The Drowning Girls (28 page)

* * *

In May, we marked Danielle’s fifteenth birthday with a gourmet pizza split three ways with Hannah. I offered to take the two of them somewhere—a day trip to the city, a visit to the new IMAX. Danielle glared at me stonily, shaking her head. What gift do you give your daughter when you’re in the process of ripping her life apart? In the end I settled for a stack of crisp, impersonal gift cards, a note that said I loved her. The gift cards disappeared into her wallet; the following week, I spotted my note in her trash can.

We lived out the rest of the school year and the beginning of the summer like hermits. Since Phil no longer worked for Parker-Lane, we avoided the clubhouse and the communal areas and made our brief forays into the real world by car. There was something ominous about the way the access gates closed behind us each time, I realized. One day I wondered if they simply wouldn’t open to readmit us.

“We’ll make the most of it,” I told Danielle. I’d hoped to be able to send her to camp for one more summer, as a volunteer-counselor-in-training, but the fee was too steep. “It’s only until the end of June. You can still go swimming every day, you can hang out with Hannah...”

For once she acknowledged that I had spoken, giving me the fake, patronizing smile that had appeared out of nowhere these past few weeks. “Sounds like paradise,” she said.

It didn’t occur to me until later that she was quoting Phil. That was what he’d told us the first time he’d brought us to The Palms, into the cavernous empty house. We’d looked out the row of windows on to the back deck, and he’d put an arm around each of our shoulders.
It’ll be like living in paradise.

* * *

Hannah Bergland was the only person in The Palms who was going to miss us. She took the place in Danielle’s life that had been vacated by Kelsey; it was now Hannah’s shoes I tripped over in the entryway, Hannah’s sweatshirts that got mixed in with our laundry. Her sixteenth birthday this spring had been marked with much less fanfare than Kelsey’s had last fall, but she ended up with a sporty Ford Focus and a prepaid gas card.

“We can go anywhere,” she told Danielle, dangling the keys from a braided leather rope embossed with her name.

Danielle raised an eyebrow. “Anywhere?”

I wondered just how far away she wanted to be, just how far she would go if she had the chance. Technically, Hannah wasn’t allowed to have a minor in the car without another adult present, but the Berglands didn’t seem to be aware of this rule, and I was too exhausted to enforce it. Besides, Hannah was a meticulous driver, even putting on her turn signal to round the curve of our cul-de-sac.

“Just be home before dark,” I told them, and they always were—returning with giant Slurpee cups, talking about their round of Putt-Putt or the movie they’d just seen. Sometimes, at night, their talk turned to Kelsey Jorgensen—she was the common denominator in their lives, the low-hanging fruit. “...such a bitch,” Hannah would say, and Danielle would respond, “I can’t believe I let her use me like that.” They reported Kelsey sightings: “I saw that whore riding in Mac’s truck” and “My mom saw her outside the pharmacy, probably loading up on her anti-psycho meds.” Once, I heard them picking out men for her—a guy they’d seen in the mall, checking them out while he waited for his wife to finish in the dressing room. “We should have given him Kelsey’s number,” Danielle said, and Hannah shrieked with laughter.

I should have stopped them—I knew that. I’d come to the point where I realized that Kelsey Jorgensen was a tragic figure, really, almost Shakespearean, ruled by an obsession she couldn’t conquer. The Jorgensens had insisted that we cease all contact and communication with Kelsey, which wasn’t hard to comply with, except that she often walked past on the sidewalk in front of our house, her face shielded by massive sunglasses. I saw her when I was loading the car with junk to take to Goodwill, when I was unloading groceries, when I was backing up and pulling in. Without Danielle and Phil, she must have been as lonely as she’d been last summer, when I’d spotted her doing the same thing. Did even a small part of her regret what she’d done?

No, I couldn’t blame Danielle for her anger, even when it spilled into mocking bitterness. Kelsey had come through our lives like a tornado, catching us all up in her swath of destruction.

Sometimes, days went by where I saw only flashes of Danielle—down the stairs and out the door, through the den to the refrigerator, out to the pool, where her body was a shimmery flash two feet beneath the surface.

This was what it would be like next year—she’d be at Miles Landers, and I’d be splitting my time between junior highs, and I’d know less and less about her life every day. This was what it would be like when she went to college—she’d be a weekly phone call home, a visit on Christmas.

The distance was allowing me to see her from a new perspective. She would be driving within a year; she wasn’t just a kid, not the cardboard cutout of my own hopes and plans. She was already far more complicated than I could understand.

One night she came home with a tattoo on her hip, a Chinese symbol visible just below the hem of her bikini. She wasn’t trying to hide it—she walked right past me on her way to the refrigerator.

“What’s that?” I asked, grabbing her arm. I ran my finger over the raised puff of skin. “How did you get this? You’re not eighteen. You needed parental permission.”

She pulled away, as if I were toxic. “I told them I was an orphan.”

“I hope it came with some kind of insurance policy,” I shot back. “Maybe a treatment plan for your hepatitis C.”

She rolled her eyes.

I was furious, of course, demanding to know why she’d done it and where. I threatened to ground her for the rest of the summer or the rest of high school.

“Why not?” she shrugged. “You’ve already ruined the rest of my life.”

Later, I looked up the character online—it was like a fancy lower-case
h
and I found it under a list of Most Popular Chinese Tattoos. It meant
strength
. I wondered if that was how she saw herself, as someone who had overcome great challenges. Or if she meant she needed strength for whatever was coming next.

I hated the tattoo—even when it wasn’t visible, I knew it was there, just beneath her waistband. But I hated, too, the thought that a stranger had touched her while she waited in her underwear, wincing, biting her lip, trusting herself completely with her own stupid decisions.

* * *

My job that summer was to pack. It was a massive downsize—4,000 square feet to 750. I’d grown ruthless with my decision-making. At each pass through the house, I was calculating what we needed and how we could get rid of the rest. We wouldn’t need the linens I’d purchased for the dining table that had never materialized, or the dozens of towels and washcloths scattered between the home’s five bathrooms. I listed the bar stools and the club chairs on Craigslist, as well as the king-size bed that wouldn’t fit in my new bedroom. Phil and I had paid over two thousand for it—were still paying, probably, the finance charges climbing monthly—but I found a buyer for six hundred who would also carry it downstairs for me, out to his waiting truck and away. While he strapped it down with bungee cords, Helen Zhang walked past with the family’s new dog, a narrow-faced whippet. She didn’t acknowledge me.

Good riddance
, I thought.

Goodbye to all that.

* * *

The third Friday in June was hot and still. I’d spent the morning in the garage, sorting through the boxes we’d never unpacked last summer. I’d been inclined to toss it all, but then I opened one box and found Danielle’s papers from elementary school—her stiff watercolors, poems written in faded color pencil, an essay on dinosaurs and their habitats.

Danielle came in with a box labeled Sweaters and dropped it in the keep pile.

“What are your plans for today?” I asked, wiping sweat from my forehead.

She shrugged. “Hannah’s coming over to swim.”

“I made chicken salad, if you want to have sandwiches,” I called after her retreating figure. I’d vowed not to buy any more groceries before our move, so I’d been thawing meat from the freezer and working our way through cans in the pantry. I was also tackling the wine Phil and I had accumulated over the past year and had a bottle of Riesling chilling in the refrigerator for later. We wouldn’t have room in our new kitchen, and it seemed a shame to leave it behind.

On the other hand—maybe the new owners would need it. I certainly had.

I ate lunch on a paper plate, since I’d already packed most of the dishes. I’d packed the wineglasses, too, so I ended up drinking a few swigs of Riesling straight from the bottle, a tragic figure in my own kitchen.

Later that afternoon, I braved the heat of the garage again in a tank top and shorts, opening the bays to allow for at least a little air movement. Why should I care what Deanna thought, pausing on her walkway, purse dangling from her wrist? Did it matter what Victor observed, jogging past bare-chested, his shirt hanging from the waistband of his shorts?

I was on my knees, elbow-deep in a box of Christmas things, ornaments and tangled strings of lights and cinnamon-scented sachets, when I saw Kelsey Jorgensen in our driveway. She was looking down at her phone in its bright magenta case. I stared at her. It seemed impossible, with everything that had happened, but Kelsey had somehow thrived. She looked healthy, her skin a glowing tan, her body strong and beautiful in a T-shirt and shorts.

I struggled to my feet, moving toward the open garage door. “You can’t be here,” I yelled. “You need to get off my property.”

She looked down at her phone and back at me. “I just wanted—”

“No.” I shooed her away with an angry hand. “It doesn’t matter what you want. Your parents don’t want you here, and I don’t want you here. You need to leave now.” She didn’t move. I retreated to the wall-mounted controls and hit one of the buttons, sending the first door down in front of her. She stepped into view in the next door as it was closing.

“Can I just say—”

“No!” I shouted, hitting the third button. For a moment I thought she would duck under the door as it lowered, come rolling ninja-like into the space. But I watched her disappear, chunk by chunk—head and shoulders, chest and torso, her long, long legs, until the garage was fully dark.

I was shaking when I went into the house. I should call the Jorgensens, tell them to come get their daughter. Or the police, to tell them I was being harassed.
No.
In a week, Danielle and I would drive away, and I planned to be fully done with Kelsey Jorgensen. She wouldn’t be at our apartment complex; she wouldn’t stop by my office.

Done.
Finito.

It was cold in the house, but sweat was still streaming into my eyes, into the V of my bra. I took the Riesling out of the fridge, uncorked it and let it slide cool down my throat. Why not? Maybe it would even help to get a little drunk. It might go faster if my senses were dulled, if I couldn’t deliberate over every little thing. After a few glasses, maybe I would forget where things had come from, what they had once meant.

For a long time, I stood by the slider, watching Hannah and Danielle in the pool. It was a beautiful day, the sky cloudless, the sun a flaming ball heading slowly west. Hannah had lugged over her stereo and the whole house seemed to throb, the windows pulsing like a heartbeat. I thought about stepping outside, discreetly turning down the volume while I reminded them to put on sunscreen. But they looked happy, and I didn’t want to spoil the moment.

I raised a hand to my reflection, pressing my palm against the glass. It had never been more than a fantasy, this place. We’d had only a tenuous toehold on this life, and it was easy enough to take ourselves away from it. Maybe it was all anyone had, after all. The bank accounts and the big houses might have been a buffer from the rest of the world, but they couldn’t keep you safe. They couldn’t make you happy.

Once we were no longer here—not just Phil and Liz and Danielle McGinnis, but everyone else, too, the Zhangs and the Mesbahs, the Sieverts and yes, the Jorgensens—how long would it take for the earth to come back and claim its own? How long until the critters found their way inside—the ants and snails and spiders and moles? How long until they burrowed into, tunneled through, nested in? How long before weeds took over the yard, before shrubs and trees grew tall enough to hide the evidence of our lives?

Tipsy, I took the bottle upstairs and sprawled on top of the sheets. Even up there, I could still hear the music pulsing, pulsing. Occasionally, the mechanical voice of the Other Woman interrupted my thoughts: “Back door open” and “Back door open” as the girls entered and exited, hunting for a can of soda or hurrying to the bathroom.

Phil should be here
, I thought, staring up at the ceiling fan. Not just to help with the packing, but to see it through to the end. We’d never had the life he’d envisioned here, not the backyard barbecues, the nights in the den with all the guys watching a game. It hadn’t been that grand of a wish, now that I thought about it. I’d resented him for bringing us out here, for leaving while everything crumbled around us. But when it came down to it, all he’d really wanted was happiness. That was all he’d been asking for.

* * *

In the bathroom it all came up—the wine, the remains of the chicken salad sandwich I’d had for lunch. I sat hunched forward on my knees, shoulders shaking. Downstairs, I heard Danielle and Hannah laughing. She would bounce back from this. Maybe Phil and I would, too—separate or together. In a few years, maybe, we would laugh about all of it, as in
whew, look at the bullet we dodged there
. Maybe a time would even come when we forgot her name, when down the road we would look at each other and say,
What was that girl’s name again? Kelsey something?

I got to my feet uneasily. At the sink, I splashed water on my face, rinsed and spat.
One more week
, I promised myself, sliding between the cool sheets. I closed my eyes against the dizzying circles of the ceiling fan. The faint overhead whir reminded me of something—an airplane, a helicopter, a boat with an outboard motor. Or maybe it reminded me of a movie scene, one of those images that isn’t real but feels like it could be—so close, so tangible, so personal. Almost like a dream.