The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (11 page)

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 recipes 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

U
ncle 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.

When Laurel and Thalia got home from school on Friday, it was obvious that Marty and Mother were already skirmishing. Marty was the closest thing Mother ever had to an in-law, and they fussed over Daddy like those squabbling ladies who came before King Solomon with one hapless toddler pulled so tight between them he was probably spread-eagled.

Marty sat on one end of Mother’s faded cabbage-rose sofa, and Mother held court at the other end. Both of them were drinking coffee and not looking at the other. Mother smiled a cream-filled cat’s smile, clearly well ahead on points. The air around Marty fairly crackled with electric anger.

Thalia rolled her eyes and whispered, “Want to take a long-odds bet over who’ll get to cut up Daddy’s meat tonight?”

Laurel stopped in the doorway, but Thalia said a quick hello and then meandered down the hall toward the room she shared with Laurel. Halfway there, out of Marty and Mother’s sight, she turned back to face Laurel. She grabbed her blouse on either side in a pinch, then pulled cloth tepees out over her small breasts. “Nice rack,” she mouthed at Laurel, grinning.

Laurel flushed. She’d forgotten to take out the cotton balls she’d stuffed into her training bra that morning.

“Would you like a snack?” Mother asked.

She hadn’t yet noticed the sudden sprouting of Laurel’s fluffy bosom, so Laurel shrugged her backpack off and hugged it to her chest. Down the hall, where Mother couldn’t see, Thalia laughed silently, giving Laurel a double thumbs-up. She went into their bedroom and closed the door with elaborate gentleness, Thalia’s signature anti-slam.

Laurel kept her backpack clutched across her front and nodded at Mother, who got up and wafted through the swinging door into the kitchen. Laurel blew her air out in a relieved sigh and let the bag slide down until she was holding it by one strap, the heavy book-filled bottom resting on the floor.

“Tell Mother I went to change out of my school clothes,” she said to Marty.

“Hold up,” he said. He was wearing faded jeans that had been washed baby-soft and one of his loungey flannel shirts, but his body language did not match the comfort of his clothes. His long torso was folded stiffly at the waist, his spine not touching the sofa back.

As the swinging doors came to rest, he tipped his head to one side, appraising her, until Laurel wished she’d kept her backpack in her arms.

“Little Laurel, are you finally growing up?” he asked.

She flushed and turned her back, looking out the windows as if she’d suddenly become fascinated by the view into her own backyard. The bird feeder was empty.

“I need to go change,” she repeated.

“You’ve already changed,” he said. “You’re getting to look exactly like your mother. I never noticed till now.” His tone had an unfamiliar edge. He didn’t sound like Laurel’s redneck, drawly uncle, the one who called her Peapod and brought her packs of Juicy Fruit. “Are you turning into a lady?” He made “lady” sound like a dirty word, not a thing a girl would want to be.

Laurel let the backpack drop entirely and crossed her arms, even though her back was to him. She felt the cottonballs flattening, and underneath, she felt her heart thump, hard and fast.

“Little Lady Laurel. Want to see something?”

She didn’t move, didn’t answer, uncomfortable and not sure why. Then, in her mother’s tidy family room, she heard the unmistakable rasp of a zipper being drawn down.

“Want to see?” he said, wheedling-like.

Her stomach turned, went sour, as if she had eaten something that was beginning to go rotten. She knew what he’d unzipped. His flannel shirt had pearl snaps on it. His leather jacket was beside him, but it had buttons.

“Want to see, Lady Laura-Lee?”

It was so dead quiet she could hear the muffled rasp of his calloused fingers on the denim. She stared at the empty bird feeder until her eyes ached from not blinking. The worst part wasn’t the nasty undercurrent in his voice. It wasn’t even that she’d loved him her whole life. The worst part was that a piece of her had a hard time not looking. She was eleven years old and had only a sister. She had never seen one.

Laurel heard the kitchen doors swing open again, heard Mother’s low heels tapping one last time against linoleum before she stepped onto the carpet.

There was a tiny silence, and then Mother said, “Laurel, honey, I told you to go change.” She spoke sweetly, in her normal dulcet voice, as if Marty’s cock weren’t loose in the room.

Laurel headed back to the hallway that led to her bedroom, careful to turn around by going right, so that she never looked at Marty or Mother. She walked down the hall to the room she shared with Thalia.

Thalia sprawled on her stomach on the floor. Her gutted backpack was beside her, and she had three open books, a notebook, and a yellow folder scattered across the floor. Laurel could hardly see a speck of carpet.

When Thalia saw Laurel, she sat up and said, “What happened?”

Laurel said, “Uncle Marty,” like his name was a complete thought.

Thalia made one of Daddy’s faces, that fierce kind of bird-looking, foreign and intense, as if she could see straight through Laurel to something beautiful and strange three feet behind her. Then she blinked and said, her voice matter-of-fact, “You still have your fake tits in.”

She picked up a pink highlighter and pulled her history book into her lap. All at once she was playing Studious Girl, and Laurel’s presence didn’t register. Laurel grabbed her play clothes and carted them off to the bathroom to change and throw out the cotton balls. She did her homework and ate the granola bar Mother brought her, exactly like she did after school every other day.

Uncle Marty was his normal self at dinner, pretending Mother wasn’t there and joking with Daddy, calling Thalia “Madame Pigtail.” Laurel’s tomato soup was bitter, and her grilled cheese went down in waxy lumps. Marty was in all ways ruined for her. But at the same time, he barely existed. His colors ran, the blue and rust of his shirt bleeding into the yellow wallpaper, and he blurred into the other shapes around the table. The only object in the kitchen with a sharp outline was Mother. She sat at the foot of the table, closest to the stove, spooning up mannerly tastes of soup.

“May I be excused?” Laurel said.

“Me, too,” said Thalia.

Mother nodded, and they scraped their chairs back in tandem, grabbing their plates to drop off at the sink. Uncle Marty tugged Laurel’s long braid as she tried to slide past without letting even his chair touch her. His eyes on her were his regular plain eyes, as if he were the same Marty he had always been. Mother kept her seat, allowing him to look at Laurel, to touch her braid with the same calloused fingers she’d heard rasp against his jeans.

“Thalia, you’d best get to bed,” Marty said. “We got to get to Alabama before sunup if we’re going to catch them deer.”

Laurel stayed by Marty’s chair. It was as if her braid had nerve endings in it and she could still feel the imprint of his fingers. Mother’s expression was bland as she heaped Daddy’s plate with more fruit. She wasn’t even watching.

Cowslip, Laurel thought, but that wasn’t the word. She knew the real word now. She’d seen it months ago in one of Mother’s
Reader’s Digest
s. The real word was “complicit.”

Mother hadn’t been surprised. That was the part Laurel couldn’t forgive. Mother hadn’t gasped or taken in a hard breath. She must have known before that he was one of those. Early in the year, their gym teacher had shown a film, girls only, like the one about getting a period. Pervos, Laurel’s friend Tammy had called them. She’d made Laurel giggle all through the movie by whispering suspicions about the male math teacher with the enormous mustache. But here was one for real, her own uncle at her table, and Mother must have known. Mother had let Laurel have friends over with Marty there, knowing. Last month Thalia had tried oral sex with a high school boy.

“Tastes like chicken,” she’d told Laurel in a gleeful whisper.

Was that “acting out,” like the film had said, or only Thalia being Thalia? Had Marty ever asked Thalia if she wanted to see?

If he had, if Thalia was acting out, then Mother was complicit. Now he wanted to show Laurel, Mother’s favorite, and Mother stayed blind and bland and unsurprised.

Laurel stood as if rooted by Marty’s chair, the dirty plate still in her hands, waiting until the waiting was obvious. She was giving Mother time to get up and put out Marty’s looking eyes with her thumbs, to come after his braid-touching fingers with her dinner knife. But Mother only sat. Laurel waited so long that Thalia stopped by the swinging doors and Daddy set down his fork and looked up at Laurel, eyebrows raised and questioning. Marty craned his neck back, with Daddy’s expression on his similar features. Only Mother kept right on eating.

“I want to go along on y’all’s hunt,” Laurel said.

Mother’s hand stilled with her spoon half dipped into her bowl.

Daddy chuckled and said, “You’re too little.”

“I’m in sixth grade now,” Laurel said. “You let Thalia go in fourth.”

“Sixth grade?” Marty said. “Already?”

“Ugh, please. She’ll wreck it,” Thalia said, speaking over Marty. “She gets dizzy looking at a scraped knee.”

“I want to go. It’s safe,” Laurel said, looking right at Mother. “If Daddy and Thalia have to run a deer down, I’ll be fine. I’ll be with Uncle Marty.”

Laurel watched her mother’s eyes harden, saw her throat move in a dry swallow.

Daddy said, “No shooting until you’ve spent some time on the range with me and Thalia.”

By “the range,” he meant an empty field where he spent a few hours every Saturday. He and Thalia would take boxes of bullets, all three of his rifles, and his pistol for good measure. They’d shoot and shoot and shoot, lining up two-liter bottles and Coke cans, blasting away until the cans and bottles were shredded strings of metal and twisted plastic that could no longer stand.

Laurel had tagged along a time or two, but she hadn’t liked how Daddy’s eagle gaze was so fierce on the bright cans Thalia lined up for him. Last time she went, Daddy had started shooting with the pistol, so focused that he hadn’t been able to stop when he was out of bullets. He’d dry-fired four or five times before he’d caught himself and offered Laurel a turn.

“I’ve been to the range,” Laurel said now.

“Not enough to try to bag you a deer,” Daddy said. “But you can come along and watch.”

Mother cut a bite of honeydew in half, speared it, and put it in her mouth, chewing carefully and not speaking.

“Would you let me go off with them?” Laurel asked, her eyes trained on Mother.

Thalia said, “Mother, you promised you guys would bake us cookies for when we got home.”

Laurel said, “Will you? Let me go off with him?”

Thalia was still griping. “Hunting means we’re going to shoot things until they die. There’s guts, did you know that? We cut the guts right out, Jesus Bug, and spill them on the ground.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Thalia,” Mother said.

Thalia went on. “Look, she’s going green just hearing about it.”

Mother cut another piece of fruit in half and said, “Fair is fair. Your sister is almost twelve, and she can go if she wants to.” She paused and then said, “Do you want to?”

She might as well have looked right at Laurel and said, “I don’t much love you.”

“Yes, Mama,” Laurel said. “If you let me, I’m going.”

“Don’t say ‘Mama,’” Mother said. “That sounds trashy. Say ‘Mother.’”

That night Laurel went to bed in a bleak world where the person she most belonged to sat quiet and smiling and let her go trip-trapping off, wide-eyed, into danger.

But Laurel had underestimated her.

Mother was so mindful of propriety that she still had single beds in the master bedroom. Thalia called the space between the beds “the Great Divide,” and said her own existence proved that someone must have bravely taken a single crossing. Her money was on Daddy.

“He went back at least one more time,” Laurel had protested the first time Thalia put this theory forward.

Thalia had shown Laurel all her big white teeth at once and said, “Nah. I suspect Mother budded you all on her own.”

That night Mother must have turned in her own bed to face Daddy’s, must have whispered things across the void. Perhaps she didn’t say anything about Laurel or that afternoon. After all, Thalia was older and had bloomed earlier. If Thalia had been interfered with, then it explained a lot about her that surely needed some explaining, and Thalia was Daddy’s very heart.

Whatever Mother said, it was enough. Her words must have echoed in the space between their beds for hours, growing louder. They had gotten inside Daddy, gone banging through his veins from brain to heart and back again, circulating that whole long night into the morning. Out in the woods, Marty had said something and then moved into Daddy’s line of sight as the deer ran off, and Daddy had twitched his finger hard against the trigger.

It wasn’t planned. Daddy never would have thought ahead to shoot down his brother in front of his daughters. It was the work of a moment, and Laurel believed that if he could have, Daddy would have called that bullet back before the sound of it rang out. Daddy had turned Marty over with such careful love. He’d put his hands over the hole to try and stop the blood, and with all his will, he’d tried to make his brother not be dead. Daddy was sorry to this day, and even though he had pulled the trigger, Laurel knew it was Mother’s whispers that had saved her.