The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,111
water, trying to drag both of you, and she’s still up there beaning us?’ Then I didn’t think at all. I did things. I knew she couldn’t swim.”
“Baby,” Laurel said in the same voice she’d used with Shelby. She was thinking of Thalia at about Shel’s age, taking her thumb out of her mouth to say, My stupid sister had her eyes shut. She’s afraid of guns. She’s probably afraid of deer.
“Baby,” Laurel said again. “You didn’t know. How could you know that? You didn’t think about that. You saw her throwing the rocks at us, so you pushed her out of the way and she fell in. Then you came and got us.”
Thalia laced both of her hands over her mouth and looked at Laurel, for once following her sister’s lead. She nodded slowly. Shelby, at the water’s edge, sank down to her knees.
“Help me up,” Laurel said.
Thalia stood, shaky as a newborn foal, and gave her a hand. Together they made their slow way to the slope to where Shelby knelt.
Laurel eased herself down beside her daughter and wrapped an arm around her, and Thalia sat down on her sister’s other side. Laurel could hear people moving up the trail, fast. David was coming. He was bringing the sheriff’s men in light blue suits, pushing through the woods to find them. Someone with a dry cell phone or a radio would call in ambulances and rescue workers with scuba gear.
Laurel pulled Shelby closer and hooked her other arm around Thalia, bringing her sister in closer, too. They sat in a row, Thalia and Laurel and Shelby, the Gray girls all watching the unbroken surface in the final quiet before the lights and noise and Sissi’s monstrous grief and the endless questions came. They waited for whatever would rise out of the water to rise.
EPILOGUE
Laurel is on her knees, digging in the sandy soil of her backyard garden. She’s working on the double beds that flank the gate. The last few bulbs are next to her in a basket, firm and still faintly cool from the crisper. By the time the house in Victorianna sold and they had found this place, four miles away, fall had given way to winter, and it was too late to plant. She’s putting them in now, at the tail end of February. The blooms will be small, but she wants the hopeful cheer of tulips and daffodils come spring.
Their new house stands on a hill, like the old one, because that’s the only way to get a basement in Pensacola. The neighborhood is not gated, but their street is long, and from the hilltop, Laurel can see a long way in both directions. She likes it here, likes the big backyard with its koi pond and patchwork flower beds, likes her country-French house with its sleepy stone lions flanking the walkway. They don’t look much like guardians; these are library lions, lollers and slackers. Shelby has named them Lawrence and Miss Iris.
Behind her, Laurel can hear the murmur of Shelby and Yvonne Feng and Carly Berman, sitting close on the stone bench in the very back of the yard, yammering. Laurel shifts her weight. The small of her back aches; she can’t kneel this way for long, not since her center of gravity shifted. She gives up and sits flat on her bottom, covering the last of the bulbs with Florida’s loose, sandy soil.
When she’s finished, she stands up, slow and careful, dusting herself off. She’s not far into her third trimester, but this is going to be a big baby. Already he is cramped inside of her. She can feel the press of his feet, a knob poking out of her left side as he stretches. She puts her palm over the knob and feels his legs retract.
“Carly?” she calls across the yard. “What time is your mother coming?”
The girls are sitting in a row, blond, brunette, and redheaded, and they look up in tandem. Shelby has her hair back in a band, and the slight jut of her ears puts a crack in Laurel’s heart. She’s starting to grow into them, and her baby mouth is firming, becoming her own.
“Before dinner,” Carly calls back.
“Okay,” Laurel replies. “And then you get right on that homework, Shel, you hear me? I want to get an early start in the morning.”
“’Kay, Mom,” Shelby yells, and the three glossy heads bend back together to whisper and giggle, silly girl noises from the beautiful tail end