The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,49
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