The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Also by Joshilyn Jackson

gods in Alabama

Between, Georgia

And for Scott, right now

CHAPTER 1

U
ntil the drowned girl came to Laurel’s bedroom, ghosts had never walked in Victorianna. The houses were only twenty years old, with no accumulated history to put creaks in the hardwood floors or rattle at the pipes. The backyards had tall fences, and there were no cracks in the white sidewalks. Victorianna had a heavy wrought-iron gate guarding its entrance. The intricately curled top looked period, but it was new as well. It ran on hydraulics, and it swung wide only for those who knew the code.

Laurel and David had moved into the big house on Chapel Circle thirteen years ago, when Laurel was only nineteen, and since that day she hadn’t seen so much as a glimmer of her dead uncle Marty. He was tethered to the three-bedroom brick ranch where her parents still lived, half an hour away in tiny Pace, Florida. As a girl, she had seen him often, mostly on the nights before a storm broke.

She’d be fast asleep on her old Cinderella sheets, faded and soft from a thousand washings, with
Anne of Green Gables
or a Trixie Belden book lying open-spined on her bedside table. Then he would be there, standing on her side of the room by her bed, mournful and transparent. He didn’t belong near the ruffled shade on her reading lamp, and his feet should not have been allowed to rest beside her cotton trainer bra and Thalia’s dirty Keds and the abandoned issues of
Tiger Beat
scattered on the floor. The stuffed pony Laurel had loved best was still allowed a place at the end of her bed, but Marty was not reflected in its glass eyes, as if her loyal pony doll refused to acknowledge his presence.

He’d smile at her, one hand tucked easy in the waistband of his faded Levi’s, the other reaching out to her, ready to show her secret scenes, her own personal ghost of Christmas never.

A thin finger of moonlight came through the bullet hole left of his center, reaching to touch Laurel’s eye and help her lids come shuddering down. She’d leave them closed and roll away. In the morning, the sun would light up dust motes in the place where he’d been standing.

He left a cold spot in the room that she didn’t like to walk through, and sometimes she’d see the impression that his blanched cowboy boots had left in the nap of the rug. Once, her sister, Thalia, caught Laurel down on her knees, trying to smooth away those faint footprints.

“Are you feeling up the carpet, Bug?” Thalia asked.

Laurel only shrugged and stilled her hands. Thalia slept light and woke often, but she never saw Marty.

Laurel brought Thalia over to see the house in Victorianna a few days after she and David moved in. They’d been married all of five weeks. Thalia sat in the passenger seat, drawing her upper lip back from her teeth, higher and higher, while Laurel drove her slowly through the winding streets. The lip was practically touching Thalia’s nose by the time they’d passed six blocks’ worth of the large pastel Victorians with their gingerbread and curling gables and romantic little balconies.

“It looks like Barbie’s Dream House threw up in here,” Thalia said. “A bunch of times. Like, went full-on bulimic.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Laurel said. Her tone was mild, but low in her belly, she felt the baby flip, popping sideways like an angry brine shrimp. “Look, this one’s ours.”

She pulled in to the driveway. Laurel and David’s house was the palest blue, trimmed in deep plum and heather. Two gargoyles hidden in the eaves watched over her with fierce eyes. A weathervane on the roof told her the wind’s plans for the day.

Thalia glanced from the turret to the sloped roof and then shook her head.

“You say something nice,” Laurel said, putting one hand over the swell of her abdomen. She was four months gone, and Shelby was so little, Laurel could only feel her fierce spins from the inside.

“Okay,” Thalia said, with the O stretched long, as if to buy her thinking time. Then she lifted her chin, manufacturing a June Cleaver smile. “It looks clean. Like they don’t even let dogs pee here.”

Laurel laughed. “I think that’s in our charter.”

She started to get out, but Thalia put one hand on her arm, stopping her. “Seriously? This is what you want? This house, this husband, a baby at nineteen?” Laurel nodded, and Thalia let her go. But Laurel heard her mutter under her breath, “It’s like you’re living inside a lobotomy.”

“Oh, stop it,” Laurel said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sure it does,” Thalia said. “Lots of things live in holes. This place is a hole where your brains used to be.”

Thalia never grew to like Victorianna any better, but then she also said Laurel’s quilts, with all their jarring elements secreted or undercut, were too pretty to be considered art. Real art, Thalia said, went for the jugular. Laurel would let a bleached bird’s skull peek out of the gingham pocket of a country Christmas angel, but she’d never replace the angel’s pretty head with it. It wouldn’t feel right. Laurel saw her quilts complete in her mind’s eye, and she knew every piece—innocent, macabre, or neutral as beige velvet—must be subject to the larger pattern. Likewise, Victorianna’s pieces made a whole that Laurel thought was lovely.

Her neighbors might have their own especial favorite sins; they drank or fought, they cheated on their taxes or each other. But they washed and waxed their cars on Saturdays, and they kept their hedges and lamps trimmed. They put up neighborhood-watch signs and kept their curtains open, ever vigilant. Old-fashioned glass lampposts lined the streets, so that even at night, a ghost would be hard put to find a shadowed path to Laurel’s door.

Even so, that night the drowned girl came anyway.

A storm was gathering, so Laurel checked that the chain was on their bedroom door before climbing into bed. She was more likely to sleepwalk when the air was humid enough to hold the taste of electricity. She’d rise and undo locks, pull up windows, unpack closets and drawers. Once, she’d left a puffy beaded poppy she was hand-sewing sitting out on her bedside table. She fell asleep thinking that the black beads at the poppy’s center were as glossy and round as mouse eyes, and then she rose in the night and picked out every stitch. Her hands liked to open and undo while she was sleeping. The chain was no challenge. Its true job was to rattle against the door frame and wake up David so he could lead her back to bed.

Their bedroom felt like a crisper. David, whose metabolism ran so high his skin always felt slightly fevered, couldn’t sleep in summer unless the thermostat was set at 65. Laurel climbed in and got under the blankets, pressing her front against his warm back. She kissed his shoulder, but he didn’t stir. He was well and truly out, and his lanky body had solidified into something dense and hard to shift.

David was working fifteen-hour days, adapting simulator code he’d written for the navy into a PC game for a company out in California. He’d probably spoken ten complete sentences to her in the last week. All the pieces of him that she thought of as her husband had moved down to live in his brain stem, while coding took his higher functions.

In another week or two, when the math was done, he’d come up from his office in the basement, rubbing his eyes as if he’d awakened from a long sleep. He’d sit on the floor and lean against her shins, dropping his head back into her lap to look up at her with the same narrow, total focus he’d devoted to his code strings. “What’s been happening in the real world?” he’d say, meaning their world.

Laurel would drift her fingers through his hair, holding him rapt with tales of the bride quilt she was working on, her victory at neighborhood bunko, and this new boy at school whom Shelby kept too casually bringing up. David always came back to her, completely, and so she let him be.

She slept soundly until the temperature dropped further, then she shuddered, dreaming that her breath was curling out in smoky plumes like a dragon’s breath. She rolled onto her back, rising toward the surface of her sleep. Her eyes opened. She saw the outline of a young girl, twelve or thirteen, standing by the foot of the bed.

“Shelby?” she said, and sat up. But Shelby was built like a blade of grass, her breasts only now budding and the faintest curve to her tum. This girl’s puppy fat had shifted into real breasts and small hips, and she was soaked to the skin. She caught the moonlight coming in the window and reflected it, shimmering.

“Honey, aren’t you freezing?” Laurel asked her, but the question came out in a strained whisper, as if Laurel had been sleeping so long and heavy that her throat had rusted shut.

The girl didn’t answer. Laurel could see her body through the wet fabric, and she realized she could also see the bedroom window. The girl had gone as transparent as her dress. Then Laurel understood what she was, and she checked the corners of the room for Marty; this girl had to be one of his.

He wasn’t there. It was unprecedented, but the drowned girl had come alone. Her head was tilted down, and her wet hair was a veil, strands of it clinging like lace to her nose and cheekbones. Her hair was blond or light brown, hard to tell since the water had darkened it.

“You can’t be here,” Laurel said, swinging her legs out of the bed. David muttered something and rolled over. His long arm moved into the space where she’d been lying.

The drowned girl turned away and walked to the open curtains, as if complying. Dark water dripped from the ends of her hair and the hem of her dress, but the carpet stayed dry. Her bare feet brushed the surface, swaying the thick pile.

“I didn’t mean leave,” Laurel said, standing up and taking two cautious steps after her. “I meant you can’t
be
here.”

The girl had reached the bedroom window, and the sound of Laurel’s voice did not pause her. She took another two steps forward, melting through the window and arching herself out, spreading her arms and drifting into the darkness without pushing off. Laurel followed, stretching out a cautious hand, but the glass was solid under her fingertips. She watched gravity catch the girl’s dress and her long hair, tugging it downward, but her body drifted down easy. She tilted her head up and her feet down as she sank, landing softly on the tiles by the pool.

The yard was dark, but Shelby had forgotten to turn the underwater pool lights off, so the water glowed. The girl glowed, too, as if she had her own light. She swept her right arm down in a smooth and graceful arc, like a game-show hostess modeling the water. Laurel’s gaze followed the gesture, and at first she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. The drowned girl was resting facedown in the center of the pool, her skirt opening like wings under the water. Her body was slim, with skinny pony legs, her hair curling toward the surface in tendrils like water weeds. Her ghost faded to a moving shadow in Laurel’s peripheral vision, blending into the darkness.

Laurel slammed her hands against the glass.

She heard David saying, “Wha—” behind her. He sounded far away.

A long, loud howling split Laurel’s sleep in two. It was familiar yet not, and she struggled to place the sound. The effort roused her, and she realized she was hearing her own voice: She was baying in her sleep. Waking further, she found herself standing at the window. She stopped abruptly, disoriented, staring down into the backyard. It didn’t make sense. She was awake now. This was her real hand touching her own cool glass. The dreamed girl should be gone, but Laurel still saw her. She was facedown, floating under water, and the pool lights shone beside her, giving her pale edges and a shadowed back. The water rocked her body as it drifted quietly in the middle of Laurel and David’s pool.

Laurel heard David again, closer now, saying, “Baby, what—” But she was already pushing off the window and running to the door, scrabbling to unlatch the chain. She wrenched the door open and ran down the hall toward the stairs. Her head turned toward Shelby’s room as she ran past, an involuntary movement.

Shelby wasn’t there. Shelby’s covers were in a heap at the foot, and Laurel had just seen a small blond body in the pool. Pure adrenaline dumped into her blood, driving her forward. She went down the stairs in three great leaping steps, even as her brain struggled to revise the room her eyes had seen. She fought the instinct to go back and look, to look a hundred times until the bed stopped being empty and her eyes saw Shelby, safe and sleeping where she belonged. Her heart was swelling, taking up too much room in her chest, compressing her lungs so that she couldn’t get a breath as she ran. Shelby and Bet Clemmens had been playing Clue in the keeping room when Laurel went to bed, but as she dashed through the room, Laurel saw the board abandoned in the middle of the floor.

Laurel flipped the lock on the sliding glass door and shoved it sideways along its track. The alarm began its pre-howl beeping, an electronic drumbeat of sound, heartless and high, that drove her across the patio. All at once she was too close to the low fence encircling the patio. She’d installed that fence back when Shelby was a toddler whose only goal was to walk straight into the pool and sink like a beautiful, stupid lemming. David, whose gaze turned inward most times, had barked his shin on it so often when it was new that Shelby had grown up thinking a fence was called a “dammit.”

Now Laurel stumbled on it and went skidding across the damp lawn. She fell to one knee and then was up again, running to the higher fence encircling the pool. She was praying, a wordless call to God. The gate was unlatched, and Laurel shoved it open and ran across the tiles, straight down the steps into the water.

The cold shocked her legs and shot up through her spine. It was as if she had been wearing a second set of eyelids, sheer as membrane. The cold snapped them open, and she saw that the girl wasn’t Shelby. She knew Shelby’s every molecule, and the delicate set of the shoulder blades and the contours of the head were not the same.

A wash of red joy bubbled and crashed its way through Laurel’s every vein, as if her blood were suddenly carbonated. Her whole body sang with a sick gladness that this was any child but hers. It was as immediate and involuntary as her heartbeat, and in her next breath, shame crept in. Not Shelby, thank God, thank God, but this girl was someone’s.