The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (10 page)

Bet quirked one shoulder up in a shrug, a Shelby move that meant, “Guilty as charged.” It wasn’t the world’s nicest joke, but the kid was trying.

Laurel reached out and gave Bet’s narrow shoulder a squeeze. Bet leaned in to the touch, a light and cautious shift, like that of a barn cat who wasn’t used to petting but could maybe get to like it. Laurel had a sudden strong memory of holding Bet one Christmas when Bet was just a baby.

Laurel had been so heavily pregnant that her doctor hadn’t wanted her to make the trip. The baby—Laurel was almost certain it had been Bet—had stiffened her fat naked legs and braced her feet against the top of Laurel’s big belly, her round eyeballs focused and intent on Laurel’s face. Shelby had kicked upward exactly then, so that Laurel felt four small feet pushing at her, inside and out. Laurel had fought an urge to clasp Bet tighter and make a run for the car. She’d leap into the backseat and yell to Daddy, “Drive. Just drive.”

It wasn’t a new impulse. She’d wanted to steal the babies every year since she was six and met the little ones Uncle Poot’s daughter had abandoned. Laurel had walked over to the playpen and stared down hard at them, mostly to keep from looking at the foot that wasn’t there. They’d been sleeping, curled up together like dirty puppies in a ratty old playpen. There was a stuffed dinosaur lying on the floor outside the pen, and its one remaining glass eye was hanging by a thread. It was what Laurel’s mother called “a chokey.” Laurel had pinched off the eye and slipped it in her pocket, then tucked the doll back in, close beside the older one.

Laurel had been a child herself, but she’d already known that babies belonged in clean yellow pajamas with feet, sleeping in a house that smelled like her own: of Pine-Sol and Mother’s cooking. Babies shouldn’t be left behind with Poot. Poot’s growly voice and the salt-and-pepper bristles on his face made Laurel think of trolls. His eyes were sunk so deep into his skull that their color was a mystery. The glass dinosaur eye went home with her, safe in her pocket, but the babies stayed in that playpen, stayed in DeLop, and every year when Laurel came back, she found them bigger and more blank-eyed and more broken.

There had been a lot of babies she’d had to leave there. More, it seemed, every year. Now, paused at the iron gate that led from her neighborhood out into the world, she wondered what Bet would be now if Laurel had been allowed to take her.

Without thinking it through, without thinking at all, Laurel said, “I have to call Sissi, Bet. You’re her kid, and it would be wrong not to let her know what’s going on. But if she doesn’t insist you come home early, we’ll take you back the weekend before school starts, like we planned. Okay?”

Bet gave a curt nod. A wait-and-see nod with no trust in it. Then she ducked her head down as if embarrassed. “Can I put thet radio on?” she asked.

Laurel’s nerves weren’t up for a solid hour of the Shelby- inspired girl-bop pop Bet had decided she liked this year. “Check in the glove box,” she said. “Shelby left her Nano in the car, and I think I stuffed it in there.”

Bet fished out the iPod, a hot-pink object that Laurel couldn’t work. Shelby must have given Bet a tutorial, because she popped in the earplugs and worked the front buttons with her thumbs like a pro. Laurel could hear a pounding bass and the tinny voice of Pink or maybe Christina Aguilera. It wasn’t loud enough to be distracting. Laurel pointed the car at Mobile in the blessed relative quiet, ignoring the tribe of running bugs that had decided to have races in her belly.

She was off to get Thalia, if Thalia would allow herself to be gotten. If Laurel had to eat crow pie, then someone should pass her a fork. She was ready. Her real problem with needing her sister’s help was always only this: In order to get it, a person had to talk to Thalia.

CHAPTER 7

L
aurel pulled in to the lot attached to the Spotted Dog. It was a converted firehouse, taller than it was wide. Thalia and Gary lived in the old barracks on the top floor. They’d turned the truck bay into a black-box theater, the outsize garage doors kept closed unless they were loading a set out or in. A huge podlike storage trailer was slowly rotting into the ground behind the theater. It was stacked floor to ceiling with the Spotted Dog’s in-house set pieces, a fire hazard behind a building no longer equipped to deal with such a thing.

Thalia’s Pacer was near the people-sized glass door that led into the lobby. Laurel pulled in beside it and shut off the engine. The glass door had a rusty burglar grate over it; the Spotted Dog wasn’t in the best area. Its neighbors included a liquor store and the most frequently robbed Starvin’ Marvin in the state. Laurel put the emergency brake on, and Bet pulled off the headphones and sat there. Laurel hadn’t made a move to get out of the car, so Bet didn’t, either.

The last time Laurel was here, she’d come to see one of Thalia’s plays, an olive branch of an outing if ever there was one. It was
A Doll’s House,
so Laurel had gotten Shelby a ticket, too. She’d had a vague memory of reading it in AP English back in high school.

She’d forgotten the play, something about a letter, something about a party, but if conservative Pace High had allowed it on the curriculum, it was sure to be suitable for Shelby. Still, Thalia had been known to “adapt” the classics, so Laurel had asked when she’d called to order the tickets if it was okay to bring her kid.

“It’s Ibsen. Of course bring Shelby. She should probably get school credit,” Thalia had said. After a small pause, she’d added, “I’m glad you’re coming to this one, Bug.”

Laurel had taken that to be an acceptance of terms, an indication that Thalia wanted peace, too. All Laurel had to do was bring David around, and things could at last return to queasy normal.

Then she actually saw the play. Most if it, anyway.

Sitting in the dark, watching the story unfold, she’d begun to wonder if Thalia hadn’t meant she was pleased Laurel was coming to this play specifically. It seemed like Ibsen had written each scene to spit in Laurel’s soup. It was mostly about how dreadful and unfulfilling it was to be a wife and mother. Thalia’s character, Nora, was more her husband’s mindless little pet than a person.

Laurel kept her temper, even when Nora began chewing at the side of her thumb exactly the way Laurel used to as a kid. She kept her seat when Nora told her servant, who was mending a dress, to leave the room so her husband wouldn’t have to be offended by the mundane sight of a woman sewing.

That dig was so direct, Laurel couldn’t help but wonder if Thalia had added the line. It was Thalia, after all, who gleefully referred to her sister as a “sewer,” pronouncing it as if it rhymed with “truer.”

But Laurel took a deep cleansing breath and whispered, “Peace. Make peace” to herself on the exhale. This was nothing new. Thalia always needed to get in a last little prang. Laurel stayed right up until Thalia showed her butt.

During the scene where Gary-as-Torvald was giving Nora a patronizing dance lesson, Thalia began to spin out of control. Torvald protested, but her dancing became even wilder and stranger, until she finally flung her dress over her head, ripped off her underpants, and began using the old fireman’s pole in a manner Laurel didn’t think the firemen—or Ibsen, for that matter—had intended.

She’d let Shelby watch Thalia channel a hateful parody of her mother, and now Thalia’s bare buttocks, gyrating suggestively, were practically churning in a primal and thrusty sort of way at both Gary and the audience. Laurel had jerked Shelby up by the arm and marched her right up the aisle to the door. Shelby had craned back around as they went, her mouth a wide O, and Laurel had manually turned her head to face front. She’d let the door bang as loud as she could on the way out.

In the lobby, Shelby had said in an outraged whisper, “I want to know how it ends!”

Laurel had replied much louder, “Then you can read it. But you’ll be reading it without the naked part, because that was strictly your aunt Thalia’s interpretation.”

“That doesn’t really happen?” Shelby had asked.

Laurel had shaken her head, pulling Shelby along through the lobby. “I’ll get you the book.”

Shelby had muttered, “Forget it. It was boring till the naked part anyway,” then sulked all the way home. Laurel had added a long drive with a hyperdramatic, palpably suffering preteen to Thalia’s considerable tab, and she hadn’t tried to make peace since.

Now Laurel glanced at the marquee. It was an old freestanding, changeable sign, the kind churches used to spell out messages like God Answers Knee-mail and The Best Vitamin for a Christian is B1. Calling it a marquee was more of a courtesy. Right now it said Next Exit, a Play by Allen Mallory and listed the dates of the run. The play had closed last week, ending their summer season. They were on hiatus until September.

Laurel said, “Bet, I’m going to need to talk with my sister alone, with no mice ears. She’s mad, I’m mad, and in the making up, there might be some language you don’t need to hear.” Bet looked slightly incredulous, and Laurel realized she was doing it again—forgetting where Bet came from. “It’s personal. Sister stuff. They’ve got some good magazines in the lobby, and I won’t be long. You can bring in Shelby’s iPod.”

Bet reached for the door handle, but Laurel put a hand on her arm, stopping her. She sat for another scant minute, gathering herself. For about the thousandth time in her life, she needed Thalia’s boldness. She tried to make her skin feel thick. She tried to make her heart beat slow and steady.

“Okay,” she said, and opened her door. They got out of the car and walked up to the glass door. Laurel pushed the discreet button that sounded the bell in the loft upstairs. Then they waited. No answer came through the intercom, and they didn’t get buzzed in. The padlock wasn’t on the metal grate, so Laurel gave the door an experimental push. It gave under her fingers, so she went through it, Bet stepping in behind her.

The Spotted Dog smelled like every other small theater Thalia had dragged Laurel to, a dry must stuck to air that had been waxed with greasepaint. The lobby had a ticket booth and a concession stand and an old red velvet chaise longue and matching love seat. Behind the concession stand was a doorway hung with a once plush velveteen curtain, also dull red. The doorway led to the dressing and costume rooms, and to the stairs up to Thalia and Gary’s quarters.

Laurel walked to the counter and called, “Hello?”

After a minute, Gary poked his head from behind the curtain, his mouth turning down when he saw Laurel. He wasn’t drop-dead handsome, exactly—he had regular features set in a flat face—but a low hum of energy seemed to leak out of his skin. Laurel could always feel him as a presence in a room, even when he wasn’t speaking.

“And here you are.” He said it like Laurel was a cold sore he was resigned to having show up every now and again. Then he saw Bet standing behind her. “Good God,” he said, eyeballing the ruffled Wal-Mart halter. “What’s this?”

“This is Bet, a friend of Shelby’s,” Laurel said, and when Gary’s eyebrows went up, she added, “Actually, she’s Shelby’s third cousin.”

Laurel could see him make the connection to DeLop. His expression softened. “Right. Pleased to meet you, third-cousin-in-law.” He tipped her an imaginary hat and turned back to Laurel. In a far more baleful voice, he said, “I didn’t think you and herself were speaking.”

She could feel his dislike for her rolling off him in salty waves, but it didn’t bother her. She’d stopped liking him first. That had baffled him, because Gary didn’t think it was humanly possible for a person not to like him. He was smart and funny and talented on top of his generic good looks, the whole package, and in truth, she had liked him fine initially. Right up until the day he married her sister and the two of them moved to Mobile to live out the most elaborate conceit that Laurel had ever seen.

They pretended Thalia had no idea that he was gay. He sneaked around having thrilling, forbidden trysts with multiple men who thought they were hiding from Thalia, which allowed Gary to hide them more easily from one another. He clambered out of whatever bed he’d been tumbling around in and came home to Thalia every night. They slept cuddled up like kids at a slumber party, enough created drama swirling around them to make life as interesting as anything in Noël Coward.

Thalia claimed it was the perfect marriage because they both were first and forever in love with theater. “Gary keeps the lonelies away,” Thalia told Laurel once, after a five-martini birthday lunch. The birthday and four of the martinis had been Thalia’s. “You let yourself get lonely, then you want to be in love, and love is an illusion, Jesus Bug. A delusion, even. It leads to marriage and monogamy. M&M’s—the candy that kills art.”

Not that Thalia lived celibate. “Wronged, chaste wife” was casting her too far from type. Thalia’s idea of a perfect marriage included running out and getting some sex the way Laurel went to Albertsons to get celery, but she always came back home to Gary.

Laurel couldn’t fathom whatever it was Thalia and Gary had, but Thalia couldn’t seem to fathom her marriage, either. More than once Thalia had tried to shock Laurel with wild tales of the delights of catting, as if sex were something Laurel was missing out on. She used words Laurel had never heard to describe acts that sounded perfectly filthy.

After one particularly foul-sounding and one-sided conversation, Laurel had gone to Urban Dictionary online and looked up all the phrases she hadn’t known. All but one turned out to be things she and David had figured out for themselves long ago, and Laurel felt she could limp along through the rest of her life and be completely happy without ever once experiencing that last one. All she was missing was Thalia’s vocabulary, which did not come from
Reader’s Digest,
and Thalia’s delight in sharing every intimate detail.

Now Laurel gave Gary a smile that felt cool even on the inside and said, “Thalia and I always make up, one way or another.”

“Yet every time I keep my fingers crossed.” He put one hand to his forehead, overacting to make it seem like he was kidding. “Foolish, hopeful me.”

He wasn’t kidding.

“Is Thalia upstairs?”

“Nope. In there.” He gestured toward the doors that led into the theater.

“Will you be all right, Bet?” Laurel asked.

In answer, Bet plopped down on a corner of the red velvet love seat. A puff of dust swirled around her hips as she landed. She stuck the earplugs back in and then grabbed an old copy of
Interview
magazine from the end table. She furrowed her brow, puzzled, peering down at what looked like a photo of Kirsten Dunst licking a kitten. Gary was looking at Bet with an almost identical expression. He shook his head and disappeared back behind the curtain.

Laurel left Bet there and walked into the theater proper. The doors opened at the top of one of the aisles. The Spotted Dog didn’t have an actual stage. Seating was on three sides, the chairs all angled slightly to face the acting area. It was a very flexible space, Thalia said, because they could build risers and make it multi-leveled, or leave it flat and shape the audience chairs around the demands of the play. Right now the acting space was empty. Either
Next Exit
had used a minimalist set or they had already torn out. Once the doors closed behind her, Laurel was in the dark, but the acting area was lit up in a circle made sunshine-warm with pale orange and gold gels.

Thalia was on a black yoga mat that she had centered in the middle of the ring of light. She stood on one bare foot with her other leg extended behind her and curled up, so her left foot was hovering practically over her face. Her spine was bowed back, her neck extended so she could look up at her foot, and her arms were stretched back over her head.

She wore a long-sleeved black unitard that covered her from ankle to neck, but it was so sheer and fitted that it looked more like naked than naked did. From where Laurel stood, her sister was in perfect silhouette, and her silhouette was pretty damn perfect.

Laurel looked like a slightly faded version of Mother. She had regular features, the default of pretty. Thalia had similar features but in very different proportions, and she could be brutally ugly and then stunning half a minute later. She had Laurel’s short, straight nose, but much smaller, set in their father’s flat, wide face with his full mouth and a pair of long, slitty sloe eyes that were all her own.

The first time Laurel saw the blond Bratz doll in Target, perched in its box with one boy-skinny hip cocked, trashy beyond Barbie’s wildest imaginings, she’d been struck dumb. The doll was whippet-thin, big-eyed, fat-mouthed, and all but noseless; Laurel had wondered who on earth had modeled a doll on her sister. Shelby had been absolutely forbidden from bringing Bratz dolls into the house. The trashy clothes would have assured that anyway, but a truer reason, one she could not share with Shelby, was that Laurel didn’t want tiny Thalias scattered across her floor in abandoned poses, wearing hooker shoes and staring at her with dead plastic eyes.

Thalia, poised on the mat, either hadn’t noticed Laurel or was pretending she hadn’t. Maybe Gary had told her that Laurel had called. Laurel could imagine Thalia waiting here, holding this impossible position for hours, so that by the time Laurel made her entrance, Thalia would have already pre-stolen it.

Thalia released a slow exhale and then uncoiled herself in a movement so fluid it was almost slithery. She kept moving, planting both feet and easing her spine until it was curving the other way. She put both hands flat on the floor, ending in the shape of an upside-down V, her butt pointing straight up at the ceiling. As she moved, it was as if her lean body displaced more air than it should have, cool air that came wafting up between the rows of chairs to touch Laurel’s skin with gooseflesh.

Marty was here.

Not his ghost, though. What she felt was his memory, coming to cold life in the space between Laurel and her sister. Mobile’s humidity went crystalline in his chill. A long shudder worked its way down Thalia’s spine, as if she felt it, too, an unseen hand passing down the length of her, cool and strange. She sighed and arched her neck and stilled herself.