Joshilyn Jackson - The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2008 by Joshilyn Jackson

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com .

First eBook Edition: March 2008

Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-446-51171-1

Contents

Also by Joshilyn Jackson

gods in Alabama

Between, Georgia

And for Scott, right now

U ntil the drowned girl came to Laurels bedroom, ghosts had never walked in Victorianna. The houses were only twenty years old, with no accumulated history to put creaks in the hardwood floors or rattle at the pipes. The backyards had tall fences, and there were no cracks in the white sidewalks. Victorianna had a heavy wrought-iron gate guarding its entrance. The intricately curled top looked period, but it was new as well. It ran on hydraulics, and it swung wide only for those who knew the code.

Laurel and David had moved into the big house on Chapel Circle thirteen years ago, when Laurel was only nineteen, and since that day she hadnt seen so much as a glimmer of her dead uncle Marty. He was tethered to the three-bedroom brick ranch where her parents still lived, half an hour away in tiny Pace, Florida. As a girl, she had seen him often, mostly on the nights before a storm broke.

Shed be fast asleep on her old Cinderella sheets, faded and soft from a thousand washings, with Anne of Green Gables or a Trixie Belden book lying open-spined on her bedside table. Then he would be there, standing on her side of the room by her bed, mournful and transparent. He didnt belong near the ruffled shade on her reading lamp, and his feet should not have been allowed to rest beside her cotton trainer bra and Thalias dirty Keds and the abandoned issues of Tiger Beat scattered on the floor. The stuffed pony Laurel had loved best was still allowed a place at the end of her bed, but Marty was not reflected in its glass eyes, as if her loyal pony doll refused to acknowledge his presence.

Hed smile at her, one hand tucked easy in the waistband of his faded Levis, the other reaching out to her, ready to show her secret scenes, her own personal ghost of Christmas never.

A thin finger of moonlight came through the bullet hole left of his center, reaching to touch Laurels eye and help her lids come shuddering down. Shed leave them closed and roll away. In the morning, the sun would light up dust motes in the place where hed been standing.

He left a cold spot in the room that she didnt like to walk through, and sometimes shed see the impression that his blanched cowboy boots had left in the nap of the rug. Once, her sister, Thalia, caught Laurel down on her knees, trying to smooth away those faint footprints.

Are you feeling up the carpet, Bug? Thalia asked.

Laurel only shrugged and stilled her hands. Thalia slept light and woke often, but she never saw Marty.

Laurel brought Thalia over to see the house in Victorianna a few days after she and David moved in. Theyd been married all of five weeks. Thalia sat in the passenger seat, drawing her upper lip back from her teeth, higher and higher, while Laurel drove her slowly through the winding streets. The lip was practically touching Thalias nose by the time theyd passed six blocks worth of the large pastel Victorians with their gingerbread and curling gables and romantic little balconies.

It looks like Barbies Dream House threw up in here, Thalia said. A bunch of times. Like, went full-on bulimic.

I think its beautiful, Laurel said. Her tone was mild, but low in her belly, she felt the baby flip, popping sideways like an angry brine shrimp. Look, this ones ours.

She pulled in to the driveway. Laurel and Davids house was the palest blue, trimmed in deep plum and heather. Two gargoyles hidden in the eaves watched over her with fierce eyes. A weathervane on the roof told her the winds plans for the day.

Thalia glanced from the turret to the sloped roof and then shook her head.

You say something nice, Laurel said, putting one hand over the swell of her abdomen. She was four months gone, and Shelby was so little, Laurel could only feel her fierce spins from the inside.

Okay, Thalia said, with the O stretched long, as if to buy her thinking time. Then she lifted her chin, manufacturing a June Cleaver smile. It looks clean. Like they dont even let dogs pee here.

Laurel laughed. I think thats in our charter.

She started to get out, but Thalia put one hand on her arm, stopping her. Seriously? This is what you want? This house, this husband, a baby at nineteen? Laurel nodded, and Thalia let her go. But Laurel heard her mutter under her breath, Its like youre living inside a lobotomy.

Oh, stop it, Laurel said. That doesnt even make sense.

Sure it does, Thalia said. Lots of things live in holes. This place is a hole where your brains used to be.

Thalia never grew to like Victorianna any better, but then she also said Laurels quilts, with all their jarring elements secreted or undercut, were too pretty to be considered art. Real art, Thalia said, went for the jugular. Laurel would let a bleached birds skull peek out of the gingham pocket of a country Christmas angel, but shed never replace the angels pretty head with it. It wouldnt feel right. Laurel saw her quilts complete in her minds eye, and she knew every pieceinnocent, macabre, or neutral as beige velvetmust be subject to the larger pattern. Likewise, Victoriannas pieces made a whole that Laurel thought was lovely.

Her neighbors might have their own especial favorite sins; they drank or fought, they cheated on their taxes or each other. But they washed and waxed their cars on Saturdays, and they kept their hedges and lamps trimmed. They put up neighborhood-watch signs and kept their curtains open, ever vigilant. Old-fashioned glass lampposts lined the streets, so that even at night, a ghost would be hard put to find a shadowed path to Laurels door.

Even so, that night the drowned girl came anyway.

A storm was gathering, so Laurel checked that the chain was on their bedroom door before climbing into bed. She was more likely to sleepwalk when the air was humid enough to hold the taste of electricity. Shed rise and undo locks, pull up windows, unpack closets and drawers. Once, shed left a puffy beaded poppy she was hand-sewing sitting out on her bedside table. She fell asleep thinking that the black beads at the poppys center were as glossy and round as mouse eyes, and then she rose in the night and picked out every stitch. Her hands liked to open and undo while she was sleeping. The chain was no challenge. Its true job was to rattle against the door frame and wake up David so he could lead her back to bed.

Their bedroom felt like a crisper. David, whose metabolism ran so high his skin always felt slightly fevered, couldnt sleep in summer unless the thermostat was set at 65. Laurel climbed in and got under the blankets, pressing her front against his warm back. She kissed his shoulder, but he didnt stir. He was well and truly out, and his lanky body had solidified into something dense and hard to shift.

David was working fifteen-hour days, adapting simulator code hed written for the navy into a PC game for a company out in California. Hed probably spoken ten complete sentences to her in the last week. All the pieces of him that she thought of as her husband had moved down to live in his brain stem, while coding took his higher functions.