The Drowning Girls (17 page)

I sat in his chair—a folding chair, temporary, like everything else about our lives—and lifted the lid.

This was where the proof would be. There would be emails, photos, a chat room history. The internet was where people lived their lives, where they kept their secrets. Somehow, people always thought they could keep their dark deeds hidden, that they were smarter than the others who had failed before them. They were clichés, the Tiger Woodses and Arnold Schwarzeneggers, the men who thought they could keep it all under wraps.

I took a deep breath and entered Phil’s password: SFGiants#14. The Giants were his adopted team, rewarding him in the past decade with three World Series titles. His password, updated each year, reflected that allegiance. I hesitated before hitting the enter key, but I needed the proof.

The display jiggled, notifying me of an incorrect login.

I tried again, varying the strokes. No capital letters. All capital letters. Maybe he’d needed to change a password for one reason or another, so I tried some variations of his favorite players with their jersey numbers. Passwords had become ridiculously complicated lately, with about seven different requirements that made them almost impossible to remember, let alone guess.

Still, I tried it—variations of Kelsey’s name, of Phil and Kelsey’s names together. It felt like proof on its own. He knew my password, but suddenly his was a mystery?

I didn’t hear Danielle come down the stairs, and I didn’t see her until she was right in front of me.

“What are you doing on Phil’s laptop?”

“I’m trying to pull up a file I need,” I said, brushing off her accusatory tone.

She came around the side of the table, and I assumed she was going to cut through the dining room to the butler’s pantry we only used as a passageway to the kitchen. But instead, she swung around the end of the table and said,
“Mom.”

I followed her gaze to the laptop, to the screen that notified me of an incorrect password. I closed the lid. “It’s not what you think.”

She said, “I don’t even know what to think,” and left the room.

* * *

I went to bed early that night and pretended to be asleep when Phil came in. He read for a while next to me, turning pages slowly and deliberately. It was a biography of John Adams, and he’d been reading it halfheartedly for months, a page or two a night, but it disgusted me now. It felt like an act—a child molester pretending to be a normal human being.

Molester
.

I’d been dancing around the word, not allowing my mind to go there.

Because there was another piece to the puzzle, too. I was an employee of a public school in California and therefore a mandated reporter. The law didn’t require proof; it required reasonable suspicion. If you suspected a minor was being harmed (even, yes, a minor like Kelsey, who was aggressively sexual and quite possibly a willing participant), it had to be reported. And as a mandated reporter, I couldn’t do so anonymously. I couldn’t put their names out there and stand behind vague details. I would have to give my name.

Try it out, Liz
, I told myself. Imagine saying
I’m Liz McGinnis and I’d like to report an inappropriate relationship between a thirty-seven-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old student at my school. His name? Phil McGinnis.

I would have to say what I suspected and why. I’d be criminally liable if I had even the faintest suggestion and didn’t report it. The procedure was a phone call to the county welfare department or the police, followed by a written report within thirty-six hours. I’d made those phone calls before and filled out the forms; we had a stack of them at work, and each year I’d conducted a brief professional development training for the rest of the staff on the process. Last year, I had a junior girl in my office, and when she’d bent over to pick up a piece of paper, I’d spotted a bruise on her back where her shirt rose above her jeans. Something about it had nagged at me, and I’d made the phone call. It turned out that she had an abusive older boyfriend, one who served a few months in jail as a result.

But this was my husband.

You don’t know anything for sure
, I reminded myself.
It’s all rumor and innuendo. It looks bad, but it can’t be true. Phil would never.

Then, just as fast, the pendulum swung back, and I remembered that first day Kelsey had come over, when her bikini top had become twisted in the pool.

Of course he would
.

But there was no way I was going to make that phone call and put our lives in jeopardy without absolute proof.

* * *

I began to watch Phil closely, tracking his movements the way he was tracking the movements of everyone else in The Palms. I left school as soon as I could each afternoon, drove faster on the way home, and popped into his office unannounced. Kelsey was never there, but somehow he always looked guilty, as if one of his hands had been pinched in the cookie jar. He was traveling to San Jose more often for meetings with Parker-Lane, sometimes leaving his laptop at home. I kept track of his mileage, and it roughly checked out.

“Why all the meetings?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re in an expansion phase,” he said, an answer too vague to be useful.

We occupied the same space, but I’d begun to think of us as separate entities, roommates for the sake of splitting expenses. In the first week of December, the three of us went to pick out a Christmas tree and we carted it home, where it stood in a bucket of water, leaning against the back of the house. A week later, Danielle asked when we were going to decorate the tree, and Phil and I looked at each other. Apparently both of us had other things on our minds.

We were waging a cold war, our sole battle over Danielle’s plans to attend Winter Formal the Saturday before the end of the semester. Danielle had made plans to go with a large group that was splitting the cost of a limo, a group that included Kelsey Jorgensen. I was inclined to allow it, since I would be chaperoning the dance anyway, and would be able to keep an eye on her. Weirdly, it was Phil who was adamant that she was too young, that she didn’t need to be out so late.

“It’s a high school dance,” I reminded him. “She is a high school student, after all.”

“I don’t like it,” he said, but I overrode him, as I’d done only a few times before. It was part of a new pattern of dismissing his opinions, discounting his advice.

The week before Winter Formal, I drove Danielle to the mall in Pleasanton and lurked outside the fitting room while she tried on dress after dress. She wanted a picture of herself in each one, and I dutifully obliged, snapping shots while she posed with a price tag dangling from her underarm. Another girl from a different high school was in the dressing room at the same time, and I struck up a conversation with her mother while we waited for our daughters, bemoaning the cost of the dance tickets, the dinner beforehand, the dress and shoes and hair and nails.

Meanwhile the other girl emerged from her dressing room in a white dress with strands of beaded fringe. Even under the fluorescent lighting she was stunning, the fringe shimmering like liquid metal. While she tried to convince her mother of the price tag, Danielle settled on a sleeveless black dress with a low back, one everyone else had passed over on the sales rack. “You look beautiful,” I told her, and she rolled her eyes but smiled at her appearance in the mirror. I snapped her picture, getting into the spirit of it now. She
was
beautiful, even wearing a pair of socks, her hair pulled back by a headband.

And she was beautiful the night of the dance, too, her hair sprayed in a dramatic faux-hawk, gold earrings dangling from her lobes. She looked as if she’d stepped off an album cover.

Phil whistled when she came down the stairs, heels dangling from one hand.

“Gross.” Danielle mock-swatted him. “Stepdads aren’t supposed to whistle.”

“Maybe I should come along with you,” Phil said. “Ward off attack, keep young men from dancing with you, that sort of thing.”

“Creepy, but no thanks.” She turned to me.

“Gorgeous,” I pronounced.

She grinned. “Really?”

I gave her an air kiss, careful not to smear her makeup. She would be picked up in the limo by seven, have dinner with her friends and be at the Miles Landers multipurpose room by no later than nine thirty, when the doors closed. I reminded her, “No alcohol, no drugs, call me if anything makes you feel uncomfortable and I’ll come pick you up.”

Danielle sighed. “Right, I know.”

“Or call me,” Phil said, puffing out his chest, Tarzan-style. “I’ll beat them away with my club.”

* * *

As chaperones, Aaron and I were stationed at different doors, giant orange plugs protruding from our ears like the knobs on Frankenstein’s monster. Even with the earplugs, the music thumped and my teeth vibrated. It was my favorite dance to chaperone—if
favorite
was the right word for a compulsory situation—because the students had put so much effort into their hair and clothes that they generally stayed out of too much trouble.

The multipurpose room was essentially the school’s cafeteria by day, the site of board meetings and choir concerts and fund-raisers by night. For the dance, the walls had been papered in black, and thousands of white Christmas lights glittered from the ceiling and floor, illuminating the perimeters of the space. The only other lights came flashing from the stage, where the DJ stood behind a massive set. In the pulse of these lights, hundreds of students were exposed in staccato flashes of dresses and tuxedos and corsages and boutonnieres, their arms over their heads, bodies close together.

There was a photo booth behind the curtain on the stage, and at first the line was long, populated by groups of girls and couples holding hands. In the crush of students I noticed the clock—nine, then nine fifteen, nine twenty. The cafeteria was filling up, a large cluster of students dancing in the middle of the floor, couples scattered here and there. On the chairs around the perimeter, girls were perched on their dates’ laps. I left my post at the door and wandered around the room, looking for a sign of Danielle. At one point, in flashes of the strobe light, I saw Kelsey. The lighting gave her an almost magical quality, her pulsing, jerky movements accompanied by the swinging of her blond hair.

I met up with Aaron at his post. He shouted something that sounded like
Kill me now
.

“Have you seen Danielle?” I shouted back.

He shook his head.

I wandered toward the main entrance, pulling my cell phone from my pocket. There were five missed calls, all in the past half hour, all from Danielle’s number. With the noise, I hadn’t heard it ring. She’d left me one voice mail, but I had no hope of hearing it inside the building. I pushed through the double doors of the lobby, trying to get away from the music. “I’ll be right back,” I told the staff members minding the cash box.

I had to take about twenty steps away from the building before I could hear anything other than the relentless, booming bass. My heart racing, I popped the foam earplug out of one ear and listened to the message. Danielle was sobbing so hard, I had to play it twice to understand.
Mom...you have to take me home. Something horrible has happened. I’m in the bathroom.

I raced back inside, brushing past Sharon Hegarty, the home ec teacher.

“Liz?” she called after me, but I couldn’t stop to explain myself. I was thinking of a million horrible scenarios at once. Danielle never asked me to bail her out of situations. I’d never picked her up from a sleepover or summer camp. Once, in elementary school, she’d scraped her knee on the playground, ripping her jeans and requiring her to change into a pair of too-big shorts from the school’s clothes bin. But still—she hadn’t called for me. When I’d picked her up at the end of the day, she’d simply handed me the ruined jeans in a plastic bag.

Maybe she was sick now. Appendicitis, food poisoning, cramps, any one of a hundred things that could go wrong with a person’s body. Or she was hurt. Someone had hurt her. One of the boys from the limo ride, from dinner.

I had to fight my way through a group of girls clustered around the bathroom door. A few of them gave me uncertain, wavering smiles and quickly scattered. In their sparkling dresses and painful heels, I barely recognized them. I pushed open the door, stepping over coats and bags stacked on the floor. Six stalls gaped, empty, but the last one was locked.

“Danielle?” I asked softly. “It’s me.”

She threw the latch and peered at me from behind the stall door as if I were a stranger on her doorstep. She’d been crying; mascara ringed her eyes, and her cheeks were streaked with the remains of her glittery eye shadow.

“Oh, honey.” I pulled a few yards of toilet paper from the dispenser, wetted them in the sink and returned, locking the stall door behind me. As I dabbed at her makeup stains, I felt her body shaking, shoulders rising and falling in silent, thrashing heaves.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

“It’s—it’s too—horrible.”

I pulled out another stream of toilet paper and held it to Danielle’s nose. She blew obediently, and I tossed the soggy mess into the open toilet.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me, Danielle. You know you can.” I drew her close, but at the same time I allowed my glance to rove over the rest of her body. Her hair was slightly flatter than it had been when she’d left the house, but it wasn’t mussed. Her dress was the same—not ripped or wrinkled. She had kicked off her shoes and was standing barefoot on a bathroom floor that had seen cleaner days.

I pulled back to look her in the face. “Dani—tell me.”

“They’re saying that I—”

The outside door opened then, music that had been a dull throb in the background becoming, briefly, a full roar. Danielle shrank back against the wall, bumping her shin against the toilet. More girls had entered. Through a gap where the door locked, I saw them huddle in front of the dingy mirrors and I stepped back to tuck my feet out of view.

“Are you kidding me? It has, like, four hundred favorites already.”