The Drowning Girls (13 page)

She lowered herself onto the corner of my desk, spread her thighs slightly, teasing me.

I almost retched again, fighting off a horrible creeping feeling of arousal and a sick disgust at her.
Imagine someone coming in
, I told myself. Lindsey. One of the contractors working on the bathrooms.
Liz
, for God’s sake. “You need to leave. You need to leave now.”

“I’ll let you off the hook,” she said. “One kiss.”

I shrank back, buying myself a few inches of safety. “It’s not going to happen.”

“One tiny kiss,” she said.

“I can’t do this, Kelsey. I’m a married man.”

“Please. That’s such a cop-out. One kiss and I keep quiet.”

It was blackmail, plain and simple. You couldn’t give in to blackmail—everyone knew that. It started small and it grew. It built into this untenable thing, unsustainable. You were pinched, put into a tight spot. The proverbial rock and a hard place. Blood out of a turnip. How had it come to this?

Her eyes grew watery, her lip wavered. “Don’t you even find me pretty at all?”

Of course I did. She was beautiful and hideous, fascinating and repulsive. She was every middle-aged guy’s fantasy, heroine and villain at once.

“Kelsey,” I said, softening. I was trying to find my way back to the script, back to
I’m so flattered
and
if only
, but she slipped off the edge of my desk, her bare knee parting my thighs. I put my hands on her arms to stop her from moving forward, and her mouth was on mine for the briefest of moments before I shifted her away, her lips grazing my neck.

She pulled back, patting her hair into place. “It was nice,” she said. “Tell me it wasn’t nice.”

“Kelsey, we can’t. Look, whatever I can do to convince you—”

She opened the door, still facing me. “Oh, I’ll take you up on that. I think there’s a lot more you can do for me.”

I was coming back to my senses, the life I’d been living flashing before my eyes. It was less of a kiss than a near-death experience. “We’re not going to tell anyone about this.”

She stepped into the hallway. “Oh, I promise. It’s our little secret.”

* * *

I locked my office door behind her, ready to burst out of my skin.
Delete the photo
. Yes. No. Obviously I hadn’t taken it—someone had taken it of me. Could I prove that I hadn’t sent it, either?

I fumbled in my desk drawer and came up with a flash drive, a cheap promotional trinket that Parker-Lane gave out to visiting guests. I took a screen shot of the email and saved it. It was hard to look at my grinning face without seeing what a parent would see, or a prosecutor. It was hard not to imagine it plastered across Twitter and the evening news, maybe with a little black censor bar across my genitals.
Fuck.

I stashed the flash drive and went back to my email where I deleted the picture, deleted the deleted picture, emptied my trash can. I deleted the email Kelsey had sent me earlier that day—
Your wish is my command
—and wished I had the IT skills to wipe it from the hard drive. Then I scanned the rest of my emails, my inbox and my sent folder and my saved mail and my drafts and my deleted mail before being satisfied that there was nothing else.

But of course, there was something else.

Or there would be. It was coming.

I wouldn’t be able to solve this, and it was too late to get ahead of it.

I wiped off my mouth with a tissue, rinsed and spit into a trash can and popped a piece of gum into my mouth. Get rid of her taste—strawberry lip gloss? Get rid of the feeling of her thigh, her chest leaning over mine.

It never happened.
Deny, deny, deny.

There was a knock on my door, a jiggle on the handle. “Mr. McGinnis?”

I made it to the door on unsteady legs and opened it to find Lindsey holding her ubiquitous clipboard.

“Sorry,” I said, gesturing to the door. “Figured I’d grab a moment to myself to get ready for the meeting.”

“No worries! I just needed to check on something, actually. I’m thinking you might want to use the dining room rather than the regular conference room. That way we can pull in some extra chairs—”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Okay. I can let Myriam know about the change, if you’d like.”

“Perfect. Thanks, Lindsey.”

She smiled at me. “One more suggestion, though.”

I leaned against the door frame, exhausted. “Shoot.”

“You might want to change your shirt.”

* * *

I rushed home, my collar turned inward to hide the pink smear of lipstick. I remembered Kelsey’s lips brushing my neck, a deliberate action. And she’d simply left me to explain myself. What if I’d gone to the HOA meeting like that, or run into Liz?

Thankfully, Liz was sitting on the couch in the den and didn’t look up as I rushed up the stairs, pulling my shirt over my head. In our bathroom, I squirted some hand soap onto the collar of my shirt and worked the fabric back and forth under the faucet. I only succeeded in smearing the color, in creating an even bigger pink stain. I would have to get it downstairs to the laundry room, where there was bound to be a gallon of bleach and a dozen other laundry-related products, none of which I’d ever used. Or I could bring it back to the clubhouse later, toss it in the trash. Maybe it was safer that way. For now, I stashed it underneath the bed.

From the doorway, I asked Liz if she was coming to the meeting. “I could use your support, Liz,” I said. She looked up at me but didn’t reply. Something was going on—a bad day at school, a fight with Danielle. But I didn’t dare to come closer, not with my heart thudding in my chest. In the bathroom mirror, my face had looked normal, the same old Phil. But would it be visible to Liz—an illicit kiss, horrible and thrilling in its own way? Would she take one look at me and see how guilty I felt about something I’d never intended?

* * *

The meeting was a blur of faces and complaints—Myriam and Deanna and Helen and Sonia, yes, Sonia, sitting so close behind me that I could hear her phone vibrate. Was it Kelsey, texting her mother that she’d been assaulted by Phil, the creepy community relations specialist? I hardly dared to turn around, for fear that Kelsey would be in the audience herself, sitting in a folding chair with her legs parted invitingly. A quick scan of the room revealed that she wasn’t there—but neither was Liz.

I couldn’t find my focus. I nodded along with everything they were saying, all but accepting responsibility myself for something I knew Kelsey Jorgensen had done. They might have been calling for my resignation, and I would have accepted it with the same bland acquiescence. Someone might have suggested that I be brought outside and stoned, sacrificed for the good of the community, and I would have gone willingly.

It had just been a kiss, one I hadn’t solicited and couldn’t have prevented. Or, no—I could have been more forceful. I could have pushed her backward. I could have dodged her, run out of the room, let her do what she wanted with the picture I hadn’t sent her. Instead, I’d held her arms and she’d leaned over me, perfectly comfortable with the role of aggressor. Her hair had fallen across my face. Her lips had been soft. The worst—and I would take it to my grave, I knew that already—the worst was that it had excited me, that my body had responded even while my brain was telling me no, no,
no
.

Stoning was the least I deserved.

* * *

I knew something was wrong the second I entered the house. It wasn’t ten, but the first floor was dark. Upstairs, I flicked on the light in our bedroom, expecting to see Liz curled beneath the comforter, but the bed was empty, still haphazardly made from that morning. In her room, Danielle was sprawled across the bed, talking on her cell phone. She gave me a little wave.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked.

She frowned, cupping her hand over the phone. “Downstairs, I guess.”

I found Liz on the patio, shivering in a blanket. The night had turned cold.

“There you are,” I said. “Jesus, it’s cold. What’s going on?”

She turned, staring at me. Her mouth was red-rimmed, and I glanced at the bottle of cabernet on the table. When I picked up the bottle, an inch of wine sloshed at the bottom.

“Did you open this tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, there you go. It’s all my fault. Shift the blame,” she said.

Liz wasn’t a good drinker—one glass made her happy, two made her punchy, three brought her to a place outside herself, where her mouth and body no longer moved in sync. She was there already, eyes glazed, words slurred.

I set the bottle carefully on the ground next to her. “What blame? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why didn’t you come to the meeting?”

She shifted in the chair, her legs pinioned by the blanket. “Why? Were you lonely? Didn’t Kelsey come to comfort you?”

I took a step backward, my mind reeling. Kelsey must have talked to her. They’d probably been out here, the two of them, while I’d endured Myriam’s litany of complaints. Or maybe she’d found the shirt where I’d wadded it up beneath the bed, made the leap between lipstick and infidelity. There were things to tell her—there was a kiss to confess—but her mind had gone beyond that already, to planning and plotting, to stolen moments and half-clothed sex, not unlike the trashy scenarios that had flitted through my mind.

It wasn’t fair.

“What are you saying, Liz? What are you accusing me of, exactly?”

“I heard you,” she spat. “In the clubhouse. I saw her coming out of your office.”

I fought for control. What had she seen, exactly? What had she heard? I’d been protesting. I’d been saying no and warding her off. “That’s right. I wanted to talk to her about the vandalism—”

“You asked her to keep it between the two of you. She said it would be your little secret. Her dress was hiked up—”

I took a deep breath. “Liz. You’re thinking about this all wrong. I asked her what she knew about the vandalism. I was trying to get a few answers before tonight’s meeting. I can’t prove anything, but I have this gut feeling she was involved.”

“I heard you. I saw the two of you together.”

“Of course we were together. We were talking in my office. I asked her to keep the conversation between the two of us. What do you think, Liz? That I’m some kind of pedophile? Our neighbor? Our daughter’s friend?”

She had worked her legs free of the blanket and was trying to stand, supporting herself with one arm against the deck chair. In the process, her foot hit the wine bottle, which toppled with a clank and rolled away, the last of the cabernet dribbling onto the concrete.

“Liz, for fuck’s sake—”

She fumbled free of the blanket and pulled something from her pocket, black and silky. “I saved this,” she said, holding it out to me. “I didn’t know why at the time, but I kept it. And now I’m glad I did, because it proves how long this has been going on. It proves how stupid I’ve been.”

I stared at her outstretched hand. “What is that?”

“You tell me.” She flung it at me, the fabric hitting my chest with a soft slap.

I snagged it with one finger on its way down and lifted it, a triangle of fabric. “Is this someone’s underwear?”

“Like you don’t know. It’s Kelsey’s. I found it in our bedroom the night of Deanna’s mountain lion crisis. Were you interrupted, and she didn’t have time to get her panties back on?”

I dropped the underwear, and it floated to the concrete, wispy as a ribbon. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Liz. I’ve never seen this before. You found this in our room, two months ago? And for two months you’ve been thinking that...” My voice trailed off, my thoughts spinning in an exhausted loop. That next day, after the mountain lion crisis, Kelsey asked me if she’d found her little present. I hadn’t, but apparently Liz had.

“I was with you, Liz,” I reminded her. “That night, out here. We heard Deanna scream. And then that idiot Victor convinced me to ride around like a vigilante with him. I have no idea why this was in our bedroom, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I heard you,” she repeated. “And I’ve known something was going on—I just knew it. All these women, hanging on your every word, and you at their beck and call. Deanna with her big boobs. Even Janet—every silicone inch of her. Was that why you moved us out here, so you could be around the beautiful people?”

It was that, more than anything else, that put me over the edge. I felt trapped, and this was what happened when you felt trapped—you did illogical things. I laughed. “Deanna Sievert, that bimbo? Janet? She’s probably old enough to be my mother. Who else, Liz? Maybe I’ve been seeing one of the waitresses in the dining hall? Maybe I’ve been entertaining the nannies during my lunch hour?”

“Keep your voice down,” she said, rising unsteadily out of the chair. She grabbed my shirtsleeve, and I pushed her back. I’d never done anything like this—never laid a hand on Liz or anyone, other than a kid on the playground when I was in grade five, and that kid had deserved it. This push was harder than I intended—at least, that’s what I would tell myself later—and it caught her off balance, drove her back until she crash-landed against the arm of the deck chair.

I swore and stepped toward the pool, glimmering in the moonlight like a living thing, and wound one foot back as if I were going for a penalty kick. My loafer connected with one of the giant terra-cotta pots along the edge and soil spilled onto the concrete.

“Stop—” Liz said, her voice laced with pain. “Let’s just stop.”

But this was what happened when you were trapped—you pushed your wife, you took out your anger on a potted plant. You denied, denied, denied, and even though it was true what you were denying, you found yourself doubting your own denial. On the second swing, my foot connected more forcefully, the pot cracking down the middle, splitting into heavy chunks.

“Don’t! People can hear you, Phil.”

On the third kick, the pot splintered apart, the topiary falling free, its roots a tangled ball.

Liz was on her feet again, her fist clutching the hem of my shirt, where it had come untucked. “Okay, okay. We’ll talk about this. Just tell me it’s nothing. Tell me nothing happened, that nothing’s ever happened, that nothing ever will happen.”