The Drowning Girls

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  I couldn’t find my focus. I nodded along with everything they were saying, all but accepting responsibility myself for something I knew Kelsey Jorgensen had done. They might have been calling for my resignation, and I would have accepted it with the same bland acquiescence. Someone might have suggested that I be brought outside and stoned, sacrificed for the good of the community, and I would have gone willingly.

  It had just been a kiss, one I hadn’t solicited and couldn’t have prevented. Or, no—I could have been more forceful. I could have pushed her backward. I could have dodged her, run out of the room, let her do what she wanted with the picture I hadn’t sent her. Instead, I’d held her arms and she’d leaned over me, perfectly comfortable with the role of aggressor. Her hair had fallen across my face. Her lips had been soft. The worst—and I would take it to my grave, I knew that already—the worst was that it had excited me, that my body had responded even while my brain was telling me no, no, no.

  Stoning was the least I deserved.

  * * *

  I knew something was wrong the second I entered the house. It wasn’t ten, but the first floor was dark. Upstairs, I flicked on the light in our bedroom, expecting to see Liz curled beneath the comforter, but the bed was empty, still haphazardly made from that morning. In her room, Danielle was sprawled across the bed, talking on her cell phone. She gave me a little wave.

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked.

  She frowned, cupping her hand over the phone. “Downstairs, I guess.”

  I found Liz on the patio, shivering in a blanket. The night had turned cold.

  “There you are,” I said. “Jesus, it’s cold. What’s going on?”

  She turned, staring at me. Her mouth was red-rimmed, and I glanced at the bottle of cabernet on the table. When I picked up the bottle, an inch of wine sloshed at the bottom.

  “Did you open this tonight?” I asked.

  “Oh, there you go. It’s all my fault. Shift the blame,” she said.

  Liz wasn’t a good drinker—one glass made her happy, two made her punchy, three brought her to a place outside herself, where her mouth and body no longer moved in sync. She was there already, eyes glazed, words slurred.

  I set the bottle carefully on the ground next to her. “What blame? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why didn’t you come to the meeting?”

  She shifted in the chair, her legs pinioned by the blanket. “Why? Were you lonely? Didn’t Kelsey come to comfort you?”

  I took a step backward, my mind reeling. Kelsey must have talked to her. They’d probably been out here, the two of them, while I’d endured Myriam’s litany of complaints. Or maybe she’d found the shirt where I’d wadded it up beneath the bed, made the leap between lipstick and infidelity. There were things to tell her—there was a kiss to confess—but her mind had gone beyond that already, to planning and plotting, to stolen moments and half-clothed sex, not unlike the trashy scenarios that had flitted through my mind.

  It wasn’t fair.

  “What are you saying, Liz? What are you accusing me of, exactly?”

  “I heard you,” she spat. “In the clubhouse. I saw her coming out of your office.”

  I fought for control. What had she seen, exactly? What had she heard? I’d been protesting. I’d been saying no and warding her off. “That’s right. I wanted to talk to her about the vandalism—”

  “You asked her to keep it between the two of you. She said it would be your little secret. Her dress was hiked up—”

  I took a deep breath. “Liz. You’re thinking about this all wrong. I asked her what she knew about the vandalism. I was trying to get a few answers before tonight’s meeting. I can’t prove anything, but I have this gut feeling she was involved.”

  “I heard you. I saw the two of you together.”

  “Of course we were together. We were talking in my office. I asked her to keep the conversation between the two of us. What do you think, Liz? That I’m some kind of pedophile? Our neighbor? Our daughter’s friend?”

  She had worked her legs free of the blanket and was trying to stand, supporting herself with one arm against the deck chair. In the process, her foot hit the wine bottle, which toppled with a clank and rolled away, the last of the cabernet dribbling onto the concrete.

  “Liz, for fuck’s sake—”

  She fumbled free of the blanket and pulled something from her pocket, black and silky. “I saved this,” she said, holding it out to me. “I didn’t know why at the time, but I kept it. And now I’m glad I did, because it proves how long this has been going on. It proves how stupid I’ve been.”

  I stared at her outstretched hand. “What is that?”

  “You tell me.” She flung it at me, the fabric hitting my chest with a soft slap.

  I snagged it with one finger on its way down and lifted it, a triangle of fabric. “Is this someone’s underwear?”

  “Like you don’t know. It’s Kelsey’s. I found it in our bedroom the night of Deanna’s mountain lion crisis. Were you interrupted, and she didn’t have time to get her panties back on?”

  I dropped the underwear, and it floated to the concrete, wispy as a ribbon. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Liz. I’ve never seen this before. You found this in our room, two months ago? And for two months you’ve been thinking that...” My voice trailed off, my thoughts spinning in an exhausted loop. That next day, after the mountain lion crisis, Kelsey asked me if she’d found her little present. I hadn’t, but apparently Liz had.

  “I was with you, Liz,” I reminded her. “That night, out here. We heard Deanna scream. And then that idiot Victor convinced me to ride around like a vigilante with him. I have no idea why this was in our bedroom, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “I heard you,” she repeated. “And I’ve known something was going on—I just knew it. All these women, hanging on your every word, and you at their beck and call. Deanna with her big boobs. Even Janet—every silicone inch of her. Was that why you moved us out here, so you could be around the beautiful people?”

  It was that, more than anything else, that put me over the edge. I felt trapped, and this was what happened when you felt trapped—you did illogical things. I laughed. “Deanna Sievert, that bimbo? Janet? She’s probably old enough to be my mother. Who else, Liz? Maybe I’ve been seeing one of the waitresses in the dining hall? Maybe I’ve been entertaining the nannies during my lunch hour?”

  “Keep your voice down,” she said, rising unsteadily out of the chair. She grabbed my shirtsleeve, and I pushed her back. I’d never done anything like this—never laid a hand on Liz or anyone, other than a kid on the playground when I was in grade five, and that kid had deserved it. This push was harder than I intended—at least, that’s what I would tell myself later—and it caught her off balance, drove her back until she crash-landed against the arm of the deck chair.

  I swore and stepped toward the pool, glimmering in the moonlight like a living thing, and wound one foot back as if I were going for a penalty kick. My loafer connected with one of the giant terra-cotta pots along the edge and soil spilled onto the concrete.

  “Stop—” Liz said, her voice laced with pain. “Let’s just stop.”

  But this was what happened when you were trapped—you pushed your wife, you took out your anger on a potted plant. You denied, denied, denied, and even though it was true what you were denying, you found yourself doubting your own denial. On the second swing, my foot connected more forcefully, the pot cracking down the middle, splitting into heavy chunks.

  “Don’t! People can hear you, Phil.”

  On the third kick, the pot splintered apart, the topiary falling free, its roots a tangled ball.

  Liz was on her feet again, her fist clutching the hem of my shirt, where it had come untucked. “Okay, okay. We’ll talk about this. Just tell
me it’s nothing. Tell me nothing happened, that nothing’s ever happened, that nothing ever will happen.”

  I pulled free of her grasp and a final kick sent the whole thing—the shards of pottery, the bewildered plant—sailing into the water. My foot was numb with pain.

  Liz joined me at the edge of the pool and together we watched the aftermath. The pottery itself was surprisingly porous, sinking briefly and bobbing to the surface, the remains of a small wreck. Dirt fanned out across the water like black mold, pulled by the gravitational edge.

  My voice caught in my throat. “Did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head, then said, “A little.”

  “We’re not ourselves,” I said. “We can talk about this later, when we’ve calmed down.”

  “We’re not ourselves,” she repeated.

  The last of the terra-cotta pot was sinking below the surface.

  “Should we clean it up?” Liz asked.

  I shook my head. I felt exposed suddenly, as if I were naked again, and Kelsey Jorgensen was lurking in the darkness, snapping pictures and rejoicing in the havoc she’d wreaked.

  We turned to the house, the fight gone out of both of us. I think we noticed Danielle at the same time on the other side of the slider—her face pale, hands to her mouth, eyes wide. When I took a step toward the door, wanting to explain—but how could I? How could I even begin?—she turned and ran for the stairs.

  JUNE 19, 2015

  6:14 P.M.

  LIZ

  Time was going too fast; it was going too slow.

  I watched the paramedics busy themselves with Kelsey, heard the crackle of a radio at Moreno’s hip.

  Stop, I thought. Go back.

  I was aware of Danielle’s sobs, low, whimpering sounds. She was still holding her cell phone, clutched in one hand. With the back of the other, she wiped her nose, a shiny trail of snot smearing her skin.

  Oh, Danielle. What did you do?

  Suddenly Richards, who had been talking into the little clip on his ear, said distinctly, “I’ve got a pulse.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” I whispered.

  “Let’s get her loaded up,” Moreno said, and there was a flurry of movement as Kelsey, limp as a sack of sand, was heaved onto the stretcher.

  “Dispatch has her parents on the phone,” Richards said. “They’re en route to the hospital.”

  I hobbled behind them through the house, my leg throbbing from knee to toe. What did it matter anyway, a little bit of blood, a torn nail? Kelsey was alive. “What hospital? We’ll follow you.”

  “Memorial,” Richards said.

  They crossed the lawn and loaded Kelsey into the back. Our last glimpse, as the ambulance rounded the corner, siren screaming, was of Moreno crouched next to Kelsey. Déjà vu.

  “Mom.”

  I’d been so rooted to the lawn, listening to the siren fade into a faint whine, that everything else had gone out of focus. Something in Danielle’s voice made the rest of the world come back—the noise of a bird overhead, the asphalt shiny under the sun. I turned, looking down the street.

  All the way down the block, our neighbors stood at their curbs, watching us.

  OCTOBER 2014

  LIZ

  After the fight, I called in sick for three days, summoning a cough each time I spoke to the school secretary. Phil took Danielle to school in the morning and dutifully returned to pick her up in the afternoon, when I’d barely moved from the bed. I was sick in a way—hungover at first, then exhausted and finally ashamed. Phil and I hardly looked at each other.

  I’d been so sure that night, piecing two and two together—her flirty voice, ripe with promise, her underwear on our bedroom floor. But Phil’s explanations were logical; they made more sense than what I’d been formulating. Maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe what I thought I heard wasn’t what was said at all. I’d gone too far, out there by the pool. It was like one of those nightmares where you sense things are going badly and you try to turn them around, but you can’t. I couldn’t stop myself, even when I’d seen the hurt and confusion on his face.

  The bruise on my hip went from red to purple before fading slowly to greenish-yellow, but that was the only physical sign of our fight. On Tuesday afternoon, a man in a white pickup truck came to clean out the pool. Phil had called him. I watched from our bedroom window as he fished out chunks of pottery and the remains of the topiary with his long-handled skimmer. He didn’t ask questions; maybe he’d fished stranger things out of pools. An hour later, the water was sparkling, with no trace of the previous night’s destruction. I didn’t ask what happened to the thong, but that was gone, too.

  The only other person I talked to was Sonia Jorgensen. I was hoping to reach her voice mail and was surprised when she answered my call. “Something’s come up,” I began, and told her I wasn’t going to be able to bring Kelsey to school for a while.

  “I see,” Sonia said, her voice considerably cooler than when she’d greeted me.

  I didn’t think she could possibly see, but I hung up without offering an explanation or an apology for the last-minute inconvenience. Let her think what she wanted. Let her dispatch another one of her minions to handle the task.

  Phil and I found ways to talk to each other without really talking, to apologize without really apologizing. He said it’s all a misunderstanding and I said sometimes I jump to conclusions and we managed to never mention her name. I wished we could laugh it off, find a way to give it instant inside-joke status. That time you kicked the plant into the pool. That time you thought I was sleeping with the neighbor girl. But it didn’t happen. It wasn’t easy to forget the smile Kelsey had given me coming out of his office, the scraps of their conversation that lingered in my mind. Phil had explained, and I had chosen to believe him, but that didn’t mean I’d silenced my doubts completely.

  What was that expression? Trust, but verify.

  So we moved on. It helped that we were busy, Phil with the video cameras Parker-Lane had decided to install throughout the community, me with quarterly grades and the resulting flurry of parent conferences. We threw ourselves into our work, and our conversations began to center around it. How was your meeting? How is the construction coming along? We became polite roommates, carefully avoiding each other, dealing only with essentials like food and money. We avoided each other in bed, too—or at least I did. If I brushed against him, even in sleep, I pulled back. If I woke to his hand on my thigh, I slid quietly out from under it, rolling away.

  It would just take time, I figured.

  And life at The Palms was better without Kelsey in our house, the perpetual visitor, the daily guest. Of course, I still saw her at Miles Landers, walking hip to hip with Danielle toward the cafeteria, and sometimes, at the end of the day, I saw her waiting on the curb in front of the school, her fingers working furiously on her phone. I wondered how long she would have to wait before one of her parents arrived, but I didn’t waver. Once the cancer was gone, you didn’t invite it back into your life.

  * * *

  I never knew what Danielle saw that night, what she heard or thought she heard. When I tried to talk to her, she went so far as to plug her ears, like she’d done as a kid, faced with the possibility of bad news. “Leave me out of it,” she said, over and over. “It’s between you and Phil. It doesn’t involve me.”

  She submitted to the weeks of her grounding with stony glares and silence. At dinner, she pushed the food around her plate. Afterward, she all but barricaded herself in her bedroom for the night.

  Our longest conversation turned into a fight, with Danielle pounding up the steps and slamming her bedroom door so hard my ears rang. I’d told her that Phil and I didn’t want her hanging around Kelsey, that while we couldn’t stop them from seeing each other at school, I would prefer if she didn’t invite Kelsey
to our house, even when her grounding was finished.

  “You know it was you who forced us together in the first place!” she yelled on her way up the stairs. “Why did you tear me away from my old life, anyway?”

  It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, if Phil and I were going to save our marriage. The suspicion and scrutiny would be there every time Kelsey stepped through our door, every time she tossed her hair over her shoulder, or dived into the pool. But the change in my relationship with Danielle felt seismic, foundational. Even when we were in the same room, she barely looked at me. There was no witty banter, there were no silly jokes. On our drives to and from school, she slumped in the passenger seat of the Camry, headphones on her ears, staring sullenly out the window. From time to time, I expected to catch a glimpse of Kelsey in the backseat, smirking at me.

  * * *

  In November, Kelsey celebrated her sweet sixteen. Since the party was held at the clubhouse and it would have created all sorts of awkwardness if she didn’t attend, I sent Danielle off, teetering in a pair of my heels. Sonia had hired a band, a gourmet pizza chef and a “cake artist” who had appeared on Food Network. All night, cars passed our house, driven by well-coiffed kids, their parents or, in a few cases, dark-suited chauffeurs.

  Phil spent the evening at the clubhouse, too, keeping an eye on the newly renovated bathrooms. Myriam had pronounced them a huge improvement, due to the light gray porcelain tile and sunny yellow paint. We had short memories at The Palms, it seemed—while everyone had swooned over the improvements, we had conveniently and collectively forgotten the vandalism.

  For my part, I watched the whole thing unfold on Facebook and Instagram, where Kelsey was tagged in dozens of photos, being “liked” and “favorited” by hundreds of followers. She looked very Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—large, tumbling curls; a shiny sheath dress; heels that could have doubled as weapons in a pinch. In each photo she was surrounded by people, laughing, teasing the camera, opening gifts, sipping from one of the nonalcoholic beverages on the menu at the bar. I even spotted Hannah, awkward in a floral dress that was more Sunday school than sweet sixteen, hovering at Danielle’s shoulder.