The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (18 page)

“Stop it!” Mother yelled, and Laurel drowned her out by sending a double stack of dinner plates hurtling to the floor. David was dead silent, but Thalia started making a strange choking noise, as if she might at any second break into hysterical laughter.

To David, Laurel said, “Get that bitch out of my house.”

David took one step toward Thalia, then paused and looked at Mother. He went still again.

Laurel grabbed a heavy crystal pitcher and held it up. To Mother, she said, “Get out, or this one’s coming at your face.”

Mother’s head wagged back and forth in small negation. Her eyes had not one safe place to land. David went to her and took her shoulders, his face grave and serious. He looked oddly disappointed. “Come,” he said.

He led her toward the front door, out of Laurel’s sight. Bet Clemmens must have still been pressed against it. She came scooting out of their way as Laurel heard the door open, coming to stand by Thalia in the middle of the foyer. Her blank, calm gaze hurt Laurel’s skin.

Laurel heard Mother’s heels tapping out the door and away, to where Daddy was waiting. All at once, the pitcher weighed a hundred pounds. Laurel set it down carefully, back in the cabinet, and started toward her sister.

“Laurel, no,” Thalia said. “Your feet are bare.”

Shattered glass was all around. Laurel stood on a tiny island of safe floor, blinking and uncertain.

Thalia held up one finger and then disappeared from the doorway. David had left the front door open, and Laurel could feel August push its way inside, a wave of heat that rolled across the room. It wilted her in one blast.

Thalia came back with the hallway runner rolled up in her hands. She bent into a deep bow and unfurled it as if laying out a red carpet. It made a bridge across the glass.

As Laurel walked over it, Thalia straightened up and put her hands together, once, twice, then faster and faster, until her hands were a blur. Bet stood behind her, uncertain, looking back and forth between them. Thalia clapped and clapped, calling, “Brava! Encore! Encore!”

Laurel kept moving, passing them both. She ran through the keeping room and up the stairs. She could still hear Thalia’s hands banging together, a one-woman standing ovation that went on and on and on. Laurel could hear her even when she ran into the bathroom. She fell to her knees there in darkness and threw up until there was nothing left at all.

CHAPTER 14

L
aurel dreamed the boy with hair like wheat again. This time he was running through her own backyard with that same dog. The dog wasn’t Miss Sugar after all. It only looked like Sugar, with a lot of beagle in the mix. Laurel was below them, looking up the length of the boy’s string-bean body. She could not see his face, only the curved underside of his pointed chin. He was tinted blue, and his limbs were curved, distorted. Around him, her backyard was a wonderland, shimmering, filled with blue-washed stone angels and flowers in full bloom. She realized she was down deep in the pool, looking through the water as the boy ran past her and away.

She wanted to follow him, but Shelby’s familiar hand was curled in hers. She squeezed, and Shelby did not squeeze back. Shelby’s eyes were open, but they did not register the boy, and her limbs shifted gently as the pool water lapped. Her body had no will, no movement of its own, and she was stiller than Shelby ever was. Only her hair seemed alive, tendrils of it coiling and swaying upward, reaching toward the sunlight like yellow petals. Laurel tugged on Shelby’s hand, tried to swim them both to the surface, to the boy, but firm fingers gripped her ankle.

It wasn’t Mother. This time it was Thalia’s hand holding her under. Laurel could see Thalia’s big teeth gleaming, pearly and iridescent, from the thatch of water weeds that had grown up over the concrete floor.

“You can’t get there from here,” Thalia said, then shrugged, nonchalant, like she wasn’t all that sorry about it.

“Watch me,” Laurel said, and her own voice woke her.

The world flipped. She wasn’t looking up from the pool’s bottom. She was standing by her window, looking down at the pool. She grabbed the sill to steady herself. She must have taken a short walk, going to the window and opening the curtains as she slept.

The pool was empty, an innocent clear blue. There was no boy in the yard, no dog, only Bet Clemmens sitting on the gazebo steps in her pajamas and sifting a fistful of what looked like twigs back and forth, hand to hand.

Even from the second-floor window, Laurel could see the dark knothole, feel the wrongness like a living thing in her yard. She’d tried to keep it all outside, but it was inside now, too, in this pretty bedroom. The colors were wrong. The air tasted flat. It bothered her a lot less than she would have thought; she’d broken everything that she could find to break last night, and this morning, she’d awakened empty.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Molly.

She’d come close. She’d started something with Stan Webelow that she doubted she could finish alone. And she would be alone in this soon. She couldn’t have Thalia in her house any longer.

She turned away from the window toward the bed. David’s pillow was dented. He must have come up sometime in the night, after she’d finished throwing up and had passed out on her side. It would have been more heartening if he hadn’t left again while she was sleeping. She pulled off her pajamas and let them lie where they fell, then went to the bathroom to dry-swallow some Motrin and get in a hot shower. She let the water beat down on her head until the ache faded and she felt something like herself again. It had been a while.

She dressed in a pair of jeans and a pale green tank top, and then she tidied up out of sheer habit, putting her pajamas in the hamper. As she made the bed, the ghost of lavender rose around her. She’d made the quilt that served as their comforter five years ago, and she’d never thought the sachet would last this long.

When everything was put in order, she looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. She’d pulled her damp hair back in a ponytail, and she wore no makeup, no shoes. She saw only Laurel, with no plan and nothing whole left to throw. Downstairs, she would find the scraps of things she’d shattered, waiting to be sorted through, and she would see what could be salvaged.

She opened the door, ready to go down, and there was Bet Clemmens. Bet’s hand was raised to knock, so it looked like she was about to punch Laurel in the face. Laurel’s heart jump- started, and she involuntarily stepped backward.

“I’m sorry!” Bet said, almost a yelp, and she lowered her arm.

“It’s okay,” Laurel said, putting one hand to her chest. “You’ve got little cat feet, you know that?”

Bet tilted her head to the side and said, “You give me a pitcher book oncet. For Christmas. It said the fog come in like that.”

“I remember,” said Laurel, though she didn’t specifically recall giving that book to Bet. Shelby had loved it in preschool, so Laurel had taken quite a few copies of it to DeLop over the years.

Laurel looked past Bet, down the hall. The door to the little guest room was closed. Bet glanced over her shoulder, following Laurel’s gaze. “Shelby’s still hard sleepin’ in there,” she said.

“Let her,” Laurel said. “She’s not going to have an easy day.”

“Because of they’re laying out Molly this evening,” Bet said.

“That, too,” Laurel agreed, but she’d meant what must happen when Shelby woke up. She thought of Mother saying,
I never yet saw a dissection that did the worm a bit of good,
but she’d tried to handle this like Mother already. All she had learned was that Mother had failed her. “Did you need something?”

“Naw. He saved you the downstairs, because of he said you like the chunks of things,” Bet said. “So I went and got you these.”

Laurel blinked, not following even a word of that, and then Bet held out a sandwich bag. Some shards of beige and clear plastic were jumbled up in the bottom. Laurel took it and spread the bag flat on one hand, petting the pieces into a single layer.

She recognized what she was holding, and she pulled her top hand back, as if the broken shards of plastic had gone hot. “It’s the planchette?” she said, and it came out high on the end, like a question, even though she knew the answer.

“Naw,” said Bet. “It’s that pointer thing. From thet broke Ouija in the grass.”

“Yes, that’s called a— Never mind. You picked up all the bits?” Laurel said.

Bet nodded. “I even grubbed around the grass some till I found that nail.”

Sure enough, in the bottom of the bag, Laurel saw the silver needle that had pointed out the letters, one by one, while the planchette moved willfully, alive under her hands.

“Why on earth,” Laurel said.

The feel of it, even in pieces, made her spine shudder so hard she felt her vertebrae clacking together.

Bet shied back a step, her dark eyes widening. “I did wrong, didn’t I? I thought you might could want it for a blanket.”

Laurel suppressed another shudder and stepped toward Bet so she could look close at the girl’s face. “You thought I’d want to use these pieces in a quilt?” she asked.

Bet bobbed her head in a shy, ashamed affirmative, and Laurel found herself smiling in spite of everything.

“That’s really very thoughtful, Bet. I might one day.”

“Naw,” said Bet. “I can see I fussed you.”

“No, really,” Laurel said. “Look, let me show you.”

She carried the bag over to her dresser. Bet followed her across the room, taking such timid mouse steps that Laurel had to wait at the dresser for Bet to finish sidling over.

Laurel opened up her jewelry box. Her rings were lined up in a tidy row in the holder, and her necklaces and bracelets were each inside its own small velvet box. She didn’t own a lot of good jewelry, and what she had, she’d mostly picked herself. David wasn’t adept at buying jewelry. Even if he had been, he wasn’t the sort to remember it was Valentine’s Day. He wasn’t the sort to remember it was February, really.

Shelby reminded him when Mother’s Day came, but he had yet to remember their anniversary. It was hard to hold a grudge when he also forgot his own birthday. If he didn’t hate parties, Laurel could have given him a surprise one every year, and he’d be probably the first person in history to be genuinely startled when friends came leaping out from behind the sofa with a cake. Candy hearts and flowers and diamond anniversary bands weren’t part of the life they’d built together. She hadn’t thought she minded, but today she wished she had pearls from their fifth anniversary and a tennis bracelet from their tenth. She wanted something hard, something tangible and valuable he’d given her that she could put on her body like a touchstone. Something like a proof.

She lifted the tray out of the way and set it aside. “There,” she said, and pointed into the secret space in the bottom. It was fuller than the jewelry compartment, brimming with strange objects of no value to anyone but Laurel. From the center, between the cork from the outsize bottle of white wine David had opened their first night together and a broken pocketknife of Uncle Poot’s, the plastic dinosaur eye stared up at them. Laurel laid the sandwich bag over it like a blanket. “This is where I keep important things, the ones I’m not quite ready to use in a quilt yet. I’ll keep your planchette here.”

Bet reached in with one finger to touch the mouse charm, then the small velvet bag that was full of Shelby’s baby teeth.

Laurel held herself still until Bet withdrew her hand, and then she put the tray back, covering up the flotsam from her life. Bet’s dark eyes were shining, proud and pleased. On impulse, Laurel reached out and touched Bet’s cheek, and Bet immediately leaned in to the touch, closing her eyes and pressing against Laurel’s palm.

Thalia had said,
That little thing is getting all rooted in,
but Laurel hadn’t noticed. She’d brought dinner and shoes and a toy or game to Bet every Christmas, from her first to the one last year. This was Bet’s second long visit to her home, but Laurel felt she’d never truly looked at the girl before.

“Can I ask you a question?” Laurel said. It was what she should have asked David, or Shelby, or even the Ouija, and it wasn’t a fair question for Bet. Not really. But Bet nodded, so Laurel asked, “Are you happy here? Do you think this is a place where people can be happy?”

Bet pulled away from Laurel’s hand and turned away, so that Laurel saw her in profile. Her nose had pinked. “I like it here fine,” she said. She tried to shrug off her answer, but her voice was trembling.

It wasn’t a fair question because Bet came from hell. Who wouldn’t like it in Victorianna, if DeLop was all they had for a comparison? But Laurel hadn’t come from hell. She’d come from Pace, and she’d liked it here fine, too. Loved it, even, every minute and molecule, no matter what Thalia thought. Thalia couldn’t imagine anyone being happy in a house and a life that were both so tidy, making chicken and quilts in between toting Shelby from dance to drill team. Laurel had been.

But that was when she’d thought that David loved it as well. Her good life was a thing they made up, made together, almost by accident, the same way they’d made Shelby.

If she’d left pieces out, then she’d done it for her family. She’d only been buttoning shut the ugly parts. The things she’d buried were better left that way. What would David and Shelby want with ghosts and family skeletons and her criminal relations and the ugly face of true and abject poverty in DeLop? She’d left those things buried, and good riddance. It had never occurred to her that David also left parts of himself outside of this house. Now that she’d seen him in excited conversation with a girl who was his intellectual equal, Laurel knew the pieces of him that she didn’t have weren’t awful. They might be his best and favorite things, buttoned up because she couldn’t share them.

Bet Clemmens had turned farther away, so that all Laurel could see of her face was the curve of her cheek. She said something else, softly, but Laurel couldn’t make out the words.

“What, honey?” Laurel asked, and it was as if the casual endearment undid Bet.

She turned toward Laurel, and her voice came out in a whispery rush. “I am happy here. Everything smells real good. You even smell good, like what I think them moms on Shelby’s Nick at Nite must smell like.”

It was nothing short of a declaration, naked and desperate. Bet flushed a deep wine red, and her throat moved as she swallowed. She ducked her head, not able to meet Laurel’s gaze in the wake of her words.

It shamed Laurel that she couldn’t say back to her, simply,
I love you, too, kiddo
.

She didn’t love Bet, and no one had a finer nose for insincerity of feeling than a DeLop kid. Laurel had never tried to love Bet, nor even thought to try, but she imagined that she could. If she spent any time at all looking at Bet like she was looking now, she could find this unexpected sweetness, this hopeful core, and come to love her back.

“We’re going to think about things, you and me, okay?” Laurel said at last, gently. “I don’t know what will happen, but there are opportunities for you that we can find. I haven’t been good enough with that. I haven’t been good enough to you, period. I’m sorry. But I promise I’m going to try and do right by you. Righter, anyway.”

Bet bobbed her head. It might have been a nod, but it was noncommittal, a wait-and-see movement. Words were cheap, and Laurel knew it would count more if she showed Bet. Over time.

“Have you seen Thalia?” Laurel asked.

“She’s in her room, doing thet yoga,” Bet said.

That was good. This morning, hollowed out and staring down at the dark spot of the knothole in her yard gone wrong, she had realized that she wanted David, this marriage, their troubled child, this life. She wanted it on almost any terms. If David left out pieces of himself, so be it. She could work with what she had of him, even if he was here mostly for Shelby’s sake. That was a starting place. She would sit him down in the soft ashes of last night until they found a way to work together. Shelby needed them both, badly. Of all the broken things, Shelby was the one that must be salvaged.

Laurel would send Thalia home as a gift, a yielding to what David needed. She would call Detective Moreno and state definitively that she’d seen Stan in the cul-de-sac the night Molly Dufresne drowned. That might be enough to get Moreno looking at him, but even if it weren’t it was the best she could do. She wanted Shelby safe and her marriage intact. Everything else was negotiable.

She turned to go downstairs, but Bet put out a hand and touched Laurel’s arm lightly, stopping her. “I’m sorry I give you the shivers with them pieces.”