The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,4
inside her house to find a peaceful room where none of this was true. It couldn’t be true, and yet her clever hands kept doing necessary things, sending two fingers into Molly’s slack mouth to clear it.
She bent to put her mouth on Molly’s and pushed air, hard, meeting resistance. All she could see was the cheerful pebbled tile, and beyond that a small part of the lawn and David’s bare feet running for the house.
As she sat up, she yelled after him, “David? Where’s Shelby? You have to find Shelby.”
The alarm cut out as she called the last two words. The siren had shocked the frogs and crickets into silence, and her voice rang out. Her hands were back on Molly’s chest, compressing, but Molly’s body felt abandoned. Her heart was dense and still.
She looked back toward the house and saw Shelby walking through the glass doors. Her bangs stuck up in tufts, and she was dry and sleepy-eyed and breathing. She was still in her ratty jean shorts and a T-shirt and pink Pumas. She stopped on the patio, her mouth opening in a shocked O. Laurel wanted to run to her, grab her up, but she had to bend and push air for Molly again.
When she sat up, Shelby was taking a hesitant step forward, and Laurel called, “Stay there, baby.”
Shelby obeyed.
Bet Clemmens came out of the back door, David right behind her. Bet had the black Hefty bag she’d brought as a suitcase pressed against her chest like a pillow. After her first visit, last year, Laurel had gotten her a wheeled suitcase with a pull-out handle, but she’d come back with a trash bag again this year. “It broke,” she’d said in a flat, defensive voice before Laurel had even asked. It had been stupid, sending a nice suitcase like that back to DeLop, expecting Bet would get to keep it.
“Stay,” David said to both girls. He stepped over the patio fence and strode fast across the lawn. He was holding the cordless phone from the kitchen by his side.
Laurel could hear the tinny voice of the 911 operator telling him to remain on the line, but as he reached Laurel, he let the handset clatter to the tile and said, “They’re coming.”
David knelt on the other side of Molly’s still form. His stronger hands folded themselves over her chest, and he thrust down, short, hard pushes, demanding a response and not getting one while Laurel breathed uselessly for her.
It went on for a long time like that. By the time Laurel heard the sirens, the pebbled tiles were tiny scissors clipping at her knees each time she shifted.
David heard the sirens, too. He called, “Shelby, go unlock the front door.”
The first two firemen hurried through the glass door. Laurel had always thought of it as a glad thing when the firemen came, a promising thing. It had been the firemen who said it was common, it was fine, let’s take her to the hospital anyway to be sure, when Shelby was three and had a febrile seizure. They’d arrived first again when David, who tripped over dust motes and should have known better, had gone up on the roof to clean the gutters himself and fallen off and broken his ankle. But when Laurel’s daddy shot her uncle Marty, it had been the sheriff’s men, dressed in light blue, and look how that turned out. They’d come from the direction of the cabin, ambling slow because Marty’s blood had already cooled, setting like gelatin.
It heartened Laurel to see the busy rush of firemen now. There was a beat when the pinkest part of her fool heart thought seeing them meant Molly was fixable and could be woken and handed back to her mother, whole and safe.
Laurel bent and pushed a last breath into Molly’s slack mouth, and then she knew it wasn’t any good. Strong hands came down and lifted her away, like David had lifted Molly out of the pool, and she was passed backward to David as the firemen took over.
David walked with her to the patio, one hand on the small of her back as if Laurel were a touchstone holding him present, even as the fluid economy of his movements disintegrated.
Shelby stood hugging herself in front of the glass doors. As soon as she was close enough, Laurel’s hands reached out for Shelby as if they had their own brains in the thumbs. She pulled Shelby tight against her chest.