The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (2 page)

The water forced Laurel into that slow, sodden running she was always doing in her dreams. She waded up past her waist and had to bend, holding her face up out of the water, to reach down and grab the girl’s ankle. She pulled the girl up and back, and a reasoning piece of her took note of how lifeless the girl’s skin felt, gelid and pliable under her fingers.

Bet Clemmens? Laurel hadn’t paused to check the guest room on her way down, but this could not be Bet. Bet was a tall girl, and her hair was a single-toned dark red with an inch of brown at the roots.

The house alarm began blaring. Laurel reached the steps and tried to roll the girl, to get her face into the air, but her body folded instead of turning. Then it was as if the girl’s body pulled itself up, levitating. For one crazy second Laurel clung to her, not understanding, but then she saw David’s hands. He was behind her on the pool steps, bare-chested, the water soaking the legs of his pajama bottoms, lifting the girl out.

Laurel grabbed the silver bar and hauled herself up the pool steps. Her heart still felt swollen, taking up all the room in her chest, banging itself against her rib cage. David laid the girl out on the tile. He’d gone to that burny-eyed place he went to in a crisis, his movements precise and spare. He said, “Start CPR. I’m calling 911.”

Laurel dropped to her knees, facing the house. She cupped the back of the girl’s neck and pulled up, tilting the head back to open an airway, using her other hand to push the heavy strands of hair away. She saw a heart-shaped face, pug nose, and round blue eyes half open under straight blond brows.

Laurel recognized her. More than that. It was Molly, and Laurel knew her, knew her high giggle and the way she walked in quick, small steps with her toes turned in. Just last October, Laurel had snapped at least ten pictures of Molly and Shelby, both of them in red lipstick and the ragged pirate miniskirts she’d made for them. She had wondered if this was the last Halloween they would want costumes and trick-or-treating. They’d refused to ruin their look with jackets; they’d run off with their skinny bare arms linked at the elbow and prickling with gooseflesh in the mild chill. This was Molly’s face. It was Molly Dufresne.

Laurel felt like something huge and heavy was rolling fast over her, flattening her and pressing out her breath. There was a film over Molly’s pale, familiar eyes. Laurel wanted to stand up and walk inside her house to find a peaceful room where none of this was true. It couldn’t be true, and yet her clever hands kept doing necessary things, sending two fingers into Molly’s slack mouth to clear it.

She bent to put her mouth on Molly’s and pushed air, hard, meeting resistance. All she could see was the cheerful pebbled tile, and beyond that a small part of the lawn and David’s bare feet running for the house.

As she sat up, she yelled after him, “David? Where’s Shelby? You have to find Shelby.”

The alarm cut out as she called the last two words. The siren had shocked the frogs and crickets into silence, and her voice rang out. Her hands were back on Molly’s chest, compressing, but Molly’s body felt abandoned. Her heart was dense and still.

She looked back toward the house and saw Shelby walking through the glass doors. Her bangs stuck up in tufts, and she was dry and sleepy-eyed and breathing. She was still in her ratty jean shorts and a T-shirt and pink Pumas. She stopped on the patio, her mouth opening in a shocked O. Laurel wanted to run to her, grab her up, but she had to bend and push air for Molly again.

When she sat up, Shelby was taking a hesitant step forward, and Laurel called, “Stay there, baby.”

Shelby obeyed.

Bet Clemmens came out of the back door, David right behind her. Bet had the black Hefty bag she’d brought as a suitcase pressed against her chest like a pillow. After her first visit, last year, Laurel had gotten her a wheeled suitcase with a pull-out handle, but she’d come back with a trash bag again this year. “It broke,” she’d said in a flat, defensive voice before Laurel had even asked. It had been stupid, sending a nice suitcase like that back to DeLop, expecting Bet would get to keep it.

“Stay,” David said to both girls. He stepped over the patio fence and strode fast across the lawn. He was holding the cordless phone from the kitchen by his side.

Laurel could hear the tinny voice of the 911 operator telling him to remain on the line, but as he reached Laurel, he let the handset clatter to the tile and said, “They’re coming.”

David knelt on the other side of Molly’s still form. His stronger hands folded themselves over her chest, and he thrust down, short, hard pushes, demanding a response and not getting one while Laurel breathed uselessly for her.

It went on for a long time like that. By the time Laurel heard the sirens, the pebbled tiles were tiny scissors clipping at her knees each time she shifted.

David heard the sirens, too. He called, “Shelby, go unlock the front door.”

The first two firemen hurried through the glass door. Laurel had always thought of it as a glad thing when the firemen came, a promising thing. It had been the firemen who said it was common, it was fine, let’s take her to the hospital anyway to be sure, when Shelby was three and had a febrile seizure. They’d arrived first again when David, who tripped over dust motes and should have known better, had gone up on the roof to clean the gutters himself and fallen off and broken his ankle. But when Laurel’s daddy shot her uncle Marty, it had been the sheriff’s men, dressed in light blue, and look how that turned out. They’d come from the direction of the cabin, ambling slow because Marty’s blood had already cooled, setting like gelatin.

It heartened Laurel to see the busy rush of firemen now. There was a beat when the pinkest part of her fool heart thought seeing them meant Molly was fixable and could be woken and handed back to her mother, whole and safe.

Laurel bent and pushed a last breath into Molly’s slack mouth, and then she knew it wasn’t any good. Strong hands came down and lifted her away, like David had lifted Molly out of the pool, and she was passed backward to David as the firemen took over.

David walked with her to the patio, one hand on the small of her back as if Laurel were a touchstone holding him present, even as the fluid economy of his movements disintegrated.

Shelby stood hugging herself in front of the glass doors. As soon as she was close enough, Laurel’s hands reached out for Shelby as if they had their own brains in the thumbs. She pulled Shelby tight against her chest.

Over Shelby’s head, Laurel watched the firemen milling around and unpacking their vinyl bags, pulling out what she supposed was medical equipment, a jumble of tubes and long cords and boxes.

There didn’t seem to be anything for them to do for the moment. They stood in a huddle on the patio, Laurel holding Shelby and David looming over them. Bet was off to the side, clutching her Hefty bag, so that for a single heartbeat there was no Bet, no firemen, no little girl gone too still in the yard. They were frozen, the three of them like a snapshot of Laurel’s life for over thirteen years, since the day she’d gone to David’s grungy student apartment with her eyes puffy and rimmed in pink. She’d balled both hands into fists before she’d knocked, ready to punch his guts out if he shrugged and said he’d pay for an abortion.

Now the child who had become Shelby was in her arms, and Laurel held her daughter for that single beat, felt the pulse of Shelby’s mighty heart doing its good work. She thought the word “safe,” and she thought the word “finished.” David watched over them, her sentinel, and she thought, “Our part is over now.”

Immediately, she heard her sister, Thalia, say, “You’re wrong.”

“What?” she said.

She looked around, but Thalia wasn’t there. Thalia was in Mobile, or Timbuktu, or hell, for all the good it did Laurel.

“I said you’re wet.”

Shelby’s voice was muffled, her face pressed into Laurel’s chest, but Laurel could hear a thin edge of hysteria in the normal words. Shelby tried to pull back, and Laurel felt her whole body contract, grasping Shelby too hard, keeping her.

“Ow,” Shelby said, jerking away, and Laurel had to bite down an urge to yell, to demand that Shelby would forever be in the first place Laurel looked, safe and expected and perfectly unharmed. She forced her clamped arms to loosen and let Shelby turn sideways. Shelby bent at the waist, her shoulders hunching up and in, her head down, gulping in air.

Laurel put one hand in the center of Shelby’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out too high. “I was so scared. You weren’t in your bed.”

Shelby, still hunched over, said, “I fell asleep in the rec room. Me and Bet were watching TV.”

Bet’s head jerked at the sound of her name, as if she’d been asleep on her feet, like a horse. “Do what?” she said.

Shelby looked up at Laurel and said, “Mommy, is that Molly?”

Laurel couldn’t answer. She felt the irrational anger draining out of her. It flowed through her arm and into Shelby like a current.

Shelby’s brows came down, and her mouth crumpled up into an angry wad. “Now you say it isn’t,” Shelby demanded. “You say.”

Laurel pulled her close again, and Shelby suffered it, stiff in Laurel’s arms.

“I’m so sorry,” Laurel said, and Shelby clamped her hands over her own mouth, her eyes wide and furious and too bright above her laced fingers.

A young fireman with apple cheeks and a clipboard stepped over the patio fence to join them in the spill of light coming through the glass doors. He asked how long Molly had been in the pool, what they had done to revive her, and how long they’d been doing it. His questions required short, factual responses, and David turned to him with something like relief, answering methodically.

Bet Clemmens stood by the glass doors, wearing a pair of the soft pajamas Laurel had given her. Her feet were stuffed into rubber flip-flops she’d brought from home, and she still clutched the trash bag as if it were her childhood lovey.

“You packed your things?” Laurel said.

Of course Bet would have to go home now, but it seemed strange that she had already packed. It was both too fast and too intuitive.

Bet said, “I heardat sarn goff. I thodda wazza far.”

It took Laurel a few seconds to process through the thick DeLop accent. Bet’s vowels stretched, taking up so much space that the consonants got jammed together, and her lips hardly moved when she spoke. Her words sounded swallowed, as if they came from her stomach instead of her lungs and throat. In DeLop, where everyone talked like that, Laurel’s ears adjusted to hear those sounds as words, but here, Bet Clemmens’s accent was an interloper. It took a moment to translate: “I heard that siren go off. I thought it was a fire.”

“It was the burglar alarm,” Laurel said.

Bet shrugged. Laurel’s relatives in DeLop did not have burglar alarms. They were, for the most part, the people burglar alarms were meant to deter.

Bet squeezed the Hefty bag and said, “I didn’t want them clothes you got me to get burned up.”

Laurel dropped it. It didn’t seem appropriate to talk about alarms or packing at the moment. No topic seemed appropriate. It simply couldn’t be that Shelby’s friend was dead in the backyard while Laurel talked about useless things with Bet Clemmens. In a few hours, she realized, she’d have to make her family breakfast. In two days, the pansy bed would need weeding. It wasn’t right.

She heard Mindy Coe calling from the backyard next door. “Laurel? Are you guys okay?”

Laurel’s mouth called out, “Yes.”

It was a reflex, like the way her knee jumped when her doctor tapped it with his rubber mallet. She didn’t want pretty Mindy Coe, her good friend next door, to see what was happening in her yard. If Mindy came over and saw, then it might be real. And they were okay, weren’t they? There they all three were, alive and whole, and what else mattered?

Shelby pulled herself out of Laurel’s arms altogether and said, “God, Mom,” from behind her hands. “We’re so, so not.”

Mindy’s head popped up over the tall privacy fence, her hands folded over the rounded boards like prairie-dog paws, her pointy chin hooked over the top between them. Mindy was barely five feet tall, so she had to be standing on a piece of her patio furniture, and still no part of her neck was visible. She was probably on tiptoe.

Jeffrey Coe’s head and shoulders appeared beside those of his mother. He was a tall, good-looking boy, older than Shelby, already in high school.

The Coes looked like cheery puppets peering down over the slats, their disembodied heads concerned and friendly. Laurel thought that on their side of the fence, she’d find daylight, a garden party, a recipe exchange. She had an absurd urge to run for it, break straight through, leaving a perfect Laurel-shaped hole in the wooden boards. Her own backyard had become a foreign country.

“Ma’am, you need to get down from there,” a fireman said, heading for the fence. But Mindy had already seen Molly.

“Oh, my dear God,” she said. Her hand snaked up to push Jeffrey’s head down. “I’ll call Simon.” Mindy’s husband was a doctor. Then she got down.

Shelby was staring at the pool, her body curved away from Laurel. Laurel put one arm back around her, both to steady herself and to feel the simple living flesh of her. “Close your eyes, baby,” Laurel said.

“I already saw,” Shelby said. Tears spilled out of her eyes, and her nose was running unchecked. “It is Molly. It is.” She pulled away again. “You’re freezing me to death.” The last word rose in an indignant adolescent lilt. Then she put her hands up to scrub at her eyes with her palms, a toddler move. Her mouth was still a cupid’s bow, as unformed and generic as a baby’s. Laurel wrapped her arms around her own middle, sick with not touching her daughter.

She could hear people tramping through her house. One of them found the switch for the back floodlights. Her pupils had dilated in the near-dark, and the burst of light hit her like a flash bomb going off. The backyard was all at once awash in summer’s colors, green grass, the last hot-pink azaleas, the bright peach-and-blue-striped cushions on the patio chairs. Only the yard’s back corners were still dark. The bulb had died in the light above the gazebo, and no light reached the pet cemetery where David had interred Bibby, Shelby’s first cat, and a childhood’s worth of gerbils and the kind of short-lived goldfish won at fairs and the school carnival.