The Drowning Girls (8 page)

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 heaped 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.

“What?” I asked again, torn between truth and silence.

Tell me.

Don’t tell me.

I’d been uneasy ever since the night of the mountain lion, since my discovery of the thong. I’d decided it was Kelsey’s underwear, that nothing else made sense. But I was queen at making something out of nothing. The thong had still been there, wadded up in the trash can when I cleaned the bathroom at the end of that week. I’d plucked it out of the trash and examined it between two fingers.
Don’t be stupid
, I’d scolded myself.
Just throw it out.
And yet I’d rolled the thong inside a clean hand towel and shoved it in the back of my dresser drawer, behind a half-slip and a strapless bra, as though I were preserving evidence for a crime I wasn’t sure had been committed.

No, I was sure.

Phil took my hand across the table, twisting my wedding band around my finger, the diamond appearing and disappearing. I had the feeling there was something he wanted to say, one of the deep and important things that had to be said in a marriage, in any fleeting moment of time alone. But then he smiled and asked, “Should we box up the rest?”

It
was
nothing.

And if it wasn’t, maybe I didn’t want to know.

We ended up wandering through the outdoor mall in Pleasanton, an area of big-box stores swamped with shoppers on a weekend night. This was the sort of thing we used to do, back in our old life—drool over an area rug or linger in front of a sectional, wondering if it would fit our tight rental space. But there wasn’t really a point to it anymore. We had everything we needed; we had plenty of things we didn’t need at all.

The sidewalks were crowded, and sometimes Phil and I broke apart to pass a slow-moving couple, but we always found each other again, even if our hold was as tenuous as the touch of two pinky fingers.

* * *

Phil’s phone started buzzing at six thirty the next morning, its hard case rattling against his nightstand.

“Ignore it,” I murmured, throwing one of my legs over his. “It’s Saturday.”

He groaned. “There’s that golf tournament, though.”

“Oh, right.” I’d successfully avoided Myriam’s pleas to work at the tournament, a fund-raiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She already had Phil wrapped up in every stage as an unofficial project manager. His role, as far as I could tell, was to be on hand for the inevitable complaints, the patrons who had one too many shots at the bar after the first nine holes and needed to be discreetly plied with coffee. I ran the length of my leg against the length of his. “Well, Myriam can make do without you for a few minutes.”

Phil laughed, wrapping an arm around me, his hand cupping a breast. Then his phone buzzed again, and he sighed, reaching over his shoulder.

“A sprinkler head malfunction,” I guessed. “A dead bird on the course. A trash can that wasn’t emptied.”

Phil struggled to a sitting position, began scrolling through the texts. “Shit,” he said finally.

“Did the landscapers forget to blow a leaf off the parking lot?”

He hopped out of bed, pulling on the clothes he’d shed the night before—the boxers, the jeans. He held up the shirt he’d worn on our pizza date, decided it was too wrinkled and went to the closet for one of a dozen Parker-Lane logo polo shirts. I watched him, propped up on my elbows, the comforter pulled up over my breasts.

“What is it?”

“The bathrooms. Some kind of vandalism.”

“Oh, my God. Do you want me to—”

But Phil was already putting on his shoes. He hustled down the stairs, and a few seconds later, the front door slammed behind him.

I showered in a rush, toweled off my hair and threw on yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt before heading over to the clubhouse. It was just after seven, and golfers had already started to arrive. About a dozen people in white pants and pastel polo shirts were milling around the clubhouse.

Helen Zhang and Daisy Asbill were standing near the entrance, wearing crisp white shirts and black pants, name tags affixed to their pockets. Helen gave me an unsubtle up-and-down look, taking in my jeans and tennis shoes.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Phil said something about the bathrooms—”

“Liz, for God’s sake.” Helen took me firmly by the elbow, leading me a few steps away. “We need to keep our voices down.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I just—”

Up close, Helen’s eyes were almost black, flecked with bits of yellow. “They’re making a decision now, I guess. Myriam’s beside herself, as you can imagine, and what with people arriving...”

Daisy put in, “It’s horrible. I mean, thank God I had an extra cup of coffee this morning and had to pee, or else we might not have discovered it until later. If one of the donors had discovered it, can you imagine?”

“So, it’s that bad, then?”

“Well, the toilets were flooded, for one thing, and someone had spray-painted these horrible things all over the walls and stall doors...” Daisy began.

I inhaled sharply, thinking of Phil, the hours of work this crisis would demand. “What are they going to do?”

“What is your husband going to do, you mean,” Helen corrected. “Parker-Lane needs to get on this,
pronto
.”

The doors to the clubhouse opened, and Myriam was there in a white shirtdress and sandals, a clipboard in one hand. She greeted the guests, ushering them toward the bar for mimosas, her voice friendly and confident. “A little issue with the plumbing in the restrooms, but we’re going to have that sorted in no time,” she reported to the group. “If everyone just wants to head around to the back patio, we’ve got a drink stand set up there to get us started.”

Then she was in front of us, a pinched line of worry between her eyebrows. “Parker-Lane is delivering two porta-potties in half an hour,” she said through clenched teeth. “
Porta-potties.
For two-hundred-fifty-dollar rounds of golf. Will someone please wake me up from this hell?”

“When did it happen?” I asked.

Myriam turned to me, frowning. “Well, I walked the course yesterday afternoon, and went through every inch of the clubhouse with your husband. Everything was in perfect shape last night at six.”

“So someone must have—”

“It’s that
fucking
gate,” Myriam hissed. “I told Phil that leaving the gate open was a
huge
mistake, a
major
security risk. Anyone could have come in here, anyone with a bone to pick.”

Helen stopped her with a hand on her arm. “I didn’t realize the gate was open. When was this?”

“All week long, when those cement mixers and God-knows-what were coming through, the gates were deprogrammed.”

Daisy shuddered. “Any of those workers could have done this, then.”

“Surely they must do some kind of background checks,” Helen said. “I certainly hope we don’t have people coming in here with criminal records.”