The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (8 page)

“I only came to see if you want me to bring you a plate. It’s hot chicken salad, and it’s getting stone cold.”

“I can microwave it later.”

“All right,” Mother said, but she’d eased forward, insinuating herself into the door’s rightful space so Laurel couldn’t close it. “Did you call Sissi Clemmens again?”

“I tried her not an hour ago.”

“You have to keep trying. You have to catch her when she’s home. And awake. And . . . taking calls.” She meant when Sissi wasn’t high. It was a narrow window. “I’m not sure Bet Clemmens is a good influence to have around Shelby right now.”

Laurel blinked. Bet Clemmens couldn’t influence the butter from one side of the table to another, much less have an impact on a small force of nature like Shelby. If anything, the influence ran the other way—Bet chose the kind of jeans Shelby liked at American Eagle Outfitters and agreed to try foods that she saw Shelby eating. Until last summer, Bet had never tasted lettuce that wasn’t iceberg.

“Bet Clemmens says strange things sometimes,” Laurel said. “She’s certainly a novelty, but Shelby doesn’t find her glamorous.”

“This is a time when Shelby might be more easily influenced than usual,” Mother said. “She’s been glued to that girl’s side ever since I got here.”

“I’ll try Sissi again,” Laurel said. She could hear impatience in her own voice, and yet her mother stayed.

“We’re still having lunch day after tomorrow. Yes?” Mother said.

Laurel had forgotten. She took Mother out to lunch, just the two of them, once or twice a month. Someplace fancy, and Laurel had already made reservations.

“I guess. Unless I’m taking Bet home. Or unless Shelby wants me.”

“Wonderful,” Mother said. “I’ll come here before. Daddy can spend a little time with Shelby, or he and I can both stay with her if you get ahold of Sissi. Shelby shouldn’t be alone right now.”

Just talking about Bet, Laurel could hear the DeLop creeping into Mother’s inflections. “Ahold” was not a typical part of Mother’s vocabulary, and perhaps her desire to remove Bet had nothing to do with the girl’s influence on Shelby.

“That’s fine. Mother, I’m trying to work.”

Mother stepped farther into the room and looked down at the quilt. She reached down and touched the rose mouth with one careful finger. “Why, that’s pretty, Laurel. I like that.”

“Really?” Laurel said, faintly surprised.

Mother didn’t like Laurel’s quilts, taking umbrage at the lift-the-flaps and hidden panels and found objects. Laurel had once made the mistake of asking her mother’s opinion on a mermaid quilt she was particularly proud of. Mother had eyeballed the broken bits of shell and pursed her lips up and said, “Why stick all that mess on? It’s not comfy.” She seemed to think the value of the work rested on how cozy she’d feel if she wrapped it around her legs while she was knitting.

Thalia hadn’t liked that quilt, either, for the opposite reason. “You’ve hidden everything that’s at all interesting down in secret pockets until it looks like a freakin’ blanket. Grow a pair. Drag out those dead sailors,” she’d said.

Laurel had sent it off to one of the galleries that showed her work anyway. It had sold in under a week for twelve thousand dollars, so someone must have liked it.

“I’ll let you get on with it,” Mother said, stepping back. She pulled the door closed.

Laurel looked at the bride with fresh eyes. With the rosebud smile and the flap in the boot safely buttoned shut, it did look like a nice blanket.

Last year she’d entered an older piece called
Eye Bones
. It had multiple layers that could be unfolded and attached by hooks and Velcro tabs and buttons, so what was hidden and what was seen were changeable. No matter how it was arranged, the face of the woman at the center could never be symmetrical or whole. It was one of her more disturbing pieces. She almost didn’t like it, although David had not been troubled by it. But he liked everything she did, more because it was hers than because of a personal aesthetic. David didn’t have one of those.

It was more telling that Thalia had said she almost liked
Eye Bones
. This year Laurel had tried to pull back, but if Mother liked it, she might have pulled back a bit too far, all the way to
Sunbonnet Sue Gets Married
.

She dashed an angry hand across the bride’s face, and the loose rosebuds scattered, flecking the dress in red. She stood to pick them back off, but the small splashes of red were both diffused and intensified by being scattered across the cream and gold and white.

It was interesting. This bride had secrets. With the mouth gone, only the shape of the eyes told the viewer she was smiling, and the invisible lips drew themselves in smug. There was an implied urge to search her, to find her out. Laurel stopped picking the rosebuds off and started moving them, repositioning them in random spots of color on the bride’s hands, spattering up her arms almost to the elbows.

She snipped off a couple of lengths of scarlet ribbon, then twisted them and pinned them into streaks of vivid color, running down the bride’s forearms. She stepped back and gazed down at the quilt for a long time.

It was exactly right.

It wasn’t what she’d intended when she first began, but the displacement of the roses had reconnected her with the quilt. It was right for right now. Looking at her bride’s soiled hands, Laurel was finished. She knew it the way she knew most things, down in her chest, not up in a tumble of wordy thinking.

She could do what Mother wanted, spackle this day over with normalcy and pile a host of other days on top of it, one by one, until the surface of her life was whole and seamless. But if Shelby had a secret, no matter how innocent, would she be spackling over a wound that should be aired? Beneath the pretty surface, a secret might eat at her child, fester and rot her and ruin her. Laurel would be complicit in her ruining. Worse, what if it
had
been Stan Webelow’s hair that night? Surely the police could unearth the truth. But Laurel didn’t want Moreno back here vivisecting her child.

She wanted Thalia. Needed her. She had needed her from the beginning.

David had said he would help, but his version of help had been bringing in Mother. Now Mother was grinding her down. By the time Mother left, David would be home, earnestly helping in all the wrong ways, not wanting Thalia back to stir around in the corners of their life. Laurel would forget what she knew in this moment, so true it felt like it was a glowing hole in her center.

She knew things best when she was quilting. In this room, she didn’t follow patterns to please Mother, or let everything ugly out to eat up the image to please Thalia, or worry that David wouldn’t like it, which would be tantamount to his not liking her. The bride was right. She knew it. Inside these walls, that ended it.

Here in her quiet room, Laurel knew what was right for Shelby, too, and she understood what Molly had come to ask her to do. Molly hadn’t really wanted Laurel, and she certainly had not come hoping for a path to Laurel’s mother. Laurel looked at the phone. Fearless Thalia, the seeker, the digger, who looked at things hard and bald enough to learn them and become them, was only eleven numbers away.

Laurel reached for the phone before Mother could knock again, or before yet another neighbor or friend from church called, offering sorries and support and tying up the line.

The phone rang twice in Mobile, but Thalia didn’t answer. Her husband did: “Spotted Dog Theater.” Gary had a deep voice, rich and smooth, as if his throat had been coated in dark chocolate.

“Hey, it’s me,” Laurel said. “Is Thalia there?”

“Why, yes. She is,” said Gary in a pleasant tone.

Then he hung up.

To fight with Thalia was to take on Gary, too. Laurel depressed the button to get the dial tone back, then hit redial.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Gary said, picking up halfway through the first ring. “Were we not finished?”

“May I speak to my sister, please?”

“Nope!” Gary said cheerfully, and hung up again.

Laurel took three deep breaths, then hit redial again.

Ethel Merman answered. “Whoopsy-doo!” said Ethel. “My hands are slippery!” and the phone banged down.

Gary’s voice was extremely versatile for being set so low.

Laurel buried her face in her hands. Enough. It had to be now, or it would never happen.

She stood up and threw open the door. She walked through her kitchen with long strides, pausing to scoop her purse up off the little phone table and dig out her keys. She came around the corner into the dining room, saying in a loud, announcing voice that brooked no argument, “I’m going to drive over to Alabama and—”

She stopped. She’d been going to finish: “—pick up Thalia. Please stay with Shelby.”

But David had come home. He’d joined her parents at the lunch table and was eating a large portion of her mother’s hot chicken salad and chopped fruit. He looked up at her as her parents did, Daddy turning around backward. David’s eyebrows lifted, listening, innocent of her intent, and she couldn’t finish. She’d avoided calling Thalia in the first place because he’d asked her to.

Mother was rising, smiling her broad, closed-lipped smile. “Wonderful!” she said. “See, I told you to go ahead and try Sissi again. I’ll just run up and have Bet pack her things.”

Laurel blinked. Mother thought she meant DeLop. When she looked around the table, she saw David and Daddy thought so, too, swept up and carried in the current of Mother’s assumption.

Laurel opened her mouth to say no, she hadn’t reached Sissi, she was going to damn Mobile to get her damn sister, and then she closed it again. David had promised to help her, but he clearly had no idea how. Daddy had come, but he was Mother’s right-hand man, not Laurel’s. And most of all, there was Mother, who would pin Laurel down with Cowslip’s blank gaze and sap her will with hot chicken salad and promises of normal days to come. Laurel couldn’t fight them all.

She shifted her gaze a hair over so she wasn’t looking Mother in the eye. Mother would see the lie there. Laurel focused on Mother’s bottom lashes, and from across the room, Thalia’s trick worked perfectly.

“Bet packed most of her things last night,” Laurel said, and her voice sounded sure and steady.

First David and then Daddy offered to drive Bet Clemmens back. Mother demurred for David on the grounds that he was unfamiliar with the route and the houses. Beneath her approving smile was a wall of will; she’d worked for years to ensure her Cherry Hill son-in-law never saw the rotten taproot of her family in DeLop.

Laurel waved Daddy’s offer away, saying, “I wouldn’t want you driving this tired, Daddy. Anyway, I’ll be back before you know. Before sunset, probably.”

That was absolutely true. Mobile was an hour away.

Mother said, “It’s an easy day trip. Good roads most of the way, and the sun so goes down so late these days, doesn’t it? Dog days, they call them.”

“Yes. Dog days,” Laurel said. She tucked her hands inside her pockets and avoided David’s eyes until he’d nodded and gone back to eating lunch.

Then Laurel went upstairs with Mother to round up Bet Clemmens. They found her in the rec room, hunched on the puffy love seat, holding her plate up near her face so she could scoop an outsize bite of hot chicken salad directly into her mouth.

Before Laurel could tap at the door frame, Mother said, “Bet, dear, let’s go gather up your things. Laurel’s going to run you home this afternoon.”

Bet looked up at them and quickly shoveled in another bite and then another, stuffing them in on top of the food already there. Her mouth was so full she couldn’t close it all the way, and flecks of thin mayonnaise bubbled out at the corners. She gulped down some of the half-chewed food, her fork already going back for the last of it.

“Don’t choke yourself,” Laurel told her. “There’s time for you to finish your lunch.”

“Are you serious?” said Shelby. She was hunched in her oversize pink beanbag, everything but her head tucked under a chenille throw. A plate of chicken and fruit sat undisturbed by the chair, the tines of the fork pristine. Laurel thought Mother would answer. When she didn’t, Shelby looked back and forth between them. Finally, her gaze settled on Laurel. “This sucks,” she said.

“Now, Shelby, there’s no call for ugly talk,” Mother said. “Sissi Clemmens is worried sick with all the goings-on here. Think how she must want Bet safe at home.”

The only person in the room who believed that was Shelby. Laurel found her own expression mirroring Bet Clemmens’s, both of them incredulous at the idea of Sissi lathered and pacing, desperate to get her baby home and lay hands on her. Laurel quickly dropped her head and blinked her widened eyes back to normal, for Sissi would be doing exactly that in the wholly fictional DeLop that Thalia had created for Shelby.

Shelby slumped down even farther in the beanbag, her hidden hands tucking up the blanket around her face. Only her eyes and the top of her head peeped out. “Fine. Get out, then,” she said, not looking at Bet.

“Shelby!” said Laurel.

“Bye,” said Bet, then added, “I wish’t I knew what happened to thet boy.”

On the television, Billy Elliot was auditioning at a ballet school.

“He dies,” Shelby said in a sour voice.

“Shelby Ann!” Laurel said again.

But Bet was nodding. “I thought he might,” she said.

“You can see the end when you come back,” Laurel told Bet. “It’s a nice end. He does not die.”

“He does, too,” Shelby said. After a grudging pause, she added, “Eventually.”

Mother spoke up then, in the sweet-tart tone she usually saved for Daddy. “Yes, Shelby, and then a terrible war breaks out somewhere. And the world ends!” She turned slightly toward Bet. “That all happens years after the credits roll, you understand.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t call and ask your mom if you
could
stay,” Shelby said. Bet stood dumb and shrugged, and Shelby’s eyes flicked over to Laurel. “Did you even ask if we could keep her? Or did you just call up her mom and totally freak her out?”

“Bet did ask to stay. She asked me,” Laurel said. She stopped. She didn’t want to lie directly, and while she picked her way through various constructions, trying to come up with a sentence that would convey to Shelby that Bet would be back sooner than Shelby thought, Bet spoke up.