The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,76
did matter, and she was desperate to unsee the reason.
“What shouldn’t?” Thalia asked.
Keys rattled against the front door. Laurel heard David’s baritone in the foyer and then a softer voice, female. She welcomed the instant rage that filled her from her deep gut to the top of her throat, welcomed it like a lover. Her eyes met Thalia’s, and she said, “Tell me he did not just bring that whore into my house.”
Thalia instantly went feral, her eyes slitted and as avid as a hawk’s as she breathed out. “You’re doing Uncle Petey-Boy because of David?” The worry was gone, replaced by something uglier. “Excellent. Go get him.”
Laurel was already moving, barreling around the counter and across the keeping room toward the foyer. She felt tipped forward, overbalanced, like she couldn’t have stopped moving even if she wanted to, not without falling flat on her face. That didn’t slow her. She didn’t want to stop. She was leaving something behind in the kitchen with her sister. She wanted it left behind.
She tore through the doorway to the middle of the foyer, and then she stopped as if she’d slammed face-first into a wall of glass bricks. She’d come ready to breathe out the fire she had stoked up in her belly, to burn Kaitlyn Reese down, but Kaitlyn wasn’t there.
David stood just inside, holding the front door open for her parents. Mother was ushering a sober-looking Shelby and Bet Clemmens forward, one hand on Shelby’s waist.
“—thought she’d want to sleep at home, what with Molly’s viewing tomorrow,” Mother was saying in a reverent hush to David. She glanced up as Laurel came charging in and said, “Hello, dear, I—” Mother’s voice cut out as Laurel stopped, bracing her arms in the doorway. Then she said, “Why, you’re bone-white, Laurel. Are you sick?”
Behind Mother, on the street, a dark sedan pulled away from the curb. Kaitlyn Reese’s rental, no doubt. Mother and Daddy’s blue Buick was parked at the bottom of the walk, the engine running. Daddy, dreaming at the wheel like always, missing everything that mattered.
Laurel’s gaze pulled inexorably back to Mother. Whatever she’d tried to leave behind in the kitchen, it was here, meeting her at the door. She drew in a ragged breath, and the air was made of razors, filling her throat with a wash of burning red.
“You okay?” David asked. He came two steps toward her, and Laurel couldn’t back up because Thalia had followed her. Her sister blocked the way back into the keeping room, a thin wall of heat at Laurel’s back. Laurel pivoted, keeping him in view, and backed up toward the dining room instead. She stopped in the large archway, one hand grasping the frame to steady herself.
David looked from Laurel to Thalia. In the sudden quiet, Barb Dufresne snored and muttered. David looked past Thalia into the keeping room, where Barb was laid out on the end of the sofa. Laurel watched the cogs in his brain start churning; he couldn’t make what he was seeing add up.
“Mommy? What’s happening?” Shelby asked in a quiet voice, but she and Bet were standing beside Mother, and Mother eclipsed them both.
“Is that Barb Dufresne?” David asked. His voice pulled Laurel’s focus, and looking at David was better, a relief. Anything was better. David asked again, “Laurel, are you okay?”
“No,” Thalia said. “She’s not okay, and she’s beyond drunk.”
All of David’s attention switched to Thalia. Laurel felt it like a loss, felt the room receding as Mother said, “Laurel! Have you been drinking?”
Laurel blinked too long and saw the deer step out into the road. Her eyes flew open, and she said, “You’re a liar.”
She said it to the air, to all of them. Mother looked affronted, David puzzled. Shelby’s lids dropped, shuddering closed over her big eyes. Only Bet did not react, standing placidly at the back of the bunch. One woman passed out in the next room, another screaming drunken accusations: For Bet, the scene must be familiar. She didn’t even twitch.
“I’m sorry,” Laurel said, this time speaking to Bet and to her daughter. Shelby grabbed Bet’s arm, hard, and Bet suffered that, too, in the same uncomplaining silence.
David’s hands burst into motion, one moving up to crumple and release a fistful of his hair, the other rising up by his shoulder and unfolding in a baffled star. “What’s happening here?”
“I think that’s the question Laurel wants you to answer,” Thalia snapped.
“You tell him,” Laurel said to her. “Shoot him, Thalia. Shoot