The Drowning Girls (14 page)

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.

And then at some point I caught what I was doing, and I slammed the lip of the laptop shut.

No more Kelsey
, I promised myself.

At the time, I thought it was a promise I would be able to keep.

* * *

The video camera installation was scheduled for the week of Thanksgiving, when most of the residents of The Palms would be out of town and the clubhouse dining room was closed. Phil planned to stay to oversee its completion, and I put up only the weakest of protests.

It had been a tradition for all of my adult life to have Thanksgiving with my family in Riverside. I’d come home even when Danielle was young and money was so tight I could pay the gas only one way, and had to beg money from my parents for the return to San Jose. When my dad died, the trip became something of an annual pilgrimage. For the past four years, Phil had come, too, the three of us crowding into my mother’s house, overwhelming her kitchen, eating too much of everything and talking through the Macy’s parade and marathons of
Law & Order
and
NCIS
. Most years, Allie could come; this year, with her new job in Chicago, she was only flying out for Christmas.

Still—I was looking forward to the trip, even though it would be only the three of us. It was four full days away from The Palms—a vacation from the vacation, as it were. Was this how my neighbors felt when they headed off to Aruba for a week, to Napa for the weekend?

And yes, it was a vacation from Phil, too. Maybe distance was what we needed, an unofficial, short-lived break to put us back on course. I told myself that anyway, as he loaded our suitcases into my trunk on Tuesday morning in a T-shirt and a pair of old sweatpants. He leaned against the driver’s window, double-checking that I had our boarding passes and, for emergencies, the lone credit card we hadn’t maxed out.

“What will you do without us?” I asked.

“Miss you horribly.” He leaned in, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. It was the closest we’d been in a month.

He waved at Danielle, who was digging her earphones out of her backpack. “Have a good time, Danielle.”

“Yup,” she said, not looking at either of us.

* * *

Somehow, while I mocked the amenities at The Palms, I’d grown used to them. It was a shock to drive down Mom’s street in Riverside, where the front lawns were set close to the street, the lampposts covered with graffiti. She still lived in the bungalow where I’d grown up, although more and more the house seemed to be caving in on itself, the linoleum curving at its edges, cobwebs blooming in the corners. How much longer could she live here, and where would she go when she couldn’t? Since our move to The Palms, I’d been trying to envision Mom there, sunning herself on our deck, walking arm in arm with me on the trail. But I knew she wouldn’t go willingly.

Over the years, Allie and I had offered to move Mom into our various apartments and rentals, but she had always insisted on her independence. She had a once-a-week housekeeper, but the walls were smudged with fingerprints and the windows streaked from a sloppy effort. Six years since Dad’s heart attack, the walls still smelled like his nicotine.

Beneath her black tunic, Mom’s body seemed more frail, her collarbone and cheekbones more prominent. With the busyness of our move, Danielle and I had skipped our summer visit, so the ordinary changes of aging were less subtle. We hugged and kissed, and then Mom turned her attention to Danielle. “Very chic,” she pronounced, running her fingers over Danielle’s hair. And then, making us laugh, “But why are you wearing so much makeup?”

We took Mom to a Mexican restaurant just around the corner, a place where she had a particular booth and a waitress who knew her order. Halfway through the meal I realized I was exhausted, the tension of the past weeks catching up to me. Between the drive to the airport, the shuttle ride, the flight and the hassle of picking up a rental car, it had been a sixteen-hour day. Back at Mom’s house, Danielle and I collapsed into the twin beds in the room I’d shared with Allie. We’d long ago removed our posters and books and knickknacks, but the space held the same creaky furniture, the same plaid comforters. It wasn’t until we’d turned out the light that I realized I’d never called Phil to tell him we arrived, and he’d never called me to check.

On Wednesday we went grocery shopping and baked pumpkin bread in Mom’s galley kitchen, bumping into each other and apologizing and backing out of each other’s way. Her kitchen made me feel nostalgic for the one Phil and I had left behind in Livermore, where we’d brushed against each other constantly, where he’d stood behind me, humming some off-key tune, arms around my waist while I chopped a pepper. At The Palms, there was no need to bump into each other, ever.

Once the bread was in the oven, Danielle excused herself to lie on the couch in the living room, where the cushions were indented from Mom’s daily use, the corduroy worn shiny.

Mom poured me a cup of coffee, expertly gathering cream and sugar and a little tray of cookies. “Does Danielle want something to drink?”

“Let me see.” I peeked into the living room again and reported that Danielle was napping—mouth open, one arm draped over her head.

“She didn’t even get up until nine thirty,” Mom commented. “It must be rough being a teenager.”

I laughed. “I bet she could sleep for twelve hours at a stretch, every day.”

Mom smiled, wetting a cloth in the sink. “You were like that, too.”

“I was?”

“Of course. You and Allie both, always in your bedroom after school, napping before dinner.”

I closed my eyes, instantly gutted. It was impossible to remember my own teenage years without a guilty lurch.
Payback’s a bitch
, Allie had written to me after Danielle’s grounding—and I agreed. If there was any what-comes-around-goes-around karmic fairness, I had more coming to me.

“It was like you’d run a marathon each day,” Mom continued now, and I remembered all the times she’d stood in the doorway of our bedroom, whispering, “Allie? Lizzie?” It was easier to pretend I was asleep than to explain that I was reading or scribbling in my journal, guarding my thoughts from her as if they were possessions that could be snatched away at any time.

Still, I reminded myself as Mom bustled around the kitchen, wiping off countertops and door handles, it had been surprisingly difficult to keep secrets from her. Since she couldn’t see what we were up to, her other senses were on constant overload. By smelling one of Allie’s shirts, she deduced there was a boyfriend; hearing me laugh late at night, she somehow figured out my plans for an upcoming party. And then there were her hands—roving, finding, assessing, on a persistent search to find evidence about our lives.

It was uncanny how she knew that something was wrong, even now, when I was standing still next to her. Maybe there was the scent of failure about me, an aura of sadness. I hadn’t intended to tell her anything about Phil. Where would I have started? Mom loved Phil; she’d seen him as a sort of savior, appearing out of the blue with his charming accent to rescue her single daughter. It would break her heart to hear that we were having trouble; it would shatter her to learn what I suspected and what still lingered as a nagging doubt.