She bent to put her mouth on Molly’s and pushed air, hard, meeting resistance. All she could see was the cheerful pebbled tile, and beyond that a small part of the lawn and David’s bare feet running for the house.
As she sat up, she yelled after him, “David? Where’s Shelby? You have to find Shelby.”
The alarm cut out as she called the last two words. The siren had shocked the frogs and crickets into silence, and her voice rang out. Her hands were back on Molly’s chest, compressing, but Molly’s body felt abandoned. Her heart was dense and still.
She looked back toward the house and saw Shelby walking through the glass doors. Her bangs stuck up in tufts, and she was dry and sleepy-eyed and breathing. She was still in her ratty jean shorts and a T-shirt and pink Pumas. She stopped on the patio, her mouth opening in a shocked O. Laurel wanted to run to her, grab her up, but she had to bend and push air for Molly again.
When she sat up, Shelby was taking a hesitant step forward, and Laurel called, “Stay there, baby.”
Shelby obeyed.
Bet Clemmens came out of the back door, David right behind her. Bet had the black Hefty bag she’d brought as a suitcase pressed against her chest like a pillow. After her first visit, last year, Laurel had gotten her a wheeled suitcase with a pull-out handle, but she’d come back with a trash bag again this year. “It broke,” she’d said in a flat, defensive voice before Laurel had even asked. It had been stupid, sending a nice suitcase like that back to DeLop, expecting Bet would get to keep it.
“Stay,” David said to both girls. He stepped over the patio fence and strode fast across the lawn. He was holding the cordless phone from the kitchen by his side.
Laurel could hear the tinny voice of the 911 operator telling him to remain on the line, but as he reached Laurel, he let the handset clatter to the tile and said, “They’re coming.”
David knelt on the other side of Molly’s still form. His stronger hands folded themselves over her chest, and he thrust down, short, hard pushes, demanding a response and not getting one while Laurel breathed uselessly for her.
It went on for a long time like that. By the time Laurel heard the sirens, the pebbled tiles were tiny scissors clipping at her knees each time she shifted.
David heard the sirens, too. He called, “Shelby, go unlock the front door.”
The first two firemen hurried through the glass door. Laurel had always thought of it as a glad thing when the firemen came, a promising thing. It had been the firemen who said it was common, it was fine, let’s take her to the hospital anyway to be sure, when Shelby was three and had a febrile seizure. They’d arrived first again when David, who tripped over dust motes and should have known better, had gone up on the roof to clean the gutters himself and fallen off and broken his ankle. But when Laurel’s daddy shot her uncle Marty, it had been the sheriff’s men, dressed in light blue, and look how that turned out. They’d come from the direction of the cabin, ambling slow because Marty’s blood had already cooled, setting like gelatin.
It heartened Laurel to see the busy rush of firemen now. There was a beat when the pinkest part of her fool heart thought seeing them meant Molly was fixable and could be woken and handed back to her mother, whole and safe.
Laurel bent and pushed a last breath into Molly’s slack mouth, and then she knew it wasn’t any good. Strong hands came down and lifted her away, like David had lifted Molly out of the pool, and she was passed backward to David as the firemen took over.
David walked with her to the patio, one hand on the small of her back as if Laurel were a touchstone holding him present, even as the fluid economy of his movements disintegrated.
Shelby stood hugging herself in front of the glass doors. As soon as she was close enough, Laurel’s hands reached out for Shelby as if they had their own brains in the thumbs. She pulled Shelby tight against her chest.
Over Shelby’s head, Laurel watched the firemen milling around and unpacking their vinyl bags, pulling out what she supposed was medical equipment, a jumble of tubes and long cords and boxes.
There didn’t seem to be anything for them to do for the moment. They stood in a huddle on the patio, Laurel holding Shelby and David looming over them. Bet was off to the side, clutching her Hefty bag, so that for a single heartbeat there was no Bet, no firemen, no little girl gone too still in the yard. They were frozen, the three of them like a snapshot of Laurel’s life for over thirteen years, since the day she’d gone to David’s grungy student apartment with her eyes puffy and rimmed in pink. She’d balled both hands into fists before she’d knocked, ready to punch his guts out if he shrugged and said he’d pay for an abortion.
Now the child who had become Shelby was in her arms, and Laurel held her daughter for that single beat, felt the pulse of Shelby’s mighty heart doing its good work. She thought the word “safe,” and she thought the word “finished.” David watched over them, her sentinel, and she thought, “Our part is over now.”
Immediately, she heard her sister, Thalia, say, “You’re wrong.”
“What?” she said.
She looked around, but Thalia wasn’t there. Thalia was in Mobile, or Timbuktu, or hell, for all the good it did Laurel.
“I said you’re wet.”
Shelby’s voice was muffled, her face pressed into Laurel’s chest, but Laurel could hear a thin edge of hysteria in the normal words. Shelby tried to pull back, and Laurel felt her whole body contract, grasping Shelby too hard, keeping her.
“Ow,” Shelby said, jerking away, and Laurel had to bite down an urge to yell, to demand that Shelby would forever be in the first place Laurel looked, safe and expected and perfectly unharmed. She forced her clamped arms to loosen and let Shelby turn sideways. Shelby bent at the waist, her shoulders hunching up and in, her head down, gulping in air.
Laurel put one hand in the center of Shelby’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out too high. “I was so scared. You weren’t in your bed.”
Shelby, still hunched over, said, “I fell asleep in the rec room. Me and Bet were watching TV.”
Bet’s head jerked at the sound of her name, as if she’d been asleep on her feet, like a horse. “Do what?” she said.
Shelby looked up at Laurel and said, “Mommy, is that Molly?”
Laurel couldn’t answer. She felt the irrational anger draining out of her. It flowed through her arm and into Shelby like a current.
Shelby’s brows came down, and her mouth crumpled up into an angry wad. “Now you say it isn’t,” Shelby demanded. “You say.”
Laurel pulled her close again, and Shelby suffered it, stiff in Laurel’s arms.
“I’m so sorry,” Laurel said, and Shelby clamped her hands over her own mouth, her eyes wide and furious and too bright above her laced fingers.
A young fireman with apple cheeks and a clipboard stepped over the patio fence to join them in the spill of light coming through the glass doors. He asked how long Molly had been in the pool, what they had done to revive her, and how long they’d been doing it. His questions required short, factual responses, and David turned to him with something like relief, answering methodically.
Bet Clemmens stood by the glass doors, wearing a pair of the soft pajamas Laurel had given her. Her feet were stuffed into rubber flip-flops she’d brought from home, and she still clutched the trash bag as if it were her childhood lovey.
“You packed your things?” Laurel said.
Of course Bet would have to go home now, but it seemed strange that she had already packed. It was both too fast and too intuitive.
Bet said, “I heardat sarn goff. I thodda wazza far.”
It took Laurel a few seconds to process through the thick DeLop accent. Bet’s vowels stretched, taking up so much space that the consonants got jammed together, and her lips hardly moved when she spoke. Her words sounded swallowed, as if they came from her stomach instead of her lungs and throat. In DeLop, where everyone talked like that, Laurel’s ears adjusted to hear those sounds
as words, but here, Bet Clemmens’s accent was an interloper. It took a moment to translate: “I heard that siren go off. I thought it was a fire.”
“It was the burglar alarm,” Laurel said.
Bet shrugged. Laurel’s relatives in DeLop did not have burglar alarms. They were, for the most part, the people burglar alarms were meant to deter.
Bet squeezed the Hefty bag and said, “I didn’t want them clothes you got me to get burned up.”
Laurel dropped it. It didn’t seem appropriate to talk about alarms or packing at the moment. No topic seemed appropriate. It simply couldn’t be that Shelby’s friend was dead in the backyard while Laurel talked about useless things with Bet Clemmens. In a few hours, she realized, she’d have to make her family breakfast. In two days, the pansy bed would need weeding. It wasn’t right.
She heard Mindy Coe calling from the backyard next door. “Laurel? Are you guys okay?”
Laurel’s mouth called out, “Yes.”
It was a reflex, like the way her knee jumped when her doctor tapped it with his rubber mallet. She didn’t want pretty Mindy Coe, her good friend next door, to see what was happening in her yard. If Mindy came over and saw, then it might be real. And they were okay, weren’t they? There they all three were, alive and whole, and what else mattered?
Shelby pulled herself out of Laurel’s arms altogether and said, “God, Mom,” from behind her hands. “We’re so, so not.”
Mindy’s head popped up over the tall privacy fence, her hands folded over the rounded boards like prairie-dog paws, her pointy chin hooked over the top between them. Mindy was barely five feet tall, so she had to be standing on a piece of her patio furniture, and still no part of her neck was visible. She was probably on tiptoe.
Jeffrey Coe’s head and shoulders appeared beside those of his mother. He was a tall, good-looking boy, older than Shelby, already in high school.
The Coes looked like cheery puppets peering down over the slats, their disembodied heads concerned and friendly. Laurel thought that on their side of the fence, she’d find daylight, a garden party, a recipe exchange. She had an absurd urge to run for it, break straight through, leaving a perfect Laurel-shaped hole in the wooden boards. Her own backyard had become a foreign country.
“Ma’am, you need to get down from there,” a fireman said, heading for the fence. But Mindy had already seen Molly.
“Oh, my dear God,” she said. Her hand snaked up to push Jeffrey’s head down. “I’ll call Simon.” Mindy’s husband was a doctor. Then she got down.
Shelby was staring at the pool, her body curved away from Laurel. Laurel put one arm back around her, both to steady herself and to feel the simple living flesh of her. “Close your eyes, baby,” Laurel said.
“I already saw,” Shelby said. Tears spilled out of her eyes, and her nose was running unchecked. “It is Molly. It is.” She pulled away again. “You’re freezing me to death.” The last word rose in an indignant adolescent lilt. Then she put her hands up to scrub at her eyes with her palms, a toddler move. Her mouth was still a cupid’s bow, as unformed and generic as a baby’s. Laurel wrapped her arms around her own middle, sick with not touching her daughter.
She could hear people tramping through her house. One of them found the switch for the back floodlights. Her pupils had dilated in the near-dark, and the burst of light hit her like a flash bomb going off. The backyard was all at once awash in summer’s colors, green grass, the last hot-pink azaleas, the bright peach-and-blue-striped cushions on the patio chairs. Only the yard’s back corners were still dark. The bulb had died in the light above the gazebo, and no light reached the pet cemetery where David had interred Bibby, Shelby’s first cat, and a childhood’s worth of gerbils and the kind of short-lived goldfish won at fairs and the school carnival.
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.
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Page 2
