The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,80
a short walk, going to the window and opening the curtains as she slept.
The pool was empty, an innocent clear blue. There was no boy in the yard, no dog, only Bet Clemmens sitting on the gazebo steps in her pajamas and sifting a fistful of what looked like twigs back and forth, hand to hand.
Even from the second-floor window, Laurel could see the dark knothole, feel the wrongness like a living thing in her yard. She’d tried to keep it all outside, but it was inside now, too, in this pretty bedroom. The colors were wrong. The air tasted flat. It bothered her a lot less than she would have thought; she’d broken everything that she could find to break last night, and this morning, she’d awakened empty.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Molly.
She’d come close. She’d started something with Stan Webelow that she doubted she could finish alone. And she would be alone in this soon. She couldn’t have Thalia in her house any longer.
She turned away from the window toward the bed. David’s pillow was dented. He must have come up sometime in the night, after she’d finished throwing up and had passed out on her side. It would have been more heartening if he hadn’t left again while she was sleeping. She pulled off her pajamas and let them lie where they fell, then went to the bathroom to dry-swallow some Motrin and get in a hot shower. She let the water beat down on her head until the ache faded and she felt something like herself again. It had been a while.
She dressed in a pair of jeans and a pale green tank top, and then she tidied up out of sheer habit, putting her pajamas in the hamper. As she made the bed, the ghost of lavender rose around her. She’d made the quilt that served as their comforter five years ago, and she’d never thought the sachet would last this long.
When everything was put in order, she looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. She’d pulled her damp hair back in a ponytail, and she wore no makeup, no shoes. She saw only Laurel, with no plan and nothing whole left to throw. Downstairs, she would find the scraps of things she’d shattered, waiting to be sorted through, and she would see what could be salvaged.
She opened the door, ready to go down, and there was Bet Clemmens. Bet’s hand was raised to knock, so it looked like she was about to punch Laurel in the face. Laurel’s heart jump- started, and she involuntarily stepped backward.
“I’m sorry!” Bet said, almost a yelp, and she lowered her arm.
“It’s okay,” Laurel said, putting one hand to her chest. “You’ve got little cat feet, you know that?”
Bet tilted her head to the side and said, “You give me a pitcher book oncet. For Christmas. It said the fog come in like that.”
“I remember,” said Laurel, though she didn’t specifically recall giving that book to Bet. Shelby had loved it in preschool, so Laurel had taken quite a few copies of it to DeLop over the years.
Laurel looked past Bet, down the hall. The door to the little guest room was closed. Bet glanced over her shoulder, following Laurel’s gaze. “Shelby’s still hard sleepin’ in there,” she said.
“Let her,” Laurel said. “She’s not going to have an easy day.”
“Because of they’re laying out Molly this evening,” Bet said.
“That, too,” Laurel agreed, but she’d meant what must happen when Shelby woke up. She thought of Mother saying, I never yet saw a dissection that did the worm a bit of good, but she’d tried to handle this like Mother already. All she had learned was that Mother had failed her. “Did you need something?”
“Naw. He saved you the downstairs, because of he said you like the chunks of things,” Bet said. “So I went and got you these.”
Laurel blinked, not following even a word of that, and then Bet held out a sandwich bag. Some shards of beige and clear plastic were jumbled up in the bottom. Laurel took it and spread the bag flat on one hand, petting the pieces into a single layer.
She recognized what she was holding, and she pulled her top hand back, as if the broken shards of plastic had gone hot. “It’s the planchette?” she said, and it came out high on the end, like a question, even though she knew the answer.