The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,44
went crystalline in his chill. A long shudder worked its way down Thalia’s spine, as if she felt it, too, an unseen hand passing down the length of her, cool and strange. She sighed and arched her neck and stilled herself.
Laurel walked down the aisle between the rows of chairs. She stopped on the edge of the lighted space. “Hey, Thalia.”
Thalia turned her head to peer out from behind her arm and said, “Hey, Jesus Bug.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
Thalia had been calling Laurel “Jesus Bug” since they were teenagers. It was Daddy’s word for the little skating beetles that zoomed over the surface of ponds and puddles, never looking down.
Thalia pushed off with her hands and stood upright. “Is it Christmas already?” she asked, unwittingly echoing Sissi Clemmens.
“Still August,” Laurel said.
“Zounds!” Thalia said, affecting an overblown Shakespearian accent. She moved her right foot forward, as if stepping into ballet’s fourth position, and put one arm out dramatically to her side while her other hand twirled at an invisible cruel mustache. “What hath summoned thee, good my lady, so fucking prematurely?”
Laurel wasn’t sure she’d felt Marty at all. The cold might have been only Thalia’s anger, thick and icy.
“Please don’t be like this,” Laurel said.
“How should I be, then?” Thalia said in her regular voice, cocking her head to one side.
Laurel said, “You have to know, for me to come here, that it has to be pretty bad. And it is, Thalia. So bad that I lied to David. Sort of lied. Almost lied. To get to you.”
And she had. She had let the truth march purposefully out the door with her and Bet Clemmens, then blamed him for it because he’d called Mother in. She couldn’t think about that now. She kept her eyes steady on Thalia’s face.
“Really,” Thalia said, drawing out the E sound. She dropped the invisible mustache and the pose and said, “Trouble in paradise. Who could ever have imagined? Bug, don’t you get Woman’s Day? Look in between the recipes and the hundred fun rainy-day crafts. There’ll be something about meeting him at the door naked except for some Saran wrap, or scented candles, or K-Y warming massage crap, whatever it is your kind of people think is all sexy. Go home and make it up. Your domestic disputes are not my problem.”
“I’m not here because I lied to David,” Laurel said, holding her voice steady with effort. “David’s not the problem.”
“So you keep saying,” said Thalia to the air. “Come back and see me when you’ve figured out that yes, in fact, he is.”
Her fourth wall came down with an almost audible bang. Laurel stopped existing, and Thalia was alone in the center of the stage, playing Beautiful Woman Doing Yoga. She coiled down into an easy lotus position and tilted her head back to begin slow breathing.
Laurel backed up until the light wasn’t touching her, and then she stopped. In the safety of the darkness, she sat down in one of the chairs and watched her sister’s body curl into impossible shapes, ropy muscle shifting under skin. She made her breathing match Thalia’s and found it was a calming way to breathe. She quit watching Thalia after a while because it was easier not to be angry when she wasn’t looking.
When she was ready, she said, “Remember Molly Dufresne? Shelby’s friend? She’s dead. She fell in our pool and drowned.”
Thalia stilled, one ankle folded back behind her neck. She brought her leg down and put her foot on the floor, her eyes trying to find Laurel in the darkness. “How’s my girl?” she said quietly.
“Not good,” Laurel said.
“Right. Let’s get this part done quick, then,” Thalia said, and stood up with abbreviated grace. “Bitch, you walked out in the middle of Gary’s best transition. You banged the door and wrecked his third act.”
“You sent thong underpants whizzing out into the audience. Right past Shelby’s ear.”
Thirty seconds ticked by.
“Call it even?” Thalia said.
“Yes,” Laurel said.
“Even, then. What’s going on with Shelby?”
Laurel took another one of Thalia’s cleansing breaths and said, “Molly drowned in the middle of the night. Her ghost came and woke me up and showed me where to find her body. The police are calling it an accident, but Shelby wasn’t in her room when Molly died, and Molly came to see me for a reason. I need to know what it is.”
Another thirty seconds ticked by, and then Thalia said, “You know I don’t believe in your ghosts.”