The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,78

things you can’t take back. And you don’t even mean them. That’s Thalia talking.”

“Do you see my hand up her ass?” Thalia said. “She’s moving her lips all on her own.”

“Girls!” said Mother in a quelling, haughty voice straight out of Laurel’s childhood. She came back into Laurel’s view, stopping beside Thalia. “You think Shelby can’t hear you? You will stop. Immediately.”

Laurel did stop. Mother was back in the room, and not even tearing her marriage into little tiny pieces could distract Laurel now. The thing she’d been running from ever since her sister had cocked her hand and shot her was there. It was simple and palpable and true and ugly.

If Marty had interfered with Thalia, and Thalia had handled it herself by way of a bullet, then Mother had not saved Laurel. Daddy, visiting his sprites in Daddy-land, hadn’t even known she was a breath away from needing to be saved. Mother had never turned to Daddy in the dark, had never whispered the truth into the space between their beds. She’d let Laurel go off with them into the woods, knowing full well what Marty was. What Marty wanted. Complicit.

Laurel had nothing left. Thalia had told her how unhappy Shelby was, how unhappy she had long been, and Laurel hadn’t seen it. Now Shelby seemed terrified of Molly’s mother, asking if Barb was angry with her, and Laurel thought the words: She saw. Perhaps there was a secret Shelby she’d long refused to see, one who could stand by in a fit of teenage rage and let it happen, maybe saying, God, Molly, quit it already, not really believing Molly wasn’t horsing around until it was too late, and then running. Hiding. Not understanding how very final this would be, choosing not to see or understand. Shelby would have learned not to see, not to understand, from Laurel, who had learned from her own mother.

Thalia had shown Laurel that David was less hers than she had ever thought, and the pieces of him she did own were being taken. Now Mother, the only rock remaining in Laurel’s foundation, was sandstone, crumbling under the light touch of Thalia’s pointing finger.

Mother hadn’t saved Laurel, a bullet had, so how could Laurel, the daughter formed in her own image, save anyone or anything? Not Shelby. Not her marriage.

Laurel’s body was a dead thing under her. A voice came out of the body, and it said, “Get out of my house.”

“There, you see?” David said to Thalia.

“She’s not talking to me,” Thalia said, but she looked confused. “Who are you talking to, Bug?”

Laurel closed her eyes, but she could still smell Mother, talcum powder over a pale green scent like celery. The ghosts of the thousand times that Laurel had been sweet and blind and silent for her mother’s sake came crowding in, riding that scent like a wave, and then ten thousand more ghosts came. They pushed in around Laurel. Laurel had believed her mother’s love was stronger than all the ways she had been broken, stronger than DeLop. She knew better now.

“Laurel, I think you need some help,” Mother said, dulcet and overkind.

Close your eyes, baby, Laurel thought, but she opened hers.

Mother’s gaze was fixed slightly left, over Laurel’s shoulder. Laurel thought of that as Thalia’s move, a theater trick, but perhaps Thalia had learned it earlier, from Mother. Mother had always had a genius for not looking at things directly.

“You need to pull yourself together, go upstairs, and reassure your child.”

Laurel glanced over her shoulder to see what Mother had focused on. The pretty dishes.

Mother snapped her fingers. “Laurel. Do you hear me?”

Laurel reached around and opened up one of the glass doors on the built-ins. She took out a delicate teacup. She turned it sideways, holding it up for Mother to see.

Mother opened her mouth to speak again, but before she could, Laurel threw the teacup down against the hardwood floor. It shattered into a thousand satisfying pieces.

“Get out of my house,” Laurel said softly.

“Laurel!” Mother said.

At the same time, Laurel plucked out the saucer and sent it hurtling down to smash in the remains of the teacup. “Get out,” she repeated.

Thalia and David stared, both shocked into silence.

Mother didn’t move, so Laurel stuck her arm all the way into the cabinet, reaching behind a row of delicate wineglasses lined up like good soldiers behind the stacks of salad plates. She shoved them all out. Gravity grabbed them and pulled them down. They detonated in a huge