The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  She spoke again to make herself stop thinking. “Lordy, Thalia, Mother didn’t even know Bet was still here.”

  “I know,” Thalia said. She threw her hands over her head and arched her back, stretching herself like a long, lolling cat. “Shelby came in trailing Bet Clemmens like a pull toy. Mother positively gaped. It was as if I’d poured sour milk into her Froot Loops. Then she forced this ghastly, gracious smile. I knew she was about to pick up her spoon and choke down every freakin’ fruity, curdled bite.

  “You know the weirdest thing? Beyond weird, but this is Mother. When she said she’d take the girls, I think she meant Shelby and Molly. She’s already managed to forget the kid died.”

  Some of Thalia’s hair was draped across the pillow, tickling Laurel’s nose. She pushed it away. “You know we’ll both pay later.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Thalia said, laughing. “Mother only lets DeLop exist at Christmas, and now I’ve walked her through a big steaming pile of it and sent her off with it stuck to her shoes.”

  Laurel sat up and swung her legs down off the bed. “So we’re going to see Bunny today? At her house?”

  Thalia didn’t answer immediately, and the pause stretched out so long that Laurel stood up and turned around, looking directly down at her sister. “Thalia?”

  Thalia closed her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose. “Why does your bedspread smell like lavender?” she asked.

  “I put sachet in the batting. Quit smelling my bed and tell me what the plan is.”

  “I’m the plan, Suzy Homemaker,” Thalia said.

  “I don’t know what that means.” Laurel’s eyes narrowed. “That’s my new blouse. Three suitcases, and you’re wearing my new blouse?”

  “It’s a Bunny costume,” Thalia said. “With this blouse and your casserole and brownies for props, I bet I can get invited down the rabbit hole.”

  “You mean we can get invited,” Laurel said. “We, Thalia.”

  Thalia sat up, too, the laziness dropping out of her body. She was suddenly all business. “Not to regress to junior high, Buglet, but may I remind you that Bunny likes me best?”

  That was true. Thalia had always been a big hit in Victorianna, mostly because Laurel had asked her to be.

  When she and David had first moved in, the homeowners’ association had assigned Trish Deerbold and Mindy Coe to stop by with the traditional muffin basket. Laurel, freshly married, hadn’t started dressing David. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that he wouldn’t mind or even notice if she threw out most of his clothes and replaced them. That day he’d been wearing the big black shiny clodhoppers that Laurel called his grampa shoes and a frayed pair of khaki high-waters he’d probably had since high school. His hair had stood up in wild tufts. He’d wanted to carry in his computer equipment himself, but the movers wouldn’t let him on the truck. Something about insurance. He’d practically yanked himself baldheaded, watching them unload his components. The moment one of his boxes had cleared the ramp, he’d made the movers hand it over until he had them all piled up on the driveway. When Trish and Mindy had arrived, he’d been toting them down to his basement lair one by one. Laurel, nervous and slightly queasy, had to physically step in his path to get him to stop long enough to say hello. He’d hardly spoken three words, but it had been enough for them to hear New Jersey in his accent. Then he’d gone back to muttering and dragging boxes.

  Laurel, pregnant, tired from the long move, had meant to say, “Those are for his job. He wants to move them himself,” but she’d accidentally said “hisself,” like Daddy did. She’d blushed and corrected herself.

  Mindy had put a friendly hand on her arm. “Pregnancy brain! I remember those days. How far along are you?”

  Trish Deerbold had leaned all her weight onto one hip and eased herself back a step, as if bad grammar might be catching. She couldn’t get away fast enough to tell her friends about the new neighbors, the Autistic Yankee and his wife, Illiterate Trash.

  After, Laurel had been rolling the word “bitch” around in her mouth, readying to release it the moment Trish Deerbold was out of earshot.

  David had spoken first, saying, “Nice neighbors. Do all the muffins have nuts?” with no irony.

  So she’d swallowed it and then ended up crying, only for a minute, that night on the phone with her sister. Thalia, who already had plans to come over and see the new house, immediately wanted to escalate. “I’ll black out one of my front teeth and put up pigtails. I can mow your lawn in Daisy Dukes and high-heeled sandals. We’ll see how Trish the Dish likes that,” she’d said.

  Laurel had scrubbed at her eyes with her free hand and made a noise halfway between a sob and a giggle. “I almost wish you would. But don’t. I think that other woman could become a real friend, and she’s right next door. Try to blend, okay? You can make people like you when you try.”

  “Do you want me to make them like me? Or do you want to make me like them?” Thalia had asked, edgy, but Laurel had been too pregnant and too weepy to suss out double meanings and snipe back. She’d sniffled into the phone, and Thalia had at last said, “You win, Pitiful Pig, but only because you’re breeding. I’ll blend.”

  Being Thalia, she’d perversely set out to dazzle the very woman who’d been unkind to Laurel. She’d gone to neighborhood bunko costumed in elegant sandals and a clingy knit dress that made her look like a length of dark ribbon. She’d stationed herself by Trish Deerbold’s elbow and tossed off sotto voce one-liners about every other woman in the room, cruel but accurate and blackly funny. Trish Deerbold and her coven had eaten Thalia up with spoons. Watching Thalia shine them on was like seeing a devious peacock peck and coo its way into the center of a smug flock of fat-breasted pigeons.

  Barb Dufresne wasn’t part of what Thalia had dubbed the “Deerbold Bitch Triumvirate.” Barb wasn’t close to anyone, as far as Laurel knew, not unusual for a closet drinker. At neighborhood socials, Barb tended to take her cues from Trish’s set, orbiting them without ever truly being part of them, so she had eaten Thalia up with a spoon, too.

  Now Laurel said, “Maybe she used to like you best, Thalia, but she hasn’t seen you in a couple of years.”

  Thalia shook her head and said, “Do I think she’s going to take your chicken divan like a ticket and bare her scary soul for me to oogle? Probably not. But if you’re along, she’ll take the food, say thank you, and close the door. It will be yesterday all over again: Stan Webelow, the remix. This is my kind of thing, Bug, and no offense, but you suck at intrigue. Apparently, you didn’t spend a lick of time canoodling with the Ooh-ja, or you’d be too busy putting a divorce lawyer on retainer to get in my way. But if you didn’t learn a damn thing last night, learn it this morning. Go make PTA flyers or a pie, and let me handle this.”

  “Don’t start with the David stuff again,” Laurel said. “That’s not going to distract me, and you are not going to see Barb without me. Period.”

  Thalia got up on Laurel’s side, rising in front of her. She had over three inches on Laurel, but Laurel held her ground until Thalia said, “Fine. But I can’t wing it with you along. Get dressed, nice, and then you can take me out and feed me Mother’s rightful lunch. I’m picking the place. We’ll eat too many shrimps in butter sauce and plot it out. Every single word you say to Barb, I’ll script in advance. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Laurel said.

  “But I’ll make a bet with you, Buglet. In the end, I’ll go see Bunny on my own. You won’t even try to stop me.”

  She was still trying to stare Laurel down, but Laurel didn’t even quiver.

  “Now you’re taking the sucker bet,” Laurel said. The words were back in her head again. She saw. Laurel was ruthless in the wake of them. “Maybe you don’t know everything I know.”

  Thalia’s mouth turned down, and she said, “You are brave, little tin soldier. But you may not know everything I know, either.” She sounded faintly sorrowful, but then she seemed to shrug it off. When next she spoke, she was all bus
iness. “Get dressed. We leave in thirty minutes.”

  Laurel took a shower so hasty it was more like a rinse, and scrambled into a sherbet-colored sundress with darker orange tulips cascading down the skirt. She threw on makeup while Thalia stood outside the bathroom door, pecking at it with her nails and alternately calling out “Bored!” and “Hungry!”

  “That’s not actually helping me go faster,” Laurel yelled back.

  By the time she came downstairs, Thalia had hooked Laurel’s spare keys out of the phone-desk drawer, and she led the way to Laurel’s Volvo and climbed in on the driver’s side without asking. Laurel had no idea where they were going, so she got in the other side and buckled up.

  Thalia turned left out of the neighborhood, driving down past the bluffs. “You’re awfully quiet, Bug,” she said.

  “And you’re heartless. You rushed me out so fast I didn’t even get coffee,” Laurel answered.

  She didn’t feel like talking. She didn’t feel like lunch, either. She wanted only to make a plan and then execute it. Time was moving forward. Shelby would be home in the morning.

  Thalia, for a wonder, actually let it go. She drove in silence until she pulled in to the parking lot of a place called Scampi’s. It was new, and Laurel hadn’t eaten there yet. It was housed inside a beige stucco building with a blue awning and a bulging dome for a roof. It looked like a Middle Eastern temple and seemed out of place on the edge of downtown Pensacola.

  Laurel reached for the door handle, but Thalia put a hand on her leg, stopping her. Thalia looked strange, for Thalia. She had an expression on her face that Laurel didn’t recognize, her lips thinning and pressing slightly together, as if she were summing Laurel up.

  Thalia said, “I’m not heartless.”

  Laurel smiled and said, “I only meant I need caffeine.”

  “Let’s skip this,” Thalia said. “I’ll drop you home and go see Barb myself.”

  “Go to hell, Thalia,” Laurel said, her tone mild. “Coffee. Shrimps. Plotting. Barb. In that order.”

  She got out of the car and walked across the lot, not bothering to see if Thalia was following. By the time she reached the front door, Thalia was beside her. The odd expression was gone, and Thalia opened the door for her with a flourish and a half-bow.

  Inside, there was a modern bar off to their right, and ahead, an older woman with a sleek bun stood at a hostess stand. Laurel hardly glanced at them. She was staring up at the dome. The whole ceiling was a mosaic of the ocean floor, with shells and starfish and red crabs scuttling. Mermaids lounged down low, near the walls, and Triton himself coiled on a sea serpent’s tail in the center. On the deep blue walls, bright fish swam, shimmering and quick-looking. Laurel’s feet were planted on a sky-blue floor.

  “Holy cats,” she whispered to Thalia.

  The hostess was asking Thalia for the name on the reservation, but Thalia said to her, “Oh, I see the rest of our party.” She took Laurel’s elbow and marched her past the stand.

  Laurel, still looking up at the ceiling, let herself be led, but then she stopped and said, “What rest of our party?”

  Thalia said, “I’m sorry, Bug.” She sounded like she meant it. She tilted her head, indicating the diners.

  “You didn’t,” Laurel said, all at once sure that Thalia had called Mother. Somehow, Thalia had read the Ouija’s small and ugly words out of Laurel’s mind, and she’d made Mother bring Shelby here for crab legs and interrogation.

  The restaurant had two levels, with a circle of sky-blue stairs leading down to a round dining area directly under the dome. Upstairs, businesspeople lined the walls, a blurry border of black and gray and navy, the men in ties, the women in sensibly chic pumps. Laurel dismissed them and searched the lower circle. It was filled with women sitting in brightly colored pairs and trios and whole gaggles, chatting and drinking chardonnay or Pellegrino. Laurel looked from table to table, seeking Mother’s fluffy topknot, Shelby’s bright braids. “I don’t see them,” she said.

  She realized she was gripping Thalia’s arm hard. Too hard. It probably hurt. She hoped it hurt, a little. Today was supposed to have been a reprieve.

  “There,” Thalia said. She thrust her chin to the right.

  Laurel looked again, all the way to the far-right wall this time, to the dull-colored edge of business diners. Her gaze caught. It was David.

  He was sitting at a two-top, wearing his usual khakis and a blue chambray button-down shirt. Scampi’s had loaned him a jacket. It was an awful checked rusty thing, no doubt crawling with the filth of a thousand sweaty-necked businessmen. There was a woman with him, a brunette, but Laurel hardly glanced at her.

  “Oh, for the love of Pete,” Laurel said, turning to her sister, not sure if she was irritated or simply relieved. “You brought me here to see this?”

  No doubt Thalia expected her to snatch a steak knife off a passing surf-and-turf plate and go scrabbling toward David, leaping over other diners, going for his throat. Thalia would have already stabbed him by now. But Thalia didn’t know David. He couldn’t manage an affair unless Laurel dressed him for it and made the hotel reservations and put all his assignations into the BlackBerry he toted around in his pocket and called Dr. Theophilus.

  But Thalia was nodding, looking at Laurel with that same strange expression, her lips thinned and pressed. This time Laurel recognized it. It was simple pity, a tourist of an emotion; it hadn’t ever lived on Thalia’s face long enough for Laurel to know it when she saw it there.

  “Are you insane?” Laurel asked. “David wouldn’t do that to me and Shelby. He couldn’t. He never has.”

  Thalia said, “You don’t know what I—”

  “Yes, I do,” Laurel interrupted. “When you took the brownie down, you heard them planning lunch over that TeamSpeak thing in the computer. Redhead in the basement, my aunt Fanny. It’s a business lunch for the game he’s making.” She glanced at the woman at David’s table again, then back at her sister. “She’s not even wearing lipstick, Thalia. Who has an affair without lipstick?”

  “Laurel,” Thalia said, and the sound of her sister saying her real name was enough to make Laurel pause. “Stop looking at me. Look at them.”

  So Laurel did. She turned and watched them across the room. The sleeves on David’s borrowed jacket were too short for his long, spidery arms, and his wrists jutted out as he gestured. He was gesturing a lot, Laurel noticed, and that was because he was talking to the woman. David. Talking.

  Her husband disliked social situations so much he’d once sent Laurel alone to represent him at his office’s mandatory Christmas party. But here he was at a lunch, happy and lathered up, his mouth going a mile a minute and his brain switched to the on position. His bony hands waved around and then grabbed his head and crunched up his dark hair, then let go to wave some more.

  The woman—girl, really, she couldn’t have been over twenty-five—leaned toward him, her elbows shameless on the table like a frame for her Neptune salad. She didn’t seem go to with either the ladies or the businesspeople. She was wearing a filmy blouse, a hippie-girl-looking thing with bandanna sleeves, and her long hair was smoothed back by a headband. She looked breathless and glossy, like he was saying the smartest thing. It was David, so he probably was, and she was pretty, lipstick or no.

  “She’s a colleague,” Laurel said, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded thready.

  “Really?” Thalia drawled, drawing the E out long in that hateful way she had. “Then we should go meet her.”

  She set off across the restaurant, and part of Laurel felt like she should walk out now, go sit in the car and let the scene play out without her. It had nothing to do with her, she was almost certain. But Thalia was bearing down on David, intent on mayhem, so Laurel followed her sister down the stairs, weaving through tables of women.

  Going back up the three steps on the other side, she felt like she was crossing a border, bringing her tulip-covered dress out of Ladies’ Lunch Land to the wall, where th
e conversation was low and the colors were serious. Laurel could hear the conversation now. The girl was talking, and she knew the voice. It was the woman from California, the one who had called him Dave over TeamSpeak.

  “—actuality always precedes potentiality, and an egg is merely a potential chicken,” she was saying.

  David’s arms were moving again, holding an imaginary oval over his soup plate. He shook it at her. “No, an egg is an actual egg. The chicken has the potential to make eggs, just as eggs have the potential to make chickens.”

  “Fine. Chicken first.” The girl flipped her long hair off one shoulder, chuckling. “Quantum me no more physics, please. Let’s talk about dessert, like sensible people.”

  It didn’t sound like business, and as Laurel and Thalia reached the table, neither David nor the girl looked up, even though Laurel felt like she was looming over her husband, and Thalia was practically on top of the girl.

  “Hi,” Laurel said.

  David started, and immediately, his hands came together and folded themselves into a single still object that he set down on the table. He looked surprised to see her, but not too surprised. He gave Thalia a brief nod, and then he said to Laurel, “Hi back. What are you doing here?”

  Thalia’s smile was out, the big wolf smile that took up half her face and made her odd brand of beauty look feral. She spoke before Laurel could. “Better question. What are you doing here?”

  The soup plate held the dregs of what looked like gumbo. He glanced at it, puzzled, as if the bowl should have answered the question for him. “Eating,” he said.

  He didn’t sound like David, Laurel’s personal mad genius. He sounded clipped and very formal. Laurel raised her eyebrows at him, tilting her head in a short nod toward the girl, who was waiting to be introduced with a polite, bored smile on her face. David either missed the cue or ignored it, and the pause stretched itself and grew into a gap.

  Thalia filled it. She ran her pink tongue around her lips and spoke to the girl in a tone of faint, lascivious surprise. “You’re beautiful. Across the room, I was thinking you were pretty, but when I come right up on you like this”—Thalia leaned down—“and get really close, wham! Gorgeous.”