The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (12 page)

Mother had blinded herself to ugliness early; growing up in DeLop made blindness a survival skill. But for Laurel’s sake, Mother had seen. She’d gone against everything in her nature to protect Laurel.

That was all Laurel was doing now, protecting her own child. She had to keep reminding herself of that. It got harder and harder to remember as the car rocketed back toward Pensacola. The trip home was happening at warp speed.

Thalia was playing with all the remote controls, adjusting and readjusting the seat. She found the heater button and stabbed at it, watching the amber light flash on.“It’s got a butt warmer?” she said, scornful.

“I guess,” Laurel said.

“You have too much money,” Thalia said. She looked into the backseat, where Bet Clemmens and the Hefty bag and Thalia’s own three suitcases sat in a row, all equally silent. Bet was still listening to Shelby’s Nano, so loud that Laurel could hear Justin Timberlake blasting directly into Bet’s ears.

“You know what she reminds me of?” Thalia said, turning back around and jerking one thumb over her shoulder at Bet.

“Who? The girl right here in the car with us?” Laurel asked.

“Yeah. The one with the headphones in,” Thalia said. “Remember, right after you had Shelby, you wanted another baby.”

“No, I didn’t,” Laurel said.

“Yeah-huh,” Thalia said. “They’d brought Shelby to your room, and you were still zoned from the epidural. My God, fifteen hours of that. You looked straight up at the nurse and asked how long until you could, you know, mount up and ride your mechanical bull again—”

“I would never say that!” Laurel said, risking a glance over her shoulder. Bet’s head bobbed slightly, and her eyes didn’t seem to be focused on anything.

“Not in those words. I’m sure you said ‘make beautiful love with the robot,’ but it was the same basic idea,” Thalia said. “There you sat, holding the seven-pound baby I’d just watched you push out your wing-wang, which, by the way? looked like it hurt like a sumbitch. I said, ‘Don’t tell me you are feeling romantical now, Bug. What are you, a hamster?’ David was purple.”

“I don’t remember this at all,” Laurel said, and then she stopped. Because she did remember it. “Oh, Lord. The spare baby.”

Shelby, brand-new, had been so alert in the hours just after she was born. She had stared up at Laurel, swaddled in a roll of receiving blankets, a solemn expression on her scrunchy monkey’s face. Laurel couldn’t look at anything else in the room. Shelby had dark, serious eyes, and she was completely innocent of hair. Laurel couldn’t believe this was the person she’d had inside her not an hour ago, the person she and David made, out here blinking in the harsh light, so floppy and helpless and perfect and beautiful. She couldn’t hardly stand to have Shelby breathing hospital air that might have a baby-killing germ in it, or drinking breast milk already poisoned by the Cheetos Laurel had eaten right before her water broke.

A crazy thought had wandered through her exhausted head: “I need a decoy.” Without thinking, she had asked the nurse when she and David could try again. She wanted an extra. A faceless, rubbery baby who was not Shelby. She wouldn’t love it very much. It would be a howler, a loud distraction, something she could offer to the ravenous world while she hid Shelby away, safe and secret.

“That was postpartum crazies,” Laurel said. “I didn’t really want a spare baby.”

She hadn’t wanted any other baby at all. The way she loved Shelby had been so huge, so inadvertent. She hadn’t chosen it. It was something that had happened to her, and she couldn’t imagine taking that kind of risk again on purpose. If she had another, it would smell like Shelby smelled. It would make the same helpless breathy noises. Even before it was born, it would spin and kick inside her with Shelby’s vigor, and Laurel would be lost to more enormous, boiling love.

As Shelby grew, changed, took her first faulty steps, Laurel sometimes imagined a brother or a sister, but then she’d see Shelby and the new baby toddling in different directions. She couldn’t be right behind both of them, couldn’t stretch herself thin enough to stand between them and all the ugly things on earth.

David had asked every so often, “Want to try again?”

Laurel had said, “Not yet. Not yet,” every time, until he’d stopped asking.

“I thought it was brilliant,” Thalia said. “We could have named the spare Puppethead. I think Puppethead would be the most awesome baby name.”

“I’ll pass,” Laurel said. “If you wanted a kid named Puppet-head, you could have married yourself a straight man and had one.”

Thalia laughed. “Now, now, kitty cat, don’t scratch. I only brought it up because when I looked in the backseat, I found myself thinking about that spare baby, all made of rubber, and how here, thirteen years later, damned if you didn’t go to DeLop and get you one.”

“Thalia!” Laurel said, more shocked than she ought to be, mostly because there was a tiny ring of truth to it. “That’s hateful.”

Thalia shrugged. “So, what’s new. Wake me when we get to Tara.” She fiddled with the buttons again, working the seat until it was as far back and low as it would go, and then she closed her eyes. Thalia slept like a soldier, in short bursts anywhere it was convenient. In two minutes, she was out.

That left Laurel to fret the wheel with her hands and try to think of exactly how she should present her lie of omission to David. She deliberately slowed, setting her cruise control lower, but it seemed like time was going by so fast that the drive became a slide show: the bridge, the state line, her exit, Victorianna’s wrought-iron gate. Then Laurel was pulling in to her own driveway.

Thalia’s eyes clicked open the minute the engine cut out. “We’re here?” she said, sitting up straight and making a grunty noise. “Shit, look. We’re here. I never sleep that hard.”

“Language,” Laurel said, tilting her head back to indicate Bet, who was pulling off the headphones.

“Yeah, right,” Thalia said, and made the grunty noise again. “Sorry, Bet, I forgot you existed for a second.” She tumbled out of the car.

Laurel and Bet got out, too, and the three of them hauled the suitcases up the front walk. Laurel unlocked the door and opened it, but then she stepped back and let Thalia and Bet go in first, cursing herself for a coward.

They trooped through the foyer, past the formal living room and dining room on into the keeping room. David was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. Shelby slouched at the breakfast bar, the remains of some kind of sandwich on a plate in front of her.

David’s face changed as they came in, first a little flash of puzzled; then he made thinking eyebrows as he did the math. His face became unreadable as Shelby caught sight of Thalia and Bet and made the happiest noise Laurel had heard out of her in two days. She got up off the stool with something like her old Shelby bounce and hurtled into Thalia’s arms. Thalia had to drop the suitcase and catch her.

“Shelbelicious,” Thalia said, and put a round smacking kiss on her face.

“And Bet, too!” Shelby all but crowed, her arms still looped around Thalia’s waist. She turned to Laurel and said, “How, Mommy?”

“You seemed to really want Bet here, so I decided she should finish out her visit. And I wanted Thalia here, the same way you want Bet.” Laurel looked at David as she said that last part. His face was still carefully blank.

“Thalia,” he said, giving her a brief nod.

“David,” Thalia said, and returned the nod exactly, same degree, same angle.

“Can I see what happens to thet boy? In the movie?” Bet asked Shelby.

“Sure you can. Can we unpack for you, Aunt Thalia?”

Thalia’s closet held nothing but Levi’s jeans and T-shirts and stretchy unitards, but she packed for trips out of the costume room. Shelby had always loved digging through her suitcases.

“Absolutely. Help me get these bags upstairs, girls. Bet, I hope you’re in the little guest room, because I am planting a flag and claiming the one with the queen-size bed for France. And I am France.”

“Do what?” Bet asked.

“Yes, she’s across from me,” Shelby said.

They began carting bags up, but Shelby paused to look over her shoulder and mouth, “Thank you, Mom!”

Then Laurel was alone with David. They stood on opposite sides of the low counter that ran between the kitchen and the keeping room. David spoke first. “I get it,” he said. “I really do.”

“Please don’t be mad,” she said.

“I’m not mad,” he said. He sounded mad.

“Do you understand why?” she said.

David played with unreal numbers, so this simple math was not a problem for him. It was obvious that she’d let Mother’s assumption stand and gone to Mobile. He’d probably also gathered that she hadn’t really spoken to Sissi Clemmens, because David could have outsolved Sherlock Holmes any day on questions of who and when and how. But motive was not his forte.

“You need to know why,” she added.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Really. I told you I needed her not to be here, and you got her anyway. So. It’s clear that you need her here more than I need her not here.”

It took Laurel a moment to sort through the grammar and see what he meant. “Exactly,” she said. “It’s like when Shelby came, remember?”

Fourteen hours of hard labor with little progress, and her doctor had said it was time to think about a C-section. Laurel had sent David to the waiting room to get Thalia. He’d been so nervous that he hadn’t wanted to leave, but she’d begged him. He’d come back with her sister and then stood off to one side. Laurel had held his hand, squeezing so hard she felt his bones grinding, but it was Thalia who had called her a pansy and told Laurel it was time to “man up and push.” That had made Laurel so angry—being told to give birth like a man, of all things—but it had worked. She’d rallied, cursing her sister as she pushed Shelby out into the world.

“I remember,” David said, and his hand flexed, an involuntary movement, like it was remembering her grip.

“Are we okay?” said Laurel.

He waved that away and said, “We’re always okay. But I’m working at the office for the next— How long? Few days?”

“Maybe a few days, yeah,” Laurel said.

“Because that’s a lot of bags she brought.”

“Thalia packs that much for an overnight,” Laurel said.

“True enough. Okay. I see what happened. It’s fine.” Now he was saying it to himself more than to her. “I’ve got to get back to work. I’m supposed to meet the Richmond Games coder online for more dogfight tests.”

“Okay,” she said. “Go be Dave.”

He walked toward the basement stairs, and his gait was stiff, as if his legs were sore.

“You are mad,” she said.

“A little mad, yeah,” he said, his back still to her. His voice was loud. Then he stopped and took a deep breath, and he did turn around. He spoke quietly. “But I’m right downstairs if you need me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and she watched him walk down. His head glided lower and lower with each step he took, as if he were setting. He’d said he was close enough to call if she needed him, and it felt true, right up until the moment when she couldn’t see him anymore.

CHAPTER 9

T
halia’s long body was sprawled out on the hardwood floor of Laurel’s dining room. She was on her back, her legs together, her back arching up as she stretched in the spill of late-morning sunshine that came in through the big bay window. It lit up her hair, two shades lighter than Laurel’s. Pure corn-colored, like Mother’s when she was younger. Laurel knelt near her feet, keeping watch through the sheers.

Thalia was all but naked again, this time in a Lycra sports bra with barely enough of a strap to credibly be mistaken for a shirt. She had on low-cut Lycra boy shorts, too, the kind Laurel had called “creepers” back in high school. They rode up as she moved, and showed the undercurve of her butt. She didn’t have one bit of cellulite there, and her breasts looked like unripe plums, set hard and high.

“I kind of hate you,” Laurel said, looking at her sister’s flat abdomen.

“Yoga,” said Thalia. “And clean living. See him yet?”

“Not yet.”

Thalia sat up, her feet still together, and bent at the waist, stretching down to touch her toes. Her long feet flexed. “God, who runs at noon in Florida?”

“He doesn’t work. I think this is first thing in the morning to him,” Laurel said.

“Is Data down in the basement?”

“
David,
” Laurel said, “is working from his office today. Does it matter?”

“If Stan Webelow takes me up on my offer, we’ll need a place to go,” Thalia said, and showed Laurel all her teeth at once.

“Oh, gross,” Laurel said, her lip curling as she got a vivid mental flash of Stan Webelow’s moist golden body, slick in its running shorts. “You wouldn’t.”

Thalia laughed and stood up, stretching her arms high toward the ceiling. “Get a grip, Bug,” she said. “If he’s gay, I’ll pick that up in three minutes. If he’s straight, I bet I can pick
him
up in two. Either way, we can cross him off the list and look where we need to be looking. It’s always the family.” She finished stretching and knelt down beside Laurel. The two of them peered up over the windowsill, watching the street like crocodiles. Even through the sheers, Laurel could see low waves of heat shimmering off the asphalt.

“Barb and Chuck Dufresne seem so . . . regular,” Laurel said.

Thalia snorted. “Even our family seems regular from the outside. As I remember, Chuck Dufresne is an ass. What’s that he calls her? Rabbit?”

“Bunny,” Laurel said.

“There you go. And she drinks like a Trojan soldier.”

“Lord, she does drink,” Laurel admitted. “I was always careful to be the one to drive the girls. Even in the daytime. Just to be sure. But I can’t imagine they had anything to do with this.”

“Then you need to work on ruling them out while I dry-hump Stanley in the road and see if anything rises—”

“Thalia!”

“Just calling a duck a duck, Jesus Bug. I bet you have funeral casseroles in the freezer, don’t you? Good to go?” Thalia turned her face like a bird would, to look at Laurel out of one fierce eye, and when Laurel didn’t answer, she laughed and said, “It was a sucker bet. Pull one out to thaw. We need to talk to Bunny, at the very least. Unless you’re up to cat-burglaring through the Dufresnes’ window in the dead of night with our eyes blacked out like quarterbacks and searching Molly’s room for her Mommy-hits-me diary?”

“No. Absolutely not. Never.”

Thalia had said it like she was mostly kidding, but with her sister, it was better to be clear. For that matter, Thalia hadn’t definitively stated that she wasn’t going to ravish Stan Webelow in the basement. Laurel made a mental note to deadbolt the door after Thalia left, just in case.

“I thought not, you pansy. That means we have to get invited in like blood-fat, darling flies, so who is Miss Spider? Who feels every little twitch in the neighborhood web?”

Laurel thought for a moment. “Trish Deerbold. But we’re not friends.”

“Bah, no. I don’t mean which rich bitch has the gossip. I mean who’s down in the trenches? Who runs bunko and calls around to coordinate the dinners whenever one of these cows drops a calf?”

“Oh,” Laurel said. “Thalia, that’s me.”

Thalia looked at her, nonplussed, and then dropped her face into her hands. “Some days I wonder how you don’t drive hard into a wall, just to make your life stop,” she muttered into her palms.

Laurel, who sometimes wondered the same thing about her sister, had to bite her bottom lip hard to keep from saying so.

Thalia put her head up again and said, “Okay, if you’re Kirk, who is your Spock?”

“Spiders, cows,
Star Trek.
You’re exhausting me. Can’t you ask plain?”

Thalia shook her head. “Sorry, Bug, but plotting requires figurative language.”

“Something is bad wrong here, Thalia,” Laurel said. “This isn’t a game.”

Thalia stilled. She kept her eyes on the road, watching for Stan Webelow, but when she spoke, her voice had gone toneless, cool as dead water. “I’m not playing. A child is going in the ground soon, and Shelby loved her. Shelby’s not herself. I see it. It’s like a light’s gone out. If any righteous bastard helped that happen, we will find him out, and we will make him sorry.”

They knelt side by side, quiet together, and Laurel believed her. She wished David would appear right at that moment. She would point to Thalia, who was watching the street as dead-eyed as a veteran sniper, and say to David, “This is why I lied to you. This is what I went to get.”

Then Thalia said in her regular voice, “But we’re going to treat this part like a game. We have to, or I’ll get sick with mad, and you’ll cry, and we’ll be worthless. Don’t think about the whole thing. We do this one small piece at a time, and we pretend each piece is the whole of it. Today? I’m playing snuggles with Stan Webelow, and I’m going to win. You’re on the Dufresnes. So. Name your Spock.”

“Mindy Coe,” Laurel said. “Next door.”

“Call her and find out when the funeral is. I bet you anything it’s set, if the police have released th—” She stopped speaking abruptly, and in the quiet, Laurel heard footsteps.

Shelby and Bet Clemmens came shuffling into the foyer. Shelby carried a long, thin game box. Bet loomed behind her. “Can me and Bet—” Shelby began, but then she stopped and asked, “What are you doing on the floor?”

“Stretching,” said Thalia. “I’m going running. What do you need, Shel?”

“We’re bored,” Shelby said. “Can we play this game?”

“Sure,” Laurel said. “Take it up to the rec room.”

“I was talking to Aunt Thalia,” Shelby said. “It’s hers. We found it in her suitcase.”

“Don’t lose any of the pieces,” Thalia said. She’d turned back around to watch the road again.

Laurel looked at the game box in Shelby’s hands, then really looked at it. It was an old box, so old that the cardboard side had buckled in and she couldn’t read it, but the pattern of the small writing that covered the back looked familiar.

Laurel stood up so fast her knees cracked. She walked toward Shelby until she could see the sepia box top, which was a picture of the game board. All the letters of the alphabet were in the middle in two rows, bent into a rainbow shape. The font was old-fashioned, with curls and flourishes on every letter. A pale sun guarded the word “yes” in the upper right-hand corner, while a black moon showed the word “no” its grim profile. Along the bottom, the word “goodbye” stretched itself out between two all-seeing eyes.

Laurel snatched her old Ouija board from Shelby’s hands. It was the most ill-conceived Christmas present Thalia had ever given her, and that included the water bra eight years ago. “No, you are not playing with this,” she said.

She’d never even played it. She’d known better, although she’d sat on her bed, her back to the wall, and watched Thalia and her friends mess around with it. The spirits Thalia drummed up were always foulmouthed and dirty-minded, and Laurel had never once wondered who was controlling the planchette. “Go play Xbox.”

“We already played Xbox,” Shelby said.

“Go play Xbox some more,” Laurel said, staring Shelby down.

“Can we go running with Aunt Thalia?” Shelby said.

“No,” Laurel said even louder. Whatever Thalia was planning to do with or to Stan Webelow, Shelby didn’t need to see it.

Shelby’s eyes widened. “Mom? Are you okay?”

Laurel took a deep, calming breath and stepped back, the game board clutched to her chest. “Maybe you could . . .” She stopped, horrified. She’d been about to suggest that they go lie out in the backyard by the pool, and she would come in a few minutes and watch them swim. Most of their summer days past had been spent in and around the pool. Now the curtain was drawn over the glass door in the keeping room. The whole room seemed darker; its gold and green colors, so warm in sunshine, had gone unfriendly. “. . . play Xbox?” she finally finished.

“You said that already. We’re not boys, you know,” Shelby said. “We’re tired of Xbox. Why can’t we go running with Aunt Thalia?”

“You’ll get heatstroke,” Laurel said. It was all she could think of.

Shelby shrugged. “Then let me have that Ouija thing.”

Before Laurel could answer, Bet Clemmens said, “It’s not a ‘Ooh-ja,’ Shelby. You say it like ‘Wee-gee.’”

Shelby looked at Bet, surprised. Even Thalia turned around to look at her. Bet flushed and shifted her weight from one small foot to the other. “I know because of Della’s got one,” she said.

That made sense; Della was Aunt Moff’s girl. Laurel turned back to Shelby and said in the softest voice that she could muster, “Why don’t you change and let me take you to your dance class this afternoon? That might be good, huh? See your friends. Get some endorphins going.”

All expression left Shelby’s face, until it was as blank and plain as a closed door. “We’ll go play stupid Xbox,” she said.

She executed a smart little turn on her heel, abrupt and precise, and walked away. Bet started to follow her, then paused.

“Yes?” Laurel said to Bet, but Bet waited until Laurel could hear Shelby stamping up the stairs.

Then Bet said, “I’m not sick of Xbox.” She was almost whispering. “I’m not sick of nothing here.”

“That’s sweet, Bet. Thank you,” Laurel said, but Bet was already scurrying away. They heard her clattering up the stairs after Shelby.

“That little thing is getting all rooted in,” Thalia said.

Laurel barely listened. She thrust the Ouija board at Thalia and said, “Seriously, what the hell?”

Thalia shrugged and turned back to peer out the window. “There he is,” she said. She backed away from the window and stood up.

“Crap!” Laurel said, and slammed the game down on the pecan table.

Thalia was already trotting through the archway to the front door.

“I’m not done with you about this,” Laurel said, following.

Thalia peered out of the peephole. “As soon as he gets past the curve, I’m going out. I’ll head the other way, sprint up to the intersection, and get myself winded. Work up a good fresh sweat. Men like a good fresh sweat.”

Laurel ignored that and said, “You brought that thing to get at me.” She waved one hand back at the Ouija board, even though Thalia had her back turned.

“Not true,” Thalia said.

“You said you’d help, but you’re making fun.”

“Great timing on the nervous breakdown, Jesus Bug. Really,” Thalia said, finally facing Laurel. “The short version is, you sleepwalk. With your eyes open. I’ve seen it. I brought the board because I thought pretending to talk to one of your little mystic essencey friends would let your subconscious tell you what that shadow was you saw moving in the yard. What or who. I brought it to help, and meanwhile, your potential perv has already passed the house. You want me to go after him, or you want to stand here and fuss about the Ooh-ja?”

Laurel wavered and said, “Go.”

Thalia opened the door and slipped through it. “Call Missy Coe,” she said, and closed the door after herself before Laurel could get out the words “It’s Mindy.”

Laurel started to walk away but then reached out and twisted the deadbolt closed with a little more force than was strictly needed. She ran lightly back through the dining room to the swinging door that led into the kitchen. It opened beside the small built-in desk. She snatched the cordless phone off its charger and hurried back toward the window. The Ouija board lay where she had left it, the dark letters standing out, stark and black; the all- seeing eyes at the bottom corners seemed to be looking at her. She flipped the box over and left it where it lay. For now.

She knelt in front of the window again, down low. Thalia was already out of view; she would sprint to the corner and back. Laurel was going to call Mindy while she waited, but when she hit the on button, she heard the broken dial tone that reminded her she had messages waiting. Probably quite a few: She’d been avoiding the phone.

The automated voice-mail robot told her she had six. The first three were concerned messages from Mindy Coe and Edie and another friend from church. The next was from a reporter with the
Pensacola News Journal
. Laurel deleted it after the first sentence.

Through her wide window, she could see a long piece of her street. Thalia came into view from the right. She was moving along at a good clip.

The phone was playing the fifth message. Laurel recognized Trish Deerbold’s voice saying, “Oh! Laurellll . . .” She hit delete before Trish had gotten through the long pity-filled L.

Stan Webelow appeared, running around the curve that led back past her house from Chapel Circle’s cul-de-sac end.

The last message was Mindy again. Laurel listened while she watched Thalia and Stan Webelow running toward each other on a collision course, down the wide white strip of sidewalk.

“Sweetie, please call me back,” Mindy was saying. “Anything I can do, you name it. I wanted to let you know that they’ve set Molly’s viewing. Day after tomorrow, at Fernwood, from seven to nine. They’ll have the funeral there the next morning at ten.”

Laurel jogged those same sidewalks three or four times a week in fall and winter. Weather like this, she used the treadmill up in the rec room. But she knew the etiquette. Stan Webelow would go onto the grass when they met. Men moved for women, always, and younger women moved onto the grass for older ones. Thalia and Stan were going to meet right in front of the house, it looked like. Both of them were sweating so hard Laurel could see their skin gleaming through the sheers.