movie. Shelby’s mouth was turned down, and her eyes were tired. She had her feet tucked up and her arms looped around her legs, as closed up as a shoe box full of secrets in the very corner of the sofa. Bet slumped beside her, looking like Bet. Someone—Laurel’s money was on Mother—had closed the drape over the glass doors, and Daddy was standing at the end, peering out at the backyard through a narrow crack. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Morning, sugar,” as Laurel came up.

  Laurel’s scrawny daddy looked like he never got fed enough when he was growing. He had a body that wanted to be strapping, but it had failed and dwindled on him. His arms, ropy with muscle and dark veins, were too long, and his head and hands were too big. He turned his head away to peer out again.

  “Sweetie,” Mother said, and came immediately to give Laurel a decorous peck on the cheek. “What an awful night you’ve had. Would you like coffee? Or an egg? I’m making lunch soon, but you could have an egg.”

  “Just coffee,” Laurel said.

  “Come away from there, Howard,” Mother said. Her tart, fond tone was back. “And no more about mermaids or the water calling people. It’s morbid.” She sailed off toward the kitchen to get Laurel’s coffee. Daddy stayed where he was.

  “There was a detective. Moreno—” Laurel said. Daddy was nodding. “Is she still out there with them?”

  He shook his head without turning around.

  Fine. Maybe she could get Mother out of here before Moreno came back.

  Shelby was walled in between Bet Clemmens and the sofa’s arm. Laurel went and squatted on her haunches in front of her.

  Bet leaned sideways, her eyes glued to the TV.

  “Whatcha watching?” Laurel asked.

  “Nothing, now,” Shelby said. Laurel was blocking her view.

  “That boy there wants to ballet-dance, I think,” Bet said, pointing. “I can’t hardly understand a word he says.”

  “It’s Billy Elliot,” Shelby said.

  She’d ordered it and October Sky from Netflix specifically for Bet’s visit, as if the films would help her feel more at home. In Shelby’s head, DeLop was probably as cinematic as the mining towns in those movies. She’d never seen the real DeLop, and Laurel’s descriptions had been soft, to say the least.

  “As soft as Dairy Queen cones, and just as fucking ersatz, Jesus Bug,” Thalia had scoffed once. She’d overheard Laurel telling Shel how much her cousins had enjoyed the Tinker Toys. Thalia had amused herself by taking Laurel’s gentling even further, telling Shelby long made-up stories set in a picturesque DeLop, one eyebrow cocked ironically at Laurel.

  Thalia had peopled her purely fictional small town with big-eyed, delectably shabby orphans pulled straight out of velvet paintings from the seventies. They were watched over by Dear Old Aunt Enid, who, in Thalia’s version, possessed both teeth and a kind spirit. Enid lined the orphans up in clean, well- mannered rows to get their packages each Christmas. “Oh, please, convey our deepest thanks to Shelby,” Thalia’s orphans warbled, tears moistening the red ribbons Shelby had curled with a pair of blunt-tipped scissors left over from her grade-school days.

  Laurel didn’t think Shelby had stopped to compare the real DeLop girl in her house right now with Thalia’s version. Bet had never warbled in her life, but she was such a blank slate, it was probably easy for Shelby to mistake the mute endurance for shyness; she saw in Bet what Thalia’s stories
had prepped her to see.

  “That other boy, that fag one, is about to get his butt beat,” Bet said in a pleased voice. Scottish accent or no, she got this part.

  Laurel and Shelby and Mother all paused and looked at her. Bet watched the screen, oblivious.

  “Call Sissi,” Mother mouthed at Laurel as she came close to hand her a steaming cup. Laurel nodded, taking the coffee. Mother tilted her head sideways, and her eyebrows came down. “Laurel, you’re pale as bedsheets. You’re supposed to take things easy today, David said. Now get up off the floor.”

  Laurel stayed where she was. “How’re you doing?” she asked Shelby.

  Shelby shrugged, pinching her shoulders up and then only half dropping them, so she stayed turtled up.

  “You look tired. What time did you girls crash out up there in the rec room?” It was the most innocuous of all of Moreno’s questions, but Laurel was still surprised to hear it coming out of her mouth.

  “I don’t know,” Shelby said. She glanced at Bet but found no help there. Bet had turned her head to look at Laurel, her eyebrows creasing in as if she were slightly puzzled. Either the movie or the conversation had lost her, there was no way to tell which.

  Shelby went on. “We were watching some stupid cartoon or something. I fell asleep in my beanbag.” Another glance at the inert Bet Clemmens, and then her voice got the slightest bit louder. “I think I fell asleep first. Isn’t that right, Bet?”

  Bet’s gaze snapped back to the screen, and the faintly puzzled look was gone. She nodded, too vigorously, and Laurel’s mom antennae, finely tuned to catch these things, vibrated. Shelby had silently asked Bet to back her up, and Bet had agreed.

  Laurel’s throat tightened, and her mouth went desert-dry. She stared at her daughter and realized Shelby was looking between Laurel’s eyes, not into them. It was an old theater trick of Thalia’s for doing love scenes with someone you hated, or hate scenes with someone you loved.