The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (7 page)

“Stop your nonsense, Howard, before I end up with jars and jars of creepy-crawlies in my house,” Mother had said from behind the screen door. “Come in and have cocoa before the mosquitoes eat you alive.”

“Sec, Junie,” said Daddy, and then asked Laurel and Thalia, “Do you see them?”

“No,” Laurel said, and went inside with Mother.

Thalia had said, “I see them, Daddy,” without even looking. He had smiled down at her lying face, turned up toward his, as open as a morning glory.

Standing quietly now with her hand in his, watching the rain on the pool’s surface, Laurel wanted to whisper that she had seen them, the fairies, that one time, and ask him what he was seeing as he peered into her yard.

Her yard was looking back at them with ghost eyes. Molly or Marty, she couldn’t tell, so she couldn’t ask. She never talked to Daddy about Marty. No one in her family ever did. She never so much as said his name in front of her father. Marty had raised him. Daddy had loved Marty best, and Daddy had held the gun.

“Come away,” she said to him, tugging at his hand. She didn’t want to look anymore. Perhaps Mother was right. She should pull the curtain closed and give her yard time to shift back into its normal self. It ought to.

If Moreno was gone, then Laurel wouldn’t have to invite Thalia back into her peaceful life. Surely that sharp-eyed Moreno and her CSIs would not have missed a single trick, rain or no rain. Molly had come to Laurel, led her to the window, and then drifted down to model her own body as if she were Vanna White, showing Laurel what she’d won. But perhaps she’d wanted only to be found.

Marty on his kite string was just a dream, a reaction to seeing a ghost again after all these years. She’d been seeking him, so she’d dreamed him. Her yard probably looked wrong because the floodlights had been on stands and their bases had cut into the grass. She could feel the sleepy tug of Mother’s will; she was sliding into it. She took a step back, trying to pull Daddy with her, but he stood fast.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing out into the yard.

The air got out of her in a long, soft braying ha-ha noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh; Daddy was a middle-finger pointer. Thalia used to make Daddy point when she was in junior high. When she was angry with Mother, Thalia would ask Daddy where something was, an object in plain view that was close to Mother. Then she’d waggle her eyebrows at Laurel while Daddy gave Mother her bird-by-proxy.

It was genetic, because when Shelby was a toddler, she’d pointed like that, too. Laurel would read with her in the glider rocker, and Shelby would shoot the bird at pictures of dogs and dump trucks, lisping, “Awe you my muzzah . . .” Laurel would take her hand and gently fold the naughty finger away, uncurling Shelby’s index finger from her tightly fisted hand. Now Laurel felt an urge to do the same for Daddy as he stood flipping off her yard.

Mother came up behind them. Laurel could feel her there. “What’s funny?” Mother asked.

“Nothing,” Laurel said. “They’re really gone. I’m sorry. I’ll go get dressed.”

“But what’s that?” Daddy insisted. His middle finger was aimed at the side fence that separated their backyard from the Coes’.

She looked. There was a dark spot marring the wood. It was deep and black, as if it had been there for years, part of the wood. It hadn’t.

“It’s nothing,” she said, but she did not believe it. “It’s just a knothole.” Her voice shook.

He was still pointing, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Mother pulled the curtain closed, as if cloth could keep out Marty.

“Normal day,” she said to Laurel, and gave her Cowslip’s smile.

CHAPTER 5

L
aurel was eleven years old the first time she was allowed to go hunting. It was also the last time. It was her uncle Marty’s last hunt, too.

Laurel and Thalia scuffled along the dirt road as they followed Daddy. Florida dirt was gray-brown and crumbly, but in Alabama, the dirt was black and rich as peat, staining the sides of Laurel’s pristine Keds. Thalia, a veteran, had known to wear old shoes. Marty was in front, and both men had their rifles pointing at the sky. Laurel swung a small cooler full of sandwiches and fruit. Thalia carried the drinks cooler. It was heavier.

The pine trees made the woods glow green around them even though the leaves on the hardwoods had already gone gold and orange and russet. All the morning birds were talking. It was close to dawn, and a sheer mist was making that day’s dew. Thalia was holding an imaginary cigarette with her free hand, sucking in on it and then puffing white breath into the chilled air. Laurel’s clothes felt heavy with damp, and she could smell more damp decaying the fallen leaves and needles.

Laurel had told Daddy before they left the cabin that she didn’t want to watch the deer drop, though Thalia had bagged her own first deer last year, using Daddy’s gun. Hunting was what Daddy and Marty and Thalia did together, all three of them thick into their odd pretends, whispering made-up songs, Laurel left at home with Mother to cut up carrots for the Crock-Pot and fold the towels so they had even corners. Laurel had made up her own secret song on this trip, and it was running over and over in a silent loop inside her head: “No deer, anywhere near. No deer, anywhere near.”

But they hadn’t been hiking ten minutes when a young buck stepped out into the middle of the road ahead of them. He took tiny, picking steps, and his nose was up, searching the air for the flat tang of gunmetal. They were safe downwind. He gave them his profile and his brown rib cage, a target so broad and close it seemed like something he was offering them.

Uncle Marty put his hand back, motioning them to stillness. “Yours,” he mouthed, stepping back.

Daddy began to lower the barrel of his rifle. His big voice muted to a mournful tremble, he whispered to Laurel, “Close your eyes, baby.”

Laurel kept her eyes closed even when the echoing bark of the shot made her flesh jump, her whole skin trying to leave her bones in one shuddering, fast rebellion. She heard the rustle of leaves as the deer bounded away, and Daddy saying, “Get him.”

Marty said something back, but she didn’t catch it, and then the second shot rang out. She kept her eyes closed even after she heard Thalia’s short, gulping scream.

When at last she opened them, the deer was gone, and Laurel saw Marty lying facedown in the dirt, a small hole going bloodlessly into his ruined jacket. Daddy had abandoned his gun on the dirt trail. Thalia was staring at it with shell-shocked eyes, her hands hanging limp at her sides, the drinks cooler tipped on its side by her feet. Daddy had already run to Marty and was turning him over. Low on Marty’s chest, Laurel saw the same size hole, only bloodier, going out.

Laurel heard herself talking from far away. “It went straight through,” she said to Thalia.

“Daddy says this kind of bullet doesn’t spoil the venison,” Thalia said, and then she lifted her right arm as if her hand were very heavy, pulling it up so she could jam her thumb into her mouth.

“Thalia?” Laurel’s voice came out quiet but desperate. Thalia didn’t answer. Her eyes were pointed at Laurel, but they weren’t focusing. Thalia wasn’t behind them. Thalia wasn’t home at all, and that scared Laurel more than anything.

The shots had left a smell in the air, burned oil and sulfur. Daddy put his face by Marty’s face and yelled his name over and over. Marty’s eyes were open and empty of all things.

Later, back at the borrowed cabin, Laurel and Thalia sat with blankets around them, even though Laurel wasn’t cold. The nicest deputy had put the blankets on them, as if Laurel and Thalia had been rescued from a shipwreck. Thalia’s blanket was pale blue, and she had it draped over her head like a Bible-times girl. She’d come back to live behind her eyes again, stretching them wide open, the whites showing all the way around. Her face looked stiff, like Laurel’s felt. Laurel couldn’t tell if Thalia was making her face be like Laurel’s on purpose, but she’d never heard her sister talk in such a thready voice.

Daddy told the sheriff’s men it had been an accident. He’d tripped, he said, and the gun had gone off. When it came their turn to talk, Thalia backed him up.

“Daddy shot at a deer, bang, and it ran,” she told them. “Uncle Marty ran after it, and Daddy ran after Uncle Marty. Daddy fell. I heard it go bang again, and then Uncle Marty was on the ground.”

Laurel turned to stare at her sister. She’d seen Thalia act. Thalia was born acting. But she’d never seen her lie so poorly. She thought that this was what it might look like if Thalia tried plain lying as herself and wasn’t good at it. Thalia’s throat worked, swallowing.

“Where were you?” the deputy asked Laurel.

“My stupid sister had her eyes closed,” Thalia answered. She spoke before Laurel could even get the sticky hinge of her jaw to open. There, Thalia had sounded sharper, more like herself, but then her voice went sweet and bland as whole-milk pudding, and she said, “Laurel? Come and have some lunch.”

Laurel jumped. Mother’s knuckles made a decorous ratty-tat-tat against the door. “Did you hear me?”

Laurel sat in her workroom, her latest quilt spread out on the table in front of her. Having a normal day.

It was a large room behind the kitchen, painted cream and accented with warm brown and caramel. Nothing pulled the eye. A chocolate leather office chair sat in front of Sylvia, Laurel’s Bernina. She moved it over on the rare occasions when she wanted to work with her dear old Singer. There was a matching chair, ratcheted up higher, for the table where Laurel did all her cutting and embellishing. The side wall was covered with built-in cabinets where the bulk of Laurel’s fabric stash was stored. The quiet room was usually filled with Laurel’s presence and her work, but today she felt as neutral as its off-white walls, as blank, as easily overwhelmed, by anything with color.

“Did Shelby come downstairs?” she called through the door.

“I’m letting the girls take their plates to the rec room,” Mother said. “They want to finish their movie.”

“You and Daddy go ahead without me,” Laurel said.

“Laurel,” Mother called through the door, drawing out the middle vowel, long and reproachful.

“I mostly miss lunch when I’m working,” Laurel said. Snapped, almost. “That’s normal when I’m working.”

She could feel her mother’s hovering presence through the wooden door. She waited it out, and at last Mother’s heels clicky-clacked away in an odd echo of her knocking.

Laurel had showered as Mother had told her to, then gotten dressed in soft jeans and a jersey pullover, combing her damp hair back in a ponytail. Mother had told her to use the time before Bet and Shelby finished getting dressed to call Sissi Clemmens, so she’d sat at her built-in phone desk in the breakfast nook and dialed. Sissi had not answered, and she didn’t have voice mail. Mother had told Laurel to try again later, so she would try again later. Mother had told her to do what she would normally do, so here she sat, a good, good dog, embellishing the figure of the bride in the center of her latest quilt.

The bride’s eyes were bright crescents, and she had smile lines embroidered in her cheeks, but she had no mouth yet. Laurel was hand-sewing slim red satin ribbon into rosebuds. They would form the bride’s lips, a grinning, three-dimensional bouquet. The bride lifted the inverted bell of her skirt as she hurried forward pell-mell, showing boots with daisies on the toes. Her feet were huge and her head was very small, as if someone were looking up at her from the ground.

Laurel had already glued down lumpy oval potato pearls to make the daisies’ petals, binding them with silver wire after they dried. The boots were the old-fashioned kind that buttoned up the sides, and the buttons on the front boot could be opened. Under the boot was a dark blue space deepened by plush velvet. Inside, Laurel had embroidered one of the eyes that served as her signature. The eye was looking toward one odd petal, too sleek and pointed for a freshwater pearl. It was a human tooth, an incisor.

When she’d first planned this quilt a year ago, she’d thought she would use one of Shelby’s baby teeth. She kept them all upstairs in the false bottom of her jewelry chest. That small space was reserved for relics and remembrances that she’d imagined as the starting place for quilts she’d never sewn: an amber doll’s eye, a broken plastic Christmas bulb, a mouse charm from an old bracelet.

But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to give up even one of Shelby’s baby teeth for a quilt she planned to show and sell. They were too precious, these ivory mementos of Shelby at six, flashing a pink-gummed, gappy grin.

Laurel had put off the bride quilt, making others until she stumbled on a stash of teeth in an old bureau drawer at an estate sale. She didn’t think they were for sale, or even there on purpose, so she bought the ugliest bureau she’d ever laid eyes on to get the teeth secreted inside.

The bride was already quilted in patterns that seemed random on the front but made pictures and letters and more of her eyes that showed up perfectly on the hand-dyed cotton she’d used to back. The quilt was bound in yellowed satin cut from a musty old wedding gown, another estate-sale find.

She wanted to enter this piece in the Pacific International Quilt Festival at the end of the month. She’d won first prize in Innovative Quilts last year, but this year she was gunning for Best in Show. Or she had been. It seemed stupid now. The mouthless bride leaned forward, eager, like she might step at any second into some big adventure in her high-buttoned boots. Laurel couldn’t remember what had made her feel a connection to this piece in the first place.

The one picture Laurel had from her own wedding was a Polaroid taken by the clerk of the court. In it, David’s chin was set and his brows were down, like he was planning to grab Mount Everest with his bare hands and pull himself straight up it. His father had taken a long walk when David was five, and in the wedding picture, it was plain that David had already decided he would never be that guy. Laurel looked trembly and puffy-eyed, Shelby faintly pushing out the skirt of her best blue Sunday dress.

Her busy fingers made red rosebuds one after another, doing their regular job on the regular day she’d been told to have. She wanted to believe it was over, but she couldn’t catch her breath. The investigation might have ended, but it didn’t feel finished.

She ought to be relieved that the policewoman would not be back to prod at Shelby. Instead, she felt an odd, strong urge to call the police back in. To lie. To say she’d seen Stan Webelow for certain, not his possible hair. They would find out if the moving shadow she’d seen by the pool had been a ghost, a dream, or something real and worse. They’d make sure Shelby was hiding nothing more than a silly girl plan gone awry. Then she’d know Shelby was safe.

Shelby seemed so closed, so soaked in guilt, sheltering herself near Bet Clemmens as if Bet were a wall, asking Bet to back her up when Laurel knew damn well her daughter was lying. If Shelby had planned to meet Molly or even Stan, had failed Molly in some way, was somehow culpable . . . It wasn’t possible. Laurel would never believe it. But if Laurel could conceive it, consider it even for a second, Moreno could, too. Did Laurel really want to bring that woman’s cold, assessing gaze back to her daughter?

Mother had told her to let everything be normal. Go to the funeral. Say goodbye. Grieve. Move on. But her house did not feel normal. It was silent and too large around her, as if it had been hollowed out. The wrongness in her yard had its nose pressed against her glass doors, and she felt something small and feral scrabbling in her belly. Every time she thought she’d lose herself in her work, the something would run one spiky tooth along her stomach lining. It was too quiet, as if Daddy had herded everyone together and they had crept out of the house and driven away, leaving Laurel alone with her ghosts.

She set down a finished rosebud and leaned over to press the listen button on the intercom system. She could hear the faint sounds of
Billy Elliot,
dancing his skinny guts out up in the rec room, but Shelby and Bet weren’t talking. She supposed Mother and Daddy were eating in the dining room, where the intercom system had no receiver. The closest one was around the corner in the entryway. Laurel’s kitchen table could fit a cozy six, but Mother preferred the pecan table in Laurel’s formal dining room. She’d perch at the foot and survey the gorgeous antique china displayed in the built-ins. David’s mother had given that china to them after Shelby came. A belated wedding present, even though—as she’d pointed out several thousand times—five minutes with a justice of the peace was hardly a wedding.

Laurel turned the volume on the intercom all the way up and caught the faint clatter of silver and Daddy buzzing air out his teeth, a sound he made between bites of food that really pleased him. The house ached with a grating silence. Laurel wasn’t the only one bothered by the quiet; her daddy needed voices around him. He turned on a TV or talk radio in every room he walked through.

The intercom system had a radio, and Laurel flipped it on. It was already set to a jazz station. Daddy liked jazz and would be happier with background noise, though if he and Mother were to talk, she wouldn’t hear, and the music couldn’t take the hollow taste out of the air.

She started laying the roses out on the bride’s face, shaping them into lips. When she sewed them on, she’d bunch them tight against one another. For now she wanted to get an idea of the mouth’s shape. She made the smile wide enough to show teeth and tongue. She’d have to fill that space.

There was a tap on the office door. “Laurel?” Mother was back, as if summoned by jazz.

Laurel swiveled in her chair and rolled herself across the tile, close enough to the door to crack it open without rising. “You said normal day. I’m normally trying to do my normal work,” she said. Her voice came out louder then she’d meant it to.