The Drowning Girls

“The rest of the summer is going to suck in comparison,” she announced, digging into her pocket until she came up, triumphant, with a pack of trail mix. She split the plastic and a stray peanut went flying into the console.

“You could always babysit, earn some spending money. I met a family with twins in The Palms—”

“Are you kidding? It was a disaster that time I babysat for the Lees, and that was only one kid. Remember how I had to call you fifteen times?” She held up the remainder of the bag of trail mix, letting the last sunflower seeds and raisins trickle directly into her mouth.

“Let’s not lead with that line on your résumé.”

She laughed through her mouthful.

“Phil and I went to that party last night, that wine-and-cheese thing—”

“That’s right. Was it fun?”

I hesitated. This morning, fighting a hangover headache, I’d dashed off a message to Allie, telling her about Janet, who could barely stretch her mouth into a smile and Deanna, with her too-large and too-perky breasts. I’d told her about the drama of Myriam’s remodeled closet, about Daisy Asbill’s reference to her nanny. But to Danielle I said only, “Sure. It was fun.”

Keeping my tone casual, I told her about Sonia’s invitation, the pool party planned for seven tomorrow night.

Danielle had been bending over, freeing her feet from her hiking shoes and a dirt-rimmed pair of socks, but when my words sank in, she looked up at me wild-eyed. “Tomorrow night? Are you kidding?”

“I didn’t realize you have plans.”

“I don’t have plans, per se,” she fumed. “I had plans to not be at a party with people I don’t know. I had plans to read a book or watch a movie. Those were my plans.”

“So now you’ll be swimming and playing games and eating junk food and making new friends. I suppose there are worse things.”

“Who are we talking about? Not that blonde girl.”

“Kelsey,” I said. “You’ve met her?”

“No, but I’ve seen her hanging around the clubhouse. Mom, she’s like...”

“Like what?”

But Danielle only glared out the window, arms folded across her chest. We’d exited 580, thick with traffic even on a Saturday, and were winding our way through twelve miles of twists and turns on the sole access road to The Palms. The road mimicked the switchbacks of the encroaching Diablo Range. In the distance, the mountains rose brown and bare, dotted with the occasional thirsty-looking clumps of cows beneath a thatch of trees. Up close the ranch land was so dry, its fissures were deep as fault lines.

“Hey,” I said, giving Danielle a nudge with my elbow. “It would be good for you to know some people in the area. And she might be nice.”

She grunted.

“What?”

“You said swimming. It’s a pool party, Mom. How am I supposed to wear my swimsuit in front of people I don’t even know?”

“Didn’t you do that all week at camp?”

“But those were just kids. These are...”

“They’re kids, too,” I said, forcing a note of conviction into my voice. I knew what Danielle was thinking. Somehow, they weren’t just kids—they were miniature reflections of their parents, with designer clothes and disposable income. They’d inherited all the best that life could offer without the struggle, without even the stories that came with triumph and success.

“What if they hate me?” Her voice was small. “What if they make fun of me?”

I swallowed hard. It was one of those parent-fail moments, listening to my daughter rehash my own fears, the same lines from the mental argument I’d had on the Mesbahs’ front porch. That never stops, honey, I wanted to tell her. There will always be those people. The difference is that at some point—a point I hadn’t quite reached myself—their opinions stopped mattering.

We were approaching the final bend on the access road, where the pavement suddenly smoothed out and the scrubby ranch land was replaced with towering, evenly spaced palm trees. Ahead of us the road forked before the wrought-iron ingress and egress gates, flanking the sign that announced our arrival: THE PALMS AT ALTAMONT RIDGE. It still struck me as pompous, and I’d lived in apartment complexes that had a genuine need to inflate themselves: Willow Glen and Stony Brook, where there had been no glens or brooks in sight. This sign announced wealth and privilege, something worth protecting, something with a high cost of admission.

Recognizing my car’s tracking device, the entrance gate rolled slowly open, then closed behind us. Janet Neimeyer’s Italianate villa loomed ahead, its terra-cotta roof flaming under the sun. As we coasted forward, I turned to Danielle. “Listen to me. You look fantastic in that swimsuit. Just be yourself—smart, outgoing, funny. How could anyone not love you?”

She shook her head, but one corner of her mouth twitched in a smile. “Okay. But what if I hate them?”

“If you want to leave, you can. It’s right around the corner. Just say, adios, goodbye, I’m heading home to watch C-SPAN with my mom.”

Behind us there was a sharp beep, and a little green Mini swerved around my Camry and zoomed past.

Danielle rolled her eyes. “That’ll firmly cement my coolness.”

* * *

Saturday night, she left in cutoff jeans and a shapeless T-shirt that read It’s elementary, dear Watson next to a fading graphic of the periodic table. The blue halter straps of her swimsuit flopped at her neck. It was the first time in years I’d been able to cajole her into a two-piece, and she did look great in it, taller than last summer, limbs longer, her body lean with the merest suggestion of curves. I watched from the front porch as she rounded the turn at the end of our street. Until she disappeared from sight, I wasn’t sure she was going to go through with it.

All night, I watched the clock while Phil watched the Giants game. I snuggled close to his T-shirt–clad chest, inhaling the smell of aftershave and laundry detergent. Outside the sliding door, the pool glimmered darkly, a reminder of my failed romantic overture last night. Eventually I nodded off, my face warm against his torso, only waking when the game was over, the players being interviewed. Phil had muted the sound. He didn’t like this part, the explanations and excuses.

My gaze drifted back to the clock. “It’s ten fifteen. Maybe I’ll just walk down there and check.”

“You’ll ruin any hope she has of being cool if you do,” Phil warned. “And believe me, there’s a kid who needs all the help she can get.”

I mock-swatted him. He wasn’t kidding, but he wasn’t being malicious, either. It was amazing how well he and Danielle understood each other, how well they’d adapted to each other’s presence. “You can call me Phil,” he’d said when they’d first met, and she’d told him solemnly, “You can call me Danielle.” In the beginning, they had bonded over shows on Animal Planet, made visits to the Bass Pro Shops on weekends, regaled each other with trivia about geology and astronomy and anatomy. She’d outgrown some of this, but what was left between them was an easy sort of comfort, a mutual respect.

The room flashed between blue and black as Phil flipped through silent channels, not lingering long on any particular image.

I knew that Danielle wasn’t a typical fourteen-year-old, and that was part of my worry. Over the years, I’d counseled hundreds of teenage girls over breakups and arguments with their parents and spats with their best friends. I was the only female counselor on staff, and girls seemed to feel more comfortable sharing their troubles with me. It was a running joke that the bulk of the school’s tissue budget went to my office. So far, Danielle had avoided those messy entanglements of adolescence—the sole perk of being nerdy. Her weekends weren’t spent at parties; they were spent at the kitchen table, where she zipped through extra-credit assignments.

Only a month ago, amidst the craziness of our impending move to The Palms, she’d delivered the salutatorian address at her middle school graduation. I had barely recognized her behind the microphone; she’d been so witty and confident, her jokes delivered with the spot-on timing of a comic.

I hopped to my feet when she came in at a quarter to eleven, her hair slicked back postswim and drying stiffly on her shoulders. Upstairs, she changed into pajamas and gave me the play-by-play as we lounged on her bed, goose bumps forming on our arms beneath the whirr of the ceiling fan. She smelled faintly of chlorine, and her fingers retained the telltale orange residue of Cheetos.

“The Jorgensens have this massive pool. Olympic-sized,” she said.

“Really?”

“Well, huge, anyway. And you should see their pool house. Our old house could practically fit in there. It has this massive TV and all these couches.”

“Sounds nice. So what did you do—watch a movie?”

Danielle rolled her eyes. “It was kind of lame. The guys—Mac from across the street and then Alex and Eric Zhang—played video games the whole time. I guess they expected the rest of us to watch them, like that would be any fun.”

I smiled. “So you went swimming?”

“Yeah. Kelsey and Hannah and me.”

“What are the girls like?”

She yawned, pulling the comforter halfway over us. “Hannah was kind of clingy. She kept hanging on to my arm like we were best friends already. But, I don’t know—she’s okay. And Kelsey’s really pretty, like the kind of pretty you see on magazines. She’s nice, though. Oh—” She sat up halfway, propping her head on her hand. “Is it okay if she comes over tomorrow to swim?”

“Of course. Are you going to invite Hannah, too?”

She grimaced. “Do I have to? I don’t think they get along very well.”

“Kelsey and Hannah? Why not?”

Danielle shrugged.

I raked my fingers through her hair, separating clumps that had dried together. “Wouldn’t Hannah feel left out?”

Danielle groaned. “I guess.”

We were quiet for a while, listening to the sounds of Phil getting ready for bed—his feet plodding on the stairs, the water running in the bathroom.

“What about the boys?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? No way am I inviting the boys.”

I laughed. “No, I meant—what are they like?”

“Oh, um—besides their video game skills? Alex and Eric are really smart and kind of quiet. Kelsey told me they’re both going to be doctors, like their parents. They go to the school she used to go to, Ass Bury.”

“Ashbury.”

“And then Mac...he’s kind of an idiot. But he’s funny, I guess.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said, smiling. Maybe this would be the beginning of something—of friends in and out of our house, breathing life into our empty spaces. “So it was fun overall?”

But Danielle had closed her eyes and was already drifting off to sleep.

* * *

In the morning, I made a trip into Livermore for groceries, lingering for a long time in front of the aisle of chips. What did teenage girls eat? Flavored chips, diet soda? Was it possible to make a wrong choice and completely blow my daughter’s chance at a social life?

I put Danielle to work straightening the house, which mostly consisted of hauling unpacked boxes from the living room to the garage. It was junk, all of it, but junk I couldn’t bear to throw away—an old spaghetti pot with the enamel worn thin, binders and outdated college textbooks.

Hannah arrived twenty minutes early—shy, answering my questions with polite monosyllables. Unlike her mother, she was plump, fat puddling at her armpits. She was awkward in her racerback tank suit, and I decided I liked her.

Kelsey was twenty minutes late, her face dwarfed by an oversize pair of sunglasses. Danielle was right. In her black bikini, with a sarong tied casually across her hips, Kelsey might have been a model for an advertisement in a men’s magazine. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, holding out a confident hand, as if she were the adult, welcoming me to her home. “I hear that you work at Miles Landers.”

“Right, I’ve been there for seven years now. I think you’ll like it.”

She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head, revealing eyes that were the same pale blue as her mother’s, but somehow colder and flatter. “Anything would be better than Ass Bury.”

All together, they were an odd trio, thrown together by circumstance rather than similarity. Throughout the afternoon I caught odd snatches of their conversation and glimpses of them from various windows of the house. Danielle blew up the beach ball I’d bought at the Dollar Store and the three of them smacked it back and forth across the surface of the water, sometimes viciously, sometimes idly, until it popped.

At one point Danielle came inside to use the bathroom and I intercepted her with a kiss on the forehead. At my insistence, she’d slathered herself with sunscreen, and her skin gleamed pink and raw from the previous week’s burn. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”

“Well, we haven’t taken a blood oath or anything yet, so don’t get too excited,” she said, hurrying past.

When Phil came home, he found me browning beef for enchiladas and wrapped his arms around my waist, swaying gently with me cheek to cheek.

“You’re in a good mood,” he observed.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“So how did it go? The great swim party of 2014?”

“Still going.” I jerked my head in the direction of the backyard, where the girls had been taking turns on the diving board. Hannah was there now, pumping her legs, her large breasts jiggling with the vertical motion. She took a clumsy leap and hit the water with a splash. I saw Kelsey and Danielle exchange smirks and felt suddenly, inexpressively sad. “I invited the girls to stay for dinner.”

Phil straightened, releasing me. We stood next to each other, watching out the window as the three of them bobbed in the pool.

“It seems to be working out,” I said. “And here Danielle didn’t think she had anything in common with them.”

And then Kelsey emerged from the water, one long leg following the other. Oh, to be so young, I thought. To be so lovely. She made her way to the diving board, water droplets glistening on her body, blond hair slicked back.

We watched transfixed as she hooked her thumbs into her bikini top, carefully adjusting her breasts within the two black triangles. She called something that sounded like “Geronimo!” and did a perfect swan dive into the water below. When she surfaced, her bikini top was twisted, revealing a perfectly round nipple.

“I bet the Jorgensens could afford a little more fabric,” I commented lightly.

Phil only said, “Shit,” and turned away.

PHIL

A question: What’s the difference between a pedophile and an innocent person accused of pedophilia? What about a rapist and a person accused of rape? Practically speaking—nothing. They’re the same. One might as well be the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, because the accusation plants the suggestion, and from there the guilt grows. The innocent are the most vulnerable, really. They’ve got the most to lose—those with wives and kids who aren’t looking for something on the side.

On my first official day of work at The Palms, she was there. The office had been repainted for me, and plastic sheeting still covered my desk when I’d arrived. I’d been sorting through files in the cabinet when I heard the door close. By the time I looked up, she was sitting in one of the club chairs. Her skirt was so short that it nearly disappeared when she crossed her legs.

I smiled. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I have a complaint.”

I’d spent the previous week getting to know the residents, schmoozing with the men and flattering the ladies, fielding complaints about the wattage of lightbulbs and the leaky faucet in the women’s locker room and a slight hump near the service line on one of the tennis courts. I’d written it all down, made the appropriate phone calls. There had been other complaints, too—private ones—made by residents who stopped me on the sidewalk, always prefacing their thoughts with You didn’t hear it from me, but... and ending them with some variation of the same theme. Of course, I wouldn’t complain just for myself, but I’m thinking about the good of the community. Myriam Mesbah hated Helen Zhang’s dog, which barked constantly. Rich Sievert’s view was spoiled by the excavator that was digging out a pool in one of the backyards in Phase 3. The trees on the edge of the Asbills’ property dropped leaves into Janet Neimeyer’s backyard, and her gardener was forever having to blow the debris, which in turn disturbed the Asbills’ twins, who needed a midmorning nap.

But I’d smiled through it all, because this wasn’t real hustling, like selling had been—courting buyers and talking clients down from unrealistic asking prices, running from open house to open house on weeknights and weekends, waiting for above-asking-price offers that might never come. This job meant regular hours and a steady paycheck, not to mention a house Liz and I would never have been able to afford on our own.

“Buyers in these communities tend to be high-maintenance,” Jeff Parker had told me, after we’d shaken hands a second time, and the job was officially mine. He was a vice president at Parker-Lane, and eventually he would inherit his dad’s job. “The thing is to soothe them, to kiss a few asses here and there, to deal with what you can immediately and pass the buck upward for the rest. Above all—they like the quiet, the security, the exclusivity. They like to feel like they’re the most important people in the world when you’re talking to them.”

At that point I was still trying to wrap my mind around the day-to-day expectations of the job. “So essentially my job is to...”

“Bottom line, McGinnis? Keep them happy.”

It hadn’t seemed like a difficult task. How could people live here and not be happy? They had minimansions with up to six garages, golf and yoga and walking trails and all the amenities of a resort, year-round. There was enough room to spread out, to really breathe. Liz and Danielle and I had been crawling on top of each other like cockroaches in that crappy rental, sharing a single bath and a kitchen so narrow I could stand in the middle and touch the walls on either side. Here we had all the room we needed, plus some to spare.

I was surprised how much convincing it had taken to get Liz on board, when I’d jumped in feetfirst.

“Are we raiding an orphanage or something?” she had asked, counting the upstairs bedrooms.

“We could make one into a home gym,” I said.

“There’s a gym in the clubhouse. Plus golf, tennis...”

“Okay, a sewing room, a music room. Whatever you want.”

Liz laughed. “Just what every girl in the 1800s wants,” she’d murmured, but this didn’t deter me.

It was a chance at the good life. So what if we didn’t need so many bedrooms, if the job requirement was to kiss a few asses here and there?

So when Kelsey Jorgensen came into my office unannounced, when she plopped into my chair and pouted, I only said, “You’ve come to the right place, then. What can I do for you?”

She yawned in response, stretching her limbs like a cat sunning itself on the pavement. I tried not to look directly at her body, focusing instead on the tips of her fingers, the pink wink of her toes. I heard it already then, that little warning bell in the back of my mind, but I pushed it to the side.

“What you can do,” she said, dragging out the syllables, “is keep me from being so bored.”

* * *

Most days, she wandered through the clubhouse with her limbs on display in tiny dresses that fluttered in the air-conditioning, or halter tops and shorts that ended at her crotch. “I just wanted to say hello,” she would say, lingering in my doorway. “So, hello, Mr. McGinnis.” In her mouth a simple greeting sounded full of suggestion.

At first, for all of five minutes, it was entertaining. I figured it was the charm she turned on every man, equally—neighbors and groundskeepers, the college kid who maintained the play area, even, yes, the thirty-seven-year-old community relations specialist. That first day I figured, where’s the harm? This was how most of the women at The Palms acted around me, and playing along seemed to be required by the job. Deanna Sievert couldn’t talk without flirting, and Janet Neimeyer couldn’t keep her hands off me—there was always a collar to be straightened or an invisible crumb to be picked from my chin.

But I loved Liz, and I wasn’t looking.

Sure, it was flattering. It made me feel young again, like the Phil I’d been in my twenties, after my parents died and my brother, Zeke, and I pooled their assets and moved to Corfu, where we opened a bar that catered to college kids on holiday and gap years. There had always been a girl—a German tourist, or Swedish or Czech—who didn’t leave at closing time, who hinted that she needed a place to stay before her boat left the next morning. When I shook her awake, she would snuggle closer and say she could catch the next one, the next time. But I’d come to California, in part, to leave that Phil behind. I’d had too many fuzzy mornings when I cleared the condensation in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. I wanted more out of life than a rented room, a bank account that emptied month to month, women who moved out, moved on.

When I met Liz, I knew she was the real deal—funny and sexy and so damned smart, someone who had met life on its terms. For the first time, I was the one in pursuit; she had too much riding on her life to hang around waiting for my call. She’d been the one who was hesitant to commit, who introduced me, for months, as a “friend.” She hinted that a relationship wasn’t possible until Danielle went off to college—at that point, nine years away. When I’d proposed to her at the lighthouse on a lonely stretch of Highway 1, it had been like preparing for a debate—laying out my reasons, providing evidence, anticipating the rebuttal. We’re a good team, we’ll have a great life together, and I cannot wait for you one more minute.

Sometimes, when we fought, I cursed myself for the empty years, the ones before Liz and Danielle. If only our paths had crossed sooner, we would have figured it out by now. We would have built up more trust in each other. We’d know each other’s little quirks, which buttons were the wrong ones to push. I was jealous of the older, long-married couples, who’d committed early and could spend a full life together, like the Browerses. When it came to Liz, I wanted more time, not less.

So I wasn’t looking for Kelsey Jorgensen, not at all.

She claimed boredom, a symptom of the same problem everyone had at The Palms. There were too many options and too few challenges. I knew I was exciting simply because I was someone different. So I laughed it off at first. I didn’t take it seriously. I smiled back at her. I played along.

She stopped by my office on the day of the Mesbahs’ party, and I asked if I would be seeing her that night.

She smiled. “Would you like that?”

I swallowed. It had been a fine line we’d been walking, but it was gone now. She’d practically pole-vaulted over it. “I’m looking forward to meeting your parents,” I answered, and she’d fixed me with those steely eyes. It was the right answer, but the wrong one, too.

Although Parker-Lane encouraged an open-door policy, I began closing mine, trying to avoid her. She opened it anyway, poking her head around the corner, followed by a bare shoulder, a thigh.

I feigned busyness when she arrived, replying to emails that weren’t at all urgent, taking imaginary phone calls. “I’m sorry, Kelsey. This is very important,” I would say, but she was persistent. She called my bluff, waiting patiently through one-sided conversations until I turned my attention to her. And while she waited, she coiled and uncoiled a long strand of blond hair around a finger, smiling.

It was too late to go back to that first day, but I wished I could. I would have told her I was busy, asked her to leave. I would have put her in her place as nothing more than a silly, spoiled fifteen-year-old girl. It wasn’t funny or flattering anymore; it wasn’t the sort of thing I could laugh about after a few beers. She was young and lovely, but mostly young.