The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (24 page)

“Go,” Thalia said to Laurel.

Thalia had left the Volvo running, so Laurel got in on the driver’s side and backed up onto the road. She wound her way through DeLop’s warren of streets, a mix of gravel and old asphalt and dirt, all crisscrossing and doubling back. The paved ones had common names, like Alice and Janet and Jasper. The others were homemade and nameless. Laurel kept her windows down, moving slowly and looking side to side.

The late-afternoon heat was keeping most people inside. She saw a young woman she didn’t know well, not part of her family, sitting out in the square of dirt she’d fenced around her trailer and watching a filthy baby grubbing around. The baby was shirtless and probably getting sunburned, and looking at its fat belly and the sag of the heavy diaper pulling at its legs, Laurel remembered the feel of Bet in her arms at that age. She’d felt that tightening urge to pick Bet up and run and keep her. Why hadn’t she? They wouldn’t be here now if she had. Bet would be in Shelby’s school, her narrow calves poking out from under a plaid uniform skirt.

About a third of the kids in DeLop had never seen the inside of a school building. Some had parents or older siblings who would take them two miles to the highway, as close as the bus would come, so they could glean a meager education from the county school. The kids who did go almost universally dropped out before getting through middle school. Bet, still registered in seventh grade, was an anomaly, and her dogged attendance was the main reason Laurel had chosen her to be Shelby’s pen pal. If Bet made it all the way through eighth grade, she’d be one of the best-educated people in the whole town.

Every now and again, one of them made it to high school. Laurel knew of only two kids who had graduated, and both of them had stopped being DeLop kids. They had gone out into the larger world and hardly ever came back.

Laurel couldn’t blame them. Still, she should have known she couldn’t pull Bet out of DeLop, drop her down in Victorianna, and not have the child feel the knife-sharp cut of difference. Of course she would long for a place to sit down in Laurel’s world, but Laurel had not made room for her. The spare baby, Thalia had called Bet, rubbery and unreal, offered as a sacrifice.

The Volvo crept down the middle of Lance Road, and Laurel peered hard in all directions. DeLop’s colors had washed out, a collage of rain-faded gray wood hung with shreds of clinging paint and metal so rusted it had no shine. Little flashes of the colors she associated with Shelby pulled her eye, shining in the dull landscape. Her heart leaped at a flash of bright pink, but it was only an overturned toy baby carriage abandoned by the road. Lime green caught her attention: a plastic bucket. A glimpse of neon orange was only a stolen traffic pylon peeking out from behind a pile of trash waiting to be burned. None of the colors were Shelby.

Was Shelby afraid? It would be so unfamiliar here. There was no trash service, and litter dotted every surface, scraps of food boxes and bottles and chicken bones. Most of the mobile homes had no indoor plumbing. Had Shelby ever seen a tin roof? They were everywhere here, some silver, some green; on rainy Christmases, they’d had to yell over the drumbeat of rain on tin. There were rusted propane tanks in almost every front yard. The Folks used propane for heat when they could pay for it. Would Shelby even know what those tanks were? Would she know to be quiet and cautious, or was she dashing about, bold as Thalia but not a third as worldly, poking her nose around, not paying attention to her surroundings, while Bet backed off and then slipped out of sight around a corner. The dogs here didn’t know Shelby, and almost everyone kept dogs that were as territorial as the people were. The people didn’t know her, either, and they were far more dangerous.

Laurel wished she had brought Shelby here before, the way Thalia had wanted her to. When Bet had urged her to come, Shelby would have been thinking of Thalia’s Disney version of DeLop, freshly stocked with clean-scrubbed orphans and friendly old Aunt Enid.

Laurel had gone around in almost a complete circuit without seeing any evidence of Shelby’s passing. She checked her cell phone and saw that she had two bars of reception. If Shelby had returned to Sissi’s, David would have called. He hadn’t, and neither had Thalia. It was tiny here. There were no businesses, no public buildings except the church where the older Folks still gathered to sing most Sundays. There were only so many places Shel could be.

Laurel was on her mother’s old street now, Jane Way, approaching the burned ruin of the house where Mother had spent her early childhood. Laurel stopped the car and shifted it into park. Would Bet have brought Shel here? Surely Shelby would want to see this place.

Laurel got out, leaving the door open and the engine running. There wasn’t much to see. The house had burned to its foundation and was nothing but a concrete slab and three scrolled wrought-iron posts that must have been part of a porch.

She stepped up onto the concrete, breathing deep, as if trying to catch a scent. The filth seemed undisturbed. If Bet and Shelby had passed this way, they’d left no indication. There was no sign of the years Mother had spent here, either. That genteel lady who spoke in a TV southern accent had once called this place home. That seemed important somehow. Laurel was missing something, some obvious clue, but anything the fire had not destroyed had long since been stripped away and carted off for use in other places. Mother had lived mostly at Poot’s until Daddy had come with his church youth group in their old bus, bent on good works, bringing ham and brown bags full of hand-me-downs.

Laurel saw it then. She went to her knees on the concrete as if she’d been knocked there. Mother came back here Christmas after Christmas, bringing all the same things Daddy once brought her. To Mother, it wasn’t a Christmas trip. It was a rescue mission. Once a year, she left her ordered life, the one she had created and kept peaceful at all cost, to foray here, into squalor, the enemy territory. It was more than the high school graduates who had gotten out had done.

But Daddy had come back to DeLop because he’d fallen in love with Mother, not to bring her ham. He had been warm and avid, coming out of Daddy-land to look at her. Mother could not see the difference. A cold offering of shoes and good manners was like throwing bricks to drowning people, thinking they were ropes. Still, it was the very best she could do. Laurel put her hands flat on the filthy concrete and accepted it. Everything. Looking at this place baldly, seeing it for what it was, Laurel knew: Mother had done the very best she could.

This had once been Mother’s town, but she had left it, and she no longer chose to understand it. She had made herself an outsider, and she had raised Laurel to be one as if it were a gift. Laurel had been thinking like an outsider ever since they’d gotten on the road. They all had. But now, hands on the filthy slab, knees aching, Laurel saw inside DeLop.

Thalia had said if it were her, she’d wind Shelby around in the streets and leave her. But to Bet, these people weren’t scary. They were as familiar and regular as the kudzu pressing in around this lot.

If Bet meant Shelby harm, she wouldn’t expect it to come in the form of Raydee and Louis or even dogs like Mitchell. They weren’t dangerous to Bet. But she had brought Shelby here for a reason. There was something here that Bet must think was dangerous. Something she could use.

Laurel remembered the drowned uncle Bet had found, his face “et” by the crawdads. Remembered Molly floating in the center of the pool. And then Laurel knew.

She was already up and running, leaving the car where it was parked, because she couldn’t get there by car; there was a chain over the access road that had once let the coal trucks come and load. But there was still a footpath that was open, up behind Enid’s house, two hundred yards or so down the road. Laurel was fumbling her cell phone out of her pocket as she ran. She thought she would call David, but her fingers were wiser. They hit the code for Thalia’s cell.

Thalia answered by saying, “At Della’s. Haven’t found her.”

Laurel yelled, “I think Bet took her to the Frog Hole. Get David. He doesn’t know the way,” and then she hung up and saved her breath for running.

She circled the perimeter of Enid’s fence, going back to the familiar place between two trees where it was possible to slip sideways into the brush-filled woods. The slim trail led up, and Laurel hurtled along it, running flat out with the branches catching at her clothing and scraping her bare arms.

The strip mine’s sides were so sheer it looked like someone had taken an enormous bread knife and cut a slice out of the earth. The stagnant water, a fathomless green, crept up its sides and then evaporated out in an endless cycle with the rain. This year had been damp, so the water would be high, emerald green and unmoving, so deep that the sun could warm only its surface.

Laurel saw a flash of color: the familiar hot pink of a Justin Timberlake T-shirt. There Shelby was, forty feet up the path, close to the edge of the quarry with her back to Laurel. Bet was right beside her, standing in profile. Shelby had a big piece of brick held up over her head, high, in both hands. As Laurel cleared the rise, rushing forward, Shelby hurled it in. It arced out over the water, plummeting fast, and Shelby yelled, “Ka-boom,” as it splashed down.

Bet Clemmens was fiddling with something, and once the brick had sunk, Shelby took it from her. As Bet leaned down to pick up her own chunk of brick, she saw Laurel, fast and breathless, racing up the trail behind them.

Their eyes met, and Bet’s mouth dropped open in silent surprise. Laurel skidded to a halt, her hands lifting, palms facing Bet.

Bet glanced down at the chunk of brick she’d just scooped up, then her gaze flicked back at Laurel.

“Shel,” Laurel called, a warning in her tone.

Shelby didn’t look back or respond, just stayed by the edge of the quarry. Then Laurel saw the little wires going into her ears. Shelby had her iPod headphones in. That was what Bet had been fiddling with, working the controls to find a song.

Shelby was standing so close to the edge. The water was high, a ten-foot drop into fathomless green.

Laurel was seven feet away. She realized she could hear the tinny echo of some boppy tune pumping into Shelby’s ears, an inappropriately cheerful sound track. Bet shifted the brick in her hand as if testing the weight of it.

“You waited this long,” Laurel said. “You don’t want to.”

Bet’s original surprise had faded, and her eyes had gone as blank and glassy as the surface of the Frog Hole.

“This is that part now,” Shelby said, in the overloud voice of someone with headphones in.

“Please don’t,” Laurel said.

She had so much more to say. She wanted to tell Bet she saw the difference now, she understood how Daddy had brought Mother down the hill. He’d made a place for her. Laurel had given Bet American Eagle jeans and colored sandals and watched her with a hard, suspicious eye, but she hadn’t made a space for Bet. Now here was Bet, leading Shelby to the Frog Hole, trying to make a space for herself.

Bet peeked at Laurel sideways out of one dead eye. There was no time to say these things. Bet’s face was expressionless, as if all her focus had turned inward.

She was wavering, and Laurel said, “It can all still be okay.”

The words fell flat between them. They weren’t true. There was Molly, and that could never be okay.

Bet’s body seemed to come to some decision.

Shelby said, “He’s saying, ‘You better take my heart,’ I’m pretty sure. You want to listen?” Her hands were moving up to take out the earphones, and Bet said, “I’m real sorry.”

Her hands moved, too. The brick came up.

Laurel was already running toward them, but Bet was too fast, smashing it down into the back of Shelby’s bright blond head, at the center part between her braids. Laurel saw the vivid spurt of fresh red blood, and Shelby stumbled forward. Laurel was reaching, her fingers scraping against the bright pink of the T-shirt but finding no purchase. Bet dropped the brick and shoved Shel in the small of her back as she crumpled. Shelby went over the edge.

Laurel went, too, jumping in right after, feeling the sick and dizzy rush of falling, a weightless moment that paused her by the sheer walls of limestone. In that dazzling halt, she heard the splash of Shelby entering the water. Then she was in as well, velocity shoving her under so that her head was in tepid warmth that cooled down the length of her body so quickly that it felt as if she’d stuck her feet in liquid ice.

She could see Shelby’s golden hair, one braid reaching up as Shelby’s body sank. Laurel grabbed it, hauled up, got her hands around Shelby’s narrow chest, and began kicking for the surface. Shelby spasmed in Laurel’s arms, coughing, choking on the water with her head lolling. Shelby’s eyes were open, showing all white as air came out of her in short bursts.

Laurel was so strong. She’d never been so strong in her whole life. Her legs propelled them up, and she would not have been surprised if the force of her kicks had thrust them up and out to hover three feet above the surface and cough and drip.

They burst into the air, and she got Shelby’s face out, trying to rest her daughter’s head back on her shoulder as Shelby coughed and sputtered, her body jerking. Shelby’s blood pumped out, as warm as the surface water, smearing across Laurel’s cheek.

Then Shel got her breath back, and her body stopped spasming, but she wasn’t swimming. Her eyes were still rolled back in her head, and her limbs felt loose and easy. She was breathing, though, and Laurel felt the hard, steady beating of her heart. Laurel rolled onto her back, cradling Shelby to her chest, and started towing her to where the access road had been cut, forming a slope out, a man-made beachhead the width of two big trucks.

The quarry was a solid quarter mile away, but Laurel was swimming toward it, strong and certain, when a wave of water rose up in front of them, splashing into Laurel’s face. She aspirated droplets and choked, struggling to keep Shelby up.

Then another wave came at them from the side, and she realized that Bet was up there, following their progress and hurling chunks of granite and shale down at them.