The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  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 he
r 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.

  “Mebbe you could come, too?” Bet said. “Just for a little visit.”

  Shelby began to sit up straighter, but Mother and Laurel both said, “No,” so fast that Shelby’s mouth hadn’t even cleared the edge of the chenille throw before she was sinking back down again.

  Laurel had almost yelled it, even though she knew she wasn’t going within a hundred miles of DeLop. The very idea of Shelby shining in that dark place chilled Laurel down to her marrow. Who knew what Shelby’s light would call?

  In a gentler tone, she added, “I want you home, Shel.”

  “I wanna go with Bet,” Shelby said, her eyebrows mutinous above the throw, and Laurel tried to ready herself for a battle that she didn’t want to have over a trip that she wasn’t going to take.

  If only Mother weren’t here, she would let Shelby come. It was Mobile and Thalia, after all. If Mother weren’t here, Laurel would tell David she had to have Thalia, period, had to, and who had called Mother in, after all? David, that was who, and if she was lying, then that was on his head.

  Mother’s dulcet voice said, “Shelby, darling, if you go, you’ll miss Molly’s funeral,” and just like that, Shelby’s eyebrows went from battle-ready to wounded. The argument was over. Shelby pulled the blanket up all the way over her head.

  “Bye,” Bet said to the blanket.

  Laurel said, “I’ll be back in a flash, Shelby.”

  Shelby didn’t respond. Laurel led Bet away to pack. She looked over her shoulder at her daughter, wanting to tell Shelby with her eyes and her smile that it would be all right. But Shelby was still slouched under her throw, an eyeless Halloween ghost made of hot-pink chenille.

  CHAPTER 6

  Bet Clemmens’s Hefty bag was a deflated packet, too small and sad to need trunk space or even the backseat. Bet had packed only the things she’d brought with her from DeLop. The clothes Laurel had bought for her were stowed in the closet in the small guest room, tucked in among Laurel’s Christmas stockpile of toys and shoes.

  “I druther leave my new clothes lie,” Bet had said. “You tole me I could come back real soon. You promised.”

  Laurel hadn’t argued, loath to waste time when she knew it was moot. Bet would be back, sooner than she could imagine. Three or four hours. Laurel had thought it was sweet, even, Bet planting her Rainbow flip-flops and American Eagle jeans as proof of her faith in Laurel’s promise and then stoically bundling herself into the Volvo, the Hefty bag at her feet.

  But they weren’t out of the driveway before Laurel heard a snuffling noise from the passenger seat. She glanced over in time to see a tear rolling unchecked down Bet Clemmens’s face. It spattered on her bare thigh.

  “Oh, honey, don’t. I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Laurel said, and then floundered, because there hadn’t been so much a misunderstanding as an enormous load of whoppers.

  Bet said nothing. Her tear ducts were functioning, and her nose had gone pink around the nostrils, but her body was relaxed and her mouth was slack. She seemed wholly disconnected from her wet eyes as they took care of the business of crying.

  Still, it was the most emotion Laurel had ever seen Bet Clemmens display, and she gave the cool flesh of Bet’s leg a pat. She had to fess up. Bet would know something was off when they stayed on I-10 instead of exiting at Highway 29. This could be Laurel’s practice confession, the first of many, because when she returned home with both Bet Clemmens and Thalia, her lies would become obvious to anyone with a brain wave. There was no story that could explain the return of Bet and the presence of Thalia, except the truth: that Laurel had smiled and nodded and knowingly let Mother’s assumption stand so she could get her way.

  Mother would exact a decorous but grim revenge, Laurel felt certain. Worse, Laurel had allowed a lie to wriggle in between her and David, a tiny wedge making a space where there had been no space before. And he wasn’t even wrong; she knew from experience that she and Thalia in the same house together would likely end in plague or famine or a rain of frogs.

  Even so, if she had it to do over? She balanced the consequences against the gray feel of ghost eyes, the way her yard was shifted and wrong, Shelby gone silent and Molly gone for good. She would do it again just the same.

  “I’m not taking you home, Bet. That was a big lie. I’m sorry. We’re going to Mobile to pick up my sister. Then we’ll all three come right back here, okay?”

  Laurel watched Bet in her peripheral vision as she drove. Bet blinked twice, slowly. Then she swiped the back of her hand across her nose and said, “Mm-kay.”

  That was all.

  Shelby would have been wailing like an outraged howler monkey by now. Any Victorianna kid would have been. Shelby at thirteen was more sophisticated than Laurel had been at the same age—they had HBO, after all—but at her core, Shelby was still a child. She believed that the good guys triumphed in the end, that the universe ought to be fair and could be made so, and that her mother didn’t tell self-serving lies.

  Bet Clemmens wasn’t outraged, though. She wasn’t even surprised. She kicked at the Hefty bag on the floorboards, pushing it forward to use as a footrest, and settled back in her seat, done with it.

  Watching her placid acceptance, Laurel all at once understood that Bet’s nice clothes hadn’t been left on the shelf as an act of faith. Bet didn’t have any of that. She’d left them because at home, they would go the way of the rolling suitcase. Laurel should have known.

  When Bet was here, dressed to blend and circling the edges of Shelby’s crew, Laurel was lulled into forgetting what Bet’s actual life was like. It was like her accent: hard to fathom when not standing in the middle of DeLop. When Laurel had driven over to pick up Bet last week, Sissi had been too stoned or drunk or both to stand unaided. Laurel had given her a hand, wincing at the zippery sound Sissi’s blue-veined legs had made against the vinyl as Laurel had peeled her off the sofa.

  Sissi had stared at Laurel, her gaze sliding into focus, and then she had slurred, “Laurel? S’it Cripmus aw’ready?”

  She’d forgotten that Laurel was taking her child for two weeks. Sissi would be the first to steal Bet’s eighty-dollar sandals for herself or to hock. A corner of Laurel’s heart broke for Bet, but underneath that, a sly stray thought slid by: There was a fundamental disconnect between Bet’s and Shelby’s ideas of what should be hidden from mothers.

  Bet Clemmens didn’t have a curfew or a standard bedtime. She would no more need to hide a secret from her mother than Shelby would need to hide her Game Boy. If Laurel could ask questions aimed into the chasm between how Shelby’s and Bet’s lives worked, Bet might blandly answer, never thinking she ought not to.

  “So I gather you girls had some plans last night,” Laurel said. She tried to sound casual, like this was something she might well ask Shelby, if only Shelby were here. Thalia taught her students that acting started from the outside in, with physical control. She didn’t hold with Method. “Make the body right,” Thalia said. “The rest will follow.”

  So Laurel made her body relax, slump, loosening her shoulders and easing the muscles that had gone tense in her thighs.

  Bet said, “I dun know. Shelby and her friends, they dun tell me all their stuff.”

  “But you think Shelby and Molly were planning something?” Laurel asked.

  Bet said, “I dun know.”

  Dead end. They were almost to Victorianna’s wrought-iron gate.

  Laurel flipped her blinker on and turned right, circling through phase one, turning left to get to Queen’s Court. She drove slowly down it. The houses here were smaller and a year older. Cookie Webelow had bought the peach house on Queen’s Court twenty years ago, when the neighborhood was
still in development.

  “Do you know anyone who lives on this street?” Laurel asked.

  Bet pointed up ahead and said, “That there is that redhead gal’s house, that Carly.”

  “Anyone else?” Laurel said. They were passing Stan’s house now, not going even ten miles an hour.

  Bet didn’t say anything, and Laurel stopped right in front of it. “Do you know who lives here?” she asked Bet.

  “Mr. Webelow,” Bet said. No hesitation.

  “Have you ever been inside?” Laurel asked.

  Bet said, “Naw, I wouldn’t. Shelby said not to, even if he offered me a drink or a snack or if I needed to pee.”

  These were the rules Laurel had long since laid down for Shelby, repeated back almost verbatim, except Laurel had said “use the restroom.”

  “Did Shelby say why?” Laurel said.

  “Naw,” said Bet. “Why?”

  Laurel said, “It’s just a good rule, Bet. Young ladies shouldn’t go off alone with a grown man they don’t know well.”

  It occurred to Laurel that she should have given Bet those rules herself. Perhaps by not saying anything to Bet, she’d put her at risk, but looking at Bet, it seemed hard to believe that was the irresponsible act here.

  Bet had changed into clothes she’d brought from home, cutoff jeans that were way too short and a ruffled plaid halter top from Wal-Mart. It was far too skimpy for a teenager. It was too skimpy for anyone who wasn’t gunning for a career in the streetwalking industry, really, but Bet Clemmens was so inert that she rendered the outfit innocuous.

  She had what Thalia called duck-body, a small head and narrow shoulders that sloped down, making them look even smaller. Frail collarbones, as delicate as bird bones, were probably her best feature. She had tiny flaps for breasts, set on a rib cage that spread as it went down instead of narrowing to a waist. Her hips were broader still, and the outside of her thighs was her widest point. Her legs narrowed sharply after that, tapering down to skinny calves and delicate feet that matched her shoulders. Her skin was waxy and seamless, like doll skin. Even in these clothes, she seemed sexless.