The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Laurel kept her eyes closed even when the echoing bark of the shot made her flesh jump, her whole skin trying to leave her bones in one shuddering, fast rebellion. She heard the rustle of leaves as the deer bounded away, and Daddy saying, “Get him.”

  Marty said something back, but she didn’t catch it, and then the second shot rang out. She kept her eyes closed even after she heard Thalia’s short, gulping scream.

  When at last she opened them, the deer was gone, and Laurel saw Marty lying facedown in the dirt, a small hole going bloodlessly into his ruined jacket. Daddy had abandoned his gun on the dirt trail. Thalia was staring at it with shell-shocked eyes, her hands hanging limp at her sides, the drinks cooler tipped on its side by her feet. Daddy had already run to Marty and was turning him over. Low on Marty’s chest, Laurel saw the same size hole, only bloodier, going out.

  Laurel heard herself talking from far away. “It went straight through,” she said to Thalia.

  “Daddy says this kind of bullet doesn’t spoil the venison,” Thalia said, and then she lifted her right arm as if her hand were very heavy, pulling it up so she could jam her thumb into her mouth.

  “Thalia?” Laurel’s voice came out quiet but desperate. Thalia didn’t answer. Her eyes were pointed at Laurel, but they weren’t focusing. Thalia wasn’t behind them. Thalia wasn’t home at all, and that scared Laurel more than anything.

  The shots had left a smell in the air, burned oil and sulfur. Daddy put his face by Marty’s face and yelled his name over and over. Marty’s eyes were open and empty of all things.

  Later, back at the borrowed cabin, Laurel and Thalia sat with blankets around them, even though Laurel wasn’t cold. The nicest deputy had put the blankets on them, as if Laurel and Thalia had been rescued from a shipwreck. Thalia’s blanket was pale blue, and she had it draped over her head like a Bible-times girl. She’d come back to live behind her eyes again, stretching them wide open, the whites showing all the way around. Her face looked stiff, like Laurel’s felt. Laurel couldn’t tell if Thalia was making her face be like Laurel’s on purpose, but she’d never heard her sister talk in such a thready voice.

  Daddy told the sheriff’s men it had been an accident. He’d tripped, he said, and the gun had gone off. When it came their turn to talk, Thalia backed him up.

  “Daddy shot at a deer, bang, and it ran,” she told them. “Uncle Marty ran after it, and Daddy ran after Uncle Marty. Daddy fell. I heard it go bang again, and then Uncle Marty was on the ground.”

  Laurel turned to stare at her sister. She’d seen Thalia act. Thalia was born acting. But she’d never seen her lie so poorly. She thought that this was what it might look like if Thalia tried plain lying as herself and wasn’t good at it. Thalia’s throat worked, swallowing.

  “Where were you?” the deputy asked Laurel.

  “My stupid sister had her eyes closed,” Thalia answered. She spoke before Laurel could even get the sticky hinge of her jaw to open. There, Thalia had sounded sharper, more like herself, but then her voice went sweet and bland as whole-milk pudding, and she said, “Laurel? Come and have some lunch.”

  Laurel jumped. Mother’s knuckles made a decorous ratty-tat-tat against the door. “Did you hear me?”

  Laurel sat in her workroom, her latest quilt spread out on the table in front of her. Having a normal day.

  It was a large room behind the kitchen, painted cream and accented with warm brown and caramel. Nothing pulled the eye. A chocolate leather office chair sat in front of Sylvia, Laurel’s Bernina. She moved it over on the rare occasions when she wanted to work with her dear old Singer. There was a matching chair, ratcheted up higher, for the table where Laurel did all her cutting and embellishing. The side wall was covered with built-in cabinets where the bulk of Laurel’s fabric stash was stored. The quiet room was usually filled with Laurel’s presence and her work, but today she felt as neutral as its off-white walls, as blank, as easily overwhelmed, by anything with color.

  “Did Shelby come downstairs?” she called through the door.

  “I’m letting the girls take their plates to the rec room,” Mother said. “They want to finish their movie.”

  “You and Daddy go ahead without me,” Laurel said.

  “Laurel,” Mother called through the door, drawing out the middle vowel, long and reproachful.

  “I mostly miss lunch when I’m working,” Laurel said. Snapped, almost. “That’s normal when I’m working.”

  She could feel her mother’s hovering presence through the wooden door. She waited it out, and at last Mother’s heels clicky-clacked away in an odd echo of her knocking.

  Laurel had showered as Mother had told her to, then gotten dressed in soft jeans and a jersey pullover, combing her damp hair back in a ponytail. Mother had told her to use the time before Bet and Shelby finished getting dressed to call Sissi Clemmens, so she’d sat at her built-in phone desk in the breakfast nook and dialed. Sissi had not answered, and she didn’t have voice mail. Mother had told Laurel to try again later, so she would try again later. Mother had told her to do what she would normally do, so here she sat, a good, good dog, embellishing the figure of the bride in the center of her latest quilt.

  The bride’s eyes were bright crescents, and she had smile lines embroidered in her cheeks, but she had no mouth yet. Laurel was hand-sewing slim red satin ribbon into rosebuds. They would form the bride’s lips, a grinning, three-dimensional bouquet. The bride lifted the inverted bell of her skirt as she hurried forward pell-mell, showing boots with daisies on the toes. Her feet were huge and her head was very small, as if someone were looking up at her from the ground.

  Laurel had already glued down lumpy oval potato pearls to make the daisies’ petals, binding them with silver wire after they dried. The boots were the old-fashioned kind that buttoned up the sides, and the buttons on the front boot could be opened. Under the boot was a dark blue space deepened by plush velvet. Inside, Laurel had embroidered one of the eyes that served as her signature. The eye was looking toward one odd petal, too sleek and pointed for a freshwater pearl. It was a human tooth, an incisor.

  When she’d first planned this quilt a year ago, she’d thought she would use one of Shelby’s baby teeth. She kept them all upstairs in the false bottom of her jewelry chest. That small space was reserved for relics and remembrances that she’d imagined as the starting place for quilts she’d never sewn: an amber doll’s eye, a broken plastic Christmas bulb, a mouse charm from an old bracelet.

  But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to give up even one of Shelby’s baby teeth for a quilt she planned to show and sell. They were too precious, these ivory mementos of Shelby at six, flashing a pink-gummed, gappy grin.

  Laurel had put off the bride quilt, making others until she stumbled on a stash of teeth in an old bureau drawer at an estate sale. She didn’t think they were for sale, or even there on purpose, so she bought the ugliest bureau she’d ever laid eyes on to get the teeth secreted inside.

  The bride was already quilted in patterns that seemed random on the front but made pictures and letters and more of her eyes that showed up perfectly on the hand-dyed cotton she’d used to back. The quilt was bound in yellowed satin cut from a musty old wedding gown, another estate-sale find.

  She wanted to enter this piece in the Pacific International Quilt Festival at the end of the month. She’d won first prize in Innovative Quilts last year, but this year she was gunning for Best in Show. Or she had been. It seemed stupid now. The mouthless bride leaned forward, eager, like she might step at any second into some big adventure in her high-buttoned boots. Laurel couldn’t remember what had made her feel a connection to this piece in the first place.

  The one picture Laurel had from her own wedding was a Polaroid taken by the clerk of the court. In it, David’s chin was set and his brows were down, like he was planning to grab Mount Everest with his bare hands and pull himself straight up it. His father had taken a long walk when David was five, and in the wedding pictur
e, it was plain that David had already decided he would never be that guy. Laurel looked trembly and puffy-eyed, Shelby faintly pushing out the skirt of her best blue Sunday dress.

  Her busy fingers made red rosebuds one after another, doing their regular job on the regular day she’d been told to have. She wanted to believe it was over, but she couldn’t catch her breath. The investigation might have ended, but it didn’t feel finished.

  She ought to be relieved that the policewoman would not be back to prod at Shelby. Instead, she felt an odd, strong urge to call the police back in. To lie. To say she’d seen Stan Webelow for certain, not his possible hair. They would find out if the moving shadow she’d seen by the pool had been a ghost, a dream, or something real and worse. They’d make sure Shelby was hiding nothing more than a silly girl plan gone awry. Then she’d know Shelby was safe.

  Shelby seemed so closed, so soaked in guilt, sheltering herself near Bet Clemmens as if Bet were a wall, asking Bet to back her up when Laurel knew damn well her daughter was lying. If Shelby had planned to meet Molly or even Stan, had failed Molly in some way, was somehow culpable . . . It wasn’t possible. Laurel would never believe it. But if Laurel could conceive it, consider it even for a second, Moreno could, too. Did Laurel really want to bring that woman’s cold, assessing gaze back to her daughter?

  Mother had told her to let everything be normal. Go to the funeral. Say goodbye. Grieve. Move on. But her house did not feel normal. It was silent and too large around her, as if it had been hollowed out. The wrongness in her yard had its nose pressed against her glass doors, and she felt something small and feral scrabbling in her belly. Every time she thought she’d lose herself in her work, the something would run one spiky tooth along her stomach lining. It was too quiet, as if Daddy had herded everyone together and they had crept out of the house and driven away, leaving Laurel alone with her ghosts.

  She set down a finished rosebud and leaned over to press the listen button on the intercom system. She could hear the faint sounds of Billy Elliot, dancing his skinny guts out up in the rec room, but Shelby and Bet weren’t talking. She supposed Mother and Daddy were eating in the dining room, where the intercom system had no receiver. The closest one was around the corner in the entryway. Laurel’s kitchen table could fit a cozy six, but Mother preferred the pecan table in Laurel’s formal dining room. She’d perch at the foot and survey the gorgeous antique china displayed in the built-ins. David’s mother had given that china to them after Shelby came. A belated wedding present, even though—as she’d pointed out several thousand times—five minutes with a justice of the peace was hardly a wedding.

  Laurel turned the volume on the intercom all the way up and caught the faint clatter of silver and Daddy buzzing air out his teeth, a sound he made between bites of food that really pleased him. The house ached with a grating silence. Laurel wasn’t the only one bothered by the quiet; her daddy needed voices around him. He turned on a TV or talk radio in every room he walked through.

  The intercom system had a radio, and Laurel flipped it on. It was already set to a jazz station. Daddy liked jazz and would be happier with background noise, though if he and Mother were to talk, she wouldn’t hear, and the music couldn’t take the hollow taste out of the air.

  She started laying the roses out on the bride’s face, shaping them into lips. When she sewed them on, she’d bunch them tight against one another. For now she wanted to get an idea of the mouth’s shape. She made the smile wide enough to show teeth and tongue. She’d have to fill that space.

  There was a tap on the office door. “Laurel?” Mother was back, as if summoned by jazz.

  Laurel swiveled in her chair and rolled herself across the tile, close enough to the door to crack it open without rising. “You said normal day. I’m normally trying to do my normal work,” she said. Her voice came out louder then she’d meant it to.

  “I only came to see if you want me to bring you a plate. It’s hot chicken salad, and it’s getting stone cold.”

  “I can microwave it later.”

  “All right,” Mother said, but she’d eased forward, insinuating herself into the door’s rightful space so Laurel couldn’t close it. “Did you call Sissi Clemmens again?”

  “I tried her not an hour ago.”

  “You have to keep trying. You have to catch her when she’s home. And awake. And . . . taking calls.” She meant when Sissi wasn’t high. It was a narrow window. “I’m not sure Bet Clemmens is a good influence to have around Shelby right now.”

  Laurel blinked. Bet Clemmens couldn’t influence the butter from one side of the table to another, much less have an impact on a small force of nature like Shelby. If anything, the influence ran the other way—Bet chose the kind of jeans Shelby liked at American Eagle Outfitters and agreed to try foods that she saw Shelby eating. Until last summer, Bet had never tasted lettuce that wasn’t iceberg.

  “Bet Clemmens says strange things sometimes,” Laurel said. “She’s certainly a novelty, but Shelby doesn’t find her glamorous.”

  “This is a time when Shelby might be more easily influenced than usual,” Mother said. “She’s been glued to that girl’s side ever since I got here.”

  “I’ll try Sissi again,” Laurel said. She could hear impatience in her own voice, and yet her mother stayed.

  “We’re still having lunch day after tomorrow. Yes?” Mother said.

  Laurel had forgotten. She took Mother out to lunch, just the two of them, once or twice a month. Someplace fancy, and Laurel had already made reservations.

  “I guess. Unless I’m taking Bet home. Or unless Shelby wants me.”

  “Wonderful,” Mother said. “I’ll come here before. Daddy can spend a little time with Shelby, or he and I can both stay with her if you get ahold of Sissi. Shelby shouldn’t be alone right now.”

  Just talking about Bet, Laurel could hear the DeLop creeping into Mother’s inflections. “Ahold” was not a typical part of Mother’s vocabulary, and perhaps her desire to remove Bet had nothing to do with the girl’s influence on Shelby.

  “That’s fine. Mother, I’m trying to work.”

  Mother stepped farther into the room and looked down at the quilt. She reached down and touched the rose mouth with one careful finger. “Why, that’s pretty, Laurel. I like that.”

  “Really?” Laurel said, faintly surprised.

  Mother didn’t like Laurel’s quilts, taking umbrage at the lift-the-flaps and hidden panels and found objects. Laurel had once made the mistake of asking her mother’s opinion on a mermaid quilt she was particularly proud of. Mother had eyeballed the broken bits of shell and pursed her lips up and said, “Why stick all that mess on? It’s not comfy.” She seemed to think the value of the work rested on how cozy she’d feel if she wrapped it around her legs while she was knitting.

  Thalia hadn’t liked that quilt, either, for the opposite reason. “You’ve hidden everything that’s at all interesting down in secret pockets until it looks like a freakin’ blanket. Grow a pair. Drag out those dead sailors,” she’d said.

  Laurel had sent it off to one of the galleries that showed her work anyway. It had sold in under a week for twelve thousand dollars, so someone must have liked it.

  “I’ll let you get on with it,” Mother said, stepping back. She pulled the door closed.

  Laurel looked at the bride with fresh eyes. With the rosebud smile and the flap in the boot safely buttoned shut, it did look like a nice blanket.

  Last year she’d entered an older piece called Eye Bones. It had multiple layers that could be unfolded and attached by hooks and Velcro tabs and buttons, so what was hidden and what was seen were changeable. No matter how it was arranged, the face of the woman at the center could never be symmetrical or whole. It was one of her more disturbing pieces. She almost didn’t like it, although David had not been troubled by it. But he liked everything she did, more because it was hers than because of a personal aesthetic. David didn’t have one of those.

  It w
as more telling that Thalia had said she almost liked Eye Bones. This year Laurel had tried to pull back, but if Mother liked it, she might have pulled back a bit too far, all the way to Sunbonnet Sue Gets Married.

  She dashed an angry hand across the bride’s face, and the loose rosebuds scattered, flecking the dress in red. She stood to pick them back off, but the small splashes of red were both diffused and intensified by being scattered across the cream and gold and white.

  It was interesting. This bride had secrets. With the mouth gone, only the shape of the eyes told the viewer she was smiling, and the invisible lips drew themselves in smug. There was an implied urge to search her, to find her out. Laurel stopped picking the rosebuds off and started moving them, repositioning them in random spots of color on the bride’s hands, spattering up her arms almost to the elbows.

  She snipped off a couple of lengths of scarlet ribbon, then twisted them and pinned them into streaks of vivid color, running down the bride’s forearms. She stepped back and gazed down at the quilt for a long time.

  It was exactly right.

  It wasn’t what she’d intended when she first began, but the displacement of the roses had reconnected her with the quilt. It was right for right now. Looking at her bride’s soiled hands, Laurel was finished. She knew it the way she knew most things, down in her chest, not up in a tumble of wordy thinking.

  She could do what Mother wanted, spackle this day over with normalcy and pile a host of other days on top of it, one by one, until the surface of her life was whole and seamless. But if Shelby had a secret, no matter how innocent, would she be spackling over a wound that should be aired? Beneath the pretty surface, a secret might eat at her child, fester and rot her and ruin her. Laurel would be complicit in her ruining. Worse, what if it had been Stan Webelow’s hair that night? Surely the police could unearth the truth. But Laurel didn’t want Moreno back here vivisecting her child.

  She wanted Thalia. Needed her. She had needed her from the beginning.