The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  You can’t get there from here, Thalia had said in the dream. Laurel had been helpless, held under.

  “Betcha I can get there from here,” Laurel said, and was surprised to hear how strong her voice came out.

  CHAPTER 15

  Thalia’s yoga mat was laid out on the only floor available in the big guest room. Laurel had done the room in crisp pale blue and white with touches of daisy yellow to warm it, but now it looked like a color bomb had gone off in the center. The floor, the chaise longue, the small desk, and the dresser were strewn with bits of Thalia’s real clothes and a ton of outfits she’d brought from the costume room. There were filmy blouses twining with silk underpants, drifts of pants and skirts dotted with shoes. In one corner, a haystack of gaudy silver feathers lay heaped, a marabou jacket or a long boa of some sort, Laurel supposed. The quilt she’d made was on the floor at the foot of the bed. The shams and throw pillows were wound in it, and Thalia’s favorite lace-up boots stood at attention on top. The white down pillow top and duvet and bedsheets were so scrambled that Laurel could have found a thousand pictures in the humps and creases, reading the bedding like clouds.

  It could not have been more different than the bare, clean lines of the emptied black-box theater, but there was Thalia, wearing a sheer sleeveless unitard, twisting herself into shapes more complicated than the ones she’d kicked the sheets into. And here was Laurel, watching. Last time she’d come to call Thalia home with her, a supplicant, needing favors. This time she didn’t wait to be noticed.

  “Time to pack up,” she said, her voice gentle. “We’re done.”

  Thalia was on her back, slowly raising her legs until her toes pointed toward the ceiling. She didn’t pause when Laurel spoke. Always aware of an audience, she must have felt the air shift when Laurel came into the room.

  “Mystery solved, Velma?” Thalia asked. “Is it time to pack up the Mystery Machine and say the part about ‘if it wasn’t for those meddling kids’?” Her legs kept rising until her hips lifted off the floor, and then she slowly lowered them, still straight, over her head. Her toes touched down on a single lace-topped stocking by the edge of the mat.

  “I’ve got enough to turn things over to the police now,” Laurel said. “Bet Clemmens knew more than she’d been saying.”

  “Mmm,” Thalia said. “Septic waters run deep.”

  “Look at me, Thalia,” Laurel said. She waited while Thalia unrolled herself and sat up, cross-legged. “I know you didn’t come here to help me put Molly to rest. That was all set dressing. You came to root me out of here.”

  Thalia cocked her head to the side and said, “That’s not entirely true.”

  “It’s true enough,” Laurel said.

  Thalia shrugged. “I face-planted in a pervo’s crotch for you, Bug, so don’t make the big bruisy wound eyes and say I wasn’t playing for your team. Yes, I’ll kill the fatted calf the day you call me up and ask me to come over in a U-Haul and get you, but it’s not like I’ve been covert about that. And I told you from the start, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “You said you’d come because you believed me,” Laurel said. “But this whole time, you were here to wreck me.”

  Thalia stood up and took a step to the left, centering herself by instinct so that the mat framed her. “You weren’t that hard to wreck, Bug. That should tell you something.”

  “I’m still here,” Laurel said simply and quietly. Shelby was sleeping one door down, and Laurel was past yelling. Past smashing things. Past dramatic exits up the center aisle.

  “It wasn’t to hurt you,” Thalia said. “Never that, Bug. It was to get you free. You’re half the artist you could be, all because that cyborg down the stairs forgot to bag it one night when you were barely nineteen. You’re living our mother’s god-awful smiley life, just in a better neighborhood. I see you going under for the third time, and I’m supposed to stand by and hum and watch? When the hell have I ever done that?”

  “Not once,” Laurel said.

  Thalia wasn’t a sideline kind of girl; no one knew that better than Laurel, who had spent her childhood being “Thalia Gray’s sister, poor thing.” Her classmates had meant she was the sister of the most notorious reprobate in school, but it was more than that. They had all wanted, on some level, to be Thalia. Maybe only for a day, but surely they had wondered what it must feel like to draw every eye, to not give two good damns what other people thought, to be made purely of appetites and bold enough to feed them all in turn. Laurel was Poor Thing because she lived in the chaotic churning of Thalia’s mighty wake, but also because she would never be Thalia. Even Thalia pitied her for not being Thalia.

  Laurel picked her way across the littered floor to stand in front of the mat. She came close enough so that Thalia could not look beside her eyes or between them. Close enough to speak in a voice barely above a breath and still be heard.

  “Who shot Marty?” she asked.

  Thalia backed up a step. “You know who, Bug. You were there.”

  Laurel followed, feeling her feet sink into the dense mat as she stepped up on it. “Your stupid little sister had her eyes closed,” she said. “She was afraid of guns. She was probably afraid of deer. But I’m not her.”

  Thalia tried to stare her down, her expression inscrutable. Laurel stood fast, expecting nothing, waiting her out.

  At last Thalia spoke. “I’m not sorry.”

  “I know,” Laurel said. “It’s okay.”

  “If you brought him here right now, I’d shoot his ass again,” Thalia said, but there was a tremble in her voice.

  “I understand,” Laurel said.

  She did. Perfectly. She’d been Mother’s, and Mother hadn’t saved her. Daddy hadn’t saved Thalia, either, though she’d always been his girl. What’s a daddy’s girl to do when her father isn’t Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson but only a daydreaming plumber with a willfully blind wife? There was no one to come in, larger than life, and save Thalia. Thalia, born larger than life, had stepped up and saved herself.

  “I don’t blame you,” Laurel went on. “But you’re not rescuing me from anything here. I’m not you, Thalia. I never wanted to be, and you’re blowing holes in everything I love.” Laurel looked at Thalia for a long time. Again, it was Thalia who backed up a step, Thalia’s eyes that dropped first.

  “Pack,” Laurel said. “I’ll take you down to Hertz and rent you a car so you can get home.”

  “We’re really done here, huh?” Thalia said. “Bet Clemmens gave you the goods?”

  “Yes,” said Laurel. “We are.”

  She was all the way across the room, in the doorway, when Thalia said her name. Her real name.

  “Laurel?” Thalia said. “You and me, are we square?”

  “No,” Laurel said as kindly as she could. “I meant we’re really done.”

  She closed the door behind her almost gingerly. The guest room door was still shut, too. Behind it, her sleeping child was lost, not even a trail of bread crumbs to lead her home again. Laurel would have to go and find Shelby, but she had to find a way to David first.

  David must have heard her coming, because he was pouring coffee into her favorite mug as she came down the stairs into the keeping room. She sat down on one of the bar stools and leaned her elbows on the counter. He put in milk and one Splenda, then set the cup in front of her. “Want some aspirin?” he asked.

  “I took Motrin upstairs. Anyway, I don’t feel too bad,” she said. “I think I threw most of that rum up.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “I think you threw most of your liver up.”

  She had a sudden flash of memory. Last night David had come into the bathroom after her. She remembered a cool rag on the back of her neck, his hands holding her hair back. She flushed.

  He was still in pajamas, although in deference to Bet and Thalia, he had found the top to the set and pulled it on. The bottoms had faded from dark royal blue to a muddy, pilled navy, but the top was bright, the cotton stiff, like new.

/>   On the long counter by the sink, she saw her black vinyl camera bag. Her digital camera sat beside it, charged and ready.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  He picked it up and said, “Come and see.”

  He went around the counter, and she got up and followed him. He ushered her through the keeping room to the foyer and then waved one long hand at the dining room.

  There was a band of duct tape running like crime-scene ribbon across the doorway. In black Sharpie, David had written Do Not Sweep Do Not Sweep across the front of it in his spiky print. What Bet had said about him saving the chunks of things for Laurel made sudden, glorious sense.

  The shattered dishes lay where she had hurled them, the shards of china and crystal glowing in spectacular circular patterns, like fireworks going off against the dark hardwood floor. A couple of the plates had broken into diffused round shapes; she could see how each had once been something whole. The crystal dust of wineglasses caught the sunlight coming through the windows, so the chaos had a hard white glow.

  She reached for the camera and found David already extending it to her, trading it for her coffee cup. She ducked under the tape, stepping onto the carpet runner Thalia had unfurled. Laurel took several shots of the plate that had broken most perfectly; then she took other shots, more patterns emerging as she spun on the carpet and framed pieces with the lens. She dropped to her knees to get some close shots.

  She could see one quilt already, a big one. It would be a banquet table, people sitting down to eat, but the quilt would cut off just above their shoulders. No human heads, no faces. The fruit and meat would be on the green grass, dumped down for some happy dogs. The diners would each have a cunning silver knife or a set of tile nippers. Their plates would be in shatter patterns before them, and they’d be lifting up spoonfuls of glass to their unseen mouths.

  She’d have to use a lot of sturdy fabrics to support the weight of the china. Upholstery fabric, maybe, but for the detail work, she’d need glossy things, raw silk and polished cotton, and a print that mimicked the pattern of tiny climbing roses around the edges of the real china. She’d make the plates out of a mix of glass and fabric or the piece would be too heavy to hang right.

  She needed to bag the pieces of each plate separately, as much as was possible, so they’d be easier to puzzle into wholes later. She snapped a few more pictures, getting close to a plate that had broken into seven large pieces, and discovered a dark hardwood star created in the space between. She snapped it several times; she’d re-create this pattern over and over, quilting it into the coats of the happy dogs and diners’ clothes.

  At last she lowered the camera and looked up at David. He was standing in the foyer, his bare feet flat on the floor, a yard or so back from the shrapnel.

  “I am sorry about your dishes,” she said.

  “These are mine?” David said. “Why do I have dishes?”

  “Your mother gave them to us. They were— Never mind. Thank you.”

  “You want Ziploc bags?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “The big heavy ones for freezing things.”

  He was already leaning over and setting down her coffee cup on the floor, exchanging it for a box of the right kind of bags. He’d had them set out by the doorway. He tossed the box to her across the glass. She caught it and stared at it, this solid cardboard rectangle in her hands, the proof she hadn’t found upstairs in her jewel box.

  She set it down unopened, looking from the box to him and back again. He’d known what she would see when she looked at this room. He’d saved it for her, and he’d known what she would need, down to the bags. It was a declaration, bald and obvious, though almost as inarticulate as Bet’s had been.

  “You love me,” she said for him. He’d never been good with the talking parts.

  His hands came up by his shoulders, and he flicked his fingers sideways in an “of course” gesture.

  “Then what the hell are you doing with Kaitlyn Reese?”

  “Not a damn thing,” said David, vehement.

  “She’s pretty,” Laurel said. “And she likes you.” He flicked his fingers again, dismissively this time, and she added, “Oh, but you didn’t notice.”

  “Of course I noticed,” David said. “So she’s pretty. So’s Famke Janssen.”

  “Who?”

  “Movie actress. She looks like a little deer in the face.”

  Laurel trailed her fingers along the plush carpet and said, “You don’t have lunch with Famke Janssen. She’s not real.”

  “Okay,” David said. “Your friend Mindy next door is pretty. I notice. I notice that Eva down the street.”

  “But you don’t—” Laurel said, and then stopped. “Eva Bailey? Trish Deerbold’s friend?” David nodded, and she said, “Her hair doesn’t even move!”

  He flushed and said, “But the body,” and then he waved one hand back and forth as if erasing Eva’s body from the conversation. “We’re off topic. I’m a man, Laurel. I notice how women look.”

  “It’s not the same,” Laurel said. “Body aside, you can’t stand Eva Bailey. This is the first time I’ve ever heard you use her name in a sentence that didn’t have the word ‘vapid’ in it. I saw you, David, with Kaitlyn. You talked to her like—I don’t know what. Like you’ve never talked to me.”

  That was the heart of it. Saying it out loud, she felt every inch of distance between them. The line of duct tape was a wall. She could feel how uneven the floor was under the carpet runner; she was kneeling on crushed glass. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking. Then he dropped it away, and his hands hung by his sides.

  “I didn’t like it when you asked me if I was only here because of Shelby. I wanted you before that, when we first met. I wanted to get you a different way, with dinners. Flowers. All that stuff girls like. I didn’t know how to do that. Then Shelby happened. You remember how scared you were when you came to tell me? I wasn’t. It was a shortcut to someplace I was heading anyway.”

  She stood up, feeling the glass shift under her feet, breaking down further. She said, “You never told me that.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But I used to sit around while your friends yakked about that TV show with the people who slept with each other and then had fights about it. I’d work on proving that week’s extra-credit theorem in my head while they talked. They sounded like white noise, and they looked like . . . whatever the visual equivalent of white noise would be.

  “I’d stay, though. Because I knew you’d come. You’d be in color. You would talk about—I don’t know. Nothing special. But you made everything around you be in color, too. You’d light up the most ordinary things and make me see the shape of them. Most times it’s all white noise, except the numbers. It’s like in my head, numbers are green, say. A green I’ve never seen in real life. I see that color when I talk to other math people like Kaitlyn. Yes, I’ve noticed from time to time that she’s pretty. I’ve got a pulse, Laurel. But when we talk, she could be anyone. I see green. I don’t see her. Not like I see you.”

  She was already moving toward him, fast, glass crunching under the runner as she ran. She broke the tape as if it weren’t there and hurled herself into his arms. He caught her.

  “What—” he said, but she wound her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear, “I’m answering you.”

  She pressed into him, pulled his mouth down onto hers, responding to him in a language he was fluent in. His mouth was still, almost inanimate, but Laurel was electric. She shocked his body into movement, filled him with current. His hands came to her hips, pulling her to him, and the new pajama top crackled between them.

  “Where can we go?” he said.

  Upstairs, Shelby slept, Bet Clemmens drifted, and Thalia, thank God, was packing.

  “Down,” Laurel said, kissing him and kissing him, and they moved in tandem to the basement door.

  David fumbled it open and pulled her through, slamming it and shooting the deadbolt lock. Th
en his hands were back on her body, his mouth on hers, and they slid lower, stair by stair, tumbling and thumping down into the darkness of the basement. They left pieces of their clothing as they went. By the time they hit bottom, they were together, fast and savage, like a series of jolts. At the end, she said his name so many times it lost its meaning and stopped being a word. It became a sound, the syllables of how they were together. His face was buried in her hair, he breathed her in and said “Laurel” once, as if he were naming her.

  Then they lay beside the futon, legs intertwined, in David’s plain white space. It was cool in the basement, and David pulled the Sunbonnet Sue quilt down around them, her bonnet hiding her face. Laurel suspected that Sue might be blushing. Laurel was, her cheeks pink and overheated even in the chilly basement. David pulled a throw pillow down as well and propped his head on it. Laurel rolled in to him, putting one arm on his chest and bracing herself above him so he could see her face in the dim light from his monitor.

  “Thalia’s going home today,” she said.

  “Awesome,” he answered, heartfelt. His eyes were sleepy.

  “Don’t sack out,” she said. She lay her head down on his chest, pressing her cheek against him to hear the good thump of his heart. “I’m not done answering you.”

  She felt his chuckle like a rumbling against her ear. “I’m thirty-four, Laurel,” he said. “I need a minute before you answer me some more.”

  She smiled into his ribs, giving his side a good whack with the flat of her hand. “I’m serious,” she said. She turned over, and he put an arm around her so she was lying with her head propped up on his chest, both of them facing his desk. On the monitor, bright fish swam back and forth in an endlessly repeating pattern. “Thalia couldn’t have gotten in between us if there hadn’t been a crack already. A big one. I think I put it there.”

  “Okay,” David said.

  There was no easy way to break thirteen years of silence, so finally, she said, “Our backyard is full of ghosts.”

  He said “Okay” again, this time drawing the word out slow, and she realized that she couldn’t start there. It wasn’t Molly or even Uncle Marty. It was DeLop. She should have taken him to see DeLop years ago, one Christmas, Mother’s wishes be damned, to see the place where all the hidden pockets in her quilts came from. The place of her first ghost.