The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “It also makes lying a hell of a lot easier offstage,” Thalia had said more than once, no doubt when Shelby was around with her little pitcher’s ears wide open. It worked, too, but only from across the room. This close, Laurel could see the faint disconnect, and all at once she wondered if Moreno had been on to something. Molly and Shelby had been so close. If Molly had been somehow grossly involved with Stan Webelow, Shelby could not be entirely ignorant.

  “Come and talk with me,” Laurel said gently, gently, as if her insides hadn’t all turned to ice. She turned one hand palm up, extending it toward Shelby.

  “Grandma says I’m supposed to be taking it easy, too.”

  Shelby came down hard on the word “supposed,” just as Mother had done, as if the gap between how the world should be and how it actually behaved were a grievous thing.

  “We could go lie down together,” Laurel coaxed. “You’ve had a hard night.”

  Shelby didn’t move, but at least she was looking straight into Laurel’s eyes. “Where is she?” Shelby asked. “Where’s Molly?”

  Laurel felt the question like a belly blow. “She’s in heaven, sweetie,” she said.

  Shelby’s mouth tightened. “I’m not four, and I’m not stupid. Daddy said the ambulance took her, they took the actual her, they took her—” She floundered, and Laurel realized she was trying hard not to say the word “body.”

  If Thalia were here, she would say, “At the morgue, babe. Somewhere across town, educated people are prowling around Molly’s flesh for evidence, and why was she in our yard? What were you girls up to? Were you supposed to meet someone? Had she been spending time with Stan Webelow? Have you?”

  Thalia would heat her up and pop her open like an oyster, because if Shelby broke, she might let slip things that would help Laurel protect her. Shelby was hiding something. She’d just looked Laurel right between her eyes and lied, and Laurel wasn’t equipped to handle it. She rallied, readying herself to say these hard things to her damp-eyed, angry girl.

  “To a funeral home, my darling.” Mother stepped in before Laurel could make words come out. Of course Mother had a beautiful lie at the ready, horses and acrobats to soothe and distract. “They’ll put her in fresh clothes and brush her pretty hair. They’ll take good care of her.”

  Shelby nodded, looking down at her lap. “You’re blocking the movie,” she said to Laurel.

  Laurel sank down, sitting low on the floor, waiting it out. She couldn’t do this with Mother here. Mother was walking back toward the kitchen, trailing her hand along Daddy’s shoulder as she passed.

  “There are still places where sailors tie themselves to the ship, the call can be so strong,” Daddy said, as if Mother’s touch had activated him. “No one brought me any coffee.”

  Mother tutted at him. “Poor mister! No legs at all, and no thumbs for pouring. Come away from there and get you a cup.”

  Even now, when they were well into their fifties, Laurel was sure people wondered how her jug-eared, google-eyed daddy managed to catch a beauty like Mother. Mother had an elegant nose and lovely skin, and when she was younger, her hair was corn-colored. Only her teeth—crooked and still faintly stained despite whitening toothpaste—testified that she had grown up in DeLop.

  But women liked to hear Daddy talk in his big voice. He had a slight distance in him, as if no one woman could ever quite get his whole attention. It made some women want to try. Also, he and Mother had common ground in that they were both orphans. Daddy had come to DeLop with his Church of Christ youth group when he was sixteen. They’d thrown a party in the abandoned Baptist church, passing out canned goods and hand-me-down shoes to every town kid who came.

  Knowing the kind of dour, old-school C of C her parents favored to this day, Laurel pictured the DeLop kids sitting in rows, clutching brown-paper bags full of charity. A chaperone read the fifth chapter of Mark by a table with a few sad green streamers and a punch bowl full of bug juice on it. There would be no music, and certainly no dancing.

  Even so, lightning had flashed between the two of them like an uninvited guest, illuminating Laurel’s strange daddy and making Mother smile her geisha’s smile, hiding her bad teeth behind her hand. Daddy, smitten, kept driving over to DeLop to see her, and when springtime came, they eloped. Mismatched as they seemed, forty years later, here they were, a solid unit in the living room.

  “Shelby?” Mother called. “Why don’t you girls pause the movie and run get showered and dressed? You’ll feel better with clean hair. I’m going to start lunch now. Laurel, you should go get dressed, too.”

  The remote was on the armrest, and as soon as Shelby paused the DVD, Bet got up and headed for the stairs as if she were being pulled on strings. Shelby scooted around Laurel to follow Bet.

  Laurel got up, too. Mother had made it easy. Once they were all upstairs, Laurel could send Bet Clemmens to shower first, and she’d have Shelby to herself.

  Laurel had her foot on the first step when her mother said, “Wait, Laurel, can you help me find a few things? Honestly, I’ll never understand your pantry system! What’s soup doing down here with the beans?”

  Laurel backtracked to the kitchen, impatient. Mother put a hand on her arm, her mouth widening into a close-lipped smile. She craned her neck, looking up the stairs to see that the girls were really gone, and then said, “You need to make today be as normal as possible. Don’t go up there and pick at Shelby.”

  It was as if Mother had read her mind.

  “This is not a normal day,” Laurel said.

  Mother raised her eyebrows and said, “I’m only saying it’s not a good time to go prying. Get Shelby doing regular things.”

  “Regular things,” Laurel repeated.

  Regular was last week, Shelby and Molly bounding in after auditions, still wearing their leotards and tap shoes. They had clattered through the kitchen, David following, and Shelby had hurled herself at Laurel, spinning her once around.

  “I got the ballet duo with Jimmy Brass,” Shelby crowed.

  Molly had grinned, hanging back with David. Molly, with her cheerleader’s nose and curvy little figure, had been such a pretty thing. Shelby was still all knees and elbows, and her ears had grown ahead of the rest of her. But when the two of them were together, people tended to look at Shelby. Shelby, shining it on, was bright enough to blind people.

  Laurel had taken Shelby’s bun down for her, slipping out the hairpins one by one. “That’s wonderful. How’d you do, Molly?”

  “Okay.” Molly had ducked her head and smiled at her toes. “It’s not a big deal, not like—”

  Shelby had interrupted her. “Is, too. Molly got a featured in the opening!”

  “You girls will steal the show.”

  Laurel had released the last lock of Shelby’s hair and kissed it. Shelby had been fresh-sweaty from dance, and Laurel had breathed in citrus and the smell that comes in springtime right before a light rain. The smell of things about to bloom.

  Shelby had twitched the piece of hair away and said, “Don’t get all mooky. It’s only fall recital. Spring is the biggie.”

  David had hung back by the door, following the conversation intently, his dark eyes ticking back and forth between them. Shelby had those same eyes, a rich, bright brown like kalamata olives.

  She had gazed earnestly up at Laurel and said, “I have to learn a new lift, and I better not grow any more, Mom. Seriously. I need to start drinking coffee.”

  “You don’t even like the smell,” Laurel had said. “I never broke five-five, and I didn’t drink coffee until college.”

  “Five-five is practically a yeti.” Shelby had spun away, clicking out of the kitchen with Molly on her heels, calling over her shoulder, “We need to go to Starbucks.”

  David had watched them pass and then grinned and said, “Don’t look at me. I’ve been trying to put a book on her head since she was four.”

  That was normal. That was regular and real. It didn’t look like a place Laurel could get to
from here.

  She stepped in closer to her mother, glancing back at Daddy. He was weaving, buzzing little hums to himself out of his nose. Laurel lowered her voice. “I have to know what happened, Mother.” She looked right into her mother’s eyes, willing her to remember, to acknowledge. A long time ago, Laurel had learned for sure and for certain that there was a place inside Mother where her love for Laurel trumped all her careful blindness, trumped silence. The day it mattered most, Mother had chosen to see and speak, if only in a whisper. “I have to know so I can protect her. Like you protected me.”

  Mother’s eyelids dropped briefly, and her lips twitched up at the corners. When she looked back up, she was wearing Cowslip’s face. “Laurel, I never once came digging at you like you were a dead worm in a high school biology class.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Laurel said. “Shelby is—”

  “Then have at her,” Mother interrupted. Her voice was tart but with none of the indulgence she gave Daddy. “Pester and poke. But I never yet saw a dissection that did the worm a speck of good.”

  Laurel heard the faint echo of DeLop in Mother’s accent. Most times Mother talked like a California TV actor trying to sound mildly southern. Her words came out breathy, with an unobtrusive lengthening of vowels, pre-formed into carefully constructed sentences. She’d had a subscription to Reader’s Digest for longer than Laurel had been alive, and she had, God knew, paid to enrich her word power. But with Bet Clemmens in the house, the old DeLop speech patterns were infiltrating Mother’s measured language.

  Laurel spoke in a hard whisper. “You can’t expect me to treat today like normal when my backyard is full of police and any minute that detective could come back and start questioning Shelby again. It’s better if I—”

  Mother held one finger up, waggling it back and forth to shush her. “Oh, sweetie, no!” she said. “I’m so sorry. You asked Daddy about the detective, so I thought David must have told you before he left. Here you’ve been worrying this whole time, and for nothing. They’re all gone.”

  “Who’s all gone?” Laurel asked.

  “The police. The coroner declared it an accidental death this morning. They left over an hour ago.”

  “Accidental?” Laurel said. She couldn’t stop repeating her mother’s words. She looked down at her hands and shook her head. “No. I touched her. She was bleeding.”

  Mother said, “They think Molly was standing out on the diving board. Probably just being silly. We can’t know. She fell, and she cracked her head open on the side of the board. They found the place. She knocked herself out. It’s a tragedy, but it’s all over, and the faster things go back to normal, the better for Shelby.”

  Laurel turned and walked as quickly as she could to where Daddy stood, still peering through the crack in the drape as if there were something to see. She pulled aside the cloth; her yard was empty. The tape was down, the lights were gone. Water mizzled down, rippling the pool’s surface. It was as if nothing had ever happened.

  But her yard did not look right. It wasn’t only the dark skies and the rain damping the colors. There was a deeper darkness there, with the fence as a perimeter. The tops of the neighbors’ trees and the roof of Mindy Coe’s tower looked fine, standing in their perfect places, at ease in the world. But Laurel’s trees and pool and patio furniture, everything, looked as if it had been shifted one tenth of an inch left. It was the same, yet infinitesimally wrong. Chill went trickling down Laurel’s spine in a droplet, and she found herself tucking her hand inside her father’s.

  As a little girl, she used to stand like this with him on the porch, watching fireflies buzz around the yard. In the pearl-gray dusk, the bugs themselves were visible. They were ugly and busy, but their lights were deep tangerine, flashing in slow motion. As the sky got darker, the bugs disappeared onto the velvet black background of night, only the lights showing.

  “Fairies,” Daddy had told the girls once.

  Thalia had stared up at Daddy’s face as if it were more interesting than any thousand fairies, but Laurel had peered hard out at the fireflies and seen the curved body of a girl, slim as filament, glowing in the heart of every light.

  “Stop your nonsense, Howard, before I end up with jars and jars of creepy-crawlies in my house,” Mother had said from behind the screen door. “Come in and have cocoa before the mosquitoes eat you alive.”

  “Sec, Junie,” said Daddy, and then asked Laurel and Thalia, “Do you see them?”

  “No,” Laurel said, and went inside with Mother.

  Thalia had said, “I see them, Daddy,” without even looking. He had smiled down at her lying face, turned up toward his, as open as a morning glory.

  Standing quietly now with her hand in his, watching the rain on the pool’s surface, Laurel wanted to whisper that she had seen them, the fairies, that one time, and ask him what he was seeing as he peered into her yard.

  Her yard was looking back at them with ghost eyes. Molly or Marty, she couldn’t tell, so she couldn’t ask. She never talked to Daddy about Marty. No one in her family ever did. She never so much as said his name in front of her father. Marty had raised him. Daddy had loved Marty best, and Daddy had held the gun.

  “Come away,” she said to him, tugging at his hand. She didn’t want to look anymore. Perhaps Mother was right. She should pull the curtain closed and give her yard time to shift back into its normal self. It ought to.

  If Moreno was gone, then Laurel wouldn’t have to invite Thalia back into her peaceful life. Surely that sharp-eyed Moreno and her CSIs would not have missed a single trick, rain or no rain. Molly had come to Laurel, led her to the window, and then drifted down to model her own body as if she were Vanna White, showing Laurel what she’d won. But perhaps she’d wanted only to be found.

  Marty on his kite string was just a dream, a reaction to seeing a ghost again after all these years. She’d been seeking him, so she’d dreamed him. Her yard probably looked wrong because the floodlights had been on stands and their bases had cut into the grass. She could feel the sleepy tug of Mother’s will; she was sliding into it. She took a step back, trying to pull Daddy with her, but he stood fast.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing out into the yard.

  The air got out of her in a long, soft braying ha-ha noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh; Daddy was a middle-finger pointer. Thalia used to make Daddy point when she was in junior high. When she was angry with Mother, Thalia would ask Daddy where something was, an object in plain view that was close to Mother. Then she’d waggle her eyebrows at Laurel while Daddy gave Mother her bird-by-proxy.

  It was genetic, because when Shelby was a toddler, she’d pointed like that, too. Laurel would read with her in the glider rocker, and Shelby would shoot the bird at pictures of dogs and dump trucks, lisping, “Awe you my muzzah . . .” Laurel would take her hand and gently fold the naughty finger away, uncurling Shelby’s index finger from her tightly fisted hand. Now Laurel felt an urge to do the same for Daddy as he stood flipping off her yard.

  Mother came up behind them. Laurel could feel her there. “What’s funny?” Mother asked.

  “Nothing,” Laurel said. “They’re really gone. I’m sorry. I’ll go get dressed.”

  “But what’s that?” Daddy insisted. His middle finger was aimed at the side fence that separated their backyard from the Coes’.

  She looked. There was a dark spot marring the wood. It was deep and black, as if it had been there for years, part of the wood. It hadn’t.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, but she did not believe it. “It’s just a knothole.” Her voice shook.

  He was still pointing, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Mother pulled the curtain closed, as if cloth could keep out Marty.

  “Normal day,” she said to Laurel, and gave her Cowslip’s smile.

  CHAPTER 5

  Laurel was eleven years old the first time she was allowed to go hunting. It was also the last time. It was her uncle Marty’s last hunt, too.
/>
  Laurel and Thalia scuffled along the dirt road as they followed Daddy. Florida dirt was gray-brown and crumbly, but in Alabama, the dirt was black and rich as peat, staining the sides of Laurel’s pristine Keds. Thalia, a veteran, had known to wear old shoes. Marty was in front, and both men had their rifles pointing at the sky. Laurel swung a small cooler full of sandwiches and fruit. Thalia carried the drinks cooler. It was heavier.

  The pine trees made the woods glow green around them even though the leaves on the hardwoods had already gone gold and orange and russet. All the morning birds were talking. It was close to dawn, and a sheer mist was making that day’s dew. Thalia was holding an imaginary cigarette with her free hand, sucking in on it and then puffing white breath into the chilled air. Laurel’s clothes felt heavy with damp, and she could smell more damp decaying the fallen leaves and needles.

  Laurel had told Daddy before they left the cabin that she didn’t want to watch the deer drop, though Thalia had bagged her own first deer last year, using Daddy’s gun. Hunting was what Daddy and Marty and Thalia did together, all three of them thick into their odd pretends, whispering made-up songs, Laurel left at home with Mother to cut up carrots for the Crock-Pot and fold the towels so they had even corners. Laurel had made up her own secret song on this trip, and it was running over and over in a silent loop inside her head: “No deer, anywhere near. No deer, anywhere near.”

  But they hadn’t been hiking ten minutes when a young buck stepped out into the middle of the road ahead of them. He took tiny, picking steps, and his nose was up, searching the air for the flat tang of gunmetal. They were safe downwind. He gave them his profile and his brown rib cage, a target so broad and close it seemed like something he was offering them.

  Uncle Marty put his hand back, motioning them to stillness. “Yours,” he mouthed, stepping back.

  Daddy began to lower the barrel of his rifle. His big voice muted to a mournful tremble, he whispered to Laurel, “Close your eyes, baby.”