The Drowning Girls Read online

  “You think that—” But my words were lost in a sudden choking sound from Elijah. His eyes blinked wildly, and he thrust his head back.

  “Oh, dear.” Fran bent down, tipping his head to one side, settling him. “We’d better keep going. He likes the constant motion. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Liz. We’ll have to bump into each other again like this.”

  I called a goodbye and watched as she disappeared into a pocket of darkness between carriage lights, the soft slurring of Elijah’s wheels fading to nothing. I continued on to the entrance to the trail, which began and ended in front of the clubhouse, Fran’s words ringing in my ears. Someone had kicked holes in our walls, scratched the countertops. I didn’t know what was more unsettling, the idea of a vandal wielding a can of spray paint, or how easily it had been covered up, leaving no trace of the damage.

  I paused along the trail when I reached the back of our Tudor. It was almost unrecognizable from this angle, as if the experience of living there was completely disconnected from what I was seeing now. There was the lawn and the pool, the patio with its topiaries in gigantic terra-cotta pots. Next to the door rose the hump of a forgotten beach towel. Darkness seeped from the windows.

  I live here.

  It not only didn’t seem real, it suddenly didn’t seem like a great idea.

  That night my dreams were dogged with images of the vandalism I’d never seen, a reverse version of the shows I watched on HGTV, where the beautiful home was smashed apart by strong-armed men swinging willy-nilly with sledgehammers, leaving gaping holes in their wake.

  And when I woke, the house didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t as solid and impenetrable, despite the security system, despite the Other Woman telling me when I was entering and exiting, what was locked and unlocked. That house had been a fantasy. It had existed in a dreamlike fugue, and now that was gone.

  * * *

  Eager to escape the stasis of The Palms, I went back to school a week early, before the office was filled with parents and students, new registrants and those pleading for a last-minute schedule change, the line five-deep out the door. It was nice to work without the distraction of an endless stream of Reply-All emails, the vaguely threatening administrative memos, the standard litany of complaints about the amount of homework in AP courses.

  For now, I locked the door to the counseling office behind me and blasted the radio, sorting papers and settling unfinished business from the end of the past school year.

  It was good to be back.

  It would be good for Danielle, too. I’d been too lenient over the summer, lax on chores and responsibilities. School would mean essays and projects and speeches; it would mean clubs and activities and friends who weren’t Kelsey.

  Deep down, I knew that was the trouble, the real trouble, with Kelsey: she was going to break my daughter’s heart. Sure, they were friends at The Palms, but what would happen when Kelsey had more options to choose from, when she decoded the social strata at Miles Landers and infiltrated the popular crowd? She wouldn’t hesitate to ditch my sweet, naive, awkward daughter who’d once spent a summer memorizing the periodic table just for fun. No, Danielle had been good for staving off boredom. She was a mere placeholder until Kelsey found her place among the jocks and mean girls of Miles Landers.

  “Just tell her not to hang around Kelsey,” Phil said one night, while we watched the end of the Giants game in bed. Down the hall, a deep quiet emanated from Danielle’s room, punctuated by occasional shrill bursts of laughter.

  I laughed. “You were never a teenage girl.”

  “What tipped you off?” He shifted and I moved closer to him, my head in the crook of his neck.

  “If I tell her not to hang around Kelsey, she’ll just want to hang around Kelsey more. That’s the first rule of being a teenager.” I yawned, pulling a sheet up to my chin. “Maybe they’ll have some kind of fight, some big blowup, and things will cool off for a bit.”

  Over the roar of the crowd and the notes of the pipe organ, I heard Phil say, “We should be so lucky.”

  * * *

  No matter the amount of preplanning, the carefully posted directional signs, the color-coordinated packets, registration was always a zoo. I’d come to expect parents who ignored directions, the horde of unattended children, the inevitable air-conditioner malfunction. Basically, it was a three-day circus in a stuffy gymnasium.

  I worked side by side with Aaron Harrigfeld, my colleague and closest friend at Miles Landers. In seven years, we’d formed a bond based on sarcastic insights about our coworkers and a mutual quest for interesting lunches within driving distance of campus. When there was a lull, we caught up on our summers: he’d broken up with Lauren, the girl he’d been dating since January, during a five-day cruise to Mexico.

  “During?” I repeated.

  He closed his eyes, as if to block out the memory. “During.”

  “What happened? Not the hot-girl effect again?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  I rolled my eyes, even though I was the one who coined the term years earlier to describe Aaron’s tendency to date stunning women in their early to midtwenties. I’d seen a whole parade of Laurens at this point—either he grew tired of them, or they moved on to bigger and better.

  “And by the way,” he said, cracking open a water bottle the next time the line died down, “I’m still waiting for my dinner invitation.”

  “It’s coming. Once we get a dining room table.”

  He laughed. “All summer, I thought of you. Poor Liz, suffering with all that tennis and golf and swimming.”

  “It was pretty rough,” I admitted.

  “And now you’re back here, slumming with the rest of the working world,” he mused.

  I gave him a friendly kick beneath the table. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the little people.” Just that morning, in fact, I’d taken a detour past our old house in Livermore—tiny, run-down, the lawn a patchwork of weeds, the street choked with cars. I was expecting to feel a rush of nostalgia, but from my drive-by perspective, it was hard to imagine we’d ever been happy there.

  Aaron mock-bowed at the waist. “On behalf of the little people, I thank you. So, when do I get to see Danielle, anyway? Is Phil bringing her through?”

  I hesitated. Danielle was supposed to be there with me now, helping with the registration table. I’d planned to take her around to the various stations when the line was low, reintroducing her to staff members she’d met over the years. But last night Sonia had called, offering to take the girls to the mall for back-to-school shopping in the morning, then to registration in the afternoon. “It’s the least I can do,” she gushed. “You’ve been so generous with Kelsey all summer, and now that she’ll be carpooling with you...”

  She was right. It was the least she could do. I’d planned to offer occasional rides to Kelsey, figuring I left too early each morning to make that an attractive offer. But Sonia had embraced the idea enthusiastically. It wasn’t until later that I wondered if she saw me as part of her support staff, one of the sprawling, faceless army of people who performed her menial tasks.

  I brushed off this thought and told Aaron, “Danielle’s coming with a friend. One of the girls in our neighborhood is starting here, too.”

  “This place is getting overrun with millionaires,” he quipped.

  All afternoon, I found myself scanning the cafeteria for a sight of them, two leggy blonde models and my own knock-kneed, dark-haired daughter, trailing behind in her Converse. When they did arrive, I spotted Kelsey first—a sheaf of white-blond hair, cutoffs so short the pockets hung below the hem. Sonia was next to her, tall in a pair of heels that dented the floor varnish. But even then, it took me a minute to recognize Danielle next to them.

  “What the...” I stood, craning to get a better look, and Danielle spotted me at the same time. H
er cheeks were red.

  “Don’t be mad,” she blurted, coming toward me. “There was this place in the mall—”

  “Your hair,” I breathed. Since kindergarten, she’d worn it long—ponytails, a braid, a dark waterfall down the middle of her back. I’d shampooed it for her, picked carefully through the wet knots, brushed it in the mornings, snapped it into place with an elastic band. Sure, she hadn’t needed that help for years—but now that her hair was gone, I was sharply nostalgic for those mother-daughter tasks. Danielle’s hair hadn’t just been cut, it was cropped short, ending above her ears, fitting her head like a dark skullcap.

  Next to me, Aaron whistled. “You know who you look like? Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.”

  Danielle laughed. “Is that good?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, leaning across the table to give her a quick hug. “Ready for high school?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Do you like it, Mom?”

  I touched her hair tentatively, trying to find a piece long enough to tuck behind her ears. She looked lovely, striking—but in a surreal way, as if this wasn’t my fourteen-year-old daughter in front of me, but a grown, postcollege version of herself, home for a visit. I tried to keep my tone light, tried not to let the hurt seep through. “You didn’t tell me you wanted a haircut.”

  “Well, Kelsey was getting hers cut anyway, and Mrs. Jorgensen offered...”

  “Kelsey’s mom paid for this?”

  “I know. I told her I had money, but she insisted...”

  “How much are we talking?”

  Danielle bit her lip. “Seventy-eight dollars.”

  “Seventy-eight dollars!” I hissed.

  Next to me, Aaron whistled.

  Then Sonia was there, oohing and aahing over the cut, offering a faux apology as if she simply couldn’t help herself. “I mean, with these cheekbones,” she gushed, “she was practically a diamond in the rough.”

  She was a diamond already, I seethed.

  “You know what we should do tonight?” Kelsey asked. “We should try on all our clothes, and I could do your makeup.”

  Danielle laughed. “I don’t know. I look funny with makeup.”

  “Seriously, I’ll give you a whole new look.”

  I had a sick feeling, as if I were on a roller coaster and the momentum was building and building, and the whole thing might just go off the tracks.

  “Let me get you girls your class schedules,” Aaron said, bustling behind me, saving me from whatever ugly thing was going to come out of my mouth. He found Danielle’s schedule under the M’s, and then hesitated, looking at Kelsey. “What’s your last name?”

  “Jorgensen,” Sonia said. “Kelsey.”

  Aaron thumbed through a stack and handed Kelsey her schedule. She glanced at it, then asked, “So which of you is going to be my counselor?”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing. “You’ll be mine. I have H through M.”

  She smiled. “Cool.”

  Danielle held up both papers, looking back and forth between them. I couldn’t stop staring at her, as if she were some kind of mythical creature, half girl, half woman. “Hey,” she said. “We have a class together! Geometry.”

  “Oh, my God, you would be in advanced math,” Kelsey teased, and Danielle blushed.

  Sonia glanced at her cell phone, noting the time. “What’s next here? Why don’t we get in line for ID photos while we can.”

  Danielle gave me an uncertain wave. “Bye.”

  “Yes, bye,” Kelsey chorused.

  I slumped back into the plastic cafeteria chair, watching them walk away from me. The crowd seemed to part at Sonia’s approach, and more than a few heads turned. They were looking at Danielle, too, I realized.

  Aaron helped the next people in line and then took a seat beside me. “She does look great, you know.”

  “Of course she does,” I breathed.

  “But that friend. Whew.” He shook his head. “I’m glad she’s one of yours. She looks like a pack of trouble.”

  * * *

  “She might have asked me,” I huffed to Phil that night. “I have a phone. Would it have been too difficult for her to call me, to at least mention the idea? Oh, by the way, Liz, we’re going to stop by a salon. Would you mind if I had Danielle’s hair hacked all the way back to her scalp?”

  “You did say you liked it.”

  I sighed. “That’s not the point.”

  The girls were upstairs, in the beginning stages of what promised to be a marathon clothes-trying-on session. They were using the mirror in our walk-in closet, so Phil and I were banished to the back deck, where we were slowly working our way through a forty-four-dollar bottle of wine from Victor Mesbah, a just-because gift he’d dropped by the office. I was slowly burning through my anger, too.

  Phil sighed. “It’s hair, Liz. It’s not like it’s a neck tattoo. And she does look cute.”

  “Of course she looks cute,” I bristled. “She couldn’t not look cute.” But she’d been cute before, when she’d been so patently herself.

  Phil’s voice was calm, his words nearly lapped up by the pool. “You’re probably going to have to let this go.” He was distancing himself, I thought, playing the role of the disengaged stepfather.

  Earlier, driving home, the blades of the wind generators on the Altamont rotated so slowly, they might have been giant house fans, barely displacing the warm air. Now the grass by the fourteenth hole was fading into a purplish blue, and sunset had brought with it a slight chill. I pulled my knees to my chest. “She’s becoming one of them.”

  Phil laughed. “Who?”

  “You know. The pretty girls.”

  He leaned over, emptying the bottle between our glasses. “What pretty girls?”

  “Please. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Look at Deanna Sievert. Look at Sonia Jorgensen. Look at Kelsey, for goodness’ sake. Those pretty girls, the ones the world smiles on, the ones who get everything they want without even trying for it.”

  “I haven’t noticed, particularly.” But his voice was distant, his gaze far away.

  Liar. I took a large gulp, savoring the slow trickle of wine down my throat, and set the half-empty glass at my feet.

  The night had been so quiet that the sound of a car starting still registered a few minutes later, an echoic memory. Out of the darkness came another sound, a strangled cry.

  “What was that?” I sat up, thinking the worst—the girls upstairs, Fran Blevins home alone with Elijah.

  He held up a hand, shushing me. We waited, and the sound came again—clearly a scream this time, its shrill edge piercing the night. Phil didn’t have to think, he was on his feet, heading for the door. I stood, toppling my glass, which shattered on the concrete.

  “Shit.” I stooped to gather the shards.

  “Leave it,” Phil called over his shoulder. “We’ll get it later.”

  Inside, Danielle and Kelsey were at the top of the stairs, looking down on us. From this angle I could see straight up Danielle’s skirt, a tiny white thing that was a waste of money, no matter what she’d spent.

  Phil charged through the kitchen to the garage.

  “What’s going on?” Danielle demanded.

  The garage door slammed and Phil was back, flicking a flashlight on-off, on-off to test the battery.

  “We heard a noise,” I told them. “Just stay put. We’ll check it out.”

  But Danielle had started down the steps, Kelsey trailing her in a skimpy baby-doll dress. “I’m coming, too,” Danielle said. “I want to go with you.”

  “Right? That’s always how it is in horror movies. The killer comes upstairs, and there’s nowhere left to go at that point,” Kelsey put in.

  “I’m sure there’s no—”

  “A
bsolutely not,” Phil snapped. “You’re staying here. And put some clothes on, both of you.”

  Danielle looked down at her legs, as if she were seeing them for the first time. Kelsey only smiled.

  “Stay,” I ordered, as if they were disobedient pets. I followed Phil as he barreled down the front walkway, the beam of his flashlight bringing into stark relief the rounded humps of our landscaping rocks. I saw a dark figure standing in the middle of the road, and he spotted me, moving into the yellow glow of an overhead carriage light. He was tall, gray hair cropped close to his head, a button-down shirt tucked firmly into his waistband.

  “Everything all right at your house?” he called.

  “We’re fine. I guess you heard that, too?”

  “Sounded like a scream.” He extended a hand. “I’m Doug Blevins.”

  “Liz—Liz McGinnis. That’s my husband, Phil,” I gestured to Phil’s retreating form, a dark shadow preceded by the beam of his flashlight. “I’ve met your wife and son a few times.”

  “That’s what I hear. Fran said it was nice to have another normal person around.”

  I laughed. “I feel the same way.”

  Again, the scream came. It was louder this time, and definitely female. I whirled around, trying to get a sense of its origin.

  “That’s it,” Doug said, digging in his pocket. “Woman screaming? I’m calling the police.”

  Phil was coming back from the clubhouse, his flashlight zigzagging toward us.

  Doug took a step away, speaking into his phone. “Yes, I’m calling from The Palms. Alameda County, outside Livermore.”

  “It’s not coming from the clubhouse,” Phil panted. “Everything’s shut up for the night.” He frowned at Doug Blevins, overhearing part of his conversation.

  The scream became a breathy wail, carried by someone coming off the trail at a sprint. Footsteps pounded closer, and Phil stepped in front of me. “Who’s out there?” he called.