The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Thalia snorted. “There are no police in DeLop.”

  “To whoever has jurisdiction there,” David said, impatience coloring his voice.

  “Are they calling in the feds?” Thalia said, perking up. “Federal agents are very often hot.”

  “No,” David said. “She called this ‘interference with custody,’ not kidnapping. A sheriff, I would guess. He’ll keep driving past Sissi’s place until they show.”

  Thalia was moving at a good clip, weaving around the big trucks that used 29 as an access road to 65. The highway was lined on both sides with strip malls and gas stations. Every four or five miles, Laurel knew, there would be another Waffle House.

  “Surely someone will see the car and stop them,” Laurel said.

  “It’s a P.O.S. red lemon with one blue door,” said Thalia. “It’s not like it blends.”

  “They’ll call my cell when they have her,” David said, and he sounded as calm as Thalia.

  Laurel could have clubbed them both. They were acting like they were going to pick Shelby up at the movies. Laurel dialed Sissi’s home again. She listened to the phone ring and ring.

  “You’ll run your battery down and not have it when you need it,” said Thalia.

  Laurel snapped the phone shut. Sissi had both girls in the car with her right now. Assuming Sissi wasn’t stoned to the gills and didn’t plow them into an embankment, Shelby would be fine until they got to Sissi’s house. It was the hour that followed that was making the pit of Laurel’s stomach feel like a clenched fist. Even if they made good time, there would be half an hour, forty-five minutes, maybe more, between the time Sissi got home and Laurel’s car pulled up.

  Shelby would be loose in DeLop with Bet Clemmens, close to alone. Laurel didn’t count Sissi as any sort of supervision. She imagined the blue-tinged flesh of Sissi’s pale legs resticking itself to the vinyl of the sofa as her body sank into the custom groove she’d worn in its cushion. Laurel imagined Sissi’s bleary eyes drifting shut. Shelby would be on her own. With Bet. It could not happen.

  Laurel said, “What if Sissi doesn’t get stopped?”

  “If she scoots through, would it truly be the end of the universe?” Thalia asked. “You’re being overly dramatic. Coming from me, that’s quite a damnation.”

  “Leave her alone,” David said. He spoke with almost no inflection, but it came out ice-cold. “Why did you come?”

  “To drive, David. So you two could make your calls. You’re welcome.”

  “I have a Bluetooth,” David said. “And it’s not being a jerk to my wife.”

  “Stop it,” Laurel said.

  Thalia said, “I haven’t started. All I said was half an hour in DeLop might do Shel some good. She needs to see that not everyone in the world lives in a place where they genetically engineer the pansies to match the mailbox trim.”

  “I said leave her alone,” David said. “This isn’t the time to . . . be you.”

  “Go to hell,” Thalia said without rancor.

  “You’re both missing the point,” Laurel said. She couldn’t blame them. She’d missed it, too, for days, her eyes focused only on Stan Webelow. But who had kept her focus there? Every time her gaze had strayed from him, Bet Clemmens had been there, saying she saw Molly going into Stan’s house, saying Shelby had seen Molly with Stan, too.

  David and Thalia were sniping back and forth at each other, Thalia’s voice winding around his, while his curt responses were like punctuation, periods and exclamation points that ended her sentences before Thalia simply started on a new one.

  Laurel stopped listening, closed her eyes as they passed yet another Krispy Kreme. She was seeing Molly Dufresne again, waiting in the Hawthornes’ backyard.

  Shelby was late.

  A couple of hours ago, Shelby and Bet had gone to their separate bedrooms, supposedly to sleep. Shel had waited in her room for the appointed hour, but her eyelids had gotten heavy. Her alarm clock might wake Bet, asleep across the hall. Bet was not privy to the plan.

  Not surprising, really. It was probably not pure teen-girl meanness. Shelby simply hadn’t thought to include her. After all, Laurel had never gone out of her way to truly weave Bet into their lives. She’d made sure that Bet was behaving and that Shelby’s friends were being kind to her, but she’d kept Bet separate, buttoned away in her own little pocket. She’d never made Bet integral and equal, so it didn’t occur to Shelby and Molly to do so, either.

  Shelby had tiptoed all the way down to the end of the hall to the rec room, which was farther from Bet’s door and at the opposite end of the house from David and Laurel’s room. She’d closed the door and put the TV’s volume on so low that it was barely more than a murmur. She’d sprawled out in her beanbag, pinching her arm every minute or so to make sure she was still awake. Her eyelids had drooped lower, and the television conversation had blended into a lullaby of empty conversation. Shelby had fallen asleep.

  Down in the yard, Molly got bored. She could smell rain coming. Clouds hid the moon, and the night was dark and hot. With the storm getting this close, Jeffrey Coe would not be coming out. Her elation faded. She wished Shelby would come so this would feel like fun again. It was dark near the gazebo, but she went back there anyway, dropping to her knees to feel around the base where she knew she could find round stones and pebbles. She gathered a small handful.

  She picked her way across the blackness of the yard to Shelby’s dark window. Molly tossed rocks at it, one after another, pinging them off the glass.

  Nothing happened. Molly decided to give Shelby five more minutes, then she would go home. The only light in the backyard came from the underwater pool lights. Molly was drawn to that blue glow. She walked around the pool’s edges, her toes pointing ballerina-style with each careful step, like a gymnast on a balance beam. At the far end, she shuffled lightly down the length of the diving board, sliding her feet along because it was so springy. She reached the end and sat down, dangling her tennis shoes over the glowing water.

  Inside, the rocks hitting Shelby’s window had woken up Bet Clemmens, who got up and went across the hall to Shelby’s empty room. Shelby’s window overlooked the backyard, so Bet had a clear view of Molly in her light-colored dress, noodling around on the end of the board.

  Bet went downstairs. The alarm was set, so Bet put in the code and waited until the light went green before she slid open the glass door. Molly, at the far end of the pool, heard the door. She didn’t know if it was Shelby or one of Shelby’s parents coming out to bust her. She peered across the yard, trying to see. She scrambled to her feet, but the soles of her tennis shoes slipped on the board’s damp surface. Molly tumbled backward, banging her head, and then splashed into the water. Bet saw the water contract as it accepted her, saw it splash up after. Ripples spread to the edge from the place Molly had fallen, but she did not rise. Under the surface, Molly had gone still, rolling facedown as the water filled her and cooled her.

  Bet started forward on instinct, stepping over Shelby’s dammit and coming all the way to the taller wrought-iron fence around the pool. There she stopped, her fingers curling around the latch on the gate. She was thinking. Her hands dropped to her sides. She didn’t go down into the water, and she didn’t yell for help. She simply stood and waited. She watched Molly die, and then she watched Molly be dead. She stayed that way for a long time, her flat unchanging eyes on Molly’s body as it drifted.

  She saw, the Ouija board had told Laurel, and Laurel, focused on Shelby’s lie, Shelby’s palpable, unhappy guilt, hadn’t seen nor noticed the quiet girl sheltering her daughter in her shadow. Bet was so affection-starved that Laurel’s wary caution and vague kindness seemed a feast to her. Laurel hadn’t understood or seen the growth of Bet’s awful love, so she could not imagine Bet stepping a little closer, a little closer, all the way to the edge of the pool, to look down at the small body drifting silent for an endless span of time.

  It must have been hypnotizing, so powerful, to do nothing, to watch w
ater fill Molly and emptiness take the place she used to occupy. Bet stood there until she heard Laurel howling from the window, banging on the glass.

  All at once, Bet felt terrified. She was the shadow Laurel saw melting into the darkness as she ran for the house. She scurried inside to reset the alarm with trembling fingers. There wasn’t time to get upstairs. She scuttled into the kitchen, crouching behind the low counter. She peered over the top to watch first Laurel and then David go tearing out into the night.

  As soon as they were out, she dashed upstairs. She’d seen Laurel at the window of a dark room, hollering. Surely Laurel had seen her, too. Bet began frantically stuffing her clothes into her Hefty bag, readying to run. But then Shelby was there, at her door, Shelby’s little living paw on her arm, pulling her down the stairs to see what was happening. Shelby went outside and Bet trailed behind, her Hefty bag clutched to her chest, numb. She was dreading the moment when Laurel’s gaze would come to rest on her face.

  Laurel’s finger would point, and she would say, “It was her. By the pool. She saw. She saw.”

  “I fell asleep in the rec room. Me and Bet were watching TV,” Shelby lied, and Bet, surprised, could say only, “Do what?”

  Then Laurel looked at Bet, and her eyes barely focused as they skimmed over her body, her bag, her flip-flops. That must have felt like Laurel’s normal look to Bet, and she’d relaxed into a passive state, adrift, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Later, when Laurel was hell-bent on getting Thalia and digging up what really happened that night, Bet ghosted around on her cat feet, listening. Bet, Laurel was certain, had her ear at every cracked door. No doubt she eavesdropped when Laurel went downstairs to tell David that they needed Thalia. Laurel imagined Bet pressing down the intercom listen button and leaning one ear against the speaker. At the theater with Thalia, Bet must have taken off the headphones as soon as Gary went back upstairs, sneaking to the door to hear Laurel tell Thalia all her theories.

  Bet had been covering her tracks ever since. She’d seen. She’d let it happen. Now she’d finagled Shelby into going with her to DeLop, the least safe place on Planet Earth.

  Thalia and David were still volleying harsh words back and forth, but Laurel heard none of them. She willed David’s phone to ring, for the police dispatcher to say they had Shelby at a rest stop off 65, not half an hour away, waiting for Laurel, safe and angry.

  This far down 29, the strip malls had given out. They’d left Pensacola. Flat Florida grassland dotted with loblolly pine trees filled the long spaces between BP stations and truck stops. The phone didn’t ring. Her child was still moving headlong into danger.

  Out of the wash of hard words, Laurel caught this sentence: “Until you gave her that big ‘you light up my life’ speech in the foyer—”

  Laurel’s head jerked around to stare at her sister. “You heard that?” she said.

  Thalia paused. She had the rearview mirror angled so that she could glare back through it at David, but she glanced at Laurel and said, “Yes, Bug. Bet’s not the only one who can glide around the house in sock feet,” and Laurel blanched. It was as if Thalia had been reading her mind. But Thalia wasn’t finished. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, per se. I came down to talk to you, and he was in the middle of it. I’m glad the whole ‘you make me want to be a better man’ thing worked for you, but then after, in the glow, in the endless hours the two of you were secluded in David’s pit downstairs, I have to know, little sister, what fleas were you putting in his ear?”

  Laurel shrugged, already losing interest. She leaned forward in her seat, pressing her hands in to the dashboard as if pushing the car forward. “Let it go.”

  “What did you tell him?” Thalia asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Maybe she should try Sissi’s house again. Sissi must have a cell phone, too, or maybe Bet had gotten her at a boyfriend’s house. Bet must have had a way to contact Sissi Clemmens that Laurel didn’t know about, because Sissi was on the road to Pensacola not half an hour after Bet pulled her final snow job. Bet had overplayed that one badly, and Laurel had panicked her by saying it was time to bring the cops back in.

  Thalia knuckle-punched Laurel in the arm, hard, claiming her attention again. “There’s that whole ‘no statute of limitations’ thing that does make it matter, a tiny bit, to me.”

  “You should thank her,” David said. “You make more sense to me now. In a way. You’re almost forgivable.”

  “Wait, what?” Thalia said. “I make sense to you? Good God, I think the earth’s polarity just reversed.”

  “David’s not going to tell anyone. He understands why you felt driven to do what you did, and it’s okay,” Laurel said.

  “‘He understands’? I don’t like the way you said that. It was very moist and hand-holdy. I am not cattle, Bug. I drive. I don’t get driven,” Thalia said. Her gaze was back on the road, but then her sloe eyes narrowed into long angry slits. Her hands clenched down on the wheel so tightly it looked like she was trying to strangle it. “Wait a sec. You have to be kidding me. So Mr. Math here thinks he’s solved for X, huh? You told him Uncle Marty gave me the bad touch and turned me into Crazy Thalia. How nice for the both of you, to be able to reduce me to such a simple two plus two. Is that what you told him, Jesus Bug?”

  Thalia had let her foot grow heavy on the gas pedal. The Volvo wobbled over onto the shoulder, and Thalia jerked it back to the middle of the lane, so mad she was panting.

  “It’s not your fault,” Laurel said.

  “Is that what you think, metal man?” Thalia whipped her head around long enough to take David’s measure in the backseat. She said, “Cause and effect. Incest in, actress out. God, I wish people really were so simple. If they were, acting would be a hell of a lot easier. Spare me. I don’t want you to excuse me, David, and I sure as hell don’t need you to explain me.” Thalia laughed, an abrupt burst of angry sound. Then she said, “Marty never laid a hand on me. You assholes.”

  Finally, Thalia had Laurel’s full attention. She turned in her seat to stare at her sister. “Yes, he did.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Thalia said.

  “Sometimes,” Laurel said carefully, “people don’t want things to be true, so they stop remembering. I’ve read about it.”

  Thalia laughed again, this time in a glorious peal. “I bet you have. In Family Circle or Reader’s Digest, no doubt. I bet those are the articles that always caught your eye in the pediatrician’s waiting room. Did you angle the magazine carefully to the wall, so the other mommies wouldn’t see what ugly story had you so engrossed?

  “And what did Reader’s Digest teach you? Do I need to go to hypnotherapy and retrieve my sad past? Please. I’ve had hypnotherapy and past-life regression. Gary and I once did a womb workshop where they tied us up together in a long canvas tube so we could struggle our way out and be rebirthed as twins. It’s the sort of thing we do on date night, while you two share a Diet Coke and hold hands at the movies.

  “What do you want, Buglet? You want some tidy cause and effect like Mr. Science back there? Then here’s a double scoop of logic for you both. One: If Marty made me who I am, tell me when. Show me the day when the fairies took your sugar-mouthed angel sister and left you a wild nixie. If you can, I swear I’ll go right back to the hypnotherapist and ask if it’s possible my uncle diddled me when I wasn’t looking.”

  There was no such day, and Laurel knew it. Thalia had always been Thalia, sly and mighty, a changeling only in her ability to slip her own skin and tuck herself inside a character. She’d been born with that. One of Laurel’s earliest memories was Thalia at about six, weeping fat tears with Laurel’s pony doll in her hands. When Laurel had asked what was wrong, Thalia’s tears had stopped instantly, and she’d glared at Laurel, irked at the interruption.

  “I’m not crying,” she’d said. “I’m being your pony. He’s the one who’s sad.”

  “Why is he sad?” Laurel had asked.

  “I don’t k
now,” Thalia had said. And then she’d peeped at Laurel, her mouth expanding into the baby predecessor of her wide wolf’s smile, and added, “Maybe he’s sad because he’s yours. I bet he wishes he was my pony.”

  She’d embellished on that theory until Laurel was the one who was crying and running to tell Mother.

  Now Laurel said, “You were always you, but—”

  “Thank you,” Thalia said. Her anger receded slightly. She leaned sideways toward Laurel, intent on proving her case. “Scoop two: Have you ever noticed the mouth on me? I’m not the vulnerable secret-keeping sort. I was born a pedophile’s worst nightmare, and if Marty had tried any crap with me, I’d have set up a sting and tried to catch his ass on film. The closest Marty ever came to getting out of line with me was when I was eleven or so. He showed me his dick.”

  Laurel’s breath caught. In the backseat, David had gone quiet, observing the two of them.

  “What did you do?” Laurel said.

  “I put one hand on my hip, and I looked that thing right in its eye and said, ‘I’ve seen better.’”

  A squawk of laughter escaped Laurel. “You didn’t!”

  Thalia slowed. They were in Century, approaching the Piggly Wiggly. It was set on the Florida side of the state line to avoid Alabama taxes. On Marty’s last hunting trip, they’d stopped there to buy beef jerky and Coors and bags of honey-roasted peanuts.

  “I was losing my crap inside, Bug. Don’t get me wrong, but I would have ripped out my own kidneys and cooked them up with eggs before I’d have let him see that. Plus, you know, by then I had seen better.”

  Laurel blinked. “You had not.”

  They crossed over into Alabama, the town changing from Century to Flomaton in the space of a blink.

  “Oh, yeah. A couple of months before, I gave Lisa Cartwright a dollar to let me climb the sycamore tree in her yard. I could see straight into the back bathroom. You remember her older brother, Lewis? He was fifteen and could not leave himself alone. He had this monstrous appendage that turned purple when he made it angry. That kid was hung like a Trojan soldier.”