The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

They pretended Thalia had no idea that he was gay. He sneaked around having thrilling, forbidden trysts with multiple men who thought they were hiding from Thalia, which allowed Gary to hide them more easily from one another. He clambered out of whatever bed he’d been tumbling around in and came home to Thalia every night. They slept cuddled up like kids at a slumber party, enough created drama swirling around them to make life as interesting as anything in Noël Coward.

  Thalia claimed it was the perfect marriage because they both were first and forever in love with theater. “Gary keeps the lonelies away,” Thalia told Laurel once, after a five-martini birthday lunch. The birthday and four of the martinis had been Thalia’s. “You let yourself get lonely, then you want to be in love, and love is an illusion, Jesus Bug. A delusion, even. It leads to marriage and monogamy. M&M’s—the candy that kills art.”

  Not that Thalia lived celibate. “Wronged, chaste wife” was casting her too far from type. Thalia’s idea of a perfect marriage included running out and getting some sex the way Laurel went to Albertsons to get celery, but she always came back home to Gary.

  Laurel couldn’t fathom whatever it was Thalia and Gary had, but Thalia couldn’t seem to fathom her marriage, either. More than once Thalia had tried to shock Laurel with wild tales of the delights of catting, as if sex were something Laurel was missing out on. She used words Laurel had never heard to describe acts that sounded perfectly filthy.

  After one particularly foul-sounding and one-sided conversation, Laurel had gone to Urban Dictionary online and looked up all the phrases she hadn’t known. All but one turned out to be things she and David had figured out for themselves long ago, and Laurel felt she could limp along through the rest of her life and be completely happy without ever once experiencing that last one. All she was missing was Thalia’s vocabulary, which did not come from Reader’s Digest, and Thalia’s delight in sharing every intimate detail.

  Now Laurel gave Gary a smile that felt cool even on the inside and said, “Thalia and I always make up, one way or another.”

  “Yet every time I keep my fingers crossed.” He put one hand to his forehead, overacting to make it seem like he was kidding. “Foolish, hopeful me.”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  “Is Thalia upstairs?”

  “Nope. In there.” He gestured toward the doors that led into the theater.

  “Will you be all right, Bet?” Laurel asked.

  In answer, Bet plopped down on a corner of the red velvet love seat. A puff of dust swirled around her hips as she landed. She stuck the earplugs back in and then grabbed an old copy of Interview magazine from the end table. She furrowed her brow, puzzled, peering down at what looked like a photo of Kirsten Dunst licking a kitten. Gary was looking at Bet with an almost identical expression. He shook his head and disappeared back behind the curtain.

  Laurel left Bet there and walked into the theater proper. The doors opened at the top of one of the aisles. The Spotted Dog didn’t have an actual stage. Seating was on three sides, the chairs all angled slightly to face the acting area. It was a very flexible space, Thalia said, because they could build risers and make it multi-leveled, or leave it flat and shape the audience chairs around the demands of the play. Right now the acting space was empty. Either Next Exit had used a minimalist set or they had already torn out. Once the doors closed behind her, Laurel was in the dark, but the acting area was lit up in a circle made sunshine-warm with pale orange and gold gels.

  Thalia was on a black yoga mat that she had centered in the middle of the ring of light. She stood on one bare foot with her other leg extended behind her and curled up, so her left foot was hovering practically over her face. Her spine was bowed back, her neck extended so she could look up at her foot, and her arms were stretched back over her head.

  She wore a long-sleeved black unitard that covered her from ankle to neck, but it was so sheer and fitted that it looked more like naked than naked did. From where Laurel stood, her sister was in perfect silhouette, and her silhouette was pretty damn perfect.

  Laurel looked like a slightly faded version of Mother. She had regular features, the default of pretty. Thalia had similar features but in very different proportions, and she could be brutally ugly and then stunning half a minute later. She had Laurel’s short, straight nose, but much smaller, set in their father’s flat, wide face with his full mouth and a pair of long, slitty sloe eyes that were all her own.

  The first time Laurel saw the blond Bratz doll in Target, perched in its box with one boy-skinny hip cocked, trashy beyond Barbie’s wildest imaginings, she’d been struck dumb. The doll was whippet-thin, big-eyed, fat-mouthed, and all but noseless; Laurel had wondered who on earth had modeled a doll on her sister. Shelby had been absolutely forbidden from bringing Bratz dolls into the house. The trashy clothes would have assured that anyway, but a truer reason, one she could not share with Shelby, was that Laurel didn’t want tiny Thalias scattered across her floor in abandoned poses, wearing hooker shoes and staring at her with dead plastic eyes.

  Thalia, poised on the mat, either hadn’t noticed Laurel or was pretending she hadn’t. Maybe Gary had told her that Laurel had called. Laurel could imagine Thalia waiting here, holding this impossible position for hours, so that by the time Laurel made her entrance, Thalia would have already pre-stolen it.

  Thalia released a slow exhale and then uncoiled herself in a movement so fluid it was almost slithery. She kept moving, planting both feet and easing her spine until it was curving the other way. She put both hands flat on the floor, ending in the shape of an upside-down V, her butt pointing straight up at the ceiling. As she moved, it was as if her lean body displaced more air than it should have, cool air that came wafting up between the rows of chairs to touch Laurel’s skin with gooseflesh.

  Marty was here.

  Not his ghost, though. What she felt was his memory, coming to cold life in the space between Laurel and her sister. Mobile’s humidity went crystalline in his chill. A long shudder worked its way down Thalia’s spine, as if she felt it, too, an unseen hand passing down the length of her, cool and strange. She sighed and arched her neck and stilled herself.

  Laurel walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs. She stopped on the edge of the lighted space. “Hey, Thalia.”

  Thalia turned her head to peer out from behind her arm and said, “Hey, Jesus Bug.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  Thalia had been calling Laurel “Jesus Bug” since they were teenagers. It was Daddy’s word for the little skating beetles that zoomed over the surface of ponds and puddles, never looking down.

  Thalia pushed off with her hands and stood upright. “Is it Christmas already?” she asked, unwittingly echoing Sissi Clemmens.

  “Still August,” Laurel said.

  “Zounds!” Thalia said, affecting an overblown Shakespearian accent. She moved her right foot forward, as if stepping into ballet’s fourth position, and put one arm out dramatically to her side while her other hand twirled at an invisible cruel mustache. “What hath summoned thee, good my lady, so fucking prematurely?”

  Laurel wasn’t sure she’d felt Marty at all. The cold might have been only Thalia’s anger, thick and icy.

  “Please don’t be like this,” Laurel said.

  “How should I be, then?” Thalia said in her regular voice, cocking her head to one side.

  Laurel said, “You have to know, for me to come here, that it has to be pretty bad. And it is, Thalia. So bad that I lied to David. Sort of lied. Almost lied. To get to you.”

  And she had. She had let the truth march purposefully out the door with her and Bet Clemmens, then blamed him for it because he’d called Mother in. She couldn’t think about that now. She kept her eyes steady on Thalia’s face.

  “Really,” Thalia said, drawing out the E sound. She dropped the invisible mustache and the pose and said, “Trouble in paradise. Who could ever have imagined? Bug, don’t you get Woman’s Day? Look in between the rec
ipes and the hundred fun rainy-day crafts. There’ll be something about meeting him at the door naked except for some Saran wrap, or scented candles, or K-Y warming massage crap, whatever it is your kind of people think is all sexy. Go home and make it up. Your domestic disputes are not my problem.”

  “I’m not here because I lied to David,” Laurel said, holding her voice steady with effort. “David’s not the problem.”

  “So you keep saying,” said Thalia to the air. “Come back and see me when you’ve figured out that yes, in fact, he is.”

  Her fourth wall came down with an almost audible bang. Laurel stopped existing, and Thalia was alone in the center of the stage, playing Beautiful Woman Doing Yoga. She coiled down into an easy lotus position and tilted her head back to begin slow breathing.

  Laurel backed up until the light wasn’t touching her, and then she stopped. In the safety of the darkness, she sat down in one of the chairs and watched her sister’s body curl into impossible shapes, ropy muscle shifting under skin. She made her breathing match Thalia’s and found it was a calming way to breathe. She quit watching Thalia after a while because it was easier not to be angry when she wasn’t looking.

  When she was ready, she said, “Remember Molly Dufresne? Shelby’s friend? She’s dead. She fell in our pool and drowned.”

  Thalia stilled, one ankle folded back behind her neck. She brought her leg down and put her foot on the floor, her eyes trying to find Laurel in the darkness. “How’s my girl?” she said quietly.

  “Not good,” Laurel said.

  “Right. Let’s get this part done quick, then,” Thalia said, and stood up with abbreviated grace. “Bitch, you walked out in the middle of Gary’s best transition. You banged the door and wrecked his third act.”

  “You sent thong underpants whizzing out into the audience. Right past Shelby’s ear.”

  Thirty seconds ticked by.

  “Call it even?” Thalia said.

  “Yes,” Laurel said.

  “Even, then. What’s going on with Shelby?”

  Laurel took another one of Thalia’s cleansing breaths and said, “Molly drowned in the middle of the night. Her ghost came and woke me up and showed me where to find her body. The police are calling it an accident, but Shelby wasn’t in her room when Molly died, and Molly came to see me for a reason. I need to know what it is.”

  Another thirty seconds ticked by, and then Thalia said, “You know I don’t believe in your ghosts.”

  “I know,” said Laurel, and yoga breaths or not, she could feel herself heating. She wasn’t angry, exactly. More like exasperated. “You don’t believe in ghosts, or God, or marriage or country or that puppies are really that damn happy. You don’t believe in anything.”

  “That’s not true,” Thalia said automatically. “Come back down here. I want to see you.”

  Laurel got up and joined her sister on the mat. They sat cross-legged on opposite ends, facing each other. Thalia stared hard at Laurel, as if trying to see past her tired eyes, all the way into her brain.

  “I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe you mean it,” Thalia said. “I believe seeing ghosts is your way of telling yourself something is bad wrong. I believe you’re smart. If you feel it this strongly, then I believe it’s true. That’s a pretty long list.”

  “That’s really only one thing,” Laurel said. “You’re saying you believe in me, and that’s the only thing that matters right now, Thalia. Please come home with me.”

  Thalia didn’t answer for a solid minute. Then she said, “I remember Molly. Even at eleven, she looked to me like she was going to grow into a beauty.”

  “She did,” Laurel said.

  “Lay it out for me, Bug,” Thalia said. “Like Aunt Moff lays the cards.”

  “Hearts for love, diamonds for money,” Laurel said.

  “Don’t leave out the ace of spades. Not this time,” Thalia said.

  So Laurel started at the beginning, trying to think of the events as cards she was turning up, and it was better that way. It came out clearer than when she’d tried to explain to David in the basement. Thalia listened, not speaking at all until Laurel had wound down to the end: David calling Mother to the house, and the lie she’d let stand to get to Thalia.

  The first thing Thalia said was, “Typical David, but at least this time you see it.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Laurel said.

  “Am I? Fine. You have a ghost, Shelby’s empty bed, and you think you saw a creepy, dateless man’s hair. It’s not much, Bug. I don’t suppose the creepy-hair guy wears pink Izod shirts and rooms with some genial tanning-booth godlet that he introduces as ‘Sean, my life partner’?”

  “No,” Laurel said.

  “If he’s gay, I’ll probably be able to tell right off. All these years with Gary, I’ve developed a nose for it. You need to get me in a room with him.”

  “We can do that,” Laurel said, ready to agree to anything. It sounded like Thalia’s scales were tipping in her favor.

  “Stan Webelow,” Thalia said. “Are you sure this isn’t you—you know—projecting?”

  She’d said Stan’s name. Not Marty’s. But now Laurel was certain that it was Marty’s memory in the room with them. They sat quietly, both thinking of Marty Gray, and of all the bad things that can happen to young girls who are shy and good and obedient. The secret keepers. The easily led.

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said honestly. “It’s possible, but I can’t gamble. Not when it’s Shelby.”

  “If he’s not in love with God, nor man, nor woman, it has to be going somewhere,” Thalia said. She quirked up one eyebrow. “Does he keep goats?”

  “Thalia!”

  Thalia stretched her arms up over her head. “Bug, this could all be in your head. You think he dragged Molly through the neighborhood all the way to your pool and then banged her in the head with a brick and drowned her? The forensics would have shown that.”

  Laurel shrugged. “What if he was just . . . there? Maybe Molly was going to tell. Say she has plans to meet up with Shelby and she’s going to spill their secret. She’s threatened Stan? Or she’s just left his house? Somehow he knows. So he comes to stop her. The pool light’s the only one on in the backyard, so Molly waits for Shelby there. She’s sitting on the diving board. He sees her, she sees him. She’s startled. She jumps up, misses her footing, falls, and hits her head. And he does nothing. He watches. He’s the shadow I see slipping away, thinking his secret has taken care of itself.”

  Thalia was nodding. “Okay, that works. Criminally negligent homicide.” Laurel raised her brows, and Thalia went on. “What? I watch CSI. Your scenario is possible, but it’s not the most likely one I can think of. We’re predisposed to look for perverts in the bushes, you and I. On the other hand, the world is full of predators. If you even slightly suspect you had something toothy in your own backyard, not thirty feet from where your own baby lies at night, then you can’t put your nose down and graze all sheeply and stupid and hope it passes into another yard next time. Neither can I. I’d best go throw some panties in a bag. You wait here or in the lobby so I can smooth it with Gary. He’s not going to love me going off with you, of all people, especially since we’ve got company auditions set for Monday week.”

  Thalia stood up and walked out of the circle of light, over to the curtained entrance on the left that the actors used. Laurel could barely make her out as she slid her feet into her shoes and unfurled a long strip of weightless cloth from the floor.

  “Little Shelby and your weirdo neighbor, what a list of suspects,” Thalia muttered to herself.

  “Shelby’s not a suspect,” Laurel said, so hard and loud that the good acoustics picked it up and amplified it, setting the words ringing in her ears.

  “Oh, relax, Mother Bear. I’m coming home with you mostly because I’d burn down Paris for Shelby, and you know it,” Thalia said. “I meant that Stan-Webelow-gives-you-the-wig and Shelby-has-a- secret shouldn’t be your whole list. You’ve
missed the obvious.”

  The heels of her black slides clicked on the wood as she walked back to the edge of the light. Thalia shook out the cloth she’d picked up, a sheer scarf in leopard print, and wound it around her body. The addition didn’t make her look less naked. It only made her look accessorized. “You didn’t lay clubs, Bug. When Aunt Moff lays the cards, clubs are for family. Maybe things are ugly inside the Dufresne house. You ever notice Molly having bruises, anything like that?”

  “No,” Laurel said.

  “Still, a young girl goes running out into the night, coming to her best friend’s place, you have to ask what happened in her house to drive her from it. Statistically speaking, it’s more likely. It’s almost always people in a family who kill each other.”

  Thalia stepped back out of the light, turning away and walking toward the door that led backstage. “No one knows that better than you and me,” she added, and exited stage left.

  CHAPTER 8

  Uncle Marty had the short eyes.

  That’s what they would have called it if he had ever gone to prison. He didn’t. Instead, Laurel’s daddy took them hunting in a county where he and Marty knew the sheriff so well they were borrowing his cabin. Marty had the short eyes, and Daddy shot him.

  Put that way, it didn’t seem like murder. Laurel had seen similar stories on late-night cable, one with Clint Eastwood, and she thought maybe Charles Bronson had done one like that, too. Clint Eastwood had been the hero. It was a good story, but Laurel couldn’t claim it as her own. In spite of what had happened between them the day before Marty died, Laurel’s uncle never laid a hand on her that wasn’t proper. Laurel didn’t even know which way his tastes ran until his last day on the earth.

  Laurel was eleven years old, and Marty came, as he did every year, for the first weekend of deer season. He brought a real silver charm bracelet with a starter charm each for Laurel and Thalia. Laurel’s was cutesy kidsy, a mouse with obsidian chip eyes, but Thalia got a high-heeled shoe with gem flecks set to make a flashy daisy on the toe.