The Drowning Girls Read online

  “I hear you were out there keeping us safe,” he said. “I bet we’re out of danger now.”

  Not at all, I thought. Not a bit.

  It was bright outside, a deceptively cold East Bay morning. I let myself in through the front door and took the stairs two at a time. Danielle met me on the landing, surprised. My mind had been reeling with worst-case scenarios, and I’d simply forgotten about her.

  “Why are you here?” Danielle asked.

  “I live here. Why are you here?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m not feeling so great. I need a private bathroom.”

  “Ewwwww...” she groaned, waving me past.

  I locked the bedroom doors behind me and surveyed the scene. My clothes were draped over a chair, where I’d left them last night. Liz’s pajamas were balled next to them. I’d made the bed haphazardly this morning, and the duvet hung low on my side. Nothing looked out of place, nothing looked as if it didn’t belong. But I wasn’t the most observant guy under the best of circumstances. I was the wrong person for this sick little game.

  I pulled back the sheets, running my hand under the pillows and along the foot of the mattress, gingerly, as though I was away at summer camp, feeling in my sleeping bag for a snake. I opened my nightstand drawer, then Liz’s, rifling through the junk that had accumulated there in only a couple of months. I was beginning to feel queasy, imagining Kelsey in our room, touching our sheets, holding the tube of K-Y Jelly in Liz’s nightstand. I bent to the floor, lifting the bed skirt. Nothing. I rifled through my dresser, upsetting the folded stacks of boxers, the balled pairs of socks. Nothing. I was more careful with Liz’s dresser. If she came in the room right now, or Danielle did, how would I explain myself?

  But there was nothing.

  Fuck.

  Maybe it was there, but I just didn’t know what I was supposed to find. What would an obsessed teenager leave in the bedroom of a man three times her age? A folded love letter, a heart drawn in lipstick on the vanity mirror?

  She was sick—that was it. She was a sick person, this was a sick joke. And somehow I was the punch line. I’d fallen right into it.

  I flushed the toilet twice before leaving the master suite, and called, “All better now,” as I passed Danielle’s room.

  She was lying on her bed, reading a book, and she grimaced at me. “Seriously? TMI.”

  * * *

  I didn’t see Kelsey again that day, but I jumped every time someone passed in the hallway. In the dining room, I chose a seat with my back to the corner, like a character in a gangster movie. I wasn’t going to be surprised by her again.

  That night in bed, Liz ran her hand down my back in a quiet invitation, and I rolled over to face her. I slid my hands beneath her top, helped her wriggle out of the bottoms. But I wasn’t able to shut out the image of Kelsey in this very room, invading what had been a sacred space. Eyes closed, I could picture her in detail—the long line of her legs, the pink scar on her kneecap. When I opened my eyes, I had a vision of her standing just over Liz’s shoulder, smiling that teasing smile.

  “Hey,” Liz said, sliding off me, her skin clammy with sweat. “What’s wrong?”

  I claimed exhaustion, which was true. I’d hardly slept the night before, and my mind had been racing, endlessly, around the same track. I’d pawed through our room like a cat burglar sniffing out a dirty secret.

  “You’re sure that’s it?” she asked, and when I glanced at her, she’d gone still, as if she were holding her breath, waiting for my reply.

  Tell her.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  * * *

  From that point on, I resolved not to look at Kelsey, not to talk to her, not to give her the slightest acknowledgment. School started, which meant that five days a week, she was out of sight until four thirty. After that, I locked my office door, citing a call to make, business that couldn’t be interrupted.

  What I’m trying to say is that I tried. I tried.

  Days went by without so much as a glimpse of her. But she was still there, if only in my thoughts—like the black widow Liz had spotted in our house in Livermore. Once she knew it was there, she claimed she couldn’t rest easy.

  I knew Kelsey was still there, lurking in the shadows, unpredictable and therefore dangerous. I was busy with the construction on Phase 3, walking through homes at various stages of completion, chatting with contractors. The progress had little to do with me—the homes had been planned before I took the job with Parker-Lane, the contractors chosen, subcontractors hired. But it felt good to be out there in a hard hat and boots, stopping to lunch with the crew next to the temporary construction trailer.

  One afternoon near the end of September, I logged on to my email after a morning at the site. Half my emails were from Parker-Lane—press releases about a planned expansion over the Altamont in the Central Valley, interdepartmental memos. There was one from Myriam, complaining about the cement mixer that had arrived at seven thirty this morning. Farther down, sent at 10:37 a.m., was an email from [email protected]. The subject line read: Phil McGinnis, this is for you. I clicked on the message, hoping it was spam, hoping I was wrong about the name in the address.

  A photo was embedded in the email, and even as it filled my screen, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was seeing. It was a woman’s body, shot from an angle somewhere near her neck—the pale skin of her chest exposed, breasts meeting, a dark V gaping between them. She was wearing a white shirt, buttons undone to her navel. One arm was visible, the sleeve rolled to her elbow. Below that was the hem of a miniskirt, thighs and knees. It was the angle more than anything that made me curious—it was too strange and tame to be pornography. It looked more like a shot from an art magazine, a play on perspective. In the background, the floor loomed large, pale gray industrial-sized tiles outlined by thick black grout. I zoomed in, noticing two things at once. At the edge of the frame was a piece of curved plastic and below it hung the feathered edge of a piece of toilet paper. This was a picture of someone sitting on a toilet.

  And not just someone—I recognized that knee with its shiny sickle-shaped scar. It was Kelsey Jorgensen, sitting on a school toilet.

  Sweat bloomed in my armpits. I punched keys frantically. Delete—delete again from my deleted mail. But was it still there, somewhere? I emptied the computer’s trash, shut down and rebooted. I couldn’t find it when I looked again, but I imagined it getting caught by Parker-Lane in some kind of employee-email scan. Phil, you want to explain this photo for us? In the bathroom next to the men’s locker room, I splashed water on my face and blotted myself dry with a paper towel.

  Shit.

  What was she thinking?

  I came home early that night and found Kelsey perched on the edge of the love seat in the den, watching TV with Danielle. She didn’t look up as I passed, but her appearance confirmed what I already knew. Denim miniskirt, white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, fully buttoned now. Liz called something about me starting the grill, and I told her I’d be right there.

  I waited in the upstairs hallway, and Kelsey met me a minute later. She gave me that bedroom smile—soft eyes, pouty lips. She worked the top button of her shirt back and forth between two fingers.

  “Did you like the picture?” she asked.

  I grabbed her arm just above the elbow, hard enough so that she gasped. “You will leave me alone,” I seethed in her ear. “You will stop these stupid games right now. Do you understand?” She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were wide, her irises a startling blue. And then I released her with a little backward shove.

  In our bedroom, I leaned against the door, half expecting her to rattle the handle, to come after me like the ax murderer who had chased me to the most secluded point of the house, from which there could be no escape.

  Fuck.

 
Fuck.

  JUNE 19, 2015

  5:56 P.M.

  LIZ

  The day was still hot, the sun beating on my neck. I puffed twice into Kelsey’s airway, locking my lips over her mouth. When her father had told me to stay away from his daughter, was this what he’d meant? Once Kelsey had sat on a stool in my kitchen and laughed so hard orange juice snorted out her nose. Once she’d come to my office and almost convinced me not to trust my own daughter.

  Her skin was clammy beneath my touch, her chest yielding as I began compressions, counting out loud. “One, two—” Was I pressing too hard, not hard enough? I tried not to think of cracked ribs, punctured lungs. Danielle was sobbing into the phone, water dripping from her suit. With each compression, Kelsey’s body jerked and settled back, unresponsive.

  Seven, eight, nine—

  I tried to picture the life-size poster of a human heart on the wall in my doctor’s office—the valves, the veins and arteries, the chambers, the blood.

  I caught snatches of Danielle’s sentences:

  I don’t know how long.

  There was blood...her head.

  My mom is doing CPR.

  And then to me: “Is she breathing? Is there a pulse?”

  No. No.

  Two breaths, fifteen compressions, check for pulse, repeat.

  I gasped, out of breath, “Tell me what happened. Tell me what you did.”

  But Danielle only shook her head, tears leaking down her face.

  Miles overhead, a plane passed en route to Oakland or San Jose. The passengers couldn’t see us, of course, but I had a dizzying thought that maybe they were looking down, framing through their rectangular windows our small, particular tragedy.

  “Why aren’t you coming?” Danielle shrieked into the phone.

  But I knew the answer to that, even though time had slipped away along with all the other rules of the universe. Twelve miles down a dusty access road, full of twists and turns. It would be twenty minutes at least, and then there were the winding avenues, the dead-end cul-de-sacs. It’s so far away, I’d protested to Phil. It’s practically in the middle of nowhere. He’d grinned. That was the selling point, after all.

  I pressed on, dizzy, sick. Kelsey was lifeless underneath me, her body only rising and falling with the compressions, a trick of nature. It was like manipulating a corpse. My arms had begun to feel like jelly, and my mind was wandering. What had they done while I was sleeping? What had she done, to end up floating in my pool, with her clothes still on? I lost count of compressions and started over.

  Breathe, damn it, I pleaded.

  After the mess she’d created, it was the least she could do.

  AUGUST 2014

  LIZ

  The beginning of the school year was always a mess for the counseling office, no matter how much we preplanned—a blur of students and parents, late registrants and scheduling complaints. Somehow, I’d figured that this year it would be different because Danielle would be on campus. I’d imagined her in my office before class began and after the last bell, chatting with Aaron or Jenn, the administrative assistant, thumbing through old yearbooks, volunteering to straighten the fliers on the table or replenish the pamphlets in the rotating case. I’d imagined the talks we would have to and from school (the only perk to having a longer commute from The Palms, I’d reasoned in May)—her witty observations about classmates and teachers, the advice I would give about clubs and cliques and boys. I’d imagined mother-daughter bonding, the deep insights we would gain into each other’s lives.

  Instead, Kelsey was always there, waiting in her driveway at 6:45 a.m. each morning, wearing a short skirt or tight jeans, as if she only owned clothes that challenged the dress code. While I played the role of chauffeur, a necessary but unwanted presence in the front seat, she adjusted Danielle’s makeup—glittery shadow, sparkly lip gloss.

  Sometimes I caught a glimpse of the two of them passing the counseling office on the way to the cafeteria, and I was hit hard by nostalgia for the girl Danielle used to be, the one with the camo pants and the rotation of graphic T-shirts that said things like Reunite Pangaea or My Other Car is a Flying Saucer. Now, with her shorn hair and glittery eye shadow, she might have been an exotic bird, some rare and endangered species.

  I waited for the inevitable breakup, the messy fallout when Kelsey realized that Danielle wasn’t her ticket to cool. I’d been bracing myself for it, like a long fall through the air with the ground looming. But somehow—it didn’t come. Within weeks, they were part of the in crowd, “friending” juniors and seniors on Facebook, lunching with a sprawling, noisy group at two pulled-together tables in the cafeteria. I regretted that I’d ever encouraged the friendship, as if they might never have glommed on to each other without that fateful pool party. Kelsey was too sophisticated for Danielle, interested in things I didn’t want Danielle to care about. What was it Sonia had said? Fifteen going on thirty.

  Maybe it would be better if we weren’t at the same school, I thought—if I didn’t see Danielle walking by with an upperclassman’s arm draped over her shoulders, or catch her exchanging a full-body hug with a boy she hadn’t seen in half a day. Maybe it was better not to know.

  I tried to embrace the changes, to be friendly and encouraging, to understand just how another person had come to inhabit my daughter’s skin, but it was hard to say goodbye to the girl I used to know. One night when it was just the two of us in the kitchen, forming hamburger patties, I asked Danielle if she ever ran into Devon, one of her old middle school friends.

  She looked puzzled, as if the name had already slipped out of her working memory. “Devon from math meets? I don’t know. Why?”

  I shrugged. “I saw her in the counseling office today, and I remembered how you used to be such good friends.” Devon had been picking up information for the PSAT, more than a year away. I’d almost swooned over her geekiness, her quirky glasses and threadbare Toms. “Maybe you could invite her over here sometime.”

  Danielle was quiet for a long moment, the only sound the smack-smack of her hands, shaping a patty. “I don’t know, Mom. We’re so different now. I’m not sure we’d have that much to talk about.”

  Another time, on our drive home, I listened to Danielle laugh when Kelsey talked about a kid in her PE class who was so fat, she hadn’t been able to run a single lap around the track.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Girls, that’s not nice.” My words hung in the air, and in the embarrassed silence, I realized they had forgotten I was there, as if there were an invisible wall separating us. At the last stoplight, I studied Danielle in the rearview mirror, looking for clues. Who was she now? How had she become this new person?

  “What?” she asked finally, meeting my glance.

  I shook my head.

  Nothing.

  Everything.

  * * *

  On the last Friday of September, Danielle asked if she could spend the night at Kelsey’s, and Phil took me out for an impromptu dinner date. We didn’t have reservations, and the first three restaurants we visited had waits of up to an hour. Eventually, we ended up at a Pizza Hut, filling our plates at the buffet. A dozen kids were crammed into the arcade, their shrieks drowning out the radio.

  “If this is a date, I’m letting you off easy,” I said, wiping greasy fingers on a stack of single-ply napkins.

  Phil rubbed a circle on my wrist with his thumb. “I thought about renting a helicopter for the night and taking you on a tour of the bay, but it turns out you have to book those months in advance.”

  “I’m sure we could have borrowed one from a neighbor.”

  “Damn. Next time.”

  We grinned at each other. Five weeks in, we’d fallen into the rhythm of the school year—the frozen entrées, the leftovers stretched to a third day, the unfolded laundry heape
d on the floor of an empty bedroom. I’d been waiting for things to settle into some kind of normal, but it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe there was no normal at The Palms.

  There hadn’t been another mountain lion sighting, although it was still the talk of The Palms, as real as if we’d all witnessed it ourselves. Deanna had achieved a sort of celebrity status in the neighborhood from an appearance on the local ABC affiliate, where she’d been interviewed about her “brush with danger.” Phil and I had watched the clip so many times, I’d memorized each word said in Deanna’s trembling voice, each curl of her blond hair in the sunlight. Next to her, with his receding hairline and rounded paunch, Rich might have been her lecherous uncle. It had been Phil’s job to repeat Parker-Lane’s party line to whoever called, needing a sound bite. We’re taking the situation very seriously and doing everything to ensure the safety of our residents at The Palms. Just about every resident had approached him with a concern, including the people who had bought into Phase 3. I could always tell when he was on one of those phone calls; his voice changed, became deferential and solicitous in a way that grated on my ears.

  Phil ran a finger along the condensation from his beer. “Oh, Liz,” he sighed.

  I sat back hard against the wooden booth, bracing myself for the delivery of bad news, whatever it was. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I was just thinking...”

  Don’t, I thought. Don’t think. Don’t say anything.

  He drank and set the glass down. “We should do this more often. Get away from there.”

  I raised an eyebrow. The whole point of moving to The Palms was to spend time there, away from the rest of the world, with every luxury at our fingertips. “I thought you loved there.”

  “But this is nice, just the two of us.”

  “Right. It is nice.”

  I was looking for the loophole, waiting for the but. He twirled his glass in a small circle on the plastic tablecloth.