The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (15 page)

Laurel, still looking up at the ceiling, let herself be led, but then she stopped and said, “What rest of our party?”

Thalia said, “I’m sorry, Bug.” She sounded like she meant it. She tilted her head, indicating the diners.

“You didn’t,” Laurel said, all at once sure that Thalia had called Mother. Somehow, Thalia had read the Ouija’s small and ugly words out of Laurel’s mind, and she’d made Mother bring Shelby here for crab legs and interrogation.

The restaurant had two levels, with a circle of sky-blue stairs leading down to a round dining area directly under the dome. Upstairs, businesspeople lined the walls, a blurry border of black and gray and navy, the men in ties, the women in sensibly chic pumps. Laurel dismissed them and searched the lower circle. It was filled with women sitting in brightly colored pairs and trios and whole gaggles, chatting and drinking chardonnay or Pellegrino. Laurel looked from table to table, seeking Mother’s fluffy topknot, Shelby’s bright braids. “I don’t see them,” she said.

She realized she was gripping Thalia’s arm hard. Too hard. It probably hurt. She hoped it hurt, a little. Today was supposed to have been a reprieve.

“There,” Thalia said. She thrust her chin to the right.

Laurel looked again, all the way to the far-right wall this time, to the dull-colored edge of business diners. Her gaze caught. It was David.

He was sitting at a two-top, wearing his usual khakis and a blue chambray button-down shirt. Scampi’s had loaned him a jacket. It was an awful checked rusty thing, no doubt crawling with the filth of a thousand sweaty-necked businessmen. There was a woman with him, a brunette, but Laurel hardly glanced at her.

“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Laurel said, turning to her sister, not sure if she was irritated or simply relieved. “You brought me here to see this?”

No doubt Thalia expected her to snatch a steak knife off a passing surf-and-turf plate and go scrabbling toward David, leaping over other diners, going for his throat. Thalia would have already stabbed him by now. But Thalia didn’t know David. He couldn’t manage an affair unless Laurel dressed him for it and made the hotel reservations and put all his assignations into the BlackBerry he toted around in his pocket and called Dr. Theophilus.

But Thalia was nodding, looking at Laurel with that same strange expression, her lips thinned and pressed. This time Laurel recognized it. It was simple pity, a tourist of an emotion; it hadn’t ever lived on Thalia’s face long enough for Laurel to know it when she saw it there.

“Are you insane?” Laurel asked. “David wouldn’t do that to me and Shelby. He couldn’t. He never has.”

Thalia said, “You don’t know what I—”

“Yes, I do,” Laurel interrupted. “When you took the brownie down, you heard them planning lunch over that TeamSpeak thing in the computer. Redhead in the basement, my aunt Fanny. It’s a business lunch for the game he’s making.” She glanced at the woman at David’s table again, then back at her sister. “She’s not even wearing lipstick, Thalia. Who has an affair without lipstick?”

“Laurel,” Thalia said, and the sound of her sister saying her real name was enough to make Laurel pause. “Stop looking at me. Look at them.”

So Laurel did. She turned and watched them across the room. The sleeves on David’s borrowed jacket were too short for his long, spidery arms, and his wrists jutted out as he gestured. He was gesturing a lot, Laurel noticed, and that was because he was talking to the woman. David. Talking.

Her husband disliked social situations so much he’d once sent Laurel alone to represent him at his office’s mandatory Christmas party. But here he was at a lunch, happy and lathered up, his mouth going a mile a minute and his brain switched to the on position. His bony hands waved around and then grabbed his head and crunched up his dark hair, then let go to wave some more.

The woman—girl, really, she couldn’t have been over twenty-five—leaned toward him, her elbows shameless on the table like a frame for her Neptune salad. She didn’t seem go to with either the ladies or the businesspeople. She was wearing a filmy blouse, a hippie-girl-looking thing with bandanna sleeves, and her long hair was smoothed back by a headband. She looked breathless and glossy, like he was saying the smartest thing. It was David, so he probably was, and she was pretty, lipstick or no.

“She’s a colleague,” Laurel said, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded thready.

“Really?” Thalia drawled, drawing the E out long in that hateful way she had. “Then we should go meet her.”

She set off across the restaurant, and part of Laurel felt like she should walk out now, go sit in the car and let the scene play out without her. It had nothing to do with her, she was almost certain. But Thalia was bearing down on David, intent on mayhem, so Laurel followed her sister down the stairs, weaving through tables of women.

Going back up the three steps on the other side, she felt like she was crossing a border, bringing her tulip-covered dress out of Ladies’ Lunch Land to the wall, where the conversation was low and the colors were serious. Laurel could hear the conversation now. The girl was talking, and she knew the voice. It was the woman from California, the one who had called him Dave over TeamSpeak.

“—actuality always precedes potentiality, and an egg is merely a potential chicken,” she was saying.

David’s arms were moving again, holding an imaginary oval over his soup plate. He shook it at her. “No, an egg is an actual egg. The chicken has the potential to make eggs, just as eggs have the potential to make chickens.”

“Fine. Chicken first.” The girl flipped her long hair off one shoulder, chuckling. “Quantum me no more physics, please. Let’s talk about dessert, like sensible people.”

It didn’t sound like business, and as Laurel and Thalia reached the table, neither David nor the girl looked up, even though Laurel felt like she was looming over her husband, and Thalia was practically on top of the girl.

“Hi,” Laurel said.

David started, and immediately, his hands came together and folded themselves into a single still object that he set down on the table. He looked surprised to see her, but not too surprised. He gave Thalia a brief nod, and then he said to Laurel, “Hi back. What are you doing here?”

Thalia’s smile was out, the big wolf smile that took up half her face and made her odd brand of beauty look feral. She spoke before Laurel could. “Better question. What are
you
doing here?”

The soup plate held the dregs of what looked like gumbo. He glanced at it, puzzled, as if the bowl should have answered the question for him. “Eating,” he said.

He didn’t sound like David, Laurel’s personal mad genius. He sounded clipped and very formal. Laurel raised her eyebrows at him, tilting her head in a short nod toward the girl, who was waiting to be introduced with a polite, bored smile on her face. David either missed the cue or ignored it, and the pause stretched itself and grew into a gap.

Thalia filled it. She ran her pink tongue around her lips and spoke to the girl in a tone of faint, lascivious surprise. “You’re beautiful. Across the room, I was thinking you were pretty, but when I come right up on you like this”—Thalia leaned down—“and get really close, wham! Gorgeous.”

“Oh. Um, thank you?” the girl said. She turned toward David, which proved she didn’t know him very well. Looking to David for social rescue was like asking the Sahara for a cocktail.

Still, Thalia was right. The girl had gotten prettier as they’d come closer. Even with no makeup, her skin had a creamy glow, and her dark eyes were wide-spaced and liquid over molded cheekbones and a lush mouth.

A waiter zoomed smoothly over to them. He was a young man with a single eyebrow that was shaped the way Shelby had drawn birds back when she was in kindergarten. “Will you ladies be joining the party?” he asked Thalia.

“God, I
hope
so,” Thalia said, not taking her eyes off the brunette. The girl blushed, and the waiter’s eyebrow lifted up until Laurel thought it might take flight, zooming up to the ceiling to hang like an unflapping black M beside the closest mermaid.

“Give us a minute,” Laurel said, then gave him a belated smile to temper her curt tone. After a slight reluctant pause, he backed away.

Meanwhile, Thalia had put one hand over the girl’s arm and leaned in even closer. “Can I maybe get your phone number?”

The dark-haired girl pulled her arm away, setting her hands under the table in her lap. “Who are you?” she asked.

At the same time, David said, “Stop it,” to Thalia. He looked back at the girl and added, “This is my sister-in-law, Thalia. She’s not a lesbian.”

Thalia straightened and said to Laurel in a fake loud whisper, “Denial. It can be so powerful. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

“I’m sorry,” Laurel said, her cheeks burning. “My sister is a small bit mentally ill. I’m Laurel. By the way.”

The girl looked blank, as if the name meant nothing to her.

“Oh. Right,” David said. “Laurel, this is Kaitlyn Reese, from Richmond Games. She flew in this morning for the dogfight demo. Kaitlyn, this is my wife.”

The minute David said the word, said “wife,” Kaitlyn’s expression changed. Once Laurel had found four-year-old Shelby standing in a glass-shard sea of what used to be a favorite vase. Shelby had immediately peeped, “I didn’t touch it!” with her eyes round and wide, caught. Kaitlyn had that same look on her face now.

Laurel’s world tilted and reversed, and she felt slightly sick.

“Nice to meet you,” Kaitlyn said too brightly. She bobbed up, gave Laurel’s hand a quick squeeze, and dropped back into her chair. Her palm was damp. Laurel saw her glance at David’s left hand. It was the slightest flick of her eyes, but Laurel caught it.

She angled her body toward Kaitlyn and leaned across Thalia, speaking softly. “It’s in his pocket.”

Kaitlyn pinked faintly.

“What?” David said.

“Kaitlyn was wondering where your wedding ring is,” Laurel said, and David’s eyebrows came together.

“I missed that.” He reached in his pocket and pulled it out, along with a jangle of change and his bandless watch. “I don’t like things on my hands,” he explained to Kaitlyn.

“I think I’m done here,” Thalia said. She held up Laurel’s keys and jingled them, a merry sound that struck Laurel as wildly inappropriate. “Still want to come to Barb’s with me?”

Laurel shook her head. She wouldn’t walk away from this table now even if it caught fire. Thalia turned on one heel, crisp and smart as a Buckingham Palace guard, and then marched off.

Kaitlyn said, “Should you let her go off by herself?”

“She’s not that kind of crazy,” Laurel said. “She’s not a danger to herself or others.”

“Says you,” David muttered. “Where is Shel?”

Laurel closed her eyes. He’d been working on this project for weeks, working endlessly, to the point where she had hardly seen him. He’d been with this woman, virtually and in the flesh, day and night. The team from Richmond Games had flown out here more than once, and how had Kaitlyn Reese gotten all the way across the country, several times, without knowing David was married?

“Shelby’s with Mother,” Laurel answered. Her hands gripped the table so hard that her knuckles were turning white. To Kaitlyn, she said, “Shelby is our daughter.” Invoking Shelby was pretty close to peeing around David in a circle, but Kaitlyn had recovered her composure.

“Dave’s little dancer,” she said, her eyes hard. “He talks about her all the time,” and there was a subtle emphasis on the word “her.” Kaitlyn was damn sure making it plain whom David didn’t talk about.

“Are you okay?” David asked Laurel, but she wasn’t. The world was upside down.

“I hate that ceiling,” Laurel said.

“Your sister walked right out the front door,” Kaitlyn reported. “Is she allowed to drive?”

“She’s fine,” Laurel said, and it came out angry, like a bark.

Kaitlyn was sizing Laurel up. All traces of her blush had faded. “Well, if you two came together, then she’s stranding you. Can you catch her? Dave and I have the dogfight demo in less than an hour.” She turned to David, resting her elbow on the tablecloth so her body became a wall, enclosing the table and leaving Laurel on the outside. “We ought to head on over to the office.”

Laurel had a strong urge to grab David’s hand, pull him to his feet, and say, “You come on with me, Dave.”

She could peel the jacket off his lanky frame and lead him out, sticking Kaitlyn Reese with the bill. He’d been readying for this demo for weeks, but his job could go to hell along with Kaitlyn. Laurel longed to tug him through the parking lot and find his SUV. They could climb into the back, and he would kiss her and touch her while she whispered to him about regular things, what to have for dinner, should they paint the bathroom, until he remembered who she was. Who they were together.

But David had pulled out his bandless watch to check the time. “How’d it get so late?” he asked. He signaled the hovering waiter for the check. “Did she really take your car?”

“I don’t know,” Laurel said. “Probably.”

“Typical Thalia,” David said, his nostrils flaring.

The waiter came over with the bill on a tray, and David glanced at it, then took out his wallet and set money down, his movements precise and spare. He had cooled and slowed the way he did in a crisis, but this wasn’t a crisis. This was lunch. Lunch was not a crisis unless Thalia was right.

“I don’t have time to run you home. I have to get to this meeting,” David said.

“Let her take your car,” Kaitlyn said. “You can come with me in the rental.”

“Good.” David stood up. He dropped a kiss onto the corner of Laurel’s mouth, and she had to physically stop herself from jerking back. “You have a key for the SUV?”

“Wait, David. How will you get home?” she asked, a stopgap measure that paused him only for a moment.

“I’ll bring him back to you,” Kaitlyn said. She gave Laurel a tight smile and then added, as if joking, “When I’m done.”

David didn’t seem to hear. He shrugged off the ugly jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. “I’ll call you, tell you how it went,” he told Laurel. “Sorry about—” He waved one hand around, and Laurel didn’t know if he meant Thalia, or Kaitlyn, or leaving her here.