The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,50
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, swaddled 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.”
Thalia laughed. “Now, now, kitty cat, don’t scratch. I only brought it up because when I looked in the backseat, I found myself thinking about that spare baby, all made of rubber, and how here, thirteen years later, damned if you didn’t go to DeLop and get you one.”