The Drowning Girls (19 page)

“Okay,” he said finally. “Monday. I’ll call her in and see what she has to say.”

“I appreciate it, Sanjay,” I said.

* * *

Danielle did go back to school on Monday, but it was a different Danielle, her hair less styled, with only a bit of mascara and lip gloss. She wore a long sweater over her jeans and her beat-up pair of turquoise Converse.

“I’m proud of you,” I told her in the car. And I was—almost to bursting. It felt like a movie scene, minus the swell of uplifting music.

She shrugged. “I may as well get it over with.”

“You can come to my office anytime,” I offered. “If anything happens that you don’t like, if anyone says anything to you, then you can come right to me.”

“I’m not sure it would help my social status if I ran right to my mommy,” she said. “But anyway, thanks.”

* * *

Aaron came into my office at the beginning of fifth period lunch, the sleeves of his yellow Oxford rolled up to his elbow. He held one hand behind his back.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

“It’s a shitty thing, Liz. How is she?”

“I think the worst of it is over by now.” I gestured to his arm. “What’s behind your back? A bottle of Johnnie Walker?”

“Next best thing.” He brought his arm around, producing a cafeteria tray heaped high with the daily special. “I present to you, faux chicken.”

I grimaced.

“These nuggets represent your tax dollars at work, Liz. And personally, I hate the thought of my tax dollars ending up in a trash bin at the end of the day.”

I scooted a few loose pens and papers out of the way, and Aaron set the tray on the desk in between us. He’d brought a half-dozen sauce containers and proceeded to open them one by one, peeling back the thin plastic strips carefully, like a solicitous waiter.

I picked up a nugget, holding it to the light. “Do the kids actually eat these?”

“No, and that’s my point.”

We ate in silence. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until the first nuggets passed my lips. They were surprisingly good for food that was far removed from any kind of natural state. We ate in silence, picking apart the breading, chewing with great concentration.

“So, let’s hear it,” Aaron said.

I swallowed and took a swig from my water bottle. “Well, the worst part is that she’s convinced her friend Kelsey—the one you met at registration?—was behind the whole thing.”

“Some friend, huh?” Aaron sighed. “I’ll never understand girls. Guys, we punch it out and that’s the end of it. Girls go for the jugular. Look, I know this probably isn’t helpful, but it could have been worse.”

“I know. It’ll die down, like any other rumor. The weird thing is, even though people are more accepting than ever, being gay is still the low-hanging fruit. I mean, this can’t be helping kids who actually are gay.”

“Right.” Aaron grabbed a tissue and took a swipe at his chin. “Now, I have zero experience with the whole parenting thing. My cat causes me very little trouble, as you know. But, Liz, if there’s anything I can do...”

“There is, actually.”

“Really? Because that was just a standard consolation phrase.”

I laughed. “Jerk. I was just thinking—maybe you could call Danielle in sometime, just to see how she’s doing.”

He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

There was a short rap on my door and Jenn popped her head in a few inches. “Liz? There’s someone who wants to talk to you. A Mrs. Jorgensen? She doesn’t have an appointment, so if you want me to tell her—”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Give me just a minute.”

Aaron tipped the rest of the chicken nuggets and the empty sauce containers into the trash can, and I straightened the top of my desk. Sonia Jorgensen was
here
? For the first months of the year, she hadn’t even taken a turn bringing Kelsey to school. She’d been in Raleigh for a convention on Back-to-School night, and to my knowledge she’d only set foot on campus for registration.
Gopal
, I thought.

“Excuse me,” Sonia said, passing through the doorway at the same time as Aaron, who left with a sympathetic smile. Instantly, I felt like I always did when I saw Sonia—horribly underdressed. She wore a silk blouse and pencil skirt, smart three-inch heels. She held a buttery leather briefcase by its handle. Her gaze swept over my room—dusty binders, stacks of memos that should have been tossed a month ago, Post-it notes affixed to half the surfaces—before coming to rest on me. I had the feeling that what I’d seen of her at The Palms had only been a polite veneer, but that pretense was gone now.

Sonia dropped her briefcase onto the chair Aaron had vacated. “You accused my daughter of spreading rumors on Twitter?”

I stepped behind her to shut the door. In the lobby, I caught Jenn’s raised eyebrows. “Did Mr. Gopal call you?”

“No, Liz, my daughter called me. In tears. Apparently she was called into the assistant principal’s office for cyberbullying. I was on my way to the city, but I had to cancel my appointments and drive all the way back.” This, clearly, was what she found most upsetting about the entire situation.

I stared at her. “I never used the word
bullying
, but yes, I do believe she knows something about what happened. It concerns our students, so that’s why the assistant principal is involved.”

“Our students?” Sonia repeated. “We’re talking about our
daughters
. This could have been kept between you and me, and we could have chatted it out over coffee.”

I cleared my throat. “Actually, it doesn’t involve you and me. It mainly involves Danielle. Did you see the comments on that Twitter account?”

Sonia shook her head. “I only just learned about this. But Kelsey told me there were some horrible comments. I’m very sorry about that. I don’t know why you would think Kelsey had something to do with this, though.”

I had to plant my hands firmly on my desk to steady myself. “She mocked Danielle. That night, in front of the other kids in their group. She was humiliated. I found her crying in the bathroom.”

“I’m sure Kelsey didn’t mean anything by it. After all the things she’s been through...”

I waited, but she dropped the thought.

“Try to see this from my daughter’s perspective, Liz. If everyone thinks her best friend is gay...”

My throat felt tight, as though I were in the throes of an allergy attack.

There was an incredible pettiness to her, I saw now, a lack of empathy, a myopic shortsightedness. The world began and ended with Kelsey. It was a fitting attitude for The Palms; maybe it was written into a homeowner’s manual somewhere, like a commandment: Thou shalt look out for thyself first.

That’s not the worst of it
, I wanted to tell her.
That’s only the beginning of what your daughter has done to my family.

I remembered what Sonia had said about the other students at Ashbury. She would never be convinced that her daughter had been in the wrong. She would always be the victim. I gave her the fake smile I’d perfected at The Palms, the smile-through-it-all, the smile down my nose. “Maybe you’re right, Sonia. Maybe my daughter just has too many issues. It’s probably best that they don’t see each other anymore. I wouldn’t want Danielle to be a bad influence on her.”

Sonia was quiet. Her posture had gone rigid, her face red.

I stood again and moved around the desk, opening the door for her. “I’ll be sure to let Danielle know,” I told her. And then in a voice loud enough to attract Jenn’s attention on the other side of the foyer, I added, “Thank you so much for coming in, Sonia.”

I thought I detected a slight flinch, a small crack in the armor that was Sonia Jorgensen before she turned and walked toward the outside door, the points of her heels smacking against the tile.

PHIL

After Thanksgiving, Kelsey was everywhere—hitting balls on the tennis court early in the morning, her short white skirt billowing up to the tops of her thighs. She was driving herself to school now, so sometimes she skipped first period to have breakfast in the clubhouse. If she could touch me, she did—her leg grazing mine, her arm brushing against me. She straightened my collar, fixed my hair. Once, she bent down to tie my shoe.

Close-up, there was something repulsive about Kelsey Jorgensen. It was only at a safe remove—when she was stripping in my backyard, or flouncing past my window—that she was exciting.

I’d begun to dream about her, too. When Liz rolled over in bed, I woke in a cold sweat, sure it was Kelsey next to me. If the house made a creaking noise, I thought it was Kelsey coming up the stairs. It helped if I took a sleeping pill, bringing myself to a numb state, almost incapable of dreams. But I would wake up with a memory of her lips on mine, my fist around a clump of her hair. I punished myself by throwing on jogging clothes and running fierce early-morning laps on the walking trail. As if I thought I could sweat her out.

I widened my search for attorneys—Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Rosa. One of the lawyers I met was an ethics professor at Stanford. He seemed almost delighted by my problem; mine would probably be a case study for a future course. He steepled his fingers in front of his face, delivering a summation. “So it’s a clear case of obsession, then. The subject being a minor and the object being a—well—virile adult male. It’s an interesting predicament to be sure. And you’ve never so much as touched her, never done anything that could be construed...?”

I shook my head, forcing down the memory of grabbing her by the arms in the hallway outside Danielle’s bedroom, not mentioning the touch of her lips on mine in my office. I’d told him about her appearance in the backyard over Thanksgiving, leaving out the fact that I hadn’t wanted to look away. I cleared my throat, driving out the image. “My concern is that if I come forward, everything I say can be interpreted another way. Kelsey’s smart. She’s—calculating. She knows how to work things to her advantage.”

He smiled. “Well, that is the worry, isn’t it?” When he didn’t call after two weeks, I knew he wouldn’t take the case.

I met with two other attorneys and one, Jacob Fitch, accepted me on a two-thousand-dollar retainer. Every time we spoke, I imagined him calculating the minutes in quarter-of-an-hour increments—fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there. I sent him all my files, downloading everything onto a flash drive and delivering it in person to his office in Moraga. Yet I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just a huge sleazeball. He didn’t seem to believe in my innocence—but then, I didn’t, either, not since the moment Kelsey had kissed me inside my office. He replayed our conversations with a smile on his lips and a sort of delighted twinkle in his eye.

“What do you want to do with this?” he asked me in the beginning. “Press charges of your own? File a restraining order?”

“I just want it to go away,” I told him.

He nodded. He alluded to a previous career in corporate law; he knew what a scandal like this could do. When he said
out-of-court settlement
and
gag order
, I heard
hush money
and
guilty, guilty, guilty.

Jacob advised me to avoid her, then—to stop gathering evidence, to stop giving her opportunities. But I found it was easier to play along, to let her sit in my office one afternoon rather than be ambushed by her the next. I could control the situation that way.

In early December, she told me about Winter Formal. I’d already heard about it at home from Danielle, and I’d voiced a concern that Liz had ignored. Once the decision had been made without me, the rest was only detail. All that was required of me was to open my wallet.

“Here’s my dress,” Kelsey said, showing me a picture on her phone. It was red, emblazoned with thousands of tiny sequins and skintight, but of course, it was chaste compared to what I’d seen of her.

“Do you have a date for the dance?” I asked, trying not to let too much hope into my voice.

She had to stand to slide her phone into the pocket of her jeans, revealing a flat stomach still tanned from the summer, the tiny elliptical sphere of her navel. “Are you volunteering?”

“Not at all.”

“Really? It would be fun. A limo ride, a fancy dinner, slow dancing. We could get a hotel room at the end of the night.”

I shook my head. What she was describing was a high school boy’s dream, an all-American experience. Why was she here, when she could have been hanging out with a boyfriend after school, making out on her bed and pretending to complete math homework? “So you don’t have a date? Why not?”

She rolled her eyes. “With one of the idiots at my school?”

“They can’t all be idiots.”

“Yes, they can.”

“Isn’t there a—I don’t know—captain of the football team or a class president or just some cool guy with a guitar?”

She leaned forward. For once she didn’t look sexy, just angry. “They’re just boys. They haven’t been anywhere and they don’t know anything. And the sex?” She let the question dangle in the air before answering it. “Boring.”

I dodged the bait. “But eventually, that’s what you’ll want. Isn’t it? Those guys will grow up. They’ll mature. I was the same way in high school.”

She didn’t answer.

“I mean, you’ll go off to college—”

“Stop it,” she said.

“No, really. You’re an attractive girl. Some guy is going to spot you walking across campus, and before you know it—”

“I said stop. I’m not going to college. I’m not interested in any college boys.”

“Not now, maybe.”

She stood up. “What don’t you get? I practically throw myself at you.”

Not
practically
. “But seriously, Kelsey, long-term. This is just a—”

“Don’t you tell me this is a phase.” Her voice was dangerously shrill.

I glanced at my closed door.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “After everything I’ve done for you. In the end, you’re still picking that bitch over me.”

I flinched. “Don’t you ever say that. There was never any picking. She’s my wife. And you’re—”

She slammed the door behind her.

* * *

And so I waited. She would get her revenge, of course. She would flood another toilet or spray-paint something on a wall—maybe on the outside of my house. She would send me a picture or show up naked in my kitchen one morning, slicing a bagel with a carving knife.
Bring it on
, I thought. She was bound to screw up, to get the attention of others.

“Maybe you should call the police,” Jacob Fitch said. “Or I can. I’ve got an old friend who’s a retired detective. I could pay him a visit, run some hypotheticals past him to get the lay of the land.”

I added up that cost in my head—visit to a friend, lunch on my dime. “If you think that’s necessary.”

“Don’t you? And, man. I think I’d watch out, if I were you.”

“I’m getting out of there,” I told him. I hadn’t worked out the specifics, but I understood it needed to happen.

His laugh was wistful. “How soon?”

But I’d miscalculated. I saw that the minute Danielle came through the front door on the night of the dance. Only Kelsey could be responsible for those tears. I’d been wary of their friendship all along, but I thought there was a line she wouldn’t cross, a hallowed ground of friendship.

I didn’t tell Jacob Fitch about the rumor Kelsey had started about Danielle, or how that discovery had made me read back through the feed on MLHS Stories, my eyes burning with each new post. Forget what the experts say about kids today being just like kids of previous generations—it’s simply not true. That was where I found, dated two days after her naked swim in my pool, this post:
Where a sophomore hottie has sex with her 37yo neighbor and wants more
. It had been sitting there for weeks, presumably seen by all the account’s followers. The entire student body at Miles Landers must have gagged over it; Liz must have seen it, too, which explained her growing distance, the suspicious look she gave me at each turn.

I’d begun to question how much good Jacob Fitch was doing me anyway, now that I’d thrown the money his way. It was like talking to a therapist; it had been good to unburden myself, but somewhere between his office and The Palms, that relief always dissipated. What could a lawyer do in the real world, the next time Kelsey Jorgensen struck?

* * *

I didn’t want to tell him, either, about the card I was holding. This had come to me late at night, an idea so diabolical that it was finally a match for Kelsey. I asked her to meet me one afternoon in an empty house in Phase 3, where I knew no one would overhear our conversation.

I’d brought a basket of wine and cheese with me, tucking a note in the raffia between two bottles.
Happy holidays from the McGinnises.
If anyone asked, it was my alibi.

I was waiting in the kitchen when she entered, looking around the cavernous emptiness of the house. Work would be finished by Christmas; the owners would take up residency January 1.

She shivered in her short black dress and knee-high black boots. “Why is it so cold in here?”

“Heat’s not on yet.”

“Why are we here, then?”

I gestured to the basket on the counter. “I was hoping you could deliver this to your parents. It’s from Liz and me.”

She glared at me. “Seriously?”

“And I thought we could have a little talk.”

She narrowed her eyes. We hadn’t spoken since she’d stormed out of my office, since before she’d started the rumor about Danielle.

“Here’s the thing,” I told her. “I’ve been afraid of you. I’ve been afraid of what you might do to me. Maybe you would accuse me of something, and then I’d be known as this rapist or a pedophile. And I figured that would be the worst thing.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I could call rape right now. I could scream and people would come running.”

“You could,” I said evenly. “But then after what you did to Danielle, I realized that I could take it. I could fight it. But my daughter? She’s just a kid.”

She didn’t bother to deny anything. “She’s your stepdaughter. And she’s not a kid.”

I kept going, as if she hadn’t spoken. “So, I figured that two could play at this game. I have a story of my own ready.”

She laughed. “You’re going to say I raped you?”

“No. I’m going to say you confided in me. You kept coming to my office after school just to talk, and then one day you finally told me that your father has been molesting you, and I knew I had to report it.”

Her mouth went slack. “That’s sick.”

“Authorities take those sorts of accusations very seriously.”

“But it’s not true. And you don’t have any proof!”

“No, of course not. But it’ll take a while for it all to get sorted out. In the meantime, I’ll probably get hauled in for questioning. And that’s bad, yes, but I’ve had time to get used to the idea. I’ve been making other plans, anyway. But your poor father, Kelsey. Think of him. This would destroy him—even the suggestion of it. He’s a lawyer, right? Job, gone. Your poor mother. Trust, gone. Marriage, gone. Believe me, I know how easily that can happen.” I hadn’t meant to say the last part—it just slipped out.

“You wouldn’t do that to me.”

“But I would, if that’s what I had to do. If you post something on social media, if you hurt my daughter or my wife, if you do something to hurt me one more time, that would be it.”

“No one would ever believe it. Not for a minute.”

I nodded. “That may be true, Kelsey. But I’ve been getting some legal advice of my own, so I have an understanding of just how bad it would be for your father. Poor man. He’d probably make bail after a night in jail, but the community would crucify him. Imagine what the papers would say. Imagine the jokes on social media. Even if he’s cleared—years later, when the investigation is finally closed—there will always be that question, won’t there? Did he or didn’t he?”

She was trembling, her irises moving frantically, as if she couldn’t figure out where to look. It was the first time I’d ever unsettled her. And I’d unsettled myself, too. It was terrifying to actually play the trump card. Terrifying and sickening—Tim Jorgensen didn’t seem like father of the year, but his only real crime, as far as I knew, was being far too permissive in his parenting.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

“I understand, Kelsey. But that won’t stop me.”

She practically ran to the front door, forgetting the basket of wine.

* * *

I actually thought, for a delirious, happy moment, that it might work. That we might be rid of Kelsey for good. Oh, I still had another plan, in the form of two job interviews scheduled for the beginning of January. If one of them panned out, I’d be faced with giving Liz the inverse of the speech I’d given her last spring, when I brought her to The Palms for the first time.

But I figured at the very least, I’d bought myself some time.

What I didn’t expect was that Kelsey would burn down the fucking house.