The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

  When Laurel and Thalia got home from school on Friday, it was obvious that Marty and Mother were already skirmishing. Marty was the closest thing Mother ever had to an in-law, and they fussed over Daddy like those squabbling ladies who came before King Solomon with one hapless toddler pulled so tight between them he was probably spread-eagled.

  Marty sat on one end of Mother’s faded cabbage-rose sofa, and Mother held court at the other end. Both of them were drinking coffee and not looking at the other. Mother smiled a cream-filled cat’s smile, clearly well ahead on points. The air around Marty fairly crackled with electric anger.

  Thalia rolled her eyes and whispered, “Want to take a long-odds bet over who’ll get to cut up Daddy’s meat tonight?”

  Laurel stopped in the doorway, but Thalia said a quick hello and then meandered down the hall toward the room she shared with Laurel. Halfway there, out of Marty and Mother’s sight, she turned back to face Laurel. She grabbed her blouse on either side in a pinch, then pulled cloth tepees out over her small breasts. “Nice rack,” she mouthed at Laurel, grinning.

  Laurel flushed. She’d forgotten to take out the cotton balls she’d stuffed into her training bra that morning.

  “Would you like a snack?” Mother asked.

  She hadn’t yet noticed the sudden sprouting of Laurel’s fluffy bosom, so Laurel shrugged her backpack off and hugged it to her chest. Down the hall, where Mother couldn’t see, Thalia laughed silently, giving Laurel a double thumbs-up. She went into their bedroom and closed the door with elaborate gentleness, Thalia’s signature anti-slam.

  Laurel kept her backpack clutched across her front and nodded at Mother, who got up and wafted through the swinging door into the kitchen. Laurel blew her air out in a relieved sigh and let the bag slide down until she was holding it by one strap, the heavy book-filled bottom resting on the floor.

  “Tell Mother I went to change out of my school clothes,” she said to Marty.

  “Hold up,” he said. He was wearing faded jeans that had been washed baby-soft and one of his loungey flannel shirts, but his body language did not match the comfort of his clothes. His long torso was folded stiffly at the waist, his spine not touching the sofa back.

  As the swinging doors came to rest, he tipped his head to one side, appraising her, until Laurel wished she’d kept her backpack in her arms.

  “Little Laurel, are you finally growing up?” he asked.

  She flushed and turned her back, looking out the windows as if she’d suddenly become fascinated by the view into her own backyard. The bird feeder was empty.

  “I need to go change,” she repeated.

  “You’ve already changed,” he said. “You’re getting to look exactly like your mother. I never noticed till now.” His tone had an unfamiliar edge. He didn’t sound like Laurel’s redneck, drawly uncle, the one who called her Peapod and brought her packs of Juicy Fruit. “Are you turning into a lady?” He made “lady” sound like a dirty word, not a thing a girl would want to be.

  Laurel let the backpack drop entirely and crossed her arms, even though her back was to him. She felt the cottonballs flattening, and underneath, she felt her heart thump, hard and fast.

  “Little Lady Laurel. Want to see something?”

  She didn’t move, didn’t answer, uncomfortable and not sure why. Then, in her mother’s tidy family room, she heard the unmistakable rasp of a zipper being drawn down.

  “Want to see?” he said, wheedling-like.

  Her stomach turned, went sour, as if she had eaten something that was beginning to go rotten. She knew what he’d unzipped. His flannel shirt had pearl snaps on it. His leather jacket was beside him, but it had buttons.

  “Want to see, Lady Laura-Lee?”

  It was so dead quiet she could hear the muffled rasp of his calloused fingers on the denim. She stared at the empty bird feeder until her eyes ached from not blinking. The worst part wasn’t the nasty undercurrent in his voice. It wasn’t even that she’d loved him her whole life. The worst part was that a piece of her had a hard time not looking. She was eleven years old and had only a sister. She had never seen one.

  Laurel heard the kitchen doors swing open again, heard Mother’s low heels tapping one last time against linoleum before she stepped onto the carpet.

  There was a tiny silence, and then Mother said, “Laurel, honey, I told you to go change.” She spoke sweetly, in her normal dulcet voice, as if Marty’s cock weren’t loose in the room.

  Laurel headed back to the hallway that led to her bedroom, careful to turn around by going right, so that she never looked at Marty or Mother. She walked down the hall to the room she shared with Thalia.

  Thalia sprawled on her stomach on the floor. Her gutted backpack was beside her, and she had three open books, a notebook, and a yellow folder scattered across the floor. Laurel could hardly see a speck of carpet.

  When Thalia saw Laurel, she sat up and said, “What happened?”

  Laurel said, “Uncle Marty,” like his name was a complete thought.

  Thalia made one of Daddy’s faces, that fierce kind of bird-looking, foreign and intense, as if she could see straight through Laurel to something beautiful and strange three feet behind her. Then she blinked and said, her voice matter-of-fact, “You still have your fake tits in.”

  She picked up a pink highlighter and pulled her history book into her lap. All at once she was playing Studious Girl, and Laurel’s presence didn’t register. Laurel grabbed her play clothes and carted them off to the bathroom to change and throw out the cotton balls. She did her homework and ate the granola bar Mother brought her, exactly like she did after school every other day.

  Uncle Marty was his normal self at dinner, pretending Mother wasn’t there and joking with Daddy, calling Thalia “Madame Pigtail.” Laurel’s tomato soup was bitter, and her grilled cheese went down in waxy lumps. Marty was in all ways ruined for her. But at the same time, he barely existed. His colors ran, the blue and rust of his shirt bleeding into the yellow wallpaper, and he blurred into the other shapes around the table. The only object in the kitchen with a sharp outline was Mother. She sat at the foot of the table, closest to the stove, spooning up mannerly tastes of soup.

  “May I be excused?” Laurel said.

  “Me, too,” said Thalia.

  Mother nodded, and they scraped their chairs back in tandem, grabbing their plates to drop off at the sink. Uncle Marty tugged Laurel’s long braid as she tried to slide past without letting even his chair touch her. His eyes on her were his regular plain eyes, as if he were the same Marty he had always been. Mother kept her seat, allowing him to look at Laurel, to touch her braid with the same calloused fingers she’d heard rasp against his jeans.

  “Thalia, you’d best get to bed,” Marty said. “We got to get to Alabama before sunup if we’re going to catch them deer.”

  Laurel stayed by Marty’s chair. It was as if her braid had nerve endings in it and she could still feel the imprint of his fingers. Mother’s expression was bland as she heaped Daddy’s plate with more fruit. She wasn’t even watching.

  Cowslip, Laurel thought, but that wasn’t the word. She knew the real word now. She’d seen it months ago in one of Mother’s Reader’s Digests. The real word was “complicit.”

  Mother hadn’t been surprised. That was the part Laurel couldn’t forgive. Mother hadn’t gasped or taken in a hard breath. She must have known before that he was one of those. Early in the year, their gym teacher had shown a film, girls only, like the one about getting a period. Pervos, Laurel’s friend Tammy had called them. She’d made Laurel giggle all through the movie by whispering suspicions about the male math teacher with the enormous mustache. But here was one for real, her own uncle at her table, and Mother must have known. Mother had let Laurel have friends over with Marty there, knowing. Last month Thalia had tried oral sex with a high school boy.

  “Tastes like chicken,” she’d told Laurel in a gleeful whisper.

  Was that “acting out,” lik
e the film had said, or only Thalia being Thalia? Had Marty ever asked Thalia if she wanted to see?

  If he had, if Thalia was acting out, then Mother was complicit. Now he wanted to show Laurel, Mother’s favorite, and Mother stayed blind and bland and unsurprised.

  Laurel stood as if rooted by Marty’s chair, the dirty plate still in her hands, waiting until the waiting was obvious. She was giving Mother time to get up and put out Marty’s looking eyes with her thumbs, to come after his braid-touching fingers with her dinner knife. But Mother only sat. Laurel waited so long that Thalia stopped by the swinging doors and Daddy set down his fork and looked up at Laurel, eyebrows raised and questioning. Marty craned his neck back, with Daddy’s expression on his similar features. Only Mother kept right on eating.

  “I want to go along on y’all’s hunt,” Laurel said.

  Mother’s hand stilled with her spoon half dipped into her bowl.

  Daddy chuckled and said, “You’re too little.”

  “I’m in sixth grade now,” Laurel said. “You let Thalia go in fourth.”

  “Sixth grade?” Marty said. “Already?”

  “Ugh, please. She’ll wreck it,” Thalia said, speaking over Marty. “She gets dizzy looking at a scraped knee.”

  “I want to go. It’s safe,” Laurel said, looking right at Mother. “If Daddy and Thalia have to run a deer down, I’ll be fine. I’ll be with Uncle Marty.”

  Laurel watched her mother’s eyes harden, saw her throat move in a dry swallow.

  Daddy said, “No shooting until you’ve spent some time on the range with me and Thalia.”

  By “the range,” he meant an empty field where he spent a few hours every Saturday. He and Thalia would take boxes of bullets, all three of his rifles, and his pistol for good measure. They’d shoot and shoot and shoot, lining up two-liter bottles and Coke cans, blasting away until the cans and bottles were shredded strings of metal and twisted plastic that could no longer stand.

  Laurel had tagged along a time or two, but she hadn’t liked how Daddy’s eagle gaze was so fierce on the bright cans Thalia lined up for him. Last time she went, Daddy had started shooting with the pistol, so focused that he hadn’t been able to stop when he was out of bullets. He’d dry-fired four or five times before he’d caught himself and offered Laurel a turn.

  “I’ve been to the range,” Laurel said now.

  “Not enough to try to bag you a deer,” Daddy said. “But you can come along and watch.”

  Mother cut a bite of honeydew in half, speared it, and put it in her mouth, chewing carefully and not speaking.

  “Would you let me go off with them?” Laurel asked, her eyes trained on Mother.

  Thalia said, “Mother, you promised you guys would bake us cookies for when we got home.”

  Laurel said, “Will you? Let me go off with him?”

  Thalia was still griping. “Hunting means we’re going to shoot things until they die. There’s guts, did you know that? We cut the guts right out, Jesus Bug, and spill them on the ground.”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Thalia,” Mother said.

  Thalia went on. “Look, she’s going green just hearing about it.”

  Mother cut another piece of fruit in half and said, “Fair is fair. Your sister is almost twelve, and she can go if she wants to.” She paused and then said, “Do you want to?”

  She might as well have looked right at Laurel and said, “I don’t much love you.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Laurel said. “If you let me, I’m going.”

  “Don’t say ‘Mama,’” Mother said. “That sounds trashy. Say ‘Mother.’”

  That night Laurel went to bed in a bleak world where the person she most belonged to sat quiet and smiling and let her go trip-trapping off, wide-eyed, into danger.

  But Laurel had underestimated her.

  Mother was so mindful of propriety that she still had single beds in the master bedroom. Thalia called the space between the beds “the Great Divide,” and said her own existence proved that someone must have bravely taken a single crossing. Her money was on Daddy.

  “He went back at least one more time,” Laurel had protested the first time Thalia put this theory forward.

  Thalia had shown Laurel all her big white teeth at once and said, “Nah. I suspect Mother budded you all on her own.”

  That night Mother must have turned in her own bed to face Daddy’s, must have whispered things across the void. Perhaps she didn’t say anything about Laurel or that afternoon. After all, Thalia was older and had bloomed earlier. If Thalia had been interfered with, then it explained a lot about her that surely needed some explaining, and Thalia was Daddy’s very heart.

  Whatever Mother said, it was enough. Her words must have echoed in the space between their beds for hours, growing louder. They had gotten inside Daddy, gone banging through his veins from brain to heart and back again, circulating that whole long night into the morning. Out in the woods, Marty had said something and then moved into Daddy’s line of sight as the deer ran off, and Daddy had twitched his finger hard against the trigger.

  It wasn’t planned. Daddy never would have thought ahead to shoot down his brother in front of his daughters. It was the work of a moment, and Laurel believed that if he could have, Daddy would have called that bullet back before the sound of it rang out. Daddy had turned Marty over with such careful love. He’d put his hands over the hole to try and stop the blood, and with all his will, he’d tried to make his brother not be dead. Daddy was sorry to this day, and even though he had pulled the trigger, Laurel knew it was Mother’s whispers that had saved her.

  Mother had blinded herself to ugliness early; growing up in DeLop made blindness a survival skill. But for Laurel’s sake, Mother had seen. She’d gone against everything in her nature to protect Laurel.

  That was all Laurel was doing now, protecting her own child. She had to keep reminding herself of that. It got harder and harder to remember as the car rocketed back toward Pensacola. The trip home was happening at warp speed.

  Thalia was playing with all the remote controls, adjusting and readjusting the seat. She found the heater button and stabbed at it, watching the amber light flash on.“It’s got a butt warmer?” she said, scornful.

  “I guess,” Laurel said.

  “You have too much money,” Thalia said. She looked into the backseat, where Bet Clemmens and the Hefty bag and Thalia’s own three suitcases sat in a row, all equally silent. Bet was still listening to Shelby’s Nano, so loud that Laurel could hear Justin Timberlake blasting directly into Bet’s ears.

  “You know what she reminds me of?” Thalia said, turning back around and jerking one thumb over her shoulder at Bet.

  “Who? The girl right here in the car with us?” Laurel asked.

  “Yeah. The one with the headphones in,” Thalia said. “Remember, right after you had Shelby, you wanted another baby.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Laurel said.

  “Yeah-huh,” Thalia said. “They’d brought Shelby to your room, and you were still zoned from the epidural. My God, fifteen hours of that. You looked straight up at the nurse and asked how long until you could, you know, mount up and ride your mechanical bull again—”

  “I would never say that!” Laurel said, risking a glance over her shoulder. Bet’s head bobbed slightly, and her eyes didn’t seem to be focused on anything.

  “Not in those words. I’m sure you said ‘make beautiful love with the robot,’ but it was the same basic idea,” Thalia said. “There you sat, holding the seven-pound baby I’d just watched you push out your wing-wang, which, by the way? looked like it hurt like a sumbitch. I said, ‘Don’t tell me you are feeling romantical now, Bug. What are you, a hamster?’ David was purple.”

  “I don’t remember this at all,” Laurel said, and then she stopped. Because she did remember it. “Oh, Lord. The spare baby.”

  Shelby, brand-new, had been so alert in the hours just after she was born. She had stared up at Laurel, swa
ddled in a roll of receiving blankets, a solemn expression on her scrunchy monkey’s face. Laurel couldn’t look at anything else in the room. Shelby had dark, serious eyes, and she was completely innocent of hair. Laurel couldn’t believe this was the person she’d had inside her not an hour ago, the person she and David made, out here blinking in the harsh light, so floppy and helpless and perfect and beautiful. She couldn’t hardly stand to have Shelby breathing hospital air that might have a baby-killing germ in it, or drinking breast milk already poisoned by the Cheetos Laurel had eaten right before her water broke.

  A crazy thought had wandered through her exhausted head: “I need a decoy.” Without thinking, she had asked the nurse when she and David could try again. She wanted an extra. A faceless, rubbery baby who was not Shelby. She wouldn’t love it very much. It would be a howler, a loud distraction, something she could offer to the ravenous world while she hid Shelby away, safe and secret.

  “That was postpartum crazies,” Laurel said. “I didn’t really want a spare baby.”

  She hadn’t wanted any other baby at all. The way she loved Shelby had been so huge, so inadvertent. She hadn’t chosen it. It was something that had happened to her, and she couldn’t imagine taking that kind of risk again on purpose. If she had another, it would smell like Shelby smelled. It would make the same helpless breathy noises. Even before it was born, it would spin and kick inside her with Shelby’s vigor, and Laurel would be lost to more enormous, boiling love.

  As Shelby grew, changed, took her first faulty steps, Laurel sometimes imagined a brother or a sister, but then she’d see Shelby and the new baby toddling in different directions. She couldn’t be right behind both of them, couldn’t stretch herself thin enough to stand between them and all the ugly things on earth.

  David had asked every so often, “Want to try again?”

  Laurel had said, “Not yet. Not yet,” every time, until he’d stopped asking.

  “I thought it was brilliant,” Thalia said. “We could have named the spare Puppethead. I think Puppethead would be the most awesome baby name.”

  “I’ll pass,” Laurel said. “If you wanted a kid named Puppet-head, you could have married yourself a straight man and had one.”