The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,85
her voice gentle. “We’re done.”
Thalia was on her back, slowly raising her legs until her toes pointed toward the ceiling. She didn’t pause when Laurel spoke. Always aware of an audience, she must have felt the air shift when Laurel came into the room.
“Mystery solved, Velma?” Thalia asked. “Is it time to pack up the Mystery Machine and say the part about ‘if it wasn’t for those meddling kids’?” Her legs kept rising until her hips lifted off the floor, and then she slowly lowered them, still straight, over her head. Her toes touched down on a single lace-topped stocking by the edge of the mat.
“I’ve got enough to turn things over to the police now,” Laurel said. “Bet Clemmens knew more than she’d been saying.”
“Mmm,” Thalia said. “Septic waters run deep.”
“Look at me, Thalia,” Laurel said. She waited while Thalia unrolled herself and sat up, cross-legged. “I know you didn’t come here to help me put Molly to rest. That was all set dressing. You came to root me out of here.”
Thalia cocked her head to the side and said, “That’s not entirely true.”
“It’s true enough,” Laurel said.
Thalia shrugged. “I face-planted in a pervo’s crotch for you, Bug, so don’t make the big bruisy wound eyes and say I wasn’t playing for your team. Yes, I’ll kill the fatted calf the day you call me up and ask me to come over in a U-Haul and get you, but it’s not like I’ve been covert about that. And I told you from the start, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“You said you’d come because you believed me,” Laurel said. “But this whole time, you were here to wreck me.”
Thalia stood up and took a step to the left, centering herself by instinct so that the mat framed her. “You weren’t that hard to wreck, Bug. That should tell you something.”
“I’m still here,” Laurel said simply and quietly. Shelby was sleeping one door down, and Laurel was past yelling. Past smashing things. Past dramatic exits up the center aisle.
“It wasn’t to hurt you,” Thalia said. “Never that, Bug. It was to get you free. You’re half the artist you could be, all because that cyborg down the stairs forgot to bag it one night when you were barely nineteen. You’re living our mother’s god-awful smiley life, just in a better neighborhood. I see you going under for the third time, and I’m supposed to stand by and hum and watch? When the hell have I ever done that?”
“Not once,” Laurel said.
Thalia wasn’t a sideline kind of girl; no one knew that better than Laurel, who had spent her childhood being “Thalia Gray’s sister, poor thing.” Her classmates had meant she was the sister of the most notorious reprobate in school, but it was more than that. They had all wanted, on some level, to be Thalia. Maybe only for a day, but surely they had wondered what it must feel like to draw every eye, to not give two good damns what other people thought, to be made purely of appetites and bold enough to feed them all in turn. Laurel was Poor Thing because she lived in the chaotic churning of Thalia’s mighty wake, but also because she would never be Thalia. Even Thalia pitied her for not being Thalia.
Laurel picked her way across the littered floor to stand in front of the mat. She came close enough so that Thalia could not look beside her eyes or between them. Close enough to speak in a voice barely above a breath and still be heard.
“Who shot Marty?” she asked.
Thalia backed up a step. “You know who, Bug. You were there.”
Laurel followed, feeling her feet sink into the dense mat as she stepped up on it. “Your stupid little sister had her eyes closed,” she said. “She was afraid of guns. She was probably afraid of deer. But I’m not her.”
Thalia tried to stare her down, her expression inscrutable. Laurel stood fast, expecting nothing, waiting her out.
At last Thalia spoke. “I’m not sorry.”
“I know,” Laurel said. “It’s okay.”
“If you brought him here right now, I’d shoot his ass again,” Thalia said, but there was a tremble in her voice.
“I understand,” Laurel said.
She did. Perfectly. She’d been Mother’s, and Mother hadn’t saved her. Daddy hadn’t saved Thalia, either, though she’d always been his girl. What’s a daddy’s girl to do when her father isn’t Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson but only a daydreaming plumber with a willfully blind wife? There was no