The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (6 page)

Laurel didn’t think Shelby had stopped to compare the real DeLop girl in her house right now with Thalia’s version. Bet had never warbled in her life, but she was such a blank slate, it was probably easy for Shelby to mistake the mute endurance for shyness; she saw in Bet what Thalia’s stories had prepped her to see.

“That other boy, that fag one, is about to get his butt beat,” Bet said in a pleased voice. Scottish accent or no, she got this part.

Laurel and Shelby and Mother all paused and looked at her. Bet watched the screen, oblivious.

“Call Sissi,” Mother mouthed at Laurel as she came close to hand her a steaming cup. Laurel nodded, taking the coffee. Mother tilted her head sideways, and her eyebrows came down. “Laurel, you’re pale as bedsheets. You’re supposed to take things easy today, David said. Now get up off the floor.”

Laurel stayed where she was. “How’re you doing?” she asked Shelby.

Shelby shrugged, pinching her shoulders up and then only half dropping them, so she stayed turtled up.

“You look tired. What time did you girls crash out up there in the rec room?” It was the most innocuous of all of Moreno’s questions, but Laurel was still surprised to hear it coming out of her mouth.

“I don’t know,” Shelby said. She glanced at Bet but found no help there. Bet had turned her head to look at Laurel, her eyebrows creasing in as if she were slightly puzzled. Either the movie or the conversation had lost her, there was no way to tell which.

Shelby went on. “We were watching some stupid cartoon or something. I fell asleep in my beanbag.” Another glance at the inert Bet Clemmens, and then her voice got the slightest bit louder. “I think I fell asleep first. Isn’t that right, Bet?”

Bet’s gaze snapped back to the screen, and the faintly puzzled look was gone. She nodded, too vigorously, and Laurel’s mom antennae, finely tuned to catch these things, vibrated. Shelby had silently asked Bet to back her up, and Bet had agreed.

Laurel’s throat tightened, and her mouth went desert-dry. She stared at her daughter and realized Shelby was looking between Laurel’s eyes, not into them. It was an old theater trick of Thalia’s for doing love scenes with someone you hated, or hate scenes with someone you loved.

“It also makes lying a hell of a lot easier offstage,” Thalia had said more than once, no doubt when Shelby was around with her little pitcher’s ears wide open. It worked, too, but only from across the room. This close, Laurel could see the faint disconnect, and all at once she wondered if Moreno had been on to something. Molly and Shelby had been so close. If Molly had been somehow grossly involved with Stan Webelow, Shelby could not be entirely ignorant.

“Come and talk with me,” Laurel said gently, gently, as if her insides hadn’t all turned to ice. She turned one hand palm up, extending it toward Shelby.

“Grandma says I’m supposed to be taking it easy, too.”

Shelby came down hard on the word “supposed,” just as Mother had done, as if the gap between how the world should be and how it actually behaved were a grievous thing.

“We could go lie down together,” Laurel coaxed. “You’ve had a hard night.”

Shelby didn’t move, but at least she was looking straight into Laurel’s eyes. “Where is she?” Shelby asked. “Where’s Molly?”

Laurel felt the question like a belly blow. “She’s in heaven, sweetie,” she said.

Shelby’s mouth tightened. “I’m not four, and I’m not stupid. Daddy said the ambulance took her, they took the actual her, they took her—” She floundered, and Laurel realized she was trying hard not to say the word “body.”

If Thalia were here, she would say, “At the morgue, babe. Somewhere across town, educated people are prowling around Molly’s flesh for evidence, and why was she in our yard? What were you girls up to? Were you supposed to meet someone? Had she been spending time with Stan Webelow? Have you?”

Thalia would heat her up and pop her open like an oyster, because if Shelby broke, she might let slip things that would help Laurel protect her. Shelby was hiding something. She’d just looked Laurel right between her eyes and lied, and Laurel wasn’t equipped to handle it. She rallied, readying herself to say these hard things to her damp-eyed, angry girl.

“To a funeral home, my darling.” Mother stepped in before Laurel could make words come out. Of course Mother had a beautiful lie at the ready, horses and acrobats to soothe and distract. “They’ll put her in fresh clothes and brush her pretty hair. They’ll take good care of her.”

Shelby nodded, looking down at her lap. “You’re blocking the movie,” she said to Laurel.

Laurel sank down, sitting low on the floor, waiting it out. She couldn’t do this with Mother here. Mother was walking back toward the kitchen, trailing her hand along Daddy’s shoulder as she passed.

“There are still places where sailors tie themselves to the ship, the call can be so strong,” Daddy said, as if Mother’s touch had activated him. “No one brought
me
any coffee.”

Mother tutted at him. “Poor mister! No legs at all, and no thumbs for pouring. Come away from there and get you a cup.”

Even now, when they were well into their fifties, Laurel was sure people wondered how her jug-eared, google-eyed daddy managed to catch a beauty like Mother. Mother had an elegant nose and lovely skin, and when she was younger, her hair was corn-colored. Only her teeth—crooked and still faintly stained despite whitening toothpaste—testified that she had grown up in DeLop.

But women liked to hear Daddy talk in his big voice. He had a slight distance in him, as if no one woman could ever quite get his whole attention. It made some women want to try. Also, he and Mother had common ground in that they were both orphans. Daddy had come to DeLop with his Church of Christ youth group when he was sixteen. They’d thrown a party in the abandoned Baptist church, passing out canned goods and hand-me-down shoes to every town kid who came.

Knowing the kind of dour, old-school C of C her parents favored to this day, Laurel pictured the DeLop kids sitting in rows, clutching brown-paper bags full of charity. A chaperone read the fifth chapter of Mark by a table with a few sad green streamers and a punch bowl full of bug juice on it. There would be no music, and certainly no dancing.

Even so, lightning had flashed between the two of them like an uninvited guest, illuminating Laurel’s strange daddy and making Mother smile her geisha’s smile, hiding her bad teeth behind her hand. Daddy, smitten, kept driving over to DeLop to see her, and when springtime came, they eloped. Mismatched as they seemed, forty years later, here they were, a solid unit in the living room.

“Shelby?” Mother called. “Why don’t you girls pause the movie and run get showered and dressed? You’ll feel better with clean hair. I’m going to start lunch now. Laurel, you should go get dressed, too.”

The remote was on the armrest, and as soon as Shelby paused the DVD, Bet got up and headed for the stairs as if she were being pulled on strings. Shelby scooted around Laurel to follow Bet.

Laurel got up, too. Mother had made it easy. Once they were all upstairs, Laurel could send Bet Clemmens to shower first, and she’d have Shelby to herself.

Laurel had her foot on the first step when her mother said, “Wait, Laurel, can you help me find a few things? Honestly, I’ll never understand your pantry system! What’s soup doing down here with the beans?”

Laurel backtracked to the kitchen, impatient. Mother put a hand on her arm, her mouth widening into a close-lipped smile. She craned her neck, looking up the stairs to see that the girls were really gone, and then said, “You need to make today be as normal as possible. Don’t go up there and pick at Shelby.”

It was as if Mother had read her mind.

“This is not a normal day,” Laurel said.

Mother raised her eyebrows and said, “I’m only saying it’s not a good time to go prying. Get Shelby doing regular things.”

“Regular things,” Laurel repeated.

Regular was last week, Shelby and Molly bounding in after auditions, still wearing their leotards and tap shoes. They had clattered through the kitchen, David following, and Shelby had hurled herself at Laurel, spinning her once around.

“I got the ballet duo with Jimmy Brass,” Shelby crowed.

Molly had grinned, hanging back with David. Molly, with her cheerleader’s nose and curvy little figure, had been such a pretty thing. Shelby was still all knees and elbows, and her ears had grown ahead of the rest of her. But when the two of them were together, people tended to look at Shelby. Shelby, shining it on, was bright enough to blind people.

Laurel had taken Shelby’s bun down for her, slipping out the hairpins one by one. “That’s wonderful. How’d you do, Molly?”

“Okay.” Molly had ducked her head and smiled at her toes. “It’s not a big deal, not like—”

Shelby had interrupted her. “Is, too. Molly got a featured in the opening!”

“You girls will steal the show.”

Laurel had released the last lock of Shelby’s hair and kissed it. Shelby had been fresh-sweaty from dance, and Laurel had breathed in citrus and the smell that comes in springtime right before a light rain. The smell of things about to bloom.

Shelby had twitched the piece of hair away and said, “Don’t get all mooky. It’s only fall recital. Spring is the biggie.”

David had hung back by the door, following the conversation intently, his dark eyes ticking back and forth between them. Shelby had those same eyes, a rich, bright brown like kalamata olives.

She had gazed earnestly up at Laurel and said, “I have to learn a new lift, and I better not grow any more, Mom. Seriously. I need to start drinking coffee.”

“You don’t even like the smell,” Laurel had said. “I never broke five-five, and I didn’t drink coffee until college.”

“Five-five is practically a yeti.” Shelby had spun away, clicking out of the kitchen with Molly on her heels, calling over her shoulder, “We need to go to Starbucks.”

David had watched them pass and then grinned and said, “Don’t look at me. I’ve been trying to put a book on her head since she was four.”

That was normal. That was regular and real. It didn’t look like a place Laurel could get to from here.

She stepped in closer to her mother, glancing back at Daddy. He was weaving, buzzing little hums to himself out of his nose. Laurel lowered her voice. “I have to know what happened, Mother.” She looked right into her mother’s eyes, willing her to remember, to acknowledge. A long time ago, Laurel had learned for sure and for certain that there was a place inside Mother where her love for Laurel trumped all her careful blindness, trumped silence. The day it mattered most, Mother had chosen to see and speak, if only in a whisper. “I have to know so I can protect her. Like you protected me.”

Mother’s eyelids dropped briefly, and her lips twitched up at the corners. When she looked back up, she was wearing Cowslip’s face. “Laurel, I never once came digging at you like you were a dead worm in a high school biology class.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Laurel said. “Shelby is—”

“Then have at her,” Mother interrupted. Her voice was tart but with none of the indulgence she gave Daddy. “Pester and poke. But I never yet saw a dissection that did the worm a speck of good.”

Laurel heard the faint echo of DeLop in Mother’s accent. Most times Mother talked like a California TV actor trying to sound mildly southern. Her words came out breathy, with an unobtrusive lengthening of vowels, pre-formed into carefully constructed sentences. She’d had a subscription to
Reader’s Digest
for longer than Laurel had been alive, and she had, God knew, paid to enrich her word power. But with Bet Clemmens in the house, the old DeLop speech patterns were infiltrating Mother’s measured language.

Laurel spoke in a hard whisper. “You can’t expect me to treat today like normal when my backyard is full of police and any minute that detective could come back and start questioning Shelby again. It’s better if I—”

Mother held one finger up, waggling it back and forth to shush her. “Oh, sweetie, no!” she said. “I’m so sorry. You asked Daddy about the detective, so I thought David must have told you before he left. Here you’ve been worrying this whole time, and for nothing. They’re all gone.”

“Who’s all gone?” Laurel asked.

“The police. The coroner declared it an accidental death this morning. They left over an hour ago.”

“Accidental?” Laurel said. She couldn’t stop repeating her mother’s words. She looked down at her hands and shook her head. “No. I touched her. She was bleeding.”

Mother said, “They think Molly was standing out on the diving board. Probably just being silly. We can’t know. She fell, and she cracked her head open on the side of the board. They found the place. She knocked herself out. It’s a tragedy, but it’s all over, and the faster things go back to normal, the better for Shelby.”

Laurel turned and walked as quickly as she could to where Daddy stood, still peering through the crack in the drape as if there were something to see. She pulled aside the cloth; her yard was empty. The tape was down, the lights were gone. Water mizzled down, rippling the pool’s surface. It was as if nothing had ever happened.

But her yard did not look right. It wasn’t only the dark skies and the rain damping the colors. There was a deeper darkness there, with the fence as a perimeter. The tops of the neighbors’ trees and the roof of Mindy Coe’s tower looked fine, standing in their perfect places, at ease in the world. But Laurel’s trees and pool and patio furniture, everything, looked as if it had been shifted one tenth of an inch left. It was the same, yet infinitesimally wrong. Chill went trickling down Laurel’s spine in a droplet, and she found herself tucking her hand inside her father’s.

As a little girl, she used to stand like this with him on the porch, watching fireflies buzz around the yard. In the pearl-gray dusk, the bugs themselves were visible. They were ugly and busy, but their lights were deep tangerine, flashing in slow motion. As the sky got darker, the bugs disappeared onto the velvet black background of night, only the lights showing.

“Fairies,” Daddy had told the girls once.

Thalia had stared up at Daddy’s face as if it were more interesting than any thousand fairies, but Laurel had peered hard out at the fireflies and seen the curved body of a girl, slim as filament, glowing in the heart of every light.