The Drowning Girls (27 page)

She stared at me.

I lowered my voice. “If Mr. Blaine or Mr. Gopal, or if any adult asks you, you’re going to say that Kelsey told you she had a crush on Phil, and that she was starting to creep you out, because she was always asking you questions about him and wanting to get closer to him. Do you understand?”

“That’s disgusting,” Danielle said. “I’m not going to lie. She never told me anything like that.”

“You’re not understanding the whole picture, Danielle. She’s telling lies that we can’t prove. We have to do something. I’m going to go to Blaine and tell him that she made it all up, that her parents are protecting her because she’s mentally unstable. But you have to back me on this, too.”

“There was nothing going on, then? For sure?”

“Danielle! Of course there wasn’t.” I could see her wavering, processing. She was sorting the evidence, same as I’d done, trying to remember when she’d seen them together, if they’d ever exchanged a significant glance.

There was a knock on my door.

“Just a second,” I called.

“Why do I have to lie about it?” Danielle asked. “Why can’t I just say I didn’t know anything? That’s the truth. I
didn’t
know anything.”

“Because that’s not going to be good enough. Listen, I need you to do this. You have to do this. Everything is on the line here.”

“Liz?” Jenn called. She opened the door an inch. “Blaine’s calling for you. He says he needs to see you right away.”

I came around to Danielle, leaning down to kiss her on top of the head. And I whispered in her ear, “I’m counting on you.”

* * *

I felt like a chastened student in Blaine’s office, where I’d sat a hundred times before and been treated like a professional. A thin manila folder sat on his desk, probably the same one Tim had been holding when he came into my office. I shuddered to think of the picture inside—my husband, naked and grinning.

I argued my side of things, but he only listened with a tired expression, the lines on his face so deep they might have been etched in with an X-Acto knife. When I finished, he pointed out the obvious. I’d disappointed him, I’d kept things hidden—things that were my responsibility as a counselor to report—for my own self-interested reasons. He’d have to disclose this whole mess to the superintendent, and that would likely mean facing these allegations in front of the school board.

I didn’t say anything—because of course he was right. I’d circled wagons. I’d been focused on how their possible relationship might affect me, not about the health and well-being of a student under my charge.

* * *

Danielle didn’t talk to me on the way home from school. She sat stone-faced, staring out the window when I asked how it had gone with Blaine. When she didn’t look at me, I banged the flat of my palm against the steering wheel. “This is serious. I don’t think you understand how this could affect us. What did you tell him?”

In response, she unzipped the small pocket at the front of her backpack. I watched carefully, thinking she was going to hand me something, some piece of evidence that related to what we were discussing. But she was untangling the cords of her earbuds from the pens and pencils.

“You’re not going to put those on,” I snapped. “You’re going to listen to me. You’re going to talk to me.”

She didn’t look at me as she fitted the buds into her ears, left first, then right, and plugged the cord into her phone.

“Hey,” I said, louder, my eyes darting between the road and her blank expression. “You’re going to talk to me. This isn’t some kind of game.”

She fiddled with her phone, adjusting the volume.

I reached across the console and yanked on the cord, and the earbud came flying.

Danielle flinched, hand going to her ear. “Mom! That seriously hurt.”

“I’ll throw it out the window,” I said, still holding on to the cord. It wouldn’t have been hard—one more yank and it would be in my hand. It was strange—I heard my voice, but didn’t believe it was me talking. It was like a nightmare, a daylong waking dream in which everything was real and not real, in which nothing was solid, everything was just outside my grasp.

“Fine,” she said. “I did it. I lied for you. There, now you can go ahead and award yourself mother of the year.”

I let the cord go—not sailing out the window, the earbuds flailing through the air like a flimsy stethoscope, but simply falling into her lap. I kept driving, not seeing the foothills or the still-green brush or the wind generators in the distance, although I knew they were there, turning and turning, slicing the air like a knife.

* * *

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?