The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (5 page)

“I mean it,” she said.

He gaped at her and said, “Have you met Thalia?” He leaned toward Laurel, bracing his elbows on his knees, long hands dangling, oblivious as his plane hurtled down and crashed behind him. Laurel heard the faint rumble of the impact and explosion. “You can’t be serious,” he added.

“I am, though. This isn’t a regular day. This is the kind of day Thalia is good at.”

It was true. Thalia didn’t fit inside the hours set aside for lawn mowing and trips to the grocery. She chafed against their edges, pushed until she burst their seams and ruined them.

David touched the pads of his fingers to his forehead. He sat up and dropped his hand, then pressed his forehead again, as if he had something stuck up there and was pushing at it, trying to manually make it drop down and come out of his mouth. At last he said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“That detective. Moreno. She barely asked us anything, and she treated Shelby like a perp on
Law and Order,
bad-copping her. We sat there and let her.”

“You think Thalia would have stopped her?”

“Yes,” Laurel said.

No hesitation. After all, it had worked that way before. Daddy had shot Marty, and after, in the bitter dregs of that long day, Thalia had done all the talking. When the deputy had turned to question Laurel, Thalia had taken her thumb out of her mouth and said, “My dumbass sister had her eyes shut. She’s scared of guns. She’s probably scared of deer.”

Laurel hardly had to say a thing after that.

Now Laurel said, “That detective kept saying we had to answer her questions first, but then there never was a turn for us to ask anything. Molly Dufresne is dead, and Moreno is treating Shelby like a criminal. Thalia would make her stop. She’d make Moreno tell us what’s going on. Thalia would—”

“Thalia isn’t magic,” David interrupted.

Laurel had to bite the inside of her lip because she was about to ask him how he knew. There was a tiny piece of her that still believed her big sister had taken Super Glue and put that shattered snail right back together. Maybe he had gone creeping off the garden to live out his life, eating moss and making more snails.

David said, “They’ll tell us what’s going on when they know.”

Laurel didn’t believe that. On the monitor, the game reset, the plane’s windscreen repaired, the controls restored. The view showed a red dirt runway that bisected a grassy field.

Laurel said, “What
was
Molly doing in our yard? After midnight? All by herself? That’s not like her.”

“It’s not?” he said.

“Of course not,” Laurel said. “What do you remember about Molly? As a person?”

He thought for a moment, his forehead creasing. “She was blond?” he said. “And not loud.”

“That was the wrong question. Never mind. Molly wasn’t a leader in that dance gang of Shelby’s. She did whatever Shelby did. I’m not saying she wouldn’t sneak out to TP a house or maybe even meet a boy, but she wouldn’t do it alone.” Laurel remembered the drowned girl’s ghost landing beside the pool, changing into a moving shadow that faded into the darkness as Laurel’s gaze found Molly in her pool. “What if someone else was there, David? I think I saw someone moving in our yard when I was looking out the window.”

He shook his head. “You were sleepwalking. You could have seen dancing trees. It wouldn’t mean our pines were sentient.”

“There’s more, though. After, when we were walking over to Simon and Mindy Coe’s, I thought I saw Stan Webelow. He was standing in the Deerbolds’ yard.”

“The creepy guy who lives all the way down Queen’s Court? Are you sure?”

“No,” Laurel said. “I only saw curly hair.”

David thought about it. “Rex Deerbold has curly hair.”

“It wasn’t curly like that. Anyway, I think Trish said it was a travel week for him.”

“Wait. Why didn’t you tell that detective?”

Laurel lifted her hands and said, “I don’t know. She didn’t ask who was in the cul-de-sac, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly. All she wanted to do was pry at Shelby.”

The screen saver came up, fish swimming peacefully in an aquarium.

“You have to tell the police,” David said.

“Tell them what? I saw suspicious hair? I was sleepwalking, and there was a shadow that might have been a dream or a fox or a . . .” She stopped before she said the word. Ghost. David knew the name of her every childhood hamster, every boy she’d kissed, every favorite teacher. But she’d never told him that her dead uncle Marty used to visit her at night.

She hadn’t known David very well when they’d married, and since that day, Marty had not come. Not once. Of course, David had heard her family mention Marty’s name. He knew that her daddy had been raised by his older brother and that Marty had died in a hunting accident. But that was all.

At some point early in their marriage, she began to believe that to talk about dead Marty would be to make him real for David, too, to reinvite him, perhaps to reinvent him. So she had tucked all thoughts of him deep away. She slept curled against her husband’s long back with her face buried in the warm corner made by the mattress and his side, and Marty could not penetrate the high, hard wall of David’s rationalism. David did not know her ghost, and she couldn’t explain it to him. He wouldn’t understand; he had never even set foot inside DeLop.

These things were connected; even though Marty had been Daddy’s family, Laurel could see him because of Mother’s people.

Laurel had a cousin just her age who had claimed to see ghosts, too. When he and Laurel were seventeen, he’d “gone all the way to odd,” as Aunt Enid put it, by which she meant he stopped talking and had to be fed by hand. He sat in a rocking chair drooling his days away. Every now and again, he’d stand up and whirl in frenzied circles and then lope back and forth across the room, grabbing and smashing anything he could touch. His daddy or his brother would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until he went limp and could be propped back in his chair. Then he had burned down Uncle Petey-Boy’s shed and gotten arrested. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a state home instead of prison. Petey-Boy had said, “I coulda tol’ them he was ass-rat crazy a year ago and stilla had my shed.”

Laurel had her own diagnosis; her cousin had gone with the ghosts when they wanted to show him things. He had looked too long, was all.

Her great-aunt Moff still read cards for The Folks, and she was spooky-right when she laid them. Hearts for love, diamonds for money, clubs for family and friends, and spades for death. Moff left the ace of spades out of her deck because, she said, “If I dun, that ace drops ever’ time I lay. Shitfire, I dun need uh ace to tell that we’re all gonna die.”

In DeLop, death came sooner rather than later. People who were born there tended to stay there. People who stayed died young and angry. No health insurance, so cancer, when it came, ate them. Too many drugs around too many guns. No jobs, restless young men with knives, drinking in small packs. The walls of the rattletrap houses were soaked in ghosts, all with things to show, all wanting to be seen. They eased into the genes.

David had never seen anything like DeLop. He’d spent his childhood in affluent Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and he probably thought Laurel had grown up poor because her parents’ house had only two small bathrooms and Mother believed Hamburger Helper and a salad was a nice family meal.

If David understood people, she could take his hand, lead him upstairs, and show him a piece of DeLop lying with eyes open, wide and dry, in the small guest bedroom. But people were one of her jobs, like balancing the checkbook was one of his. He couldn’t extrapolate DeLop by looking at Bet Clemmens. Without DeLop, Laurel couldn’t tell him about her ghosts, even though she’d been looking for Marty from the moment the drowned girl had appeared in her room.

A woman’s voice came through the speakers that sat on either side of David’s monitor. “Dave? Are you back yet?”

He turned his chair toward the keyboard and pushed that button again. “I need a few more minutes,” he said into the air.

The voice said, “Okay. I’m going to go make a fresh pot of coffee. I’ll yell when I’m back.”

David swiveled back to face Laurel.

“Someone is talking in your computer,” Laurel said.

“Yeah. That’s Kaitlyn Reese, the coder from Richmond Games.”

“In San Francisco?” Laurel said.

“Yeah. She’s there this week. We’re in TeamSpeak.” At Laurel’s baffled look, he explained, “It’s a voice-over IP application. Gamers use it to coordinate attacks.”

“The San Francisco people call you Dave?” Laurel asked. He shrugged, waving away the question. If they were calling him Dave, he hadn’t noticed. “Can she hear us?”

“Only when I hold down the tilde key.”

“That’s so strange. If we lived in California, I’d be married to someone named Dave,” Laurel said. San Francisco sounded crisply green and temperate, like a place where she’d have fruit trees in a tiny yard with no pool. Her head hurt. “It must be three
A.M.
there. Did you wake her up?”

David blew air out between his teeth, a quick, dismissive exhale. “She was up. She’s a coder.” He said it as if coders were some strange species of space camel that could walk through an airless desert of ones and zeros for days without water or sleep.

“Coffee’s on,” said the woman’s voice. “Dave? Hello? We’ve got to demo these dogfights this week.”

“Go ahead,” Laurel said. “We can talk about it when you’ve finished.”

Still he didn’t turn away. “I can’t take Thalia here,” he said. “Not right now. It’s too many things. There’s too many things already.”

She nodded. “I know it’s a bad time. It was an awful night, and this week is huge for you at work. But I need help.”

“I’ll help you,” he said. He sounded matter-of-fact, as if not helping her had never been a possibility.

“How?” she said.

“I don’t know. I need to think about what you said. But I will think. And then I’ll help you or get you help. Trust me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, but even to her, she sounded uncertain.

He leaned in closer and held his rough cheek against hers, turning his face to press his nose into her neck. If he was sniff-testing her for truth, then she passed. He leaned back, pushing with his feet to roll his chair toward his desk, and she had the sense of him moving again, that same underwater feeling; she was drifting down, and he was walking away. She caught his leg before he could swivel. Laurel looked down at her hand on his knee. Washed clean.

“Baby,” he said, “you need to rest. I’ll figure out what to do. Lie down, okay?”

There was an old quilt that Laurel had thrown over the back of the futon, three rows of identical Sunbonnet Sues watering flowers in a nine-patch garden. Mother had made it with her when she was a girl, teaching her to sew. Laurel put her head down on one of the throw pillows, and David pulled Mother’s quilt up around her. Then he turned back to his monitor. He put on a headset and turned off his speakers, so she could no longer hear the shooting or the whoosh of the planes or the voice of the woman all the way across the country.

She lay quietly, listening to him telling the woman to bank left, to try upping the difficulty level, to switch to keyboard controls. The whole night felt like it had happened in pieces, so she was left with scraps, their edges shredded so she could not fit them into a seamless whole. She was sinking again, and still his voice went on, only this time it was sinking with her. He’d said he would think about it. Maybe he’d realize they needed Thalia after all. Through the thin film of her sleep, she heard it happening.

He was saying, “Sorry to wake you, but I do think you should come. Laurel needs you.”

It was a warm invitation, issued in a tone she hadn’t heard him use with her sister in years. Maybe not ever. Laurel found herself relaxing into a deep and peaceful darkness.

Thalia was on the way.

CHAPTER 4

L
aurel dreamed her parents’ house, half an hour away in Pace. It was in the center of the block, on a busy street lined with brick ranches that squatted low under the wind. The rain was falling, and Marty’s ghost stood by the porch, lurking in the faint gray-on-gray shadows of a drizzling sunrise.

Marty tied his tether to her father’s bumper, and then Laurel’s parents were on the move. As their car pulled out, the warm backwash of air pushed Marty high, sent him rising up until the identical black slate roofs camouflaged the one that had been his. The small yards were brown with summer grass, perfectly square and all the same. The Buick towed Marty like a pale kite on an endless string toward Laurel’s house in Pensacola.

The gargoyles in the eaves saw him coming, and the weathervane spun as he passed over. The Buick pulled in to the driveway, and Marty drifted down to settle by the backyard fence. He found himself a knothole in the wood and oozed inside it, seeping down into the buried part of the post until he was an abscess at the root of it.

He’d come to stay.

Laurel woke to the sound of her mother’s low heels tapping across the hardwood floors above. The pleasant hum of Mother’s voice drifted down the stairs. Laurel couldn’t make out the words, but already the house felt blanketed, cozy with decorum.

She sat bolt upright, saying, “David, you didn’t!”

But David was gone. There was a note duct-taped to the backside of his leather chair that said,
Had to get file from office. Back ASAP.

He’d promised he would help her, and she’d heard him make that call. To Mother? She was dizzy with disbelief. She put her hands down flat on either side of her, pressing into the worn cloth cover, and tried to calm her ragged breathing. Mother and Thalia were not the same thing. Not even close. Even David should know that. When she watched her mother and sister exchange their ritual stiff kiss at Christmas, Laurel always held her breath, waiting to see if matter touching antimatter really would make the universe explode.

Then Laurel heard her daddy say, “Water can call a person.”

Of course, Daddy was here, too. Whither Mother went, there Daddy was also. There was no mistaking the sound of his voice. It had a single blaring timbre, large and low. He dredged words up from the bottom of his narrow tube of a chest and sent them on a side trip through his nose before releasing them.

Daddy’s voice came from up the stairs in the keeping room, and Mother answered him. Laurel recognized her tone, sharpness coated with sweet indulgence, designed especially to pull Howard Gray down off flights of fancy.

When Mother’s voice stopped, Daddy said, “That’s how stories about mermaids and sirens got started, Junie. Sailors know.”

Mother must have passed close by the stairs, because Laurel heard her clearly. “I’ll put that on my to-do list for today. Ask some sailors how mermaids got invented . . .”

Her parents’ voices went back and forth, peppering the house with their own odd music. It was the soothing lullaby of Laurel’s childhood, Daddy’s trumpet blaring between long refrains on Mother’s sweet viola, but Laurel didn’t want to be soothed this morning. She had to be sharp. If Mother was David’s idea of help, then she was truly on her own.

She got up, running her hands through her hair, trying to smooth it. She wished she weren’t wearing silly green pajamas with pink umbrellas on them. She’d borrowed them from tiny Mindy Coe, and the bottoms fit her like capri pants, the loose hems flapping around her calves. She wished she had a toothbrush in the downstairs bathroom, and slim black pants to put on with her sleekest deep blue sweater. Even a hairbrush would help. Mother’s hair would be immaculate, her clothes pressed, and her shoes would match her handbag.

Worse, Mother had come to Laurel’s house blindly bearing more than familial support. She’d brought Marty, sailing him effortlessly over the gate that had kept him out for thirteen years. Laurel couldn’t even yell at her. Ghosts, like family squabbles, bad manners, and other people’s dirty houses, rendered Mother oblivious. She flat refused to see them, although she was the one who had come out of DeLop, a town so haunted that every tin shed and ’fraidy hole housed its own dark spirit.

Long before Uncle Marty began visiting, before he died, even, Mother unwittingly introduced Laurel to her first ghost: Uncle Poot’s foot.

Poot lived in DeLop with his common-law wife, Enid, his “no-account” brother, and two grandbabies whom his daughter had abandoned. She’d peeled them off her body and dropped them at Poot’s like they were laundry the year that Laurel turned six. The babies added his house to Mother’s Christmas route.

Poot was a spindly man with a big belly and a tittery laugh that made him sound like a girl hyena. He was sprawled on a cot in the den of his two-bedroom tract home. He’d angled the cot on the downslope of the sagging floor, so he could see the TV over his belly without having to sit up too much. His stump had been sticking out from under his blanket, covered by a thin and graying sock.

The foot was gone, but Laurel could still see the foot.

Not when she looked directly. But if she looked away, there was the foot in her peripheral vision, with an old man’s yellowed toenails and calluses as thick as horn. The foot twitched from side to side as if it were listening to polka music. It was the happiest part of Poot, and Laurel couldn’t blame it; it had escaped him. For months after that first visit, the sour smell of Poot and his cot and the dirty sock with no foot in it, the ghost foot bobbing cheerfully in the corner of her eye, woke her up screaming.

From then on, Christmas by Christmas, up until the year she turned ten, Mother smiled and nodded and passed out presents, unseeing, while Laurel and Thalia watched their uncle Poot get eaten.

The next year, when Daddy pulled up in front of Poot’s house and shut off the engine, Laurel hung back in the car with him. Daddy was more than willing to drive them all over DeLop, but he never went inside.

Laurel whispered, “Can I stay here with you, Daddy? For this one house?”

He didn’t hear her. His bird eyes had already focused sharply on something invisible floating three feet above the solid roof of the car. “Visiting sprites in Daddy-land,” Thalia called it.

Mother, arms already full of bags, bumped at the window with her elbow and called, “Laurel, come on now,” through the glass.

The three of them picked a path through Poot’s rocky yard, toe-stepping from one tip-tilty slide of gravel to the next: Mother, then Thalia, Laurel trailing behind. Aunt Enid had the door open before Mother knocked. Once inside, Laurel saw that the whole lower half of Poot’s leg was gone, even the knee. Uncle Poot had his new, higher stump right there in plain sight, as if he were giving it an airing. It was a knob-shaped object with dry skin webbing the tip and curling off in little peels. Underneath the skin he was sloughing, the flesh looked waxy and wattled.

The stump had a long, curved scar on the end, and Thalia whispered, “Holy goats. It’s
smiling
at us.”

It was. Laurel couldn’t look away. Part of her didn’t want to, because she didn’t want to see if the ghost foot had been joined by a ghost calf. Would it be attached? Or a separate entity? It was all she could do to keep her eyes from squinching shut entirely, but Mother looked Poot right in his face and said, “Merry Christmas, Uncle,” in a firm voice, unmindful that another goodly chunk of Poot had left the building.

Laurel turned her back and found herself facing the broken end table with Poot’s glass Christmas tree on it. The tree was hollow, and it had an electrical cord, so the cheap bulbs dotting its surface had probably worked at one time. An undisturbed layer of grime coated its green glass spikes, testifying that no one had moved it in years. Laurel snaked one hand out and pulled a red bulb from its socket, curling her fist around it, tight, tight, not looking.

The next year, Poot’s other foot was gone, too, and the following year, the remaining leg joined it. A scant year later, Poot, his phantom foot, and even his sour cot had been taken away.

Mother told Enid, “I was sorry to hear of your loss.”

Aunt Enid answered, “Yeah. I tol’ Poot that the sugar diabetes would get him in the end if he didn’t stop with the drinkin’. But he kept him a bottle of—”

“Please pass on my condolences to Doodle,” Mother interrupted. Doodle was the no-account brother.

Nothing more was said.

Back at home, Laurel asked Thalia, “Do you think Mother’s sad that Uncle Poot is gone?”

Laurel was plaiting a hundred tiny braids all over Thalia’s head. When she finished, Thalia would wet her hair down in the sink and sleep on it, and in the morning, she’d take out the braids and have the Pace, Florida, girl’s version of a hundred-dollar spiral perm.

“Are
you
sad?” Thalia asked, incredulous.

“No,” said Laurel. “But Mother might be.” Poot had let Mother sleep on his couch and had fed her some after her mama passed out holding a cigarette and burned herself up.

Thalia snorted. “Mother doesn’t even know he’s dead.”

“Oh, come on, Thalia. She can’t say condolences and not know Uncle Poot’s dead.”

“Sure she can.” Thalia shook Laurel’s hands out of her hair and crossed the room to her bookshelf. She ran her fingers across the spines of her paperbacks and then pulled one out and passed it to Laurel. It was
Watership Down.
“Mother is Cowslip,” Thalia said.

It was a thick book, intimidating, but Laurel had to know what Thalia meant, and once she’d begun it, she couldn’t put it down. Cowslip turned out to be a fat healthy rabbit in a warren of equally fat and healthy rabbits. Laurel thought the whole bunch of them were smug. They had things the regular rabbits didn’t have: feasts and poetry and art. But she ended up feeling sorry for Cowslip. The feasts, the poems, all turned out to be distractions. A farmer was putting out the food and, every now and again, setting a trap and having rabbit supper. Underneath, Cowslip knew, but he loved his peaceful life. So he willfully stopped knowing, and he made every other rabbit in the warren stop knowing, too. Laurel read that part of the book with a faint shock of recognition.

Thalia was right: Mother was Cowslip.

From then on, Thalia used it as a verb, whispering “She’s Cowslipping” whenever they saw their mother’s face blank itself, her closed lips stretching into a wide smile, quelling whole rooms into submission with her mighty blindness and her will.

And this was the person David had called in to help her. Laurel buried her head in her hands. There had been a day, just one, when Mother had taken a stand for Laurel, but she’d done it covertly, in her own sly way. Mother would not want to hear that Molly Dufresne had walked through walls to visit Laurel’s bedroom. She would not be interested in getting Thalia to come over and soak that detective in words, then twist her and wring out answers. She wouldn’t want Laurel to run around asking her neighbors if they could confirm the presence of a pervert lurking on the Deerbolds’ lawn last night, and Laurel could not remember a single time in her life when she’d pitted herself against her mother’s love of decorum and won.

Still wishing for a toothbrush, Laurel squared her shoulders and went on upstairs.

Shelby and Bet Clemmens sat side by side on the sofa, watching a movie. Shelby’s mouth was turned down, and her eyes were tired. She had her feet tucked up and her arms looped around her legs, as closed up as a shoe box full of secrets in the very corner of the sofa. Bet slumped beside her, looking like Bet. Someone—Laurel’s money was on Mother—had closed the drape over the glass doors, and Daddy was standing at the end, peering out at the backyard through a narrow crack. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Morning, sugar,” as Laurel came up.

Laurel’s scrawny daddy looked like he never got fed enough when he was growing. He had a body that wanted to be strapping, but it had failed and dwindled on him. His arms, ropy with muscle and dark veins, were too long, and his head and hands were too big. He turned his head away to peer out again.

“Sweetie,” Mother said, and came immediately to give Laurel a decorous peck on the cheek. “What an awful night you’ve had. Would you like coffee? Or an egg? I’m making lunch soon, but you could have an egg.”

“Just coffee,” Laurel said.

“Come away from there, Howard,” Mother said. Her tart, fond tone was back. “And no more about mermaids or the water calling people. It’s morbid.” She sailed off toward the kitchen to get Laurel’s coffee. Daddy stayed where he was.

“There was a detective. Moreno—” Laurel said. Daddy was nodding. “Is she still out there with them?”

He shook his head without turning around.

Fine. Maybe she could get Mother out of here before Moreno came back.

Shelby was walled in between Bet Clemmens and the sofa’s arm. Laurel went and squatted on her haunches in front of her.

Bet leaned sideways, her eyes glued to the TV.

“Whatcha watching?” Laurel asked.

“Nothing, now,” Shelby said. Laurel was blocking her view.

“That boy there wants to ballet-dance, I think,” Bet said, pointing. “I can’t hardly understand a word he says.”

“It’s
Billy Elliot,
” Shelby said.

She’d ordered it and
October Sky
from Netflix specifically for Bet’s visit, as if the films would help her feel more at home. In Shelby’s head, DeLop was probably as cinematic as the mining towns in those movies. She’d never seen the real DeLop, and Laurel’s descriptions had been soft, to say the least.

“As soft as Dairy Queen cones, and just as fucking ersatz, Jesus Bug,” Thalia had scoffed once. She’d overheard Laurel telling Shel how much her cousins had enjoyed the Tinker Toys. Thalia had amused herself by taking Laurel’s gentling even further, telling Shelby long made-up stories set in a picturesque DeLop, one eyebrow cocked ironically at Laurel.

Thalia had peopled her purely fictional small town with big-eyed, delectably shabby orphans pulled straight out of velvet paintings from the seventies. They were watched over by Dear Old Aunt Enid, who, in Thalia’s version, possessed both teeth and a kind spirit. Enid lined the orphans up in clean, well- mannered rows to get their packages each Christmas. “Oh, please, convey our deepest thanks to Shelby,” Thalia’s orphans warbled, tears moistening the red ribbons Shelby had curled with a pair of blunt-tipped scissors left over from her grade-school days.