The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Shelby was pressing Thalia’s crumpled shirt to the back of her head. Her eyes were red and puffed almost shut. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Laurel said.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” Shelby said. “Gramma brought me home, and I saw Molly’s mom on our sofa, and I knew I couldn’t stand it if she looked at me. It was my fault, Mommy. I couldn’t stand for Molly’s mom to look at me and know.”

  Laurel grabbed Shelby’s shoulders and said, “It was not your fault.”

  “It was. If I had met her—”

  “Baby,” Laurel said, “I know. And it’s not your fault. You can’t control the whole world, honey. It was an accident.” She gathered Shelby up and held her, rocked her, and Shelby melted into her and let her and wept until her whole slim body was shaking with it.

  Thalia finally stopped vomiting. She sat up, tugging on her bra straps. Her red eyes met Laurel’s.

  Over Shelby’s head, Laurel mouthed, “Where is Bet?”

  Thalia tilted her head slightly, toward the water.

  Laurel looked out at the still expanse of the Frog Hole. The green water was like a sheet of uncracked glass. There weren’t even ripples. “We have to—”

  But Thalia was shaking her head. She tapped her wrist where a watch would go if she wore one and said, “No point.”

  Then Thalia started gagging again, tears spurting from her eyes, and she went back onto her hands and knees until she could gulp in enough fresh air to stop.

  She crawled to them and sat by Laurel, close on her other side. Shelby rested on Laurel’s chest, exhausted, and Laurel put her hand over Shelby’s on Thalia’s wadded-up T-shirt, applying pressure.

  “I have to stop doing this,” Thalia said. She looked, in that moment, as young and lost as Shelby. Laurel put her arm around her sister. She understood exactly what Thalia meant.

  “What did he say when the deer ran?” she asked Thalia. “I heard Daddy say, ‘Get him,’ and the deer going. Then Marty said something. What was it?”

  Thalia said, “He said, ‘Next time, I’d pick her,’ and he kinda jerked his thumb at you. He meant because I’d missed such an easy shot. But that’s what he said. That he’d pick you next time. He stepped in front of me, going after that deer, and I didn’t even think about it. It was something my hands did.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Shelby.

  “Shhhh,” said Laurel. “Never you mind.” She looked at her sister, wiped down to toddler level again, big circles under both her eyes, her mouth still trembling. The unbreakable Thalia, broken. “I’m not like you,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t have said ‘I’ve seen better’ or told.”

  “I know,” Thalia said, and then she buried her face in her hands. “I knew she couldn’t swim.”

  “What happened?” Shelby said, struggling back out of Laurel’s arms. She was still holding the T-shirt to her head, and now her other hand reached around to feel it. “Wasn’t Bet here? Where is she? Did rocks fall on us? I remember rocks falling.”

  “We couldn’t get her out,” Laurel said, and Shelby scrambled to her feet, swaying. Laurel tried to get up after, but her body failed her. She fell back as Shelby ran the few feet to the water’s edge.

  Thalia said, “Put one toe in that water, Shelby Ann, and I will drag you back and spank you till we both die.”

  Shelby stopped, staring out the smooth expanse of green. “Bet?” she called. “Bet?”

  It echoed off the sheer rock walls, and there was no answer.

  “I could have punched her in the face,” Thalia said in a low voice for Laurel alone. “I could have hit her with a stick, knocked her out. But I thought, ‘What if she doesn’t go down? What if I’m in the water, trying to drag both of you, and she’s still up there beaning us?’ Then I didn’t think at all. I did things. I knew she couldn’t swim.”

  “Baby,” Laurel said in the same voice she’d used with Shelby. She was thinking of Thalia at about Shel’s age, taking her thumb out of her mouth to say, My stupid sister had her eyes shut. She’s afraid of guns. She’s probably afraid of deer.

  “Baby,” Laurel said again. “You didn’t know. How could you know that? You didn’t think about that. You saw her throwing the rocks at us, so you pushed her out of the way and she fell in. Then you came and got us.”

  Thalia laced both of her hands over her mouth and looked at Laurel, for once following her sister’s lead. She nodded slowly. Shelby, at the water’s edge, sank down to her knees.

  “Help me up,” Laurel said.

  Thalia stood, shaky as a newborn foal, and gave her a hand. Together they made their slow way to the slope to where Shelby knelt.

  Laurel eased herself down beside her daughter and wrapped an arm around her, and Thalia sat down on her sister’s other side. Laurel could hear people moving up the trail, fast. David was coming. He was bringing the sheriff’s men in light blue suits, pushing through the woods to find them. Someone with a dry cell phone or a radio would call in ambulances and rescue workers with scuba gear.

  Laurel pulled Shelby closer and hooked her other arm around Thalia, bringing her sister in closer, too. They sat in a row, Thalia and Laurel and Shelby, the Gray girls all watching the unbroken surface in the final quiet before the lights and noise and Sissi’s monstrous grief and the endless questions came. They waited for whatever would rise out of the water to rise.

  EPILOGUE

  Laurel is on her knees, digging in the sandy soil of her backyard garden. She’s working on the double beds that flank the gate. The last few bulbs are next to her in a basket, firm and still faintly cool from the crisper. By the time the house in Victorianna sold and they had found this place, four miles away, fall had given way to winter, and it was too late to plant. She’s putting them in now, at the tail end of February. The blooms will be small, but she wants the hopeful cheer of tulips and daffodils come spring.

  Their new house stands on a hill, like the old one, because that’s the only way to get a basement in Pensacola. The neighborhood is not gated, but their street is long, and from the hilltop, Laurel can see a long way in both directions. She likes it here, likes the big backyard with its koi pond and patchwork flower beds, likes her country-French house with its sleepy stone lions flanking the walkway. They don’t look much like guardians; these are library lions, lollers and slackers. Shelby has named them Lawrence and Miss Iris.

  Behind her, Laurel can hear the murmur of Shelby and Yvonne Feng and Carly Berman, sitting close on the stone bench in the very back of the yard, yammering. Laurel shifts her weight. The small of her back aches; she can’t kneel this way for long, not since her center of gravity shifted. She gives up and sits flat on her bottom, covering the last of the bulbs with Florida’s loose, sandy soil.

  When she’s finished, she stands up, slow and careful, dusting herself off. She’s not far into her third trimester, but this is going to be a big baby. Already he is cramped inside of her. She can feel the press of his feet, a knob poking out of her left side as he stretches. She puts her palm over the knob and feels his legs retract.

  “Carly?” she calls across the yard. “What time is your mother coming?”

  The girls are sitting in a row, blond, brunette, and redheaded, and they look up in tandem. Shelby has her hair back in a band, and the slight jut of her ears puts a crack in Laurel’s heart. She’s starting to grow into them, and her baby mouth is firming, becoming her own.

  “Before dinner,” Carly calls back.

  “Okay,” Laurel replies. “And then you get right on that homework, Shel, you hear me? I want to get an early start in the morning.”

  “’Kay, Mom,” Shelby yells, and the three glossy heads bend back together to whisper and giggle, silly girl noises from the beautiful tail end of childhood.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Laurel catches a flash of color. Bet Clemmens lurks near them, behind the climbing roses on their trellis, her small feet planted in the earth. Laurel d
oesn’t look at her directly. If she does, she’ll see it’s only a redbird, stirring the leaves of the azalea bush that stands up against the fence behind the roses. Bet doesn’t like to be caught watching. She’s there, though, at ease in the weak late-winter sunshine. She’s Laurel’s only ghost now that Molly is at peace and Marty has gone on to get whatever rest he earned.

  Laurel doesn’t mind Bet Clemmens. Bet seems happy here among Laurel’s stone angels and garden frogs and the tacky plastic pink flamingo Shelby gave her for Christmas. Moreover, she is Laurel’s best reminder.

  Laurel’s second-best reminder is peering over the backyard gate, scowling.

  “I’ve been ringing that front bell for all eternity,” Thalia says. The gate is white and wooden, only four feet high. Thalia rattles it.

  “Well, you’re early,” Laurel replies. She leaves her basket and spade and opens the latch to let Thalia through. “I was just heading in.”

  Tomorrow they will get up before six and drive over to DeLop, Laurel and Shelby and Thalia. They go once a month now, on the last weekend of the month, when Thalia’s theater is dark between productions. They’ll stop by Sissi Clemmens’s place first. Sissi will watch them from her vinyl sofa as Thalia restocks her pantry and Shel and Laurel clean a little. She doesn’t seem to mind them coming. She seems past minding anything. They don’t stay long. They have only the weekend and a lot to do.

  Laurel is stealing the babies.

  Already Della’s three-year-old, Janina, hollers, “Miss Lall, Miss Lall!” and holds her arms up when they come through the door.

  It isn’t only because of the candy and the board books and the fat wax crayons Laurel brings. It’s because Laurel looks at her and sees her, seeking out the little girl under the dirty T-shirt and the jam-ringed mouth. Laurel is learning this child and Della’s sister’s boys the same way she’ll learn the baby Raydee has made with fifteen-year-old Polly Deeks. If they want out, they’ll damn sure know they have a way. It’s a small hope that even one of them will take it, but if they do, Laurel will be there to walk them down.

  “Missionary to the mud people,” Thalia calls her these days, but she hasn’t missed a trip since Laurel started.

  David comes, too, when work allows. With all of them together in one car, the air takes on an electric tang, the taste of their uneasy, silent truce.

  “Do you want me to have her stay home?” Laurel asked him after dinner one night, leaning on his shoulder on the sofa. “On the weekends you can come, I mean.”

  After a thinking pause, David said, “No. Bring her. You have some spooky relatives, and with Thalia along, at least I know we’ve got someone to gut-shoot anyone who tries to hurt you or Shel.”

  Laurel whacked him in the leg with the flat of her hand.

  “What?” he said, and she realized he hadn’t been making a macabre joke. David was just being David, calling it as bluntly as he saw it. “I still don’t like her, though,” he added.

  “Well, she’s crazy about you,” Laurel said, and then she got the giggles.

  It feels right to have her sister orbiting her life again, even if Planet Thalia is prone to loop-de-loops and calls itself the sun. Laurel needs her now more than ever; she’s called peace with Mother and Daddy, mostly for Shelby’s sake, but it’s not the same. Laurel gives her mother party manners and kindness, and Mother, in return, chooses to have no memory of smashed dishes and profanity, all the things she can’t forgive. Laurel has forgiven, but she won’t forget.

  Now Thalia looks her up and down and says, “Hey there, big fat fatty.” She leans over and cuts her huge voice loose, calling, “You in there, Mr. Puppethead? Wake up! It’s Auntie Thalia,” to Laurel’s round midsection. The baby thumps at Laurel’s bladder like it’s his own personal drum.

  “Oof,” says Laurel.

  Shelby has heard Thalia. She’s running across the lawn toward her, her girlfriends in her wake. Thalia strides away to meet them and catch Shelby in a hug. Laurel stands back, watching, both hands braced around her belly.

  After the second line turned pink, David predicted another little girl. Shelby Junior. But Laurel imagined a loud little boy with a voice like a trumpet and blond hair that stuck straight up.

  “He’ll want a dog,” she whispered to David in the quiet dark of their big bed.

  “A dog’ll dig up all those flowers,” David said.

  “I don’t much care. A boy needs a good dog, and I’m telling you, we’ve made a boy here.”

  The ultrasound backed Laurel up. That very night, she felt his first small flutter. Tucked beneath the velvet of her skin, his movement was too muffled to be felt from the outside. Secret moth wings.

  He has quickened and grown since then. He’s alive and strong inside her, a hidden thing. Come spring, when the last of her daffodils are tall and blooming, she’s going to do the bravest thing that she knows how to do. She’s going to open, and she’s going to let him out into the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Novelists always say, “This book could not have been written without list-of-people,” but no, really, this book would not ever have been finished if it weren’t for the devious machinations of Caryn Karmatz Rudy and Lydia Netzer. These two women have never met, and yet they acted as a tag team, alternating sugar with judicious pinching to keep me writing (always my best medicine) through a difficult year. I keep trying to amalgamate them into Helen Hunt so I can make Jack Nicholson eyebrows at them and say, “You make me want to be a better man,” but they both just tell me to shut up and start work on the next novel.

  In order to write about Laurel’s career, I spent hours staring, awed and dumbstruck, at Canadian folk artist Pamela Allen’s work and the tarot quilts of Deb Richardson. I knew nothing about sewing, so a foaming-crazy batch of wild fabric artists called the Quilt Mavericks took me in, fed me strange berries, and taught me how to say “Bernina.” I will never be the same.

  Georgia homicide detective Ted Bailey and Pensacola, Florida, assistant chief Chip Simmons explained police procedure during an investigation. Several times. Slowly. These are good, smart, savvy cops, while I am at best a shoddy criminal, so anything I got right is due to their efforts.

  Yolanda Reed, Patricia Simmons, Waylon Wood, Hunt Scarritt, and the ensemble troupe at the Loblolly Theatre in Pensacola taught me about black box and its surrounding culture. I am pleased to report that the Loblolly folks don’t need nearly as much therapy as my theater people.

  Grand Central Publishing remains my home thanks to the unwavering support of folks like Jamie Raab, Martha “angels want to borrow her white shoes” Otis, Karen Torres, the inimitable Evan Boorstyn, and so many more. I was honored to have Harvey-Jane Kowal working her magic in tandem with Beth Thomas, whose rampant purple pencil marshaled the forces of goodness and order to triumph over my wayward gerunds and sloppy typing. Stet! I must also thank my agent and dear friend, Jacques de Spoelberch. You don’t forget the guy who pulled you from the slush pile.

  Love and thanks to crit partners Karen Abbott (forever my Potsi!), Anna Schachner, Lily James, and fifth monkey Jill James. RN Julie Oestreich has, for three novels now, told me how to properly kill, injure, drug, and maim people. Thanks, Jules!

  I pause here and wave to the FTK regs, tireless guerrilla marketers who remain my Best Beloveds. For them, a little insider information: DeLop is a made-up place, but it’s based on a real mining town in northern Alabama. I call it a mining town, but at this point, there’s nothing left to dig up. Some of the people stayed, and if you are born there, chances are, you’ll die there. The Christmas letters from the DeLop kids are based on real letters. These letters are currently answered by a Birmingham church, since the real kids don’t have Laurel and Thalia. Of course, knowing Thalia, perhaps this is better.

  My wonderful family—Scott, Sam, Maisy Jane, Bob, Betty, Bobby, Julie, Daniel, Erin-Fishelby-Virginia, Jane, and Allison—are my heart. I am eternally grateful for the way they work together to knit time out of nothing an
d give it to me so I can write.

  Most of all, I thank you for reading.