The Drowning Girls

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  * * *

  That night I finally told Allie everything, in a three-hour phone call that was mostly questions on her end and sobbing on mine. “You have to fight this,” she told me. “Don’t let them ruin your life.”

  When I told Phil, he was silent for a long time on the other end of the phone before letting out a string of curses. “I’ll come up there,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”

  Instead, I asked him to send me the letter he’d written, the one that he’d told me about during his wild confession about Kelsey. It might be better if he was heard, not seen.

  * * *

  My meeting with the superintendent, Gerald Fiedler, might have been an inquisition. Fiedler sat on one side of a table with the assistant superintendent, the district lawyer and Blaine. I sat on the other side with Vicki, my CTA rep. Aaron had offered to come, too, if only to walk back and forth in front of the office with a picket sign.

  Fiedler was dressed in a three-piece suit, as if he had a meeting at the bank later in the day. It was warm for April, and I wanted to get up and crack a window. It was hard to focus on his words. “...a position that comes with certain expectations and responsibilities...”

  “They cannot possibly fire you,” Vicki had told me in advance. “You have grounds for an appeal if they do. It might be ugly, because they’d have to examine all kinds of evidence. But you’re entitled to a private session before the board...”

  Now I just wanted Fiedler to get it over with, like pulling off a Band-Aid in a single, stinging motion.

  “...imperative that we have the full trust of the students we serve, not to mention parents and the wider community of stakeholders...” Fiedler was good at this, very professional. There was an almost apologetic tone to his voice. Believe me, I don’t want this. If it were up to me... But I knew he’d talked to the Jorgensens, and I was sure he’d used the same tone then.

  Blaine, beside him, was watching me. Over the years I’d spoken up dozens of times at staff meetings, arguing a point, correcting a wrong. He was expecting me to speak up now, too—maybe he’d even been counting on it.

  “No one wants this to become an issue for the entire district,” Fielder said, and I heard an embarrassment.

  “I understand,” I said.

  Vicki swiveled in her chair to face me head-on. “What they’re saying, Liz, is that they don’t have a bit of real evidence, just conjecture. And you have a sworn affidavit and the witness of your daughter. You don’t have to accept any type of punishment.”

  Blaine cleared his throat pointedly, and I knew it was my last chance.

  The thing was—somewhere along the line, I’d stopped believing that I was in the right. I’d made mistakes, and maybe it was time to take my punishment and move on. Danielle had already lied for me once, and I didn’t want her to have to repeat the lie again at a board hearing, or a civil trial.

  When I didn’t say anything, Fiedler continued, “What we think might be best, Mrs. McGinnis, is if you were to transfer to another position in our district. We feel the Jorgensens would be satisfied with this response. I know this might seem as though the district doesn’t support you, or that I don’t value the work that you’ve done at Miles Landers, but I hope you see it instead as a chance to move on from what could potentially be an ugly situation.”

  “Liz?” Vicki asked. She was like a gnat hovering by my ear. “You don’t have to say anything right now. This is absolutely not something you have to accept without discussion. Why don’t we think about this a bit and schedule another meeting?”

  But I shook my head. It was better than I’d hoped for. I said simply, “I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  The following afternoon, there was a burgundy Mazda in front of our house, parked with one wheel up on the curb. Judging by the dusty exterior and sagging rear bumper, the car didn’t belong to a resident of The Palms.

  I parked in the driveway and handed Danielle my keys. “Leave the door unlocked for me,” I said.

  The young woman who stepped out of the car looked familiar—pale face, thick hair held back by a clip. I recognized her as the reporter who had written about the house fire. She looked younger than she had in the tiny head shot that accompanied her article. “She’s home now. Let me call you back,” she said into her phone.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I followed someone in.”

  “Security around here really is going to hell,” I commented.

  She laughed and held out a hand. “I’m Andrea Piccola from the Contra-Costa Times. And you’re Liz McGinnis, right?”

  I shook her hand and found myself assessing her against The Palms standard—eyebrows too thick, fingernails too ragged, shirt too boxy. The bag slung over her shoulder looked old rather than vintage. In other words, she looked more like a Liz McGinnis than a Deanna Sievert.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” I told her.

  “It’s my understanding that there have been some issues recently at Miles Landers, some allegations of incompetence.” This was the rumor mill at work, then—I’d already been hit with a sheath of papers from the Jorgensens’ attorney. There was a nondisclosure form, too, old hat for the Jorgensens.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I really don’t have anything I can say to you.”

  She followed me halfway up the sidewalk, asking questions about my job and the unspecified scandal.

  I kept walking.

  “I’m just trying to get all the facts,” she called after me as I opened the front door. “If it were me, I would want to be represented fairly and accurately in the media.”

  I leaned against the closed door and waited for her to get back into her car, finish a phone call and drive away. Easy enough to say, but it wasn’t Andrea Piccola in the situation. It was me, and it was a horrible, lonely place to be.

  * * *

  Andrea Piccola wrote her article without me, Phil or the Jorgensens. It ended up as just a blurb: Incompetence Alleged Against Miles Landers Counselor. She’d talked to Fiedler, who made vague references to the expectations for guidance counselors, and to Blaine, who would only state that I’d been a counselor in good standing for seven years, and had helped many students. She’d reached Aaron, who said that I was an asset to the school and would absolutely be missed. The Jorgensens were silent, not wanting to open that can of worms. My official reappointment happened during a closed session of the school board. In the fall, I would be counseling junior high students at two schools, twenty minutes apart.

  On the day the article appeared, I packed up my desk and told Blaine I would be taking sick leave for the next thirty days, through the end of the school year and into summer. I’d only taken a day or two a year on average throughout the years, and I had more than enough days left. Jenn gave me a long hug, Aaron kissed me on the forehead and said he refused to believe it was happening, and even Dale Streeter stuck his head out of his office to say it was a shame. He’d agreed to stay on for another year, to give some continuity to the department.

  Aaron carried one of the boxes to my car, and while I rearranged things in the trunk to make more room, he said, “I’m worried about you—both of you. I’ve been talking with Danielle, you know. She’s told me a bit of what happened with you and Phil.”

  Ah, so that was it. “Keep talking to her, will you? She’s not talking to me at all.”

  We hugged once more at my car, and I drove away. When I returned later that day to pick up Danielle, I avoided the staff parking lot and queued in the long line of parents in front of the school.

  * * *

  It was an understatement that Danielle wasn’t speaking to me. She spent her afternoons and evenings in her room, sometimes with Hannah; she rode next to me on the way to and from school with tinny music seeping out of her headphones
.

  I yelled, I pleaded, I cajoled and then I stopped. When I was a kid, we’d had a cat that was a finicky eater, and Dad always said it would eat when it was hungry. I applied the same logic here. Danielle would talk when she was ready. She couldn’t be silent forever.

  In the meantime, she communicated by Post-it notes left next to the front door: I need $10 for the BBQ or We’re out of Popsicles.

  By the end of May, I had enough money for a deposit and first and last month’s rent on an apartment not far from the freeway, near the proposed extension for the commuter train, still a few years away. The entire complex was built on that hope, on the idea of what might be coming around the bend. It seemed fitting. Danielle and I took a tour after school one day, although it took a great deal of coercion to get her out of the car. The general manager pointed out the laundry areas, the fitness center and the communal green space. The laundry room consisted of four washers and dryers, and the fitness center was a row of treadmills and a stack of hand weights in the corner. I smiled encouragingly as he spoke, wondering how long it would take to get The Palms out of my head, to stop comparing everything else in life to its lavishness.

  Phil was still convinced that I would come to my senses, that by the end of June we would be joining him at the condo in Laguna Niguel. “You can’t just throw it all away, Liz,” he said. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could.

  My mom didn’t understand, either. To be fair, I’d skirted all the nuances of the situation and focused only on Phil’s new job. She gave me her standard speech about things happening in a marriage, about putting in the effort to work things out. Was that what she had done with Dad, when she found out about his woman on the side? Or had she just accepted it, turning her blind eye, because there was nothing else she could have done?

  * * *

  In May, we marked Danielle’s fifteenth birthday with a gourmet pizza split three ways with Hannah. I offered to take the two of them somewhere—a day trip to the city, a visit to the new IMAX. Danielle glared at me stonily, shaking her head. What gift do you give your daughter when you’re in the process of ripping her life apart? In the end I settled for a stack of crisp, impersonal gift cards, a note that said I loved her. The gift cards disappeared into her wallet; the following week, I spotted my note in her trash can.

  We lived out the rest of the school year and the beginning of the summer like hermits. Since Phil no longer worked for Parker-Lane, we avoided the clubhouse and the communal areas and made our brief forays into the real world by car. There was something ominous about the way the access gates closed behind us each time, I realized. One day I wondered if they simply wouldn’t open to readmit us.

  “We’ll make the most of it,” I told Danielle. I’d hoped to be able to send her to camp for one more summer, as a volunteer-counselor-in-training, but the fee was too steep. “It’s only until the end of June. You can still go swimming every day, you can hang out with Hannah...”

  For once she acknowledged that I had spoken, giving me the fake, patronizing smile that had appeared out of nowhere these past few weeks. “Sounds like paradise,” she said.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that she was quoting Phil. That was what he’d told us the first time he’d brought us to The Palms, into the cavernous empty house. We’d looked out the row of windows on to the back deck, and he’d put an arm around each of our shoulders. It’ll be like living in paradise.

  * * *

  Hannah Bergland was the only person in The Palms who was going to miss us. She took the place in Danielle’s life that had been vacated by Kelsey; it was now Hannah’s shoes I tripped over in the entryway, Hannah’s sweatshirts that got mixed in with our laundry. Her sixteenth birthday this spring had been marked with much less fanfare than Kelsey’s had last fall, but she ended up with a sporty Ford Focus and a prepaid gas card.

  “We can go anywhere,” she told Danielle, dangling the keys from a braided leather rope embossed with her name.

  Danielle raised an eyebrow. “Anywhere?”

  I wondered just how far away she wanted to be, just how far she would go if she had the chance. Technically, Hannah wasn’t allowed to have a minor in the car without another adult present, but the Berglands didn’t seem to be aware of this rule, and I was too exhausted to enforce it. Besides, Hannah was a meticulous driver, even putting on her turn signal to round the curve of our cul-de-sac.

  “Just be home before dark,” I told them, and they always were—returning with giant Slurpee cups, talking about their round of Putt-Putt or the movie they’d just seen. Sometimes, at night, their talk turned to Kelsey Jorgensen—she was the common denominator in their lives, the low-hanging fruit. “...such a bitch,” Hannah would say, and Danielle would respond, “I can’t believe I let her use me like that.” They reported Kelsey sightings: “I saw that whore riding in Mac’s truck” and “My mom saw her outside the pharmacy, probably loading up on her anti-psycho meds.” Once, I heard them picking out men for her—a guy they’d seen in the mall, checking them out while he waited for his wife to finish in the dressing room. “We should have given him Kelsey’s number,” Danielle said, and Hannah shrieked with laughter.

  I should have stopped them—I knew that. I’d come to the point where I realized that Kelsey Jorgensen was a tragic figure, really, almost Shakespearean, ruled by an obsession she couldn’t conquer. The Jorgensens had insisted that we cease all contact and communication with Kelsey, which wasn’t hard to comply with, except that she often walked past on the sidewalk in front of our house, her face shielded by massive sunglasses. I saw her when I was loading the car with junk to take to Goodwill, when I was unloading groceries, when I was backing up and pulling in. Without Danielle and Phil, she must have been as lonely as she’d been last summer, when I’d spotted her doing the same thing. Did even a small part of her regret what she’d done?

  No, I couldn’t blame Danielle for her anger, even when it spilled into mocking bitterness. Kelsey had come through our lives like a tornado, catching us all up in her swath of destruction.

  Sometimes, days went by where I saw only flashes of Danielle—down the stairs and out the door, through the den to the refrigerator, out to the pool, where her body was a shimmery flash two feet beneath the surface.

  This was what it would be like next year—she’d be at Miles Landers, and I’d be splitting my time between junior highs, and I’d know less and less about her life every day. This was what it would be like when she went to college—she’d be a weekly phone call home, a visit on Christmas.

  The distance was allowing me to see her from a new perspective. She would be driving within a year; she wasn’t just a kid, not the cardboard cutout of my own hopes and plans. She was already far more complicated than I could understand.

  One night she came home with a tattoo on her hip, a Chinese symbol visible just below the hem of her bikini. She wasn’t trying to hide it—she walked right past me on her way to the refrigerator.

  “What’s that?” I asked, grabbing her arm. I ran my finger over the raised puff of skin. “How did you get this? You’re not eighteen. You needed parental permission.”

  She pulled away, as if I were toxic. “I told them I was an orphan.”

  “I hope it came with some kind of insurance policy,” I shot back. “Maybe a treatment plan for your hepatitis C.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I was furious, of course, demanding to know why she’d done it and where. I threatened to ground her for the rest of the summer or the rest of high school.

  “Why not?” she shrugged. “You’ve already ruined the rest of my life.”

  Later, I looked up the character online—it was like a fancy lower-case h and I found it under a list of Most Popular Chinese Tattoos. It meant strength. I wondered if that was how she saw herself, as someone who had overcome great challenges. Or if sh
e meant she needed strength for whatever was coming next.

  I hated the tattoo—even when it wasn’t visible, I knew it was there, just beneath her waistband. But I hated, too, the thought that a stranger had touched her while she waited in her underwear, wincing, biting her lip, trusting herself completely with her own stupid decisions.

  * * *

  My job that summer was to pack. It was a massive downsize—4,000 square feet to 750. I’d grown ruthless with my decision-making. At each pass through the house, I was calculating what we needed and how we could get rid of the rest. We wouldn’t need the linens I’d purchased for the dining table that had never materialized, or the dozens of towels and washcloths scattered between the home’s five bathrooms. I listed the bar stools and the club chairs on Craigslist, as well as the king-size bed that wouldn’t fit in my new bedroom. Phil and I had paid over two thousand for it—were still paying, probably, the finance charges climbing monthly—but I found a buyer for six hundred who would also carry it downstairs for me, out to his waiting truck and away. While he strapped it down with bungee cords, Helen Zhang walked past with the family’s new dog, a narrow-faced whippet. She didn’t acknowledge me.

  Good riddance, I thought.

  Goodbye to all that.

  * * *

  The third Friday in June was hot and still. I’d spent the morning in the garage, sorting through the boxes we’d never unpacked last summer. I’d been inclined to toss it all, but then I opened one box and found Danielle’s papers from elementary school—her stiff watercolors, poems written in faded color pencil, an essay on dinosaurs and their habitats.

  Danielle came in with a box labeled Sweaters and dropped it in the keep pile.

  “What are your plans for today?” I asked, wiping sweat from my forehead.

  She shrugged. “Hannah’s coming over to swim.”