The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (3 page)

Bet Clemmens was watching the firemen with her blank, calm eyes. She seemed almost serene, and Laurel realized with a start that this was as comfortable as she had ever seen Bet in Victorianna. Sirens and flashing lights were a regular Saturday night for Bet. She was one of The Folks; that was Laurel’s name for her mother’s family in DeLop, though Thalia, colder and more dramatic, called them The Squalid People.

DeLop had once been a mining town, but the coal had run out seventy years back, and most everyone in town had moved on when the jobs dried up. The Folks were what was left. They lived squashed up on one another, three and four generations layered into one falling-down mobile home or trailer. Half of them were meth heads, the rest were drunks, and girls Shelby’s age walked around dead-eyed with babies slung up on their skinny hips. At Christmas, Laurel went with Thalia and Daddy and Mother to deliver a ham dinner and a pair of shoes and some toys to every child in DeLop who had a shred of blood in common with Mother. Three years ago, Shelby began agitating to go along. She wanted to help deliver the toys. She’d picked most of them out, she argued. She’d kicked in part of her allowance every week to help buy them. Why should she be left at home with her dad?

The very idea of Shelby in DeLop chilled Laurel to her marrow. Guns or meth labs inside every other house, drunk men laid out bare-chested on their porches, Dixie plates of soft white food left moldering on the floors, every yard adrift in dog crap and broken glass and needles and Taco Bell wrappers and used condoms. Once, at Uncle Poot’s house, Laurel had seen a dead animal lying in the middle of the driveway. It was about the size of a possum or a small raccoon. There was no telling, since the thing had been left there so long it had rotted down to bones lying in a nest of its own dark hairs. Shelby had no idea what she was asking.

Bet Clemmens was a compromise. She’d started as a pen pal whom Laurel had selected from the herd of vaguely related DeLop kids near Shelby’s age.

“How touching. It’s like you’re bringing a tiny piece of shit mountain back to Mohammed,” Thalia had said when she found out. “I assume you’ll read the letters first and black out the bad words before Shelby’s little eyes get tainted?”

But Laurel had chosen well. Bet was one of the few DeLop kids who hadn’t dropped out before middle school. Even so, her handwriting looked like an eight-year-old’s, and she wasn’t literate enough to write much beyond “Hi, I’m Bet. I got me a dog name Mitchl. Do you got a dog?” The letters had tabled the discussion of DeLop until last summer, when Shelby, in a pen-pal coup, invited Bet to come visit her.

That first year had been a qualified success. Shelby and her friends treated Bet Clemmens with elaborate courtesy. At twelve, they’d been more impressed by their own kindness to The Poor Girl than they were interested in Bet herself. Bet Clemmens stood it the way she stood everything, phlegmatic and unsurprised, plunking herself down on the fringes of Shelby’s gang. Laurel kept a careful watch, but Bet didn’t instigate liquor-cabinet raids or bring the drugs she certainly had access to or relieve the gangly boys in Shelby’s circle of their innocence.

Laurel had a cautious hope that the visits might do Bet some good. After all, Mother had gotten out. Sometimes it happened. Maybe Bet would finish high school, let Laurel and David help her get through college. Laurel had driven over to get Bet again this summer. She hadn’t regretted her decision until now, as she watched Bet Clemmens stand rooted to the patio, practically dozing in the middle of the ugliest night Laurel had ever witnessed.

The young fireman finished questioning David and walked back toward the other firemen. Laurel, who had kept her profile to the pool as long as possible, found herself tracking him. The other firemen had stopped CPR. The group shifted, and Laurel caught a glimpse of Molly’s face framed by black boots.

Laurel said to David, “Molly looks like herself, only she’s not there. It’s the hatefulest thing I’ve ever seen.”

No one spoke for half a minute, and then Bet Clemmens said, “I seen my one uncle who got drowned.” Shelby turned to look at Bet. They all did. “He laid out drunk in the crick. It was only five inches deep.”

“Thank you, Bet,” said Laurel, meaning “Stop talking.”

“He was out there dead all night afore I found him,” Bet offered. “The crawdaddies et his face.”

“I don’t think that story’s helping right now,” Laurel said much too loudly.

Shelby was looking at Bet with rounded eyes, as if her summer charity had shifted from a project to a person. “You’re the one who found him?” she asked. “You saw his face?”

Bet Clemmens bobbed her head. “Et,” she repeated, and Shelby took a step closer to her.

A flood of people, paramedics and policemen, poured through the glass doors, streaming around the four of them as if they were rocks in a river.

David hunched his shoulders, compressing as they passed him. He had his hands folded together, the fingers tucked inside, and he was compulsively bringing his palms together and then apart, as if he were doing that hand play for kids that went
This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people.

With no more questions to answer and his yard filling up with human beings, he was looking to Laurel for cues. People were Laurel’s department. But Laurel was as lost in this crowd as David was in any. Laurel’s mother had read the “Miss Manners” column aloud at Sunday lunch, reverently, in the same voice that she used to read the gospel. Laurel had been raised on Miss Manners and King James, maybe in that order; neither source had ever told her what was proper on a night like this.

She didn’t know if she should offer to make coffee or start screaming until someone gave her medicine. Both options seemed equally obscene. She needed a script to tell her what words to say, what actions were appropriate to perform, and she found herself wondering if this was how David felt when she gave dinner parties.

Her only reliable instinct was to touch Shelby, to physically move her child two steps back from Bet Clemmens’s story of the drowned uncle. She reached for Shelby’s arm and saw a line of red and rust on the shoulder of her daughter’s lime green T-shirt. It was shaped like a finger.

Laurel pulled her hands back and turned them over in the light to see the palms. Her right hand, the one she’d placed on the back of Molly’s neck to tilt her head back, was streaked and flecked with drying blood. She rubbed at it, but she succeeded only in marking her other hand as well. She felt a scream building, and then a small, strong hand encircled her wrist, catching it before she could wipe her hand down her damp pajamas.

A brunette in a tailored brown pantsuit was standing beside her. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail. “Detective Moreno,” she said by way of introduction. “You touched the body?”

“I touched Molly,” Laurel said. “We did CPR.”

Moreno looked around and then flagged down a passing man in a jumpsuit. Laurel saw that the detective’s ponytail was perfectly centered on the back of her head, and it narrowed evenly to a point at the end. It was such a mathematically exact ponytail that under normal circumstances, she would have pointed it out to David. Its symmetry would have pleased him.

“I need a tech to look at your hands, mm-kay?” Moreno handed Laurel’s wrist over to the man in the jumpsuit as if it were an object. Laurel closed her eyes.

As Moreno walked away, Laurel heard her saying, “You need to get these people out of my crime scene. The skies could open up anytime.”

But it wasn’t her crime scene. It was Laurel’s yard, where things like this were not allowed to happen.

She smelled the tang of rubbing alcohol and felt the cool tip of a swab running down her palm. She opened her eyes.

The tech said, “You can wash up after this,” and his voice was kind. “We’re going to take you over to your neighbors’ house.” He tilted his head toward the Coes’. “We’ll need your daughters’ T-shirt, too. She can change at your neighbors’. We’ll take you there now, okay?”

“Who did this?” she said to the tech, but he was putting the swab into a little tube and labeling it.

Laurel wasn’t sure what she was asking, anyway. She’d thought of waiting half an hour after eating, of signs that said
NO
L
IFEGUARD ON
D
UTY
and
SWIM AT
Y
OUR
O
WN
R
ISK
. She’d assumed Molly was here because of some violation of the careful, basic safety rules of childhood. But drowned people don’t bleed. Blood meant bullet holes and violence. Blood was Uncle Marty on his last hunting trip. Her teeth buzzed, as if she’d bitten tinfoil. Time sped up, and too many people milled around, moving things. Her family became some of the things that they were moving. A uniformed woman was telling them all to follow her, please, and Shelby was looking down at her stained shirt, saying, “What? What?” to the tech.

“This won’t come off,” Laurel said, holding her bloody palm up to David as they passed through the wooden gate and crossed their lawn, walking toward the Coes’ house. Shelby led the way between Bet Clemmens and the tech who wanted the T-shirt.

Out in the cul-de-sac, Laurel and David’s neighbors stood in clots between the emergency vehicles. Edie Paintin, Laurel’s other close friend, stood on the edge of Mindy’s yard with her husband, and in between the cop cars and the wasted ambulance she saw the Simpsons, the Decouxs, and the Rainwaters in a huddle. The Prestons and another woman, maybe Julie Wilson, stood farther back, almost lost in the shadows.

Trish Deerbold, the thin lines of her overplucked brows raised and her mouth curling, was across the cul-de-sac in front of her house. She stared hard as Laurel passed, as if Laurel were an exhibit. Laurel saw Trish poke one elbow into Eva Bailey and then lean toward her, whispering. All her neighbors’ eyes were on her. She hated being looked at this way, her stained hands held up like a confession.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of another person standing across the street. He was well behind the crowd, all the way back in the Deerbolds’ grass. The colored lights of the farthest cop car bounced off his curls, or else he would have been invisible. He had Percy Bysshe Shelley hair, the top rumpled into an artful tousle. It looked like Stan Webelow’s hair, but everyone else she could see milling in the cul-de-sac was a close neighbor; Stan lived all the way over in Victorianna’s phase one.

“Who is that?” she asked David.

“Who is what?” said David. He didn’t stop.

Laurel craned her head back over her shoulder as David walked her forward. The Decouxs were blocking her view, so the person had to be short. Stan Webelow was built small and leanly muscled. When he jogged shirtless through the neighborhood, his lithe chest as dewy as if he’d oiled it, the mommy brigade paused to watch. Not Laurel; Stan Webelow had a pixieman face, and his hands were moist and soft, as if he’d deboned them. He should not be here now.

Mindy came running to her other side and threw an arm around her, saying, “Oh, honey!” She saw Laurel’s hands and added, “Are you hurt?”

Mindy tugged her up the stairs and inside. Laurel peered through the crack as the Coes’ front door was closing, but she could no longer see the man.

Thalia would have pulled away and run across the street. If it were Stan Webelow, she would have grabbed him by all his curls, squeezed him at both ends, demanding to know his business here on Chapel Circle. But her sister had not set foot in Victorianna for going on two years now; Thalia wasn’t here, and Laurel wasn’t her.

For the first time in her life, she wished she were.

CHAPTER 2

T
he last time Thalia came to Victorianna was in the dead heat of an endless September. The dog days made her torpid. She spent the weekend lounging by the pool with Laurel, watching Shelby and her friends leaping in and out of the water like seal puppies. That time she hadn’t needled David much about being a robot or taught Shelby’s crew how to say “fart” in nine languages or gotten rowdy with someone’s husband back in Laurel’s gazebo. She was lazy and easy, right up until the last night of her visit. Then she made up for all her good behavior: She let Laurel take a walk.

They stayed up too late, sitting hip to hip in front of the fireplace and drinking wine as Thalia pulled out pretty childhood memories for Laurel in a string, like Christmas lights. No one could tell stories like Thalia in a sweet mood; she’d gone to Chapel Hill’s prime drama school on scholarship, and by her sophomore year, she’d had more than one West Coast agency courting her. But she’d fallen in love with the tiny laboratory theater in the basement of Graham Memorial.

“I can smell the audience’s collective breath. That’s intimacy. Television is for assholes,” she explained. “And movies are for slightly smarter assholes.”

She dropped out, married her gay boyfriend, Gary, and together they opened a nonprofit theater in Mobile that teetered on the desperate edge of collapse every time the electric bill came. They survived on grants, the yoga and acting lessons Thalia taught, and a small but dedicated fan base.

That night, long after David and Shelby had gone up to bed, Thalia had been on, and Laurel was an audience of one. Her stomach muscles hurt from laughing. It was after midnight when Thalia sat up straight and said, “Do you remember the Resurrection Snail?”

“I don’t think so,” Laurel said.

“He’s a Gray family legend. You were little, though, maybe five or six. We were playing hospital, and I was going to do surgery on that doll you loved, Pink Baby. We went out to the garage to get something out of Daddy’s toolbox. Maybe a screwdriver?”

“No,” Laurel said. It was coming back. She pointed an accusing finger at Thalia. “You wanted the drill!”

“Lucky for Pink Baby, that big-ass snail was by the workbench to distract me. I almost stepped on him.”

He’d been a huge fellow, larger than a silver dollar, making his slow way toward the door that led to their backyard. Thalia had pressed her cheek to the sealed concrete, her butt poking up, her arms draped flat at her sides, trying to mimic the way he moved forward, the upside of him sailing smoothly while his belly undulated.

Daddy had left a hammer sitting out by his workbench, and Laurel had picked it up.

“You held it over him,” Thalia said, her fingers curling around an invisible handle as she made an instant shift. She was five-year-old Laurel, her head tilted, innocent of bad intentions, running a curious finger over a shell that felt invincible. Then she was Thalia again, intoning, “The tool of Damacles,” with such high drama that Laurel burst out laughing again.

“The poor snail,” Laurel said, wiping at her eyes.

Laurel had let the hammer tip and fall forward, no force behind it except its own weight. It seemed unlikely she would do more than shiver his fine edifice, but there was a crunching sound when the hammer landed like a foot on the gravel driveway. When Laurel had lifted it, the snail’s cream and brown swirled house had mashed into a flat sliced pie. His middle had become a jelly filling, oozing up between the slivers, though his head had still been plump and his ball-tipped feelers had waved and quested, suddenly frantic.

“Holy crap, the weeping,” said Thalia, unfolding from her mashed-snail pose. “‘Unbreak it, unbreak it,’ you said. You ran to our room and flung yourself onto your bed. Mother came down on me like the very wrath of God, sure I’d done him in myself to make you sorrowful.”

“Poor Thalia,” Laurel managed to sputter out. “Although I’m sure you’d done
something
that day to earn a little wrath of God.” Mother had appeared by Laurel’s bed to pet her sweat-damp hair and tell her to stop crying. “Mother said that you had put that snail right back together again.”

“With Super Glue. That was my idea,” Thalia said, inclining her head graciously to an imaginary audience.

“That’s right! She read the package to me, about how it could fix anything. She made it sound magic,” Laurel said. “So I went to look, and it
was
like magic. He was gone, and there was a trail, like a greasy slug trail, all the way from the workbench to the door.”

“Vaseline. Mother gave me two bucks to design the set and sell the story. Lazarus, take up thy shell!” Thalia reached for the cabernet.

Laurel covered the mouth of her glass with one hand and then stood up, unsteady. They were halfway through the second bottle, and her eyes felt grainy, as if they’d been salted. Outside the glass doors, lightning split the humid air, but the storm was still too far off for them to hear thunder.

“None for me. That was perfect, but I’m done, done, baked through.”

Thalia stood and bowed extravagantly, flourishing her arm, putting one leg behind her and then bending deep at the knee. At the bottom of the bow, she nearly lost her balance, which sent Laurel into a fit of fresh giggles. She trailed up the stairs to her room. In her mild wine glaze, she tumbled into bed without putting the chain on the bedroom door, and her dreams came bright and fast. She heard calliope music and saw a boy with hair like wheat running with her childhood dog, Miss Sugar.

The storm drew closer, and by three
A.M.
, Laurel was up again, barefoot, naked under her sheer blue nightie. She came down the stairs with David’s Swiss army knife in one hand, the screwdriver attachment extended.

Thalia was reading on the sofa. She took less sleep than a cat and had trouble getting settled to do what little she liked, especially away from Gary.

“Tigers in the deer garden. We have to root them out,” Laurel informed Thalia, then walked purposefully past her to work the locks on the front door.

Thalia punched in the key code before the alarm went off, and watched Laurel walk out onto the front porch. That night Laurel had seen Thalia be everything from their mother to their monstrous uncle Poot to a murdered snail, so it was easy afterward to reconstruct what Thalia did next.

Instead of helping her sister back upstairs to her safe bed or calling David, Thalia slipped on her shoes and followed Laurel out into the night. Followed her exactly, placing her feet carefully in Laurel’s footsteps. She left one hand at her side, the fingers curling under, while the other held out an invisible pocketknife. She dogtrotted around to the front for a moment to observe and re-create the expression in Laurel’s open eyes, as if Laurel were a subject, not a sister. Thalia learned sleepwalking until she owned it, until she learned and owned Laurel in her most vulnerable state.

The air was so thick with storm that the smell came into Laurel’s dream, hot and electric. Victorianna was dense woods all around her. Thalia was slinking along behind her again like a predator. Laurel felt meaty breath on her neck. She sped up, winding her way deeper into her vine-lashed neighborhood.

They had passed the communal playground and the duck pond when a fat drop of rain came slicing down through the summer air and popped off Laurel’s shoulder. Then water fell out of the sky in one solid sheet after another.

Laurel woke up drenched, her left heel bleeding where she’d stepped on something unfriendly. Her nightgown had gone transparent. She screamed and dropped David’s knife, jumped back from its clatter and screamed again. The storm and darkness stripped the houses of their colors, and they crowded the sky around her, the turrets looming high.

Thalia said, “Laurel, it’s me.”

Laurel’s head jerked back and forth as her eyes tried to focus. She put her arms out to catch herself, as if she were falling. Thalia tried to gather Laurel up, but she was lean as a greyhound, not built for comfort; her attempted pat felt like a slap on the slick wet skin of Laurel’s back. Laurel pushed at her, her eyes rolling as she tried to find a landmark. She saw the lights of the clubhouse as Thalia came at her again, her long arms spreading to try to take her in. Laurel turned and limp-sprinted away from her, down the road home, her arms wrapped tight around her front to keep her breasts from bouncing.

She felt the invisible eyes of a hundred imaginary neighbors on her. Was Darla St. John peering out from her darkened bedroom windows, calling Mark over to see that Laurel Hawthorne had snapped like a June pea? Was Edie’s teenage son peeking through the blinds, watching his mother’s friend hobbling through the streets in a nightgown that the rain had rendered as sheer as wet tissue? She could have cried at the injustice of it. This was Thalia’s fault! But Thalia was fully dressed in jeans, tank top, and shoes, running after a hollering, struggling, nearly naked Laurel. Thalia, who didn’t give a crap what any human on God’s green earth thought of her, looked like a Good Samaritan, arms outstretched, trying to rescue her shivering mess of a sister. Laurel, who had to face her neighbors at church and the PTA for decades yet to come, was a train wreck, calling all eyes.

Thalia yelled her name again, and Laurel stopped long enough to shush her sister. She waited, letting Thalia catch up, so at least it would no longer look like Thalia was trying to chase her down and stop her from streaking madly up Beeton Street. They walked back to the house together, quickly, in silence, both of them soaked to the skin. Once inside, Thalia stopped in the foyer, but Laurel kept walking.

“You be gone when I get up,” Laurel said without looking back, and she stalked upstairs.

David sat up as she came in, turning on his bedside lamp and blinking in the light. He stared at Laurel for a long minute, his gears grinding.

“I forgot the chain,” she said. “I took a walk.”

“I thought I set the house alarm,” he said.

Laurel turned her back and started rummaging through her dresser for fresh pajamas. She didn’t want to tattle. David didn’t notice her sister’s good visits, but he kept a running tally of the days Thalia had left Laurel exhausted or furious or crying. Angry as she was, she already knew she would make it up with Thalia; David was less forgiving when it came to injuries against her person.

“Did you turn off the alarm?” he asked, and Laurel shrugged, carrying her bundle of dry clothes toward the bathroom. She hoped he would leave things there.

“Thalia turned it off, didn’t she?” he said, making her sister’s name sound like a dirty word.

He didn’t wait for an answer. She heard him climbing out of bed and turned around in time to see him yanking the door open.

“David, no.”

Assuming he didn’t plan to either challenge Thalia to Rubik’s Cubes at dawn or strangle her, David was no match for her sister in an argument. Delivering words was Thalia’s forte, while David thought so strongly in numbers that English seemed almost his second language.

“I’m fine,” Laurel called after him. “David!”

He didn’t hear her. He’d transferred his considerable focus to the space around him, moving through it with an angry precision that boded ill for her sister. Most times David didn’t pay attention to his limbs, but he went out and down the stairs with a scything grace that was almost beautiful. She let him go. Maybe Thalia was the one who should, this time, be worried.

Laurel had finished her good cry in the shower and was in bed by the time he came back up. He was pale and winded, and his eyes were round. He had a spot of red in each cheek, about the same size and shape as his eyes. His mouth was a lipless line.

“She’ll be gone in the morning,” Laurel said, her tone apologetic.

“She’s gone now.”

That was all he said.

Three months later, Laurel felt Thalia’s absence like a lost tooth. She couldn’t stop exploring the hole, and Shelby, who thought her bohemian aunt was the ultimate in cool, was agitating hard to see her. It wasn’t unusual for Laurel and Thalia to stop speaking, but it had never gone on this long before. One night at dinner, Laurel talked around the idea of having Thalia back, and David’s usual rapt focus on her changed into a charged, unhappy silence. Laurel decided to leave him out of it. She and Shelby went to Thalia’s home turf, buying tickets for her latest production and driving to Mobile.

That night Laurel had walked out of the theater midplay, finished with Thalia. Period. Shelby was heartbroken, but Laurel was deaf to all pleas and whining on the subject. There was silence from Thalia’s camp as well. Since then they’d seen each other only at the annual Christmas sojourn to DeLop, where Mother’s presence ensured that all interactions would be muffled by a thick coat of good manners. Even when Thalia slipped in a dig, calling Laurel’s neighborhood “Stepfordianna,” Laurel took an egg from Mother’s basket and refused to notice.

But Laurel could not stop thinking of Thalia now. She imagined her striding across their backyard, her gimlet eye piercing the chaos. Thalia would grab that brisk detective by the ponytail, yank it sideways off its perfect axis, and shake her until her head bobbled loose on her neck and she explained why there was blood at the scene of a drowning.

Moreno had questioned the Hawthornes for what felt like hours, but she’d avoided telling them anything. She’d directed most of her questions at Bet and Shelby. She’d started by asking Bet if she knew why Molly would have sneaked out and visited the Hawthornes’ yard. Laurel had wanted to ask Bet that very question; Bet wasn’t charismatic enough to be a leader, but Laurel had been worried about the DeLop influence ever since the day Shelby invited her. But Bet was genuinely clueless. She’d answered with a guileless “I dun know,” then looked to Shelby. Shelby’s cheeks had pinked, just barely, and her lids had dropped.

Thalia would have taken one look at Shelby’s exhausted face, the lavender shadows under her eyes the size and shape of thumbprints, and stepped in. Stepped in hard. But Moreno’s next question seemed so innocuous. She’d lulled Laurel, following up by asking Shelby if she had planned to meet Molly, perhaps to play a trick on someone?