The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,9
toward the Coes’ house. Shelby led the way between Bet Clemmens and the tech who wanted the T-shirt.
Out in the cul-de-sac, Laurel and David’s neighbors stood in clots between the emergency vehicles. Edie Paintin, Laurel’s other close friend, stood on the edge of Mindy’s yard with her husband, and in between the cop cars and the wasted ambulance she saw the Simpsons, the Decouxs, and the Rainwaters in a huddle. The Prestons and another woman, maybe Julie Wilson, stood farther back, almost lost in the shadows.
Trish Deerbold, the thin lines of her overplucked brows raised and her mouth curling, was across the cul-de-sac in front of her house. She stared hard as Laurel passed, as if Laurel were an exhibit. Laurel saw Trish poke one elbow into Eva Bailey and then lean toward her, whispering. All her neighbors’ eyes were on her. She hated being looked at this way, her stained hands held up like a confession.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of another person standing across the street. He was well behind the crowd, all the way back in the Deerbolds’ grass. The colored lights of the farthest cop car bounced off his curls, or else he would have been invisible. He had Percy Bysshe Shelley hair, the top rumpled into an artful tousle. It looked like Stan Webelow’s hair, but everyone else she could see milling in the cul-de-sac was a close neighbor; Stan lived all the way over in Victorianna’s phase one.
“Who is that?” she asked David.
“Who is what?” said David. He didn’t stop.
Laurel craned her head back over her shoulder as David walked her forward. The Decouxs were blocking her view, so the person had to be short. Stan Webelow was built small and leanly muscled. When he jogged shirtless through the neighborhood, his lithe chest as dewy as if he’d oiled it, the mommy brigade paused to watch. Not Laurel; Stan Webelow had a pixieman face, and his hands were moist and soft, as if he’d deboned them. He should not be here now.
Mindy came running to her other side and threw an arm around her, saying, “Oh, honey!” She saw Laurel’s hands and added, “Are you hurt?”
Mindy tugged her up the stairs and inside. Laurel peered through the crack as the Coes’ front door was closing, but she could no longer see the man.
Thalia would have pulled away and run across the street. If it were Stan Webelow, she would have grabbed him by all his curls, squeezed him at both ends, demanding to know his business here on Chapel Circle. But her sister had not set foot in Victorianna for going on two years now; Thalia wasn’t here, and Laurel wasn’t her.
For the first time in her life, she wished she were.
CHAPTER 2
The last time Thalia came to Victorianna was in the dead heat of an endless September. The dog days made her torpid. She spent the weekend lounging by the pool with Laurel, watching Shelby and her friends leaping in and out of the water like seal puppies. That time she hadn’t needled David much about being a robot or taught Shelby’s crew how to say “fart” in nine languages or gotten rowdy with someone’s husband back in Laurel’s gazebo. She was lazy and easy, right up until the last night of her visit. Then she made up for all her good behavior: She let Laurel take a walk.
They stayed up too late, sitting hip to hip in front of the fireplace and drinking wine as Thalia pulled out pretty childhood memories for Laurel in a string, like Christmas lights. No one could tell stories like Thalia in a sweet mood; she’d gone to Chapel Hill’s prime drama school on scholarship, and by her sophomore year, she’d had more than one West Coast agency courting her. But she’d fallen in love with the tiny laboratory theater in the basement of Graham Memorial.
“I can smell the audience’s collective breath. That’s intimacy. Television is for assholes,” she explained. “And movies are for slightly smarter assholes.”
She dropped out, married her gay boyfriend, Gary, and together they opened a nonprofit theater in Mobile that teetered on the desperate edge of collapse every time the electric bill came. They survived on grants, the yoga and acting lessons Thalia taught, and a small but dedicated fan base.
That night, long after David and Shelby had gone up to bed, Thalia had been on, and Laurel was an audience of one. Her stomach muscles hurt