The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Oh. Um, thank you?” the girl said. She turned toward David, which proved she didn’t know him very well. Looking to David for social rescue was like asking the Sahara for a cocktail.

  Still, Thalia was right. The girl had gotten prettier as they’d come closer. Even with no makeup, her skin had a creamy glow, and her dark eyes were wide-spaced and liquid over molded cheekbones and a lush mouth.

  A waiter zoomed smoothly over to them. He was a young man with a single eyebrow that was shaped the way Shelby had drawn birds back when she was in kindergarten. “Will you ladies be joining the party?” he asked Thalia.

  “God, I hope so,” Thalia said, not taking her eyes off the brunette. The girl blushed, and the waiter’s eyebrow lifted up until Laurel thought it might take flight, zooming up to the ceiling to hang like an unflapping black M beside the closest mermaid.

  “Give us a minute,” Laurel said, then gave him a belated smile to temper her curt tone. After a slight reluctant pause, he backed away.

  Meanwhile, Thalia had put one hand over the girl’s arm and leaned in even closer. “Can I maybe get your phone number?”

  The dark-haired girl pulled her arm away, setting her hands under the table in her lap. “Who are you?” she asked.

  At the same time, David said, “Stop it,” to Thalia. He looked back at the girl and added, “This is my sister-in-law, Thalia. She’s not a lesbian.”

  Thalia straightened and said to Laurel in a fake loud whisper, “Denial. It can be so powerful. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Laurel said, her cheeks burning. “My sister is a small bit mentally ill. I’m Laurel. By the way.”

  The girl looked blank, as if the name meant nothing to her.

  “Oh. Right,” David said. “Laurel, this is Kaitlyn Reese, from Richmond Games. She flew in this morning for the dogfight demo. Kaitlyn, this is my wife.”

  The minute David said the word, said “wife,” Kaitlyn’s expression changed. Once Laurel had found four-year-old Shelby standing in a glass-shard sea of what used to be a favorite vase. Shelby had immediately peeped, “I didn’t touch it!” with her eyes round and wide, caught. Kaitlyn had that same look on her face now.

  Laurel’s world tilted and reversed, and she felt slightly sick.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kaitlyn said too brightly. She bobbed up, gave Laurel’s hand a quick squeeze, and dropped back into her chair. Her palm was damp. Laurel saw her glance at David’s left hand. It was the slightest flick of her eyes, but Laurel caught it.

  She angled her body toward Kaitlyn and leaned across Thalia, speaking softly. “It’s in his pocket.”

  Kaitlyn pinked faintly.

  “What?” David said.

  “Kaitlyn was wondering where your wedding ring is,” Laurel said, and David’s eyebrows came together.

  “I missed that.” He reached in his pocket and pulled it out, along with a jangle of change and his bandless watch. “I don’t like things on my hands,” he explained to Kaitlyn.

  “I think I’m done here,” Thalia said. She held up Laurel’s keys and jingled them, a merry sound that struck Laurel as wildly inappropriate. “Still want to come to Barb’s with me?”

  Laurel shook her head. She wouldn’t walk away from this table now even if it caught fire. Thalia turned on one heel, crisp and smart as a Buckingham Palace guard, and then marched off.

  Kaitlyn said, “Should you let her go off by herself?”

  “She’s not that kind of crazy,” Laurel said. “She’s not a danger to herself or others.”

  “Says you,” David muttered. “Where is Shel?”

  Laurel closed her eyes. He’d been working on this project for weeks, working endlessly, to the point where she had hardly seen him. He’d been with this woman, virtually and in the flesh, day and night. The team from Richmond Games had flown out here more than once, and how had Kaitlyn Reese gotten all the way across the country, several times, without knowing David was married?

  “Shelby’s with Mother,” Laurel answered. Her hands gripped the table so hard that her knuckles were turning white. To Kaitlyn, she said, “Shelby is our daughter.” Invoking Shelby was pretty close to peeing around David in a circle, but Kaitlyn had recovered her composure.

  “Dave’s little dancer,” she said, her eyes hard. “He talks about her all the time,” and there was a subtle emphasis on the word “her.” Kaitlyn was damn sure making it plain whom David didn’t talk about.

  “Are you okay?” David asked Laurel, but she wasn’t. The world was upside down.

  “I hate that ceiling,” Laurel said.

  “Your sister walked right out the front door,” Kaitlyn reported. “Is she allowed to drive?”

  “She’s fine,” Laurel said, and it came out angry, like a bark.

  Kaitlyn was sizing Laurel up. All traces of her blush had faded. “Well, if you two came together, then she’s stranding you. Can you catch her? Dave and I have the dogfight demo in less than an hour.” She turned to David, resting her elbow on the tablecloth so her body became a wall, enclosing the table and leaving Laurel on the outside. “We ought to head on over to the office.”

  Laurel had a strong urge to grab David’s hand, pull him to his feet, and say, “You come on with me, Dave.”

  She could peel the jacket off his lanky frame and lead him out, sticking Kaitlyn Reese with the bill. He’d been readying for this demo for weeks, but his job could go to hell along with Kaitlyn. Laurel longed to tug him through the parking lot and find his SUV. They could climb into the back, and he would kiss her and touch her while she whispered to him about regular things, what to have for dinner, should they paint the bathroom, until he remembered who she was. Who they were together.

  But David had pulled out his bandless watch to check the time. “How’d it get so late?” he asked. He signaled the hovering waiter for the check. “Did she really take your car?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said. “Probably.”

  “Typical Thalia,” David said, his nostrils flaring.

  The waiter came over with the bill on a tray, and David glanced at it, then took out his wallet and set money down, his movements precise and spare. He had cooled and slowed the way he did in a crisis, but this wasn’t a crisis. This was lunch. Lunch was not a crisis unless Thalia was right.

  “I don’t have time to run you home. I have to get to this meeting,” David said.

  “Let her take your car,” Kaitlyn said. “You can come with me in the rental.”

  “Good.” David stood up. He dropped a kiss onto the corner of Laurel’s mouth, and she had to physically stop herself from jerking back. “You have a key for the SUV?”

  “Wait, David. How will you get home?” she asked, a stopgap measure that paused him only for a moment.

  “I’ll bring him back to you,” Kaitlyn said. She gave Laurel a tight smile and then added, as if joking, “When I’m done.”

  David didn’t seem to hear. He shrugged off the ugly jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. “I’ll call you, tell you how it went,” he told Laurel. “Sorry about—” He waved one hand around, and Laurel didn’t know if he meant Thalia, or Kaitlyn, or leaving her here.

  “Dave,” Kaitlyn said, impatient, already walking down the three steps into the basin full of Trish Deerbold clones.

  “Sorry,” he said again, and then he followed Kaitlyn Reese.

  He left Laurel standing there, the world reversed, her feet on a sky-blue floor and what felt like the whole weight of the ocean pressing down on her.

  CHAPTER 12

  L aurel wove the SUV through traffic, hurrying away, with no other destination. She pulled in to Albertsons but left after circling the parking lot twice, even though there were plenty of spaces. She couldn’t stop picturing David leaning across the table, words pouring out of him in torrents for a girl who wasn’t Laurel.

  With his old cronies from Duke, David could yawp endlessly about quarks and how to bend space. Computer
talk with other engineers made his long torso stiffen and still itself, while his arms did their odd, controlled flailing, drawing diagrams in the air; he could be so excited about a code string that his eyes bugged out. But the hard-core coders at his job were all men. He never talked to Laurel like that, and he never talked to her in the regular way people do, to say how he was feeling. If David ever began a sentence with “I feel,” Laurel could rest certain that the next words out of his mouth would be “like eating another piece of chicken.”

  He didn’t talk to women; he hardly spoke in words to his own mother. Until Laurel had seen him waving his arms and all but hollering, so excited, back and forth with Kaitlyn Reese, she would have said it wasn’t possible.

  Kaitlyn was such a pretty girl, and with David’s brand of smartness. Laurel knew how the male-female thing worked. Words forged connections in the brain, and then the body followed. She’d learned that lesson at nineteen. Her husband had been giving that girl who called him Dave something he’d never given Laurel, and Kaitlyn Reese was giving him something back that Laurel didn’t have.

  She drove around the lots at Eckerd and the farmer’s market before she realized she wasn’t going to get out and buy shampoo or fruit, or even stop and pick up the dry cleaning through the window. She didn’t want the eye contact or to say “Did the grease spot come out of that skirt?” like everything was regular.

  She drove back to Victorianna, punching in the code so the hydraulic gate swung wide to let her in. As she wound through her neighborhood’s clean streets, the absence of ugly plaster geese or gnomes or even pink Florida flamingos began to grate on her. The neighborhood charter forbade yard art, at least in the front. There was an exception clause for Christmas; and on December first, the sudden invasion of herds and herds of light-up wire statues in tasteful white always made Laurel feel like God had sent Victorianna a plague of reindeer. Here at the end of the summer, there were only the stone mailboxes, beds of late flowers, well-watered lawns, and house after lovely pastel house. Everything sat perfect in its perfect place, except for Laurel. There ought to have been a cracked window somewhere, she thought, a roof missing some shingles, a small decay she could use as a landmark, but instead, the seamless lots blended one into another, and she was lost.

  Thalia had wanted her to ask the Ouija—Is Laurel happy?—but it was the wrong question. She was happy. She had been happy. She should have asked if Shelby was happy. Thalia had said she wasn’t, and Laurel had Cowslipped it away until it came to this, Molly dead and Shelby sealed up full of secrets. She saw.

  She’d assumed David was happy, too, but now she saw that if he wasn’t sleeping with that girl, he soon would be. Laurel had heard them talking over TeamSpeak, and she should have clued in when Kaitlyn called him Dave. Dave was a stranger, someone who didn’t belong to Laurel, but she’d Cowslipped that away as well.

  How could she protect Shelby if she refused to see danger coming? She hadn’t seen it in her house when it was rising all around her, filling up her shoes, soaking her.

  She drove slowly and aimlessly through her streets, winding her way into phase two. If she took the next left, she’d be on Chuck and Barb Dufresne’s street. She stopped at the intersection and peered down the road. Her Volvo was not in front of their house. Thalia, even armed with casserole and brownies, must have failed.

  Laurel started driving again. It was after lunchtime, and heat shimmered off the pavement. The streets were deserted. She turned another corner, and there, up the street, jogging toward her, was Stan Webelow. She stopped the SUV, grateful for David’s tinted windows, and watched him coming. He loomed larger and larger as he trotted up the sidewalk. He couldn’t see into the car, and she doubted he recognized it, but as he approached, he lifted one hand in a neighborly wave. His wide smile unfurled over his knoblike, elfin chin, the corners of his mouth pulling back so far toward his ears that he looked carnivorous.

  All at once, she couldn’t stand to let him pass. If Thalia was right, if she was Mother, then she would damn well be like Mother. Mother was Cowslip, but she had leaned in to the void between her bed and Daddy’s and spoken, going against everything in her entire nature to keep Laurel safe. Laurel could do that now for Shelby.

  She leaned on the horn. Her own car’s horn was a contralto beep, polite as a throat clearing. David’s blared like a foghorn, bisecting Victorianna’s genteel afternoon silence. Stan Webelow’s step faltered, and he peered at the SUV as he approached, as if uncertain that the blaring horn was for him. She banged out another blast.

  Stan slowed to a walk as he drew even with the front windows. He came hesitantly toward the passenger side, picking his steps like a nervous horse. He was wearing minuscule shorts, a tank top, and running shoes. His brown hair, shot with copper highlights, was a boyish mop, as if he’d spent half an hour and ten dollars’ worth of products tousling it into artful disarray before leaving the house for his jog.

  Laurel’s breathing sounded loud and ragged over the purr of the engine—the SUV’s mechanized autonomic functions ran more smoothly than her own tense body’s—but she managed to hit the button, and the passenger-side window scrolled down.

  Stan Webelow did a double take when he recognized her. Whomever he had been expecting to find blowing the horn of a big-ass SUV, calling him over like a high school boy impatient for a date, it hadn’t been Laurel.

  “Mrs. Hawthorne?” his mouth was saying, polite and surprised, but she spoke over him.

  “I saw you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?” he said. His eyelids moved in a flurry of puzzled blinking.

  “The night Molly Dufresne died. I saw you on Trish Deerbold’s lawn.”

  His mouth dropped open as if her words had unhinged it, but then she saw his widened eyes go sly and secret. His body stilled, and he deliberately closed his mouth. His eyebrows came together as if he were confused, but it was a polished emotion, manufactured and glossy. He wasn’t half the actor Thalia was. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He got the tone right; it was a single note higher than his usual speaking voice—but he couldn’t control biology, and his cheeks flooded with ruddy color.

  “Yes, you do,” Laurel said, her voice steady now. “You were standing back out of the crowd, behind everyone. They were all looking at my house, facing away from you. But not me. I was looking back at them, and I saw you.”

  “You couldn’t have,” he said. It came out sounding truthful, genuine. But he wasn’t saying he hadn’t been there. He was only saying that she could not have seen him, and the round spots of color in his cheeks ripened.

  “You thought you were too far back, safe in the dark, but you have highlights,” Laurel said, touching her own bangs. “They’re meant to catch the light.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You saw some hair glowing in the dark? And that makes you think it was me?”

  “I know it was you,” she said. Her heart was pounding itself against her rib cage, moving the blood through her so quickly she could feel it pulsing at her wrists and in her throat. But her voice came out strong and certain.

  All at once the pretense dropped away from him, and his skull seemed to bulge under his skin. “This is not your business,” he said quietly, but so fiercely that he was practically hissing. He came at the car, darting forward, his hand reaching for the passenger-side handle.

  Laurel took her foot off the brake and stomped down on the gas. The SUV screeched forward, and then she jammed on the brake. She stopped six feet beyond him. He’d come all the way into the road, following her, so he was directly behind her. She could see him in her rearview mirror, that hectic color still staining his face. She had a terrible urge to throw the car into reverse, tear backward over him and crush him, and end this. Her foot trembled on the brake. She stabbed the button for the driver’s-side window and leaned out, looking back at him. “Pervert,” she yelled, loud enough for anyone whom the horn had called to hear.

  He held up his hands, a propitiatin
g gesture, his lips pursing as if saying “shush.” He peered all around as if checking for witnesses.

  “I know you,” she yelled.

  Stan Webelow’s chest heaved as if he had already run his five miles; fresh sweat was popping out on his forehead and his shoulders. He started forward almost involuntarily, as if his body had decided to rush the SUV without his consent.

  Laurel whipped around and hit the gas, lurching forward, then smoothing out and speeding away. She kept glancing into the rearview mirror to make sure he was growing properly smaller. Her hands gripped the wheel so tight it was hard to tell how badly they were shaking.

  Her blood sped through her, thinned and quickened by adrenaline. She’d done something real, the way Mother had once, the way Thalia always did. It wasn’t enough to take to the police, not yet, but she had been right. He had been there the night Molly died, and he was hiding something ugly. She could pull Thalia off of Molly’s poor family and sic her on Stan. Thalia would find a way to prove he’d been there, something solid that they could take to Moreno. They needed only enough to turn the detective’s calculating, clever eyes on him. Moreno would root him out, and then Molly could rest.

  Laurel drove directly home, but when she opened the garage door to put away the SUV, she saw that her side was empty. Thalia and the Volvo were both still MIA.

  Laurel pulled into the garage and then hit the button to close the garage door. She stayed in the SUV until the door had closed all the way. She hadn’t expected to be alone. What if Stan Webelow came here? She’d baited him, and she wasn’t sure how dangerous he was. She hurried inside and locked the door behind her, but the house felt big and far too quiet. Her adrenaline faded, leaving her shaky and a little sick at the pit of her.

  She paced the house, too nervous to be still. She was afraid Stan Webelow would show up, and under that, she was afraid that if he didn’t, she’d have to start thinking again. David and Kaitlyn Reese. Finally, she went to her workroom and spread her quilt out on the table. The bride stared up at her, a mouthless witness to whatever came next. Laurel turned herself deliberately to the task of sewing on the pinned rosebuds and lengths of scarlet ribbon. It required enough concentration to slow her racing thoughts, but she still felt herself tensing every time she heard a car come down the quiet street. She wasn’t sure whom she was more afraid of seeing—Stan Webelow or David.