The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,48

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,” like 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