The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  She dressed in a pair of jeans and a pale green tank top, and then she tidied up out of sheer habit, putting her pajamas in the hamper. As she made the bed, the ghost of lavender rose around her. She’d made the quilt that served as their comforter five years ago, and she’d never thought the sachet would last this long.

  When everything was put in order, she looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. She’d pulled her damp hair back in a ponytail, and she wore no makeup, no shoes. She saw only Laurel, with no plan and nothing whole left to throw. Downstairs, she would find the scraps of things she’d shattered, waiting to be sorted through, and she would see what could be salvaged.

  She opened the door, ready to go down, and there was Bet Clemmens. Bet’s hand was raised to knock, so it looked like she was about to punch Laurel in the face. Laurel’s heart jump- started, and she involuntarily stepped backward.

  “I’m sorry!” Bet said, almost a yelp, and she lowered her arm.

  “It’s okay,” Laurel said, putting one hand to her chest. “You’ve got little cat feet, you know that?”

  Bet tilted her head to the side and said, “You give me a pitcher book oncet. For Christmas. It said the fog come in like that.”

  “I remember,” said Laurel, though she didn’t specifically recall giving that book to Bet. Shelby had loved it in preschool, so Laurel had taken quite a few copies of it to DeLop over the years.

  Laurel looked past Bet, down the hall. The door to the little guest room was closed. Bet glanced over her shoulder, following Laurel’s gaze. “Shelby’s still hard sleepin’ in there,” she said.

  “Let her,” Laurel said. “She’s not going to have an easy day.”

  “Because of they’re laying out Molly this evening,” Bet said.

  “That, too,” Laurel agreed, but she’d meant what must happen when Shelby woke up. She thought of Mother saying, I never yet saw a dissection that did the worm a bit of good, but she’d tried to handle this like Mother already. All she had learned was that Mother had failed her. “Did you need something?”

  “Naw. He saved you the downstairs, because of he said you like the chunks of things,” Bet said. “So I went and got you these.”

  Laurel blinked, not following even a word of that, and then Bet held out a sandwich bag. Some shards of beige and clear plastic were jumbled up in the bottom. Laurel took it and spread the bag flat on one hand, petting the pieces into a single layer.

  She recognized what she was holding, and she pulled her top hand back, as if the broken shards of plastic had gone hot. “It’s the planchette?” she said, and it came out high on the end, like a question, even though she knew the answer.

  “Naw,” said Bet. “It’s that pointer thing. From thet broke Ouija in the grass.”

  “Yes, that’s called a— Never mind. You picked up all the bits?” Laurel said.

  Bet nodded. “I even grubbed around the grass some till I found that nail.”

  Sure enough, in the bottom of the bag, Laurel saw the silver needle that had pointed out the letters, one by one, while the planchette moved willfully, alive under her hands.

  “Why on earth,” Laurel said.

  The feel of it, even in pieces, made her spine shudder so hard she felt her vertebrae clacking together.

  Bet shied back a step, her dark eyes widening. “I did wrong, didn’t I? I thought you might could want it for a blanket.”

  Laurel suppressed another shudder and stepped toward Bet so she could look close at the girl’s face. “You thought I’d want to use these pieces in a quilt?” she asked.

  Bet bobbed her head in a shy, ashamed affirmative, and Laurel found herself smiling in spite of everything.

  “That’s really very thoughtful, Bet. I might one day.”

  “Naw,” said Bet. “I can see I fussed you.”

  “No, really,” Laurel said. “Look, let me show you.”

  She carried the bag over to her dresser. Bet followed her across the room, taking such timid mouse steps that Laurel had to wait at the dresser for Bet to finish sidling over.

  Laurel opened up her jewelry box. Her rings were lined up in a tidy row in the holder, and her necklaces and bracelets were each inside its own small velvet box. She didn’t own a lot of good jewelry, and what she had, she’d mostly picked herself. David wasn’t adept at buying jewelry. Even if he had been, he wasn’t the sort to remember it was Valentine’s Day. He wasn’t the sort to remember it was February, really.

  Shelby reminded him when Mother’s Day came, but he had yet to remember their anniversary. It was hard to hold a grudge when he also forgot his own birthday. If he didn’t hate parties, Laurel could have given him a surprise one every year, and he’d be probably the first person in history to be genuinely startled when friends came leaping out from behind the sofa with a cake. Candy hearts and flowers and diamond anniversary bands weren’t part of the life they’d built together. She hadn’t thought she minded, but today she wished she had pearls from their fifth anniversary and a tennis bracelet from their tenth. She wanted something hard, something tangible and valuable he’d given her that she could put on her body like a touchstone. Something like a proof.

  She lifted the tray out of the way and set it aside. “There,” she said, and pointed into the secret space in the bottom. It was fuller than the jewelry compartment, brimming with strange objects of no value to anyone but Laurel. From the center, between the cork from the outsize bottle of white wine David had opened their first night together and a broken pocketknife of Uncle Poot’s, the plastic dinosaur eye stared up at them. Laurel laid the sandwich bag over it like a blanket. “This is where I keep important things, the ones I’m not quite ready to use in a quilt yet. I’ll keep your planchette here.”

  Bet reached in with one finger to touch the mouse charm, then the small velvet bag that was full of Shelby’s baby teeth.

  Laurel held herself still until Bet withdrew her hand, and then she put the tray back, covering up the flotsam from her life. Bet’s dark eyes were shining, proud and pleased. On impulse, Laurel reached out and touched Bet’s cheek, and Bet immediately leaned in to the touch, closing her eyes and pressing against Laurel’s palm.

  Thalia had said, That little thing is getting all rooted in, but Laurel hadn’t noticed. She’d brought dinner and shoes and a toy or game to Bet every Christmas, from her first to the one last year. This was Bet’s second long visit to her home, but Laurel felt she’d never truly looked at the girl before.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Laurel said. It was what she should have asked David, or Shelby, or even the Ouija, and it wasn’t a fair question for Bet. Not really. But Bet nodded, so Laurel asked, “Are you happy here? Do you think this is a place where people can be happy?”

  Bet pulled away from Laurel’s hand and turned away, so that Laurel saw her in profile. Her nose had pinked. “I like it here fine,” she said. She tried to shrug off her answer, but her voice was trembling.

  It wasn’t a fair question because Bet came from hell. Who wouldn’t like it in Victorianna, if DeLop was all they had for a comparison? But Laurel hadn’t come from hell. She’d come from Pace, and she’d liked it here fine, too. Loved it, even, every minute and molecule, no matter what Thalia thought. Thalia couldn’t imagine anyone being happy in a house and a life that were both so tidy, making chicken and quilts in between toting Shelby from dance to drill team. Laurel had been.

  But that was when she’d thought that David loved it as well. Her good life was a thing they made up, made together, almost by accident, the same way they’d made Shelby.

  If she’d left pieces out, then she’d done it for her family. She’d only been buttoning shut the ugly parts. The things she’d buried were better left that way. What would David and Shelby want with ghosts and family skeletons and her criminal relations and the ugly face of true and abject poverty in DeLop? She’d left those things buried, and good riddance. It had never occurred to her that David also left parts of himself outside o
f this house. Now that she’d seen him in excited conversation with a girl who was his intellectual equal, Laurel knew the pieces of him that she didn’t have weren’t awful. They might be his best and favorite things, buttoned up because she couldn’t share them.

  Bet Clemmens had turned farther away, so that all Laurel could see of her face was the curve of her cheek. She said something else, softly, but Laurel couldn’t make out the words.

  “What, honey?” Laurel asked, and it was as if the casual endearment undid Bet.

  She turned toward Laurel, and her voice came out in a whispery rush. “I am happy here. Everything smells real good. You even smell good, like what I think them moms on Shelby’s Nick at Nite must smell like.”

  It was nothing short of a declaration, naked and desperate. Bet flushed a deep wine red, and her throat moved as she swallowed. She ducked her head, not able to meet Laurel’s gaze in the wake of her words.

  It shamed Laurel that she couldn’t say back to her, simply, I love you, too, kiddo.

  She didn’t love Bet, and no one had a finer nose for insincerity of feeling than a DeLop kid. Laurel had never tried to love Bet, nor even thought to try, but she imagined that she could. If she spent any time at all looking at Bet like she was looking now, she could find this unexpected sweetness, this hopeful core, and come to love her back.

  “We’re going to think about things, you and me, okay?” Laurel said at last, gently. “I don’t know what will happen, but there are opportunities for you that we can find. I haven’t been good enough with that. I haven’t been good enough to you, period. I’m sorry. But I promise I’m going to try and do right by you. Righter, anyway.”

  Bet bobbed her head. It might have been a nod, but it was noncommittal, a wait-and-see movement. Words were cheap, and Laurel knew it would count more if she showed Bet. Over time.

  “Have you seen Thalia?” Laurel asked.

  “She’s in her room, doing thet yoga,” Bet said.

  That was good. This morning, hollowed out and staring down at the dark spot of the knothole in her yard gone wrong, she had realized that she wanted David, this marriage, their troubled child, this life. She wanted it on almost any terms. If David left out pieces of himself, so be it. She could work with what she had of him, even if he was here mostly for Shelby’s sake. That was a starting place. She would sit him down in the soft ashes of last night until they found a way to work together. Shelby needed them both, badly. Of all the broken things, Shelby was the one that must be salvaged.

  Laurel would send Thalia home as a gift, a yielding to what David needed. She would call Detective Moreno and state definitively that she’d seen Stan in the cul-de-sac the night Molly Dufresne drowned. That might be enough to get Moreno looking at him, but even if it weren’t it was the best she could do. She wanted Shelby safe and her marriage intact. Everything else was negotiable.

  She turned to go downstairs, but Bet put out a hand and touched Laurel’s arm lightly, stopping her. “I’m sorry I give you the shivers with them pieces.”

  Laurel shook her head. “It’s a great present.”

  “Naw. It fussed you. You’re like Aunt Moff, aincha? You see things.”

  Laurel smiled, rueful and a little sad. “Sometimes I think I don’t see anything,” she said.

  Bet’s eyebrows crumpled inward, worried or curious. “You ever see anything about me?”

  Laurel shook her head. “No. But you have a good future, Bet. I know it. So maybe I should look.”

  “Naw,” Bet said, hanging her head. “I am sorry I got you fussed.”

  Laurel said, “Don’t be. Not everything under my jewelry is a happy memory. They’re things that matter to me, good or bad. The planchette belongs there because I’m the one who broke it. I asked a question, and I didn’t want to know the answer.”

  “What’d you ask it for, then?” Bet said.

  Laurel shrugged. She didn’t know why she had asked that question, of all the things she could have asked. She’d seen Thalia use the Ouija enough when they were kids to know that it worked best when you kept it simple, asking yes-or-no questions in a series. Otherwise, the Ouija’s answers could be ambiguous. Could haunt a person.

  “What did you ask, anyways?” Bet wanted to know.

  She stood a little too close to Laurel, as if trying to get inside the circle of Laurel’s body heat. A strange sweetness had sprung up between them; it was like that moment in the car on the way to Mobile. Bet would tell her more than the Ouija had, if only Laurel could ask the right questions.

  “Shelby confides in you a little, right?” Laurel said.

  “What’s a confides?” Bet asked.

  “Talks,” Laurel said. “I asked that Ouija what I needed to know about the night Molly died. What I needed to know to protect Shelby.”

  Bet’s eyes were dark, unfathomable. Her gaze fixed on Laurel’s face, and her mouth turned down. “What’d it say back?”

  “She saw,” Laurel said. “It said She saw, and then I broke it.”

  “You know what it meant?” Bet said. Her eyelids dropped; she was staring at the floor by Laurel’s feet.

  “I hope I don’t. I hope to God,” Laurel said. “But this morning, I’m done with being too scared to find out.”

  “Aunt Moff woulda known straight off. But maybe you’re more like Della. It always takes Dell time to sort things into sense.” Now Bet was looking sideways out the window. “She saw don’t mean what you might come to think.”

  Laurel leaned toward her, drawn in, and said, “If you know something—anything—I wish you would say it.”

  Bet muttered something under her breath. Laurel couldn’t make it out, but it seemed like Bet was talking to herself, deciding. Laurel’s hands trembled a little, and she squeezed them together, hard.

  “Don’t be afraid. Whatever it is, Bet, you can tell me,” Laurel said. “I won’t be angry.”

  Bet looked up at Laurel, wary, but she had come to a decision. “I tole a story on you.” That was DeLop-speak for a lie.

  “That’s okay,” Laurel said, keeping her voice calm, not too eager, trying hard not to spook the kid. “You can tell me the truth now.”

  Bet’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I tole that I saw Molly go in that orange house? I said I didn’t know if Shelby saw, but that was the story. Shelby saw, awright. She made me swear not to tell no one. That’s what that Ouija meant, I bet.” Bet’s whisper fell lower, so it was little more than breath. “Shelby saw Molly with that man, going in his house. I think that there is a real bad man, and I done seed me enough of ’em to know.”

  It was the last piece Laurel needed, the one she’d thought she’d have to do without when she sent Thalia away. She saw the pattern come whole and all the pieces fit. She’d known since the first day she’d touched his soft, moist hand that Stan Webelow was something wrong, unwholesome. She’d felt it in her gut, where she knew all the things that were truest.

  Now even the Ouija’s message made a kind of sense she could accept. Shelby had seen Molly with Stan Webelow, and she was feeling guilty for keeping Molly’s secret, strong friendship mated with piss-poor teenage judgment. No doubt Molly had sworn her to secrecy. For Molly, Stan Webelow was probably a cross between a father figure and a forbidden love affair; Molly would be wholly unaware of all the damage that was being done to her. Thalia had learned that Chuck was filing for divorce; who knew how long the DuFresne marriage had been in ugly trouble. If Chuck Dufresne had been threatening to leave, then Molly would have been especially vulnerable.

  Laurel could say for certain that Stan had been in the cul-de-sac the night Molly died: He’d admitted as much in the street. Shelby knew about the relationship, and Bet could back that up to some extent. Forensics would have shown if Molly had been pushed, but there were all kinds of pushing. Stan Webelow had pushed the girl, all right, pushed her out into the night and to her death.

  It was as Laurel had always believed. Molly had been coming to see Shelby, that was obvio
us. Maybe she’d been with Stan already, and he had followed her. Waiting for her friend, Molly had been drawn like a moth to the lit pool, and Stan Webelow had found her there. He’d startled her, and she’d slipped, fallen. Banged her head on the board as she fell. He’d stood by and watched. Stan Webelow had been the shadow Laurel had seen moving in the yard when she stared down, someplace between sleep and waking. He’d been what Molly wanted her to see.

  “Means, motive, opportunity,” she said on a breath out.

  “What?” said Bet.

  “It’s enough. It’s enough to take to Detective Moreno. That’s a real thing you told me, Bet, not dreams or Ouija boards. I can’t thank you enough.” She put her hand on Bet’s arm, but Bet pulled back, staring at her with her dark eyes wide and panicked.

  “You cain’t tell nobody.”

  Laurel said, “Don’t worry. Shelby is not going to be mad at you.”

  “She’s sleepin’,” Bet said.

  “I know. I need to talk to her dad first, anyway. Don’t worry about a thing, Bet, okay? You did the right thing, telling me. That’s a big deal. You could have kept that secret, kept Shelby in danger, and you, too. That’s what Shelby did. She kept secrets from the people who could help her longer than she should have, and you made a better choice. I’m really, really proud of you right now.”

  On impulse, she leaned in and gave Bet a quick hug. Before she could pull back, Bet latched on, winding her arms around Laurel and gripping her so tight and hard that Laurel’s breath was squeezed away.

  “I wish’t you was my mother,” Bet said in a fierce whisper, burrowing her face down damply into Laurel’s neck.

  “Oh, Bet,” Laurel said, “I’m going to—”

  Bet pulled away. Her face flamed red. “Don’t say nothin’,” she said. “Please.”

  She pulled herself out of Laurel’s arms and fled, scurrying fast down the hall to the small guest bedroom. She slipped inside and softly closed the door after her.

  Laurel got up and went to the window again, looking down at the bright blue pool.