The Drowning Girls (10 page)

JUNE 19, 2015
6:02 P.M.

LIZ

It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard—first a whine like squealing brakes, then, coming closer, the looping wail of a siren. Danielle screamed, “I hear it!”

“Go,” I gasped, coming back to myself, to the present. “Flag them down on the street.”

Danielle turned and ran.

I blinked sweat from my eyes, trying to visualize the ambulance darting through The Palms, slowing for the speed bumps or dodging them or taking them full strength. Everyone must be hearing the sirens—the Jorgensens, too, if they were home. Not likely, considering their track record. Where was Hannah? Why hadn’t she come back?

The ambulance would come to a stop in front of our house, with its grass that needed to be mowed, the overgrown flower beds—things Parker-Lane wasn’t doing for us anymore, things I’d stopped caring about. The attendants would pass our front porch, heaped with unopened newspapers, push through the massive double doors that were too grand, too pretentious, that told a lie:
wealth and privilege live here. A good life is lived here.
Then they would scan the boxes I’d stacked shoulder-high to the right of the entryway—Bathroom, Books, Movies, Goodwill—and wonder how we’d screwed it all up.

It seemed like only a second later that a woman was leaning over me, a hand on my shoulder. “Ma’am, we’re going to take it from here.”

I crab-walked clumsily out of the way, collapsing back onto my elbows.

A man was there, too, her partner. “What’s her name?”

My tongue stuck in my mouth, thick and unfamiliar. “Kelsey. Kelsey Jorgensen.”

“All right, Kelsey,” the woman said, feeling for a pulse. “You just hang in there. We’re going to help you out.”

It’s too late
, I thought. But I clung to her words like an anchor that would stop the world from moving, just for the moment.

The female paramedic identified herself as Moreno, the male as Richards. She might have been my age, a few wrinkles creasing her face, her hair pulled into an unyielding braid. He seemed impossibly young, his shirtsleeves bulging with muscle. I followed their movements dumbly—the duffel bags unzipped, the machines unloaded and activated.

“We’ve got a head wound here,” Moreno said, taking over the compressions. “She hit her head and went in the pool?”

It took me a moment to realize this was a question. “I don’t know. I was inside. But we pulled her out and she was bleeding.” My body had gone from aching to numb, my arms heavy at my sides.

Moreno paused to allow Richards to slice open Kelsey’s shirt from hem to neck. Beneath it she wore a lacy pink bra, and beneath that her chest was still, only springing to life when the compressions resumed.

“Is that her blood leading to the house?” Moreno asked.

I stared stupidly at a thin trail of red drops leading back to the sliding door. “I don’t know,” I said. And then I remembered banging my big toe in my rush to get outside. Now, as if on cue, it began to throb. And it was a mess—the nail dangling crookedly, bubbles of blood rising from the bed. “No—that’s not her blood. I tore my toenail.”

She glanced at my foot, dismissing it. “Okay. Tell me what happened here. Who saw her go into the pool?”

I looked around and found Danielle in the oblong shadow of the roofline. She was shivering, arms clasped over her skinny chest. Just below her jutting hip bone I spotted the tattoo. From this distance, it looked like a smear of dirt. “Danielle, come here. Tell us what happened.”

Her voice was small, nervous. “I don’t know. Hannah and I were upstairs, and then we came down and she was just...floating there.”

“Did you let her in the house?” I demanded.

“No! I didn’t even know she was back here, until...”

Moreno looked back and forth between us. “So how long could she have been in the pool? A few minutes? Five? Ten?”

“Maybe five minutes?” Danielle’s voice rose at the end, as if she were in fact making a guess, or asking a question she hoped I would answer for her. She smelled of chlorine and suntan lotion, of salt and coconut and sweat. I squinted into the dark interior of the house, but there was no sign of Hannah.

“Eighteen minutes,” Richards said, as if he were answering the question for us. I held the number in my head, turning it around, trying to understand its importance. Then I realized: that was the length of the 911 call, the spell during which I’d leaned over Kelsey, breathing, pushing, pleading, praying. It had seemed like forever. Still—eighteen minutes was way too long, a colossus of a number.

“Do you know if she was drinking? Did she take anything?”

Danielle shook her head.

“She was on some kind of medication,” I offered. “For depression, I guess. But I don’t know what, or if she was still taking it.”

Moreno glanced quickly from me to Kelsey, and I understood what she was thinking. How in the world could this girl be depressed? But when I looked down at Kelsey, she didn’t look like any version of herself now. She was a patient, a
victim
. The cut on her head had been covered with stretchy pink gauze that crisscrossed her forehead in a giant X. Her chest had suddenly sprouted leads and tubes, the wires leading back to a defibrillator. An oxygen mask covered her mouth.

I bent at the waist, suddenly dizzy. The afternoon was coming back to me, hard and fast. I’d had too much wine, and I’d thrown it up in the upstairs bathroom. What had happened before that? I remembered yelling at Kelsey, remembered the shocked look on her face. But then what?

I’d fallen asleep, leaving Danielle and Hannah the house to themselves.

SEPTEMBER 2014
LIZ

I let Danielle cry it out, tracks of mascara trailing down her cheeks. I let her plead her innocence, her sobs uncontrollable, hands over her face so that it was difficult to tell what she was saying. She’d gone to Kelsey’s house first—that part, apparently, had been true—but then they’d eventually drifted over to Mac’s to watch a movie, and once they were there, they’d just decided to spend the night.

“What about Kelsey’s parents?” I demanded.

Danielle shrugged. “They weren’t home yet when we left.”

“What movie?”

“Um, I don’t know. Three guys on a road trip?”

I stared at her. “And you were drinking.”

Danielle leaned forward, the heels of her hands gouging at her eyes. “One. One beer, I swear. It wasn’t even good. I was just drinking it because—”

“You’re fourteen, Danielle,” I reminded her. “
Fourteen
. There is no excuse.”

She spoke into her hands. “I know.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

She looked up at me, shaking her head. Huddled on the couch, clutching a throw pillow to her chest, she looked skinny and helpless, like the fourteen-year-old girl I’d almost forgotten she was.

I remembered the distinctive smell of pot, ripe as cologne. “What about drugs? Did you smoke pot?”

“
Mom
. No.”

“What about sex?”

She sat back. “Mom!”

It was a relief to read her shock. “Did you go anywhere else?”

“No. What do you mean? Where would we have gone?”

“To the clubhouse,” I said, watching her carefully, alert to any sign that she was being dishonest. I’d always been able to tell when Danielle was lying, because she wouldn’t look directly at me. Her glance might shift down or to the right, as if she were buying time before she could confront me head-on.

But she held my gaze now. “Why would we go to the clubhouse? It would have been closed, anyway.”

“What about Kelsey?”

“What about her?”

I let this sit, let her words hang in the air.

She looked around suddenly. “Is something going on? Where’s Phil?”

I told her what I knew about the vandalism, stressing the thousands of dollars in damage, the disruption to the morning’s tournament.

“That’s horrible,” she said, wiping her face on the hem of her T-shirt. “Why would someone do that? I mean...you can’t think that I would have anything to do with that.”

I sighed, watching her. A day ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of finding her on a futon in Mac Sievert’s bedroom, mascara streaked across her face. It had come—the official world of teenagerdom, the world of bad decisions and half-truths. The ironic thing was, I spent my days counseling students who had messed up in one way or another—failing grades, pregnancies, STDs, drug use. I’d wondered, time and again, how the parents had been so clueless, how they could not know what was happening in their own child’s life. But it turned out not to be that difficult. You took your eye off the ball for a minute and it was your own kid.

“I know you have to punish me,” she said. “I deserve to be punished. You could ground me. Two weeks.”

I laughed despite myself. Danielle had always negotiated her own punishments. She’d been an incredibly easy kid, responsible and trustworthy and helpful, a single mother’s dream. At nights when I tucked her into bed, she would confess her transgressions to me, as if I were a priest or God. And she was always ready with her own punishment, too—
I won’t watch television for a week. I’ll apologize to my teacher. I’ll wash the dishes every night for a month.
But she’d missed the mark on this one. “Two weeks? You lied to me, you snuck around, you drank...”

She closed her eyes, steeling herself.

“One month,” I said. “You go to and from school only. No one spends the night.”

Danielle moaned. “For a
month
?”

I shrugged. “We could make it six weeks if you like.” This had been my dad’s type of bargaining, where a complaint would get me a worse punishment. It was something I promised myself never to do as a parent, but it slipped out so easily, like a reflex.

Danielle stood up, defeated. “No, I’ll take the month.”

* * *

Phil came home around noon, spotted with tan spray paint. He entered through the garage and undressed in the kitchen, kicking off his shoes, peeling off his shirt and pants and socks. He tossed the socks in the direction of the trash can. One missed, sliding wetly to the floor.

“So you ended up repainting?” I asked carefully. I’d sent him a half-dozen text messages, none of which he’d returned.

“A professional’s going to come out on Monday morning,” he grunted, making his way up the stairs. I followed several steps behind. “I just wanted to cover up some of the worst of it. Then we had to get the water stopped and things mopped up—it’s a nightmare.”

We passed Danielle’s door, which was closed. I’d looked in on her after her shower and found her asleep again, worn-out from all her crying and pleading, and from whatever else she’d done the night before, I suppose.

“I talked to Myriam,” I said. “I guess it’s good it was found by someone here, rather than one of the guests.”

Phil grunted. He shed his boxers a foot inside the bedroom and headed directly to the shower, shoulders down. He looked a decade older than the man who had tossed me onto the bed last night, beating his chest mock caveman-style.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub, steam from the shower stirring the air and settling on the mirrors. “Any idea who it was?”

“That’s above my pay grade.”

“I mean, I thought maybe from the graffiti...”

“You think they signed their names? It was all swearwords. ‘Fuck this, fuck that.’ Just your average senseless crime.”

“Myriam says it’s someone from outside The Palms,” I said.

Phil’s laugh was bitter. “
Myriam says
. Of course she does. That’s the only way the world makes sense to her.”

The water stopped abruptly and I passed Phil a fresh bath towel, watching through the frosted glass as he ran the towel over his hair and then down his body. When he stepped out a moment later, the towel was tied around his hips. Water beaded on his chest. “What?” he asked, realizing I was waiting.

I told him about finding Danielle at the Sieverts’ house, about grounding her for a month.

He swore. “And the one night she’s unaccounted for, there’s vandalism in the clubhouse?”

I shook my head. “I was thinking the same thing, but it couldn’t have anything to do with her. You should have seen how surprised she was when I told her about it. Besides, there was no paint on her, she wasn’t wet or dirty...” I followed him back into the bedroom, sitting on the bed while he pulled on clean clothes.

“And I suppose it had nothing to do with Kelsey Jorgensen or Mac Sievert.” His face was away from me, but I heard the disgust in his voice, the splatter as their names hit the air.

“Danielle says they watched a movie and fell asleep.” I thought of the beer bottles in Mac’s bedroom, lined up on the billiards table, the lazy way he’d come down the stairs in his shorts, bare-chested. “Yes, they’re overprivileged and entitled, but that doesn’t mean...”

Phil looked at me. “It doesn’t?”

I stopped, hearing myself. It was what everyone here told themselves, as if it were written into the HOA agreement, a credo for membership at The Palms. Other people, always, were the bad ones—the
bad influences
at Ashbury, the drywallers and cement pourers and bricklayers and roofers with questionable backgrounds. Even at Miles Landers, when the locker rooms were vandalized, when someone sprayed
LOSERS
in Roundup on the football field, we assumed it to be the work of the crosstown rival—an assumption that never proved true. Always, inevitably, it was one of our own students. But it was the same thinking at work: Why would we do this to ourselves?

Phil shut the door of his armoire, hard, and I winced from the sound of wood hitting wood. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m going to lie down. I’ve had enough hell for one day.”

* * *

Kelsey was waiting in front of her house as usual on Monday morning, wearing a short black dress and silver earrings that fell to her shoulders—as if it were a Saturday night date instead of another day at school. She said hello to me and exchanged a knowing look with Danielle as she slid into the backseat. It had been a relief to have a break from her for the weekend, to lounge around the house in yoga pants and not bump into her every time I rounded a corner.

The mood was more subdued than usual, and I turned up
Morning Edition
loud enough to drown out the silence. There were other things going on in the world. Syria. The end of the embargo on Cuba. Real, important things. It took me half the drive to realize Danielle and Kelsey were texting each other, that their thumbs were saying the things they didn’t want me to hear. In fact, they’d no doubt been texting all weekend—that’s what Danielle had been doing in her room, when I assumed she was being conciliatory, submitting mildly to her punishment.

Shit.

This was the sort of thing I would know if I’d bonded with the moms of Danielle’s classmates in the drop-off lane, if I’d kept up with them over the years, meeting for moms’ night pedicures and margaritas. Instead I’d waved and headed to work; at the end of the day, I’d stayed in the car when it was time to pick Danielle up, too tired to engage.
Take note, Liz
, I told myself. Next time, grounding includes the cell phone. It includes the internet.

At school, I watched them walk off together, laughing and chatting as soon as they were out of my earshot. Well—I thought. At least I had a month without Kelsey in my home. That would feel like a minivacation in itself.

* * *

But it was a short-lived vacation. That afternoon, following a tedious administrative meeting and an hour of posting scholarship notifications to the school’s website, Kelsey appeared in the doorway of my office.

For a moment I stared at her blankly, filled with the strange sense of two worlds colliding, school and home, business and personal. There were too many Kelseys: the girl in the backseat of my car, sprawled across my daughter’s unmade bed, stumbling to her feet in Mac Sievert’s bedroom. But Kelsey fell into my section of the alphabet—at this moment, she was just another student, and this was just another meeting.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked, leaning against the door frame. Her hair was somehow as perfectly styled as it had been this morning, the ends still holding their loose curls. It was a feat I’d never been able to manage, despite two more decades of styling experience.

I glanced up at the clock on my wall. Two thirty. “Not at all. Is everything okay?”

She shrugged. “Can we talk for a minute?”

“Of course, let me just...” I made a few clicks and saved my work before turning back to her.

My office was just large enough for three chairs, four filing cabinets, two bookshelves crammed with yearbooks, binders on testing protocol and thick catalogs from college admission departments. Kelsey stood in the middle of the room, looking around as if she had been asked to give an appraisal. “This is cute,” she said, picking up a framed photo of Danielle in a plastic kiddie pool, her brown hair hanging in wet pigtails. She set it down and picked up the other frame from my desk, a photo of Phil, Danielle and me at Disneyland three summers ago, wearing matching hats with mouse ears. Danielle’s mouth was ringed with the red stain of a sugary drink, and she looked heartbreakingly happy.

“We used to go to Disneyland every year,” Kelsey said, sloughing her tote bag from her shoulder and letting it drop to the ground. “My parents hated the long lines.”

I smiled, imagining the Jorgensens waiting in line with the tourists in khaki shorts and sweatshirts, only Tim would be in a dark suit and Sonia in a patterned dress and heels, both checking their phones every thirty seconds. “We haven’t been back since we took that picture, either.”

She approached the chair across from my desk. “Now my parents think I’m old enough for serious travel. Last year we went to Italy for two weeks, and before that my dad took me on a tour of all these Ivy League campuses. I was only
thirteen
, but I guess he was trying to make a point.”

“Sounds like a smart dad,” I said lightly.
Oh, please
, I would tell Allie later.
Thirteen years old?
I remembered Danielle telling me about the Jorgensens’ trip to Italy last year, sounding awed.
They went to Italy for Christmas.
Just
because.

Kelsey’s gaze had gone over my shoulder, to the various things tacked to the wall behind my desk. I half turned, seeing what she was seeing. A picture of Aaron and me, dressed up as Thing 1 and Thing 2 for a school spirit day, a Mother’s Day card Danielle made me in second grade, my framed diploma from San Jose State. “Was I supposed to make an appointment to see you?” she asked suddenly. “I don’t know how this works. At Ass Bury there weren’t that many students, and we could just pop in whenever the door was open.”

“Usually students make an appointment, but I’m free now,” I said, gesturing to the chair across from my desk. I tried to keep my voice friendly but professional, neutral. Kelsey settled into the chair, her black dress rising up as she sat, exposing a long line of thigh. I turned back to my monitor. “Let me do one little thing,” I murmured, typing her name into the student database. Only six weeks into the school year, there weren’t any official grades on file. Although MLHS teachers were required to maintain an up-to-date online grade book, there were some liberal interpretations of “up-to-date” that resulted in the tool being only somewhat effective. Still, at a glance, I saw that Kelsey had four As, with Bs in world history and geology. Solid enough—although a bit lower than what I would expect from an Ashbury student.

I minimized the screen and glanced back at Kelsey. “What can I help you with today?”

She tilted her head to one side, twirling one of her long earrings back and forth between her fingers. “It’s not, um, an academic thing. It’s— I guess it’s personal.”