The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Read Online Free

Laurel-shaped hole in the wooden boards. Her own backyard had become a foreign country.
    “Ma’am, you need to get down from there,” a fireman said, heading for the fence. But Mindy had already seen Molly.
    “Oh, my dear God,” she said. Her hand snaked up to push Jeffrey’s head down. “I’ll call Simon.” Mindy’s husband was a doctor. Then she got down.
    Shelby was staring at the pool, her body curved away from Laurel. Laurel put one arm back around her, both to steady herself and to feel the simple living flesh of her. “Close your eyes, baby,” Laurel said.
    “I already saw,” Shelby said. Tears spilled out of her eyes, and her nose was running unchecked. “It is Molly. It is.” She pulled away again. “You’re freezing me to death.” The last word rose in an indignant adolescent lilt. Then she put her hands up to scrub at her eyes with her palms, a toddler move. Her mouth was still a cupid’s bow, as unformed and generic as a baby’s. Laurel wrapped her arms around her own middle, sick with not touching her daughter.
    She could hear people tramping through her house. One of them found the switch for the back floodlights. Her pupils had dilated in the near-dark, and the burst of light hit her like a flash bomb going off. The backyard was all at once awash in summer’s colors, green grass, the last hot-pink azaleas, the bright peach-and-blue-striped cushions on the patio chairs. Only the yard’s back corners were still dark. The bulb had died in the light above the gazebo, and no light reached the pet cemetery where David had interred Bibby, Shelby’s first cat, and a childhood’s worth of gerbils and the kind of short-lived goldfish won at fairs and the school carnival.
    Bet Clemmens was watching the firemen with her blank, calm eyes. She seemed almost serene, and Laurel realized with a start that this was as comfortable as she had ever seen Bet in Victorianna. Sirens and flashing lights were a regular Saturday night for Bet. She was one of The Folks; that was Laurel’s name for her mother’s family in DeLop, though Thalia, colder and more dramatic, called them The Squalid People.
    DeLop had once been a mining town, but the coal had run out seventy years back, and most everyone in town had moved on when the jobs dried up. The Folks were what was left. They lived squashed up on one another, three and four generations layered into one falling-down mobile home or trailer. Half of them were meth heads, the rest were drunks, and girls Shelby’s age walked around dead-eyed with babies slung up on their skinny hips. At Christmas, Laurel went with Thalia and Daddy and Mother to deliver a ham dinner and a pair of shoes and some toys to every child in DeLop who had a shred of blood in common with Mother. Three years ago, Shelby began agitating to go along. She wanted to help deliver the toys. She’d picked most of them out, she argued. She’d kicked in part of her allowance every week to help buy them. Why should she be left at home with her dad?
    The very idea of Shelby in DeLop chilled Laurel to her marrow. Guns or meth labs inside every other house, drunk men laid out bare-chested on their porches, Dixie plates of soft white food left moldering on the floors, every yard adrift in dog crap and broken glass and needles and Taco Bell wrappers and used condoms. Once, at Uncle Poot’s house, Laurel had seen a dead animal lying in the middle of the driveway. It was about the size of a possum or a small raccoon. There was no telling, since the thing had been left there so long it had rotted down to bones lying in a nest of its own dark hairs. Shelby had no idea what she was asking.
    Bet Clemmens was a compromise. She’d started as a pen pal whom Laurel had selected from the herd of vaguely related DeLop kids near Shelby’s age.
    “How touching. It’s like you’re bringing a tiny piece of shit mountain back to Mohammed,” Thalia had said when she found out. “I assume you’ll read the letters