The Drowning Girls
The Drowning Girls
Paula Treick DeBoard
Critically acclaimed author of The Mourning Hours and The Fragile World, Paula Treick DeBoard returns with a tale of dark secrets, shocking lies and a dangerous obsession that will change one neighbourhood forever Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she's felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she's determined to make it work—if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who's about to enter high school.Yet underneath the glossy veneer of The Palms, life is far from idyllic. In a place where reputation is everything, Liz soon discovers that even the friendliest residents can't be trusted. So when the gorgeous girl next door befriends Danielle, Liz can't help but find sophisticated Kelsey's interest in her shy and slightly nerdy daughter a bit suspicious.But while Kelsey quickly becomes a fixture in the McGinnis home, Liz's relationships with both Danielle and Phil grow strained. Now even her own family seems to be hiding things, and it's not long before their dream of living the high life quickly spirals out of control…
Critically acclaimed author of The Mourning Hours and The Fragile World, Paula Treick DeBoard returns with a tale of dark secrets, shocking lies and a dangerous obsession that will change one neighborhood forever
Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she’s felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she’s determined to make it work—if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who’s about to enter high school.
Yet underneath the glossy veneer of The Palms, life is far from idyllic. In a place where reputation is everything, Liz soon discovers that even the friendliest residents can’t be trusted. So when the gorgeous girl next door befriends Danielle, Liz can’t help but find sophisticated Kelsey’s interest in her shy and slightly nerdy daughter a bit suspicious.
But while Kelsey quickly becomes a fixture in the McGinnis home, Liz’s relationships with both Danielle and Phil grow strained. Now even her own family seems to be hiding things, and it’s not long before their dream of living the high life quickly spirals out of control...
Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard (#ulink_996b812e-19e3-56df-9bcf-295a0a2da525)
“In Paula Treick DeBoard’s latest breathtaking thriller, she paints a stark and chillingly real portrayal of a family torn apart by teenage transgressions. Gritty and inauspicious from the start, The Drowning Girls left me awestruck, revealing DeBoard’s true brilliance as an author. Spellbinding.”
—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl
“The Drowning Girls by Paula Treick DeBoard is cleverly plotted, full of twists and turns and so well-written that it pulls you in from page one. Genuinely suspenseful, Treick DeBoard delivers a disturbing, multilayered, provocative novel that is impossible to put down.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence
“A heart-pounding look at what lies behind the deceptively placid veneer of the well-to-do suburbs. The kaleidoscopic view of innocence, danger, and malice shifts and twists as it races to a shattering conclusion.”
—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One on The Drowning Girls
“In The Drowning Girls, DeBoard pulls you right into her world and holds you in her grip until the book’s final twist. Fans of The Good Girl and The Luckiest Girl Alive, and really anyone who enjoys great suspense, have found their next must-read. Sure to be the book everyone is talking about in 2016, I could not put it down.”
—Catherine McKenzie, bestselling author of Hidden and Smoke
“The Drowning Girls casts a spell as brilliant and alluring as the gated community of its setting. Paula Treick DeBoard maps this world of privilege and secrets with a deft hand, and from the novel’s terrifying opening pages reveals a family’s tragic unraveling. These characters long for love and happiness, but the trail of duplicity that ultimately ensnares them creates a suspenseful and compelling page-turner I couldn’t put down.”
—Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls
“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.”
—Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing
“Assured storytelling propels DeBoard’s first novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Mourning Hours
“Rich and evocative…compelling.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Mourning Hours
“Tautly written and beautifully evocative, The Mourning Hours is a gripping portrayal of a family straining against extraordinary pressure, and a powerful tale of loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness.”
—Bookreporter.com (http://www.Bookreporter.com)
The Drowning Girls
Paula Treick DeBoard
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Will, for always.
“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything is Illuminated
Contents
Cover (#u4b0305e6-1d7d-5b3e-8f31-b5fb7556a90f)
Back Cover Text (#u0e6e5224-b8eb-5869-95e5-32086eb8b0a2)
Praise (#u3b6a4e6b-29dd-5ee2-a98d-f1c9eb591d86)
Title Page (#u7252ddbe-0938-5e3d-a20c-302c951e9602)
Dedication (#u3565d0c9-1aa3-53d0-a596-6ee15e1551b4)
Quote (#u49c2c2c3-669d-50d9-a909-8edd8e616d16)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:40 P.M. (#u1d851ca4-8343-5773-a020-339e8ed649ee)
LIZ (#u037d2488-1c96-5cfa-b7cd-7e3db3531bca)
JUNE 2014—LIZ (#ucb2be916-92d9-5c12-943c-e8e070fcdd94)
PHIL (#u1f3fa1eb-e4ae-59d2-9545-29bdd61934f5)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:43 P.M. (#udd4231f7-4348-5898-ac8f-5568d3b052ea)
LIZ (#u5432d22c-775e-59ee-9fe2-82ac45e04e0a)
JULY 2014—LIZ (#u9d5552c0-8155-56e4-acaf-70e6fe81ca76)
PHIL (#ua09b9404-cd19-57d0-bd04-d2ca0726caf7)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:56 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
AUGUST 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:02 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
SEPTEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:14 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
OCTOBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:21 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
NOVEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:32 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
DECEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:57 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
JANUARY 2015—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—7:09 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
FEBRUARY 2015—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—8:42 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (#litres_trial_promo)
A CONVERSATION WITH PAULA TREICK DEBOARD (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015 5:40 P.M. (#ulink_b263d429-8ece-5fa6-a8f7-b647014024fa)
LIZ (#ulink_431cabd6-53cc-5c9c-bd80-87f5d4743186)
Someone was screaming.
For a moment, with the ceiling fan whirring quietly over my head, I allowed myself to believe it was a benign sound—the kids next door on their play structure, maybe, sliding and swinging and climbing, their voices carrying on a breeze.
I propped myself up on my elbows, blinking myself awake. How long had I been sleeping? Twenty minutes, an hour? The tank top I was wearing was streaked with dust and damp with sweat. Dizzy, I focused on my bare feet, where chipped red polish dotted my toes. On the dresser was a nearly empty bottle of Riesling, a slick ring of condensation bubbling on the wood.
I reached a hand onto Phil’s side of the bed, groping and coming up empty. Of course. Phil was gone, and he’d taken everything with him—armfuls of shirts and pants, suit coats and blazers, slippery mounds of ties and belts, even the dry cleaning in its plastic sheeting. Shoes, too: wing tips, loafers, sneakers, the pair of black Converse I’d never once seen him wear. He’d taken the neatly folded stacks of T-shirts and boxers, the lumps of paired socks, the heavy woolen sweater that smelled like a Greek fishing village—or at least, how I’d imagined a Greek fishing village would smell, briny and deep-down damp.
After he left, I’d searched the floor for a button, a collar stay, a lonely sock, as if I could keep that one discarded thing as evidence of our life together. For a long time, I’d wanted to go back, to pin our relationship to a wall and study it, like a specimen, from every angle. I wanted to be able to say: Here. This is where it all went wrong. This was the point at which the inevitable was still evitable.
But that was a long time ago. Months now.
I shook my head, chasing away the thoughts, and heard the screams again, over a relentless pounding of bass. Was the television on downstairs? That was the simple explanation, and for a moment, I allowed myself to be reassured by the thought of actors following a script, raising their voices on cue.
And then I remembered: the girls.
The pool.
The screams were coming from outside, distorted by the triple-paned windows, as if they were being filtered through a kaleidoscope, splitting and fracturing.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and moved toward the door. My head pounded, an angry thing.
Danielle.
My baby.
No—not a baby. Fifteen and so angry we’d barely exchanged more than a sentence in a month.
I stumbled on the stairs, catching myself with a hand on the rail. Steady, Liz. I had to navigate around the stacks of boxes in the foyer marked Towels and Office and, helpfully, Stuff.
Closer now, the screams became words, and the words became language, mixed with the thumping of the stereo, the music that had been playing all afternoon.
Help!
Mom!
Ohmygodno!
I yanked open the sliding door, catching my foot on the frame in my hurry. A bright bloom of pain flowered in my vision. After the interior darkness, the outside was a trick of sunlight, bright against the water, a shimmering, endless blue. I squinted into the glare, trying to understand what I was seeing.
It looked at first like a game of tug-of-war, a three-headed, six-armed monster writhing in the water.
But of course, it wasn’t a game.
It was another inevitable, a thing that had been coming and coming, a thing I’d let come. There were three girls in the water and one of them was limp, her head flopped forward, blond hair plastered over her face.
Still the shouts came, an unrelenting swirl of voices. In that half second while my mind puzzled, before my body could snap into action, I realized that the loudest voice, the one that couldn’t stop screaming, belonged to me.
JUNE 2014 LIZ (#ulink_e72a9c3e-e396-5535-bff2-566ec3d73dbb)
The Mesbahs’ house was only a block away, but it was a long block, outsize the way everything else was at The Palms—half-acre lots, semicircular driveways, the occasional six-foot frond dropped from one of the signature palm trees like the feather of an exotic, towering bird. Next to me, Phil had his hands in his pockets, his legs shooting forward in confident strides. I kept my eyes on my feet, sure that one of my heels would snag in a sidewalk crack.
“It’s the Spanish Revival, right around the corner from you,” Myriam Mesbah had said during our sole conversation the week before, when I’d called to RSVP for the party. I’d scribbled Spanish revival? on the back of a receipt so I’d remember to look it up on Google later. “The whole neighborhood will be there,” she’d said. “You can’t miss it.”
Her words always carried that sense of emphasis—as if they needed italics, air quotes, long deliberate stresses. What I have to say is important.
Spanish Revival meant curves and arches, white stucco and terra-cotta tile and ornamental ironwork. It meant courtyards and balconies and quiet little nooks. For the Mesbahs and everyone else in The Palms, it meant a minimum of four thousand square feet and a resale value that was climbing—an asset they could list in a portfolio along with the apartment on the Upper East Side, the villa in Tuscany, the time-shares in Bali and Saint Thomas and little islands with names I couldn’t pronounce or locate on a map.
To me, it was just intimidating.
As we passed through the ornamental gate and entered the courtyard, Phil squeezed my hand, already damp and tacky with sweat. His grin belied a fierce kind of optimism.
We were three weeks into our new life, our boxes mostly unpacked, the strong leathery smell beginning to wear off the couches, fingerprints already smearing our stainless appliances. Still, I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that it was an experiment, like one of Danielle’s science projects on trifold cardboard: hypothesis, observation, data, conclusion.
Hypothesis: the McGinnises will never fit in with these people.
The observations were in progress, the data accumulating.
But I figured it was a foregone conclusion: we didn’t belong.
The Mesbahs’ house was humming with energy—outside the ten-foot mahogany doors, we heard the low pulse of music, a woman’s high-pitched laugh over the other voices. It was seven twenty, late enough to avoid the awkwardness of being too early, of having to stand around and explain ourselves, the new people. I’d taken my time in the bathroom, selecting a pair of earrings, spraying my hair repeatedly, dabbing the dregs of an old perfume bottle on my wrists—anything to avoid this moment, to prolong the inevitable.
Phil made a minuscule adjustment to his collar and breathed a short huff into his cupped palm, checking his breath. “Ready?”
I caught his fist halfway to the knock, imagining them all standing just inside the door, turning to look at us. “No.”
“Liz...”
“I know. Just give me...” I bent down and began to fiddle with the straps on my sandals. They’d been a last-minute purchase only this afternoon, after I’d rejected every single thing in my closet as being wrong for this kind of event. The trouble was that I didn’t understand the event. It wasn’t a barbecue; it was no one’s birthday. The invitation had read An instruction on wine and cheese pairing, as if we were meant to come armed with spiral notebooks and expect an exam at the end. In the dressing room at Macy’s, I’d felt good enough about the silky black pants to put them on my credit card; now, bent nearly double in the Mesbahs’ courtyard, I noticed that the fabric across my thighs was creased horizontally with hash marks. I loosened the skinny strap on one shoe and rebuckled it into the next hole before shifting my attention to the other foot.
“Come on,” Phil breathed.
Sure—I was stalling. Every minute spent on the Mesbahs’ porch was a minute I wouldn’t have to spend inside their house. In our previous lives, Phil and I had lived in a three-bedroom rental a few blocks off the freeway. When friends invited us over, we stopped by Trader Joe’s for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of microbrew. That was a social convention I understood. On the bottom of this invitation had been printed, in delicate scroll: Donations will be accepted for Shriners Hospital, Sacramento.
“So this is a thing?” I’d asked Phil, showing him the invitation. “Come to our house, bring your checkbook and we’ll teach you about wine?”
He’d shrugged. “It’s just an excuse to get together. It sounds fun.”
“We’re going?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
I’d been saying it in a hundred ways, and he hadn’t heard me yet. Because these aren’t our kind of people. Because we don’t belong. It was all a mistake, beginning with Phil’s new job and our move to The Palms, and ending with me standing in front of the Mesbahs’ front door in these silly pants and uncomfortable shoes.
“All right,” Phil said now in the voice he sometimes used with Danielle, when she took too long in the bathroom or kept him waiting in the car. I secured the second buckle and straightened, spotting the outline of the folded envelope in his breast pocket. Two hundred dollars, payable to the Shriners Hospital of Sacramento, the going rate of admission into the social world of The Palms. It was both more than we could afford and ridiculously cheap, considering the heavy door knocker and the immaculate tile work.
“We wouldn’t want to miss any instruction,” I said, trying to bring back a note of levity, of shared camaraderie and let’s-make-the-best-of-it. But Phil was looking away from me, the door was opening and the joke was lost.
Victor Mesbah stood in the doorway, a glass of wine in one hand. In the golden light from the wall sconces, it looked like blood sloshing in his glass. “Here they are!” he boomed in a voice that echoed off the floors. “Just when we were beginning to think you wouldn’t show.”
Phil met his aggressive handshake. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
I extended a hand, too, but Victor threw his free arm around my shoulder. “It’s so nice to meet you,” I said, but his neck smothered my words.
“Liz, finally,” Myriam said, and I disentangled myself from Victor’s half hug. She was slender and severely beautiful, with a nose that would have been too much on another woman. She hooked me by the arm and led me through a wide foyer to an open great room, our heels clattering on the mahogany floors. “Our new neighbors, the McGinnises,” she announced to the room at large, where at least a dozen couples were gathered in polite clusters. Everyone turned, chorusing their hellos. They looked so smooth and shiny, as if they’d all arrived, en masse, from appointments at the salon. Overhead, an enormous ceiling fan moved like a sluggish insect.
“Of course, most of us have met Phil by now. But you’ve been so elusive. I’ve wondered about you, alone in that house all day,” Myriam continued.
“Not alone, exactly. My daughter, Danielle...we’ve been unpacking, getting things in order,” I said. This was only half-true. Danielle was gone for the week, and after a few days of diligent unpacking, I’d stacked the rest of the boxes in the living room, with vague plans to tackle one a day for the rest of the summer.
Next to me, I could feel Myriam’s interest waning, her eyes roving the room. “Come on,” she said, her hand still at my elbow. “Let me get you something to drink and I’ll make some introductions.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Phil, who had already forgotten his promise to stay by my side. That was one of the benefits of being a couple, after all—in new situations, we could share the little anecdotes about each other that we wouldn’t have mentioned about ourselves, play off each other like a straight man and a comic. But already a few of the men had stepped forward to talk to Phil, and Victor had a possessive arm clapped to his back.
I smiled at Myriam. “That would be wonderful.” She released my arm and left me standing alone, in front of the frank stares of my neighbors. It was the adult equivalent of a naked-at-school nightmare. I felt the blush rising up my neck, settling in rosy splotches on my cheeks. It was funny—back in our old lives, I never gave much thought to who my neighbors were or what they thought of me. But The Palms was so exclusive, so tightly knit, it was like living in a fishbowl.
“So, you’re in the Rameys’ house,” someone said, the voice rising disembodied from a corner. “Thank goodness. That place was empty for what...eight months?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, it was more than eight months,” someone else answered. “Don’t you remember how the lawn just about died out?”
“Well, however long it was, I’m so glad someone finally bought the place.”
“Actually, we—” I began, then stopped. Didn’t everyone know? The house had come with Phil’s job, a package deal. Parker-Lane covered our lease and $1,495 in monthly HOA fees, or room and board, as I’d come to think of it, with a salary that left us house-rich, cash-poor. In practical terms, this meant that the people who were fawning over us now were also paying dearly for the right to hit tennis balls and jog along the community trail, while we could do those things for free. I tried again, feeling the need to set the record straight. “My husband, Phil, is...”
But my husband, at that moment, let out a hearty laugh from somewhere behind me. He was telling a story, his accent strong despite two decades away from Melbourne. Men and women alike were drawn to that accent—imagining, I supposed, a swashbuckling hero in the outback. Heads turned to look in his direction, and in the swirl of voices, my words were lost.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Myriam said, stepping in to clarify. She handed me a glass, saying, “Cabernet.” Then to the room at large, she announced, “Phil is our new community relations specialist, but they’ll be living right here, on-site. Isn’t that fantastic?”
I nodded, ducking my head as if to study the wine more closely. Maybe she thought of us as charity cases, worthy of a fund-raiser. Donations will be accepted on behalf of the McGinnises, who have only been able to furnish half of their four thousand square feet.
“Let’s see,” Myriam said. “Where should we start? I suppose you’ve met the Sieverts.”
“I haven’t really met anyone,” I confessed. “What with all the unpacking...”
“Well, then, here we go,” Myriam said, taking a swallow from her own glass, as if to fortify herself.
For the past three weeks, I’d been watching my neighbors from the safety of my front porch with a morning cup of coffee, like an anthropologist afraid to actually encounter the natives. I’d seen them entering and exiting the community trail in their jogging clothes, the men with their long shinbones, the women with their tight ponytails. Our greetings had never gone beyond a raised hand of solidarity, a brisk Hello! Who were these people? I’d wondered. What did they do, how could they afford such extravagant lives? The answers were in a stack of file boxes temporarily relocated to our dining room while Phil’s office was being repainted. I knew it was wrong, or at least wrongish, as my sister, Allie, and I used to say, to sneak these clandestine peeks into strangers’ lives, but from the moment I opened the first manila folder, I lacked all willpower to stop. I pawed through housing applications, ogled the lists of assets (three thousand acres in Montana! The yacht, the wine collection, the jewelry!) and raised an eyebrow at the alphabet soup that trailed their names—CEO, CFO, MBA, MD. Someone in Phase 2 had paid $750,000 for a racehorse, and I still had four years of payments on my student loan.
I’d emailed Allie in Chicago: One of my neighbors has an actual Picasso.
She replied, I have a set of four Picasso coasters. I’d fit right in.
Being at the Mesbahs’ party was like playing a real-life game of Memory—matching the faces of the people in front of me with the snippets of information I already knew.
The Sieverts were our closest neighbors across the street. Rich owned a string of fast-food restaurants in the Bay Area; Deanna (only twenty-four, I remembered from their file), was his second wife. It was Rich’s son, Mac, from his first marriage, who drove the monster truck that blasted to life several times a day and was often parked crookedly in their four-car driveway.
“Don’t you just love living in The Palms?” Deanna asked. She shimmered next to me in a strapless green pantsuit, her question punctuated by the grip of her glittery fingernails on my forearm. Up close, her hair was a brassy, yellowish blond.
“I do,” I said, and then with more emphasis, as if I were performing for a lie detector test, “It’s really great.”
“Moving on,” Myriam murmured, her hand at my elbow.
The Berglands owned the colonial farmhouse closest to the clubhouse; they passed by our house a few times each day in a burgundy Suburban loaded with kids. Carly Bergland was so petite, her baby bump stood out like a ledge, perfectly positioned to hold a glass of mineral water. “You’d think we’d learn,” she said, rubbing her belly. “This is number six. But babies are our business, I guess you could say.”
“Carly and Jeremy own Nah-Nah Foods,” Myriam explained.
I remembered this from their files—Nah-Nah Foods was an organic baby food business. “That’s fantastic,” I said.
Carly smiled. “Have you seen our displays in Whole Foods? We mostly do formula, but we’ve been venturing into the world of purees.”
The one time I’d gone into Whole Foods, I’d left with a twelve-dollar carton of blueberries and vowed never to return. “I’ll have to look for it,” I said.
Carly took a sip of her water. “I have a mommy blog, too. Between the two ventures, we’ve been very successful.” There was no trace of modesty in her voice, none of the sarcasm or self-deprecation that was my staple. In his first weeks, Phil had received a number of complaints about the Berglands—kids’ toys on the lawn, bikes left at the curb. I wondered if she knew that.
“My oldest must be about the age of your daughter,” Carly continued. “Hannah. She’s fifteen.”
I smiled. “Danielle’s fourteen. Just starting high school. Where does Hannah go?”
Carly blinked. “Oh, no. She’s homeschooled. We won’t even dream of it anymore, with the state of public education—”
Myriam steered me away, her grip insistent. This was her task as a hostess, I realized, an obligation she was determined to fulfill so she could be done with me.
I recognized Trevor and Marja Browers as the couple who walked past my house each morning at sunrise, their two white heads bobbing in sync, their hands raised in benevolent hellos. I’d come to think of them as the grandparents of the community. Trevor was a laser specialist, officially retired from Lawrence-Livermore Labs, although he still consulted part-time. “He has top-level security clearance,” Myriam said. “And Marja, dear Marja...”
“It’s very secluded here, ja?” Marja asked, her Dutch accent strong. Her face was soft and friendly, accented with a slash of red lipstick.
I stopped myself, but only barely, from agreeing with a ja in return.
She smiled, revealing teeth that were charmingly crooked. “Sometimes too secluded, if you know what I mean?”
I did.
Oh, I did.
We were only a few feet away when Myriam whispered, “We call those socialist teeth,” with a wicked laugh at her own joke. I realized it was the same laugh she would utter when I left. We call those sales-rack shoes.
I decided right there that I hated her—that I hated all of them—as we worked our way through the room: the Roche-Edwardses, the Navarres, the Coffeys. They blended together, along with their details: the Mediterranean with the blue mosaic inlay, the husband in finance, the daughter who had been homecoming queen. I nodded along, my feet aching in my heels. Was it too early to leave, to grab Phil’s arm and make a run for it, claiming exhaustion or food poisoning or cramps? When I got home, I promised myself, I would toss these sandals into the depths of our walk-in closet, which was large enough to guarantee I wouldn’t have to see them again, ever. I would avoid all other parties, all fund-raisers and wine-and-cheese pairings. Where was the cheese, anyway? It was a horrible trick of advertising.
Victor passed, touching my shoulder. “Are you having a good time?”
In a mirror over the fireplace, I saw my own wine-stained smile reflected back at me.
Myriam pointed out Janet Neimeyer, who was anywhere between forty and sixty, her body toned and deeply tanned next to her white dress, skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. “She got the house in the divorce settlement,” Myriam said casually. “She likes her men, but if she settles down, she’ll have to kiss this place goodbye.”
“Oh,” I said, not sure how I was supposed to react. I looked mournfully at the half inch of wine in my glass, wondering where the rest had gone.
“And that’s Helen Zhang,” Myriam continued. I sorted through my mental file, remembering that Helen and her husband were both dermatologists, parents of twin boys. Helen had short, almost boyish hair that somehow framed her face perfectly.
“Oh, sure. I’ve seen her walking a dog around the neighborhood.”
“Yes,” Myriam said, her mouth tight. “Isn’t he the most darling thing?”
Too late, I remembered something else Phil had told me—that the Mesbahs had filed various complaints against the Zhangs, whose darling dog had a tendency to bark at inconvenient hours.
And then there was Daisy Asbill, former Google employee turned wife of a Google executive. She was young and slim-hipped in a gray silk dress. “Does your daughter babysit?” she asked me. “I’ve got twins, and sometimes it’s about impossible to find someone...”
I hedged, recalling that Danielle’s sole babysitting effort for a neighbor down the street in Livermore had been a semidisaster.
“Oh, I don’t mean all the time,” Daisy qualified, sensing my hesitation. “Only when the nanny has the day off.”
“Of course,” I said, savoring this one: only when the nanny has the day off. Allie would get a kick out of that.
Over and over I said It’s so nice to meet you and We’re loving it out here and took miniscule sips of cabernet, trying to make it last as long as possible. My mouth ached from incessant smiling. At one point, Helen asked if Myriam’s closet was finished, and half the crowd trooped down the hallway to see the improvements. I spotted Phil next to Rich Sievert, a fresh glass in his hand. He smiled at me, and I took a relieved step toward him.
“Oh, here they are,” Deanna called, stepping between us. At the front door, Victor was fussing over another couple, so tall and blond and perfectly paired, they might have been a set of Barbies.
“So sorry we’re late,” the woman said, giving cheek kisses as she moved through the entryway. Her hair was so blond it was almost colorless, her eyes a piercing blue. As she came closer, I realized that she was an older version of a girl I’d seen walking through the neighborhood, her head bent, thumbs tapping the screen of her cell phone. “Oh, hello.” She smiled at me. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Sonia Jorgensen.”
“Liz McGinnis,” I said, shifting my glass so we could shake hands. Sonia’s nails were pale silver, her skin buttery soft.
“Liz’s husband is the one with the yummy British accent,” Deanna put in, suddenly at my side.
“Australian,” I corrected.
“Don’t you just love British accents? It’s like those episodes of, what’s it called? On Netflix?” Deanna wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Oh! Downton Abbey!”
Sonia Jorgensen smiled at me, the sort of smile that made us coconspirators. Isn’t she ridiculous? She half turned toward me, her shoulders subtly angling Deanna out of the conversation. “We’re your neighbors right around the corner, I think. The two-story Grecian—”
“Oh, with the columns,” I said. When we’d first passed the house, Danielle had gaped. “Who lives there?” And I’d answered, “A dead president.”
“Yes! Tim—that’s my husband—said he wasn’t sure about them, but when I saw the designs, I just knew.”
“It’s a beautiful house.”
“Sonia’s a party planner,” Deanna said, edging back into the conversation. “She flies all over the world, just putting on parties. Can you imagine?”
“Corporate events, mostly,” Sonia explained. “I try to stay as far from weddings as possible.”
Deanna shook her head. “I’m so jealous it makes me sick. I try to get Rich to go somewhere, and he looks at me like I’ve got three heads.”
Sonia looked at her pointedly. “You just got back from Hawaii.”
“Right, but it was just Hawaii. We go there all the time,” Deanna pouted. Her effusiveness was both familiar and uncomfortable—a slightly more polished version of a high school student. “You’ve been to— Where did you just get back from?”
“Corpus Christi,” Sonia said. “Hardly exotic.”
“Still,” Deanna whined.
Sonia turned to me, her eyes crinkling in a smile. “Liz. Is that short for Elizabeth?”
There was something engaging about her, something that made me lower my guard, my mouth relaxing into its first genuine smile of the night. “No, just Liz. I always wanted to be an Elizabeth, though. I used to sign my name that way on my papers in elementary school.”
Sonia’s laugh showed teeth so straight and white, they might have belonged to a dental hygienist. “What did your parents think about that?”
“Oh, you know, typical kid stuff.” I took a careful sip of wine. Of course she didn’t know; it wasn’t the sort of situation a person could guess. My mom was fully blind by the time I was in elementary school, so she never saw my name on any work sheets or permission slips or report cards. And my dad wouldn’t have noticed—he was too busy seeing everything else. Elizabeth had been my own private rebellion.
“So, Liz, then. What do you do?”
I finished the last drop of wine in my glass. Funny—but after all the introductions tonight, Sonia was the first person to ask about me. “I’m a high school counselor,” I said. “Miles Landers High School, in Livermore.”
Sonia’s eyes widened, and I braced myself for the cocked head, the subtle up-and-down assessment. Was she calculating my salary, my overall net worth? Was she recalling the sudden appearance of my seven-year-old Camry in the neighborhood, remembering that most of our clothes had been packed in black plastic garbage bags, toted from my trunk to the house? But she surprised me by grabbing my arm. “Oh, my God. That’s wonderful.”
“Well...” Wonderful was overstating it a bit, although I did love my job. In seven years, I’d never had the same day twice. “This year will be interesting, because my daughter will be there, too. She’s going to be a freshman.”
“Oh, this is fantastic. You don’t understand... My daughter, Kelsey, is starting there in the fall. She’ll be a sophomore. She used to go to Ashbury Prep, but...well, that’s a story for another time. It turns out those other kids were such bad influences. But this is such a fantastic coincidence. It’ll be so nice for Kelsey to have some friendly faces at Miles Landers, not to mention another responsible adult in her life.”
Her touch was warm, as if we’d known each other for years. I recognized it as the mom connection, a bond that had always been elusive for me. I’d been a single mom for most of Danielle’s life, those early years spent shuttling between her day care and my internships, and later between the carpool lane at her elementary school and the counseling office. There had never been time to get to know the other moms, and I’d envied their chummy closeness at back-to-school nights and honor-roll assemblies.
“That will be nice,” I agreed, allowing myself to get sucked into the moment. Of course, there was no guarantee that our daughters would be friends. Danielle spent most of her days with her nose in a book. Kelsey, from what I’d observed, was years ahead of her socially. I remembered her walking past in her microshorts and tank tops, her bra straps winking like a dirty secret.
“So, would it be weird...” Sonia began. “I’m just thinking out loud here, and you can feel free to say no. But maybe we could plan some kind of get-together for them?”
I grinned. “Like...a playdate?”
Sonia laughed. “Well—I don’t know. Is that silly? It could just be a little thing. I’d be happy to host.”
Deanna returned, as if she’d been listening in from just over my shoulder. “What a great idea! We could invite all the teenagers at The Palms. Let’s see—there’s Mac, the Zhang boys, Hannah Bergland...”
Sonia’s gaze crossed mine, tolerant and amused. How did she do it? How did she keep her composure, keep herself from laughing or rolling her eyes? Pay attention, I ordered myself, as if I were watching for clues on how to be a woman, on what to wear, on when to speak.
“Are you sure Mac would be interested?” she asked.
Deanna rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. He just hangs around the house all day doing nothing, driving me insane.”
And then I made the connection between the driver of the massive yellow truck and the name I’d heard often enough at school over the past three years. Mac Sievert, the chronic underachiever; Mac Sievert, the big man on campus. “I just realized Mac goes to Miles Landers. He’s a senior?”
Deanna laughed, taking an exaggerated sip of her wine. “Oh, poor you. I was waiting for you to figure that out. Just remember, when he fails Econ, the phone call goes to his dad, not to me. One of the benefits of being the stepmother,” she added with a wink.
“Noted,” I said.
“This is a great idea,” Deanna gushed. “I’ll go tell Helen.”
We watched her walk away, heels clacking on the hardwood.
Sonia cleared her throat. “Well, I guess I’m hosting the neighborhood. What about Saturday night? Would that work with Danielle’s schedule?”
“She gets back from science camp tomorrow, so—I’m sure that’s fine.”
Sonia mock-swooned, latching onto my sleeve. I was sure this was the most my arm had been touched, ever, and I had a blind mother. “Science camp. I love it. Hang on to that phase while you can. Kelsey’s into boys and clothes and drama. Fifteen going on thirty.”
I smiled. Danielle hadn’t yet discovered those things, but I knew it was coming. At the beginning of her eighth grade year, I’d had to hide her favorite pair of camo pants, purchased from the army surplus store, when she insisted on wearing them three days in a row. But for her graduation last month, we’d spent hours combing the mall for a dress. I commented, “Sometimes I think Danielle is still fourteen going on twelve.”
Victor breezed past, swapping out my empty glass for a full one, and Sonia and I smiled at each other. Wordlessly, we touched our glasses together, and they produced an inharmonious clink.
There was a burst of chatter as Myriam and the rest of the women filed back into the room, having exhausted the virtues of the remodeled closet. Janet Neimeyer just couldn’t get over the lighting; Helen Zhang was noting the name of the contractor.
I felt a hand on my back, a warm hand, the thumb running over the ridge of my spine. I glanced over my shoulder and Phil gave me a happy, sloppy grin, his cheeks flushed.
* * *
Halfway home, I propped myself against Phil and wiggled out of my shoes, not able to tolerate them for another step. I tipped to one side, laughing, and he caught me. Were the neighbors watching from their windows, behind their custom drapes, the slats of their plantation blinds? Somehow it didn’t matter as much anymore.
“So we survived,” Phil said. “It wasn’t the horror show we imagined.”
“I suppose it could have been worse.”
He pulled me close and I leaned against him, warm and light-headed. His breath smelled like the wine Victor had foisted on us, refilling our glasses until I’d lost count.
Ahead of us, our house loomed, a towering behemoth. I’d begun to think of it as a chameleon—neutral beige in the morning, so dark just after sunset that it became almost invisible. Despite several attempts with the manual, neither of us had figured out the automated lighting system, so the front porch was rendered a dark alcove, hidden in the sloped overhang of the Tudor roofline. While Phil fumbled with the house key, I tugged his shirt from his waistband, pressing my hand against the flat of his back.
He threw open the door, grinning. “I like where this is going.”
“I’m a horrible drunk,” I confessed, backing into the house, dropping my sandals onto the tile entry. With one hand, I undid the buttons of my blouse.
“That’s what I love about you,” Phil said, letting the door click shut behind him. My blouse fell open and he whistled. “Anyway, define horrible.”
It was too hard to talk. My words felt slurred, my tongue thick. It was easier to kiss him, to show rather than tell.
We were good at this; I’d come to realize that we were maybe best at this. It had been there from the beginning—a playful physical attraction, the foresight that our bodies would be good together. We’d met at a Sharks game, neither of us particularly hockey fans, both of us accompanying friends with extra tickets. Phil, seated behind me, had spilled beer on my sweatshirt and spent the rest of the night apologizing over my shoulder, then flirting, charming me with that accent. I’d had a few beers, too, which was the only way I could explain the kiss I gave him in the parking lot after the game, one that was long and ripe and full of promise, as if I didn’t have a child at home, an early morning ahead of me. On the train back to Livermore, I’d laughed at myself, so stupid for thinking that a kiss with a stranger was anything more than a kiss with a stranger. And then twelve hours later, he’d walked into the counseling office at Miles Landers, a bouquet of daisies in one hand.
That was five years ago.
We pulled apart now, and I sloughed off my blouse, the fabric fluttering to the floor. Phil’s hands were on my bra, struggling with the back clasp, his breath hot in my ear. “Danielle should go away more often. One of those summer-long camps.”
“Mmm.”
“Or a study-abroad program. Foreign exchange, whatever you call it. An entire semester, maybe.”
“Early college,” I murmured. “Send her off at sixteen.”
He groaned, nudging me toward the stairs, our king-size bed beckoning. We’d had it for three weeks now, relegating our queen-size mattress to a spare bedroom, and it still felt spacious, as if we were splurging on an expensive hotel every night.
Maybe it was the wine; maybe it was the feeling that had been coming over me slowly since our move to The Palms, the realization that I didn’t have to be me anymore. I’d left the old Liz Haney behind—pregnant in college, dependent on financial aid and a half-dozen part-time jobs and Section 8 housing until I landed my counseling position, but still struggling with the rent when I met Phil. Now she was a ghost, wisp-thin and floating away, that old Liz. Because look at us. Here we were, hobnobbing with the rich and the very rich, and almost blending in.
“I have a better idea,” I told him.
“I’m all ears.”
“Follow me,” I said, and he did—past the living room stacked with boxes, the unfurnished dining room, the gleaming granite of the kitchen. I opened the sliding door off the den, and the Other Woman, the electronic narrator of our lives, warned, “Back door open.”
But once I was through the door, I hesitated. The backyard was almost too bright, with tasteful landscaping lights aimed at the potted topiaries, the dripping strands of crepe myrtle. Overhead, the moon was a crescent sliver, its gleam reflected on the surface of the pool, where an invisible hand pulled the water gradually toward the infinity edge. Beyond the pool, the yard sloped downward and beyond that was the flat, seamless green of the fairway.
I faced Phil and undid the button on my waistband slowly, watching him watch me. I hooked my thumbs in my underwear and let them shimmy down my thighs.
Phil was motionless in the doorway.
I must have been drunk; my body felt good in the moonlight, strong and sexy, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, before that pesky snake. “Aren’t you going to join me?”
Phil grinned. “I was just appreciating the view.” He worked his way out of his dress shoes and toed them off in separate directions. One sailed onto the grass, landing upside down with a soft thud.
I turned, breaking the surface of the water with one foot, then another. We had neighbors on either side, but these were one-acre lots, and they might have been miles away. Too secluded, Marja Browers had said. I took a few tentative strokes in the water and flipped onto my back, wetting my hair. Phil was undressing clumsily, struggling with his socks. My breasts rose above the ripples of the water, and I closed my eyes. Maybe this was what a house at The Palms could give you—a sense of owning something, of deserving the license that came with it.
When I looked up, Phil was standing at the edge of the pool, his clothes shed in untidy piles at his feet. From the water, he looked larger than life—on the scale of Michelangelo’s David, rather than a mere human. He lowered one foot in the water.
“No, wait a second,” I said. “It’s my turn to appreciate the view.”
He gave me a mock pose, muscles flexed. I laughed and kicked water in his direction.
“That’s it,” he said, splashing into the water. We reached for each other.
The neighbors, I thought.
And then: forget the neighbors.
Afterward, we let our bodies drift, float, slide next to and over each other, pulled by the current of gravity, the slow drift toward the infinity edge. It was an illusion, of course—but with my eyes closed, it felt as if I could float past the lawn, out to the golf course, where it was green and green and green forever.
Sometimes, dangling my feet over the edge of the pool, a book in one hand, I’d heard sounds from the golf course—the thwack that sent a ball soaring, the occasional raised voice. From the neighborhood, I’d heard cars starting, engines revving and disappearing; I’d caught snatches of conversation, carried on a breeze. But mostly, I’d grown used to the quiet of The Palms, beginning with the empty rooms in our house, so well carpeted and insulated that I could hear my own breath. This week, with Danielle gone and Phil moving into his office in the clubhouse, I’d found myself singing along with the radio, testing out my voice in the emptiness just to hear another sound.
Now the quiet was peaceful, calming, broken only by the occasional ripple in the water when our bodies broke the surface.
But then there was a clanging sound, the rattle of metal on metal, the sound I recognized as the latch and hook of our back gate.
I looked over at Phil, floating with his chest and shoulders above water, a blissed-out smile on his face. “Someone’s out there,” I hissed.
He shook his head. “Probably just sound carrying.”
But then I heard someone laughing.
Instinctively, I shrank into the water, my eyes scanning the dark pockets of the backyard. The euphoria was gone, the feeling of freedom and invincibility and entitlement. Or maybe I was just sobering, fast. Now I was a flabby, naked woman with a potential audience. “Phil—”
He worked his way toward the shallow end, his chest and shoulders bright in the moonlight. “Probably someone in their backyard.”
“What if there’s someone out on the golf course?”
“I don’t think anyone could see us, anyway.”
But I’d spotted the occasional heads of joggers and walkers bobbing past, the quick, colorful blurs of polo shirts and checkered pants. There was no way to gauge how close this laugh had been, whether someone was standing twenty feet away or all the way at the clubhouse. “I’m going inside,” I said, swimming for the steps.
“Oh, come on.” Phil laughed. “Really?”
But the moment was broken, the fantasy evaporating fast. The Liz who could float naked and free beneath the stars was gone, a once-in-a-lifetime flash of a comet, an anomaly. My clothes were scattered on the deck and inside the house, but I could make a run for it, heading straight for the downstairs laundry room, where a load of towels was waiting in the dryer.
“Liz.”
I sloshed up the pool steps, not realizing until I hit the concrete that I wasn’t entirely sober. My feet were heavy, uncooperative. And then I heard the laugh again, echoing off the tile surround, bouncing off the stucco exterior of our house. I turned, half expecting to spot someone in our bushes. Instead, I caught a flash in the distance, out on the walking trail—the tiny, bright screen of a cell phone. I bent double, clutching at my breasts with one hand.
In the water, Phil was laughing. “It was just someone walking by. Get back in here. Come on. I’ll plant a hedge out there. I’ll plant a goddamned forest, if that’s what you want.”
But I was already moving toward my reflection in the sliding door—a pale, lumpy mass of flesh, hair dripping, mascara streaked across my face. I’d felt so weightless, sliding into the water. Now I saw the sag of my breasts, the width of my hips, the fourteen-year-old flap of skin hanging low on my belly.
I was still the old Liz, after all.
* * *
Danielle was waiting for me at the BART station the following afternoon, considerably dirtier than when I’d dropped her off on Monday. Her feet were crammed into her old hiking books, laces flopping. She waved and ran around to the driver’s side to kiss me through the window.
I pulled back, feigning disgust. “You smell like nature.”
“I actually showered this year, not that it made much difference,” she said, tossing her backpack into the backseat. Her shoulders were sunburned, her cheeks dotted with new freckles. Red welts of mosquito bites pockmarked her legs.
“So? Tell me everything.”
We eased into traffic, and she did: the wasp nest in her cabin, the nature hikes, the bonfires, the visiting botanist from UC Davis. It was her last year as a camper; next summer, when she was fifteen, she could apply as a counselor.
“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 (#ulink_4feb53d9-66b8-5155-b44a-03ae806caafb)
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.
Still, I tried. “Isn’t there something else you want to do today, Kelsey? Play tennis, maybe?”
She shrugged.
“It’s just that I have work to do,” I told her.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re a community relations specialist, and I’m part of the community. So by definition, isn’t it your job to have relations with me?”
I found it was best not to be in my office at all—to have long lunches with Liz in the clubhouse, to chat with Rich Sievert at the bar, to try out the putting green with the Zhang boys or check on the progress of the homes in Phase 3. Still, hardly a day went by without her crossing my field of vision, blindsiding me with a wave, a wink.
And then one afternoon she was in my backyard, on my diving board, adjusting her bikini. She couldn’t have known I was there, watching her through the kitchen window with Liz standing next to me. And yet it was almost choreographed—the languid walk, the stretching, the perfect swan dive, the bathing suit top that slipped off, revealing her firm breast. I closed my eyes, swallowing hard. My palms went clammy, my heart hammered in my chest. Upstairs, I stripped off my shirt and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what the hell I was going to do.
JUNE 19, 2015 5:43 P.M. (#ulink_67a0cc1c-7582-5740-a9ad-82153c9f9c35)
LIZ (#ulink_a0d2ef70-3a38-5a61-ab50-3daba73c4230)
By the time I reached them, Danielle had hoisted herself over the edge. “Mom, help me!” she screamed.
In the pool, Hannah was pushing clumsily against the limp mass of Kelsey’s body.
Kelsey.
But I’d known that, hadn’t I, from the first scream that penetrated my sleep?
Her head flopped backward at a strange angle, like a marionette with no one pulling her strings. A red stain flowered on the back of her head. She was wearing the clothes I’d seen her in earlier, cutoff shorts and a T-shirt that billowed around her in the water. At the bottom of the pool, something magenta shimmered—her cell phone.
I asked the question even as I hooked an arm through Kelsey’s, even as the three of us pushed and heaved and Kelsey’s body emerged from the pool, followed by her dangling legs, scraping the concrete surround. She was wearing one sandal. “What is she doing here?”
“I don’t know! We were inside and I saw her floating,” Danielle panted.
“She was just out here all of a sudden,” Hannah sobbed.
Kelsey’s face stared up at me, her blue eyes unnervingly open. I pressed my hand over the cut on the back of her head, a gash several inches long, gaping wide. “Kelsey, can you hear me?” I slapped lightly against her cheeks, giving her shoulders a shake as if she were merely sleeping, as if this were the scene of a late-afternoon nap. My mind was a wild thing, racing backward and forward. I remembered Kelsey in my driveway earlier that afternoon, remembered shouting at her as the door closed.
Think, Liz. Think. I could picture the flip chart near the door of the counseling office—In Case of Emergency, with a dozen color-coded tabs for every conceivable situation.
And then something kicked in—a hyperfocus, the world narrowing to a single element, a sole requirement. My mother instinct, dormant over these past hard months, came out of the cave now, roaring. I snapped into action, ordering Danielle to turn off the music that pulsed in the background and call 911, and Hannah to run over to the Jorgensens’ house to see if Kelsey’s parents were home. Danielle, teeth chattering, ran inside and returned with her cell phone. Hannah’s footsteps thundered through the house and disappeared.
Airway, Breathing, Circulation. How long since I’d taken a CPR class? The procedure had changed, but how, to what? I felt along Kelsey’s neck for a pulse. Just one beat. Anything.
I heard Danielle’s voice, but dimly, as if it were a sound track dubbed in to the background. “Hello? Hello? There’s been an accident. 4017 Fairview. My friend—I don’t know. She was in the pool. She’s not responding.”
I tilted Kelsey’s head back—Airway—my cheek to her face, hoping for a whisper of breath. Say something. Wake up and tell me to get the hell away from you. I watched her chest, alert for a single, small rise, a slight fall, but it was still, her sodden T-shirt cold. My fingers, unsure, found the notch beneath Kelsey’s ribs, just beneath the clasp of her bra. I steadied myself, remembering those long-ago lessons with Annie the plastic dummy, her synthetic lips reeking of hydrogen peroxide. Annie’s torso had been smooth and pliable, her face a plastic, colorless mask.
But this was Kelsey, not a life-size doll.
This was an all-too-real nightmare.
JULY 2014 LIZ (#ulink_55da28a5-07b6-5fc2-9e14-45f265f7fa6a)
With school done for the summer, my days fell into a pattern: wake late, meet Phil for lunch in the clubhouse, swim in the afternoons, have dinner in front of the television, drink a glass or two of wine in the evenings. Anything more required an energy I didn’t have. My previous life and the things I used to do in it were only half an hour away, but somehow elusive now—the library, the farmers’ market, the public swimming pool where I’d spent hours on a blanket in a shady corner with a novel, looking up occasionally to spot Danielle’s head bobbing in the water.
“Aren’t we going anywhere on vacation?” Danielle asked once, almost waking me from the dream fugue of The Palms. But why would we go anywhere when we were practically living in a resort, down to the marble floors in our very own bathrooms?
Lunch at the clubhouse was Phil’s idea, his way of solidifying our place in the community. Danielle came sometimes, but mostly it was just Phil and me, ordering the overpriced panini of the day. “It’s all schmoozing and boozing here,” he told me. “Not bad for a day’s work.” From our table looking over the driving range, we nodded to Rich Sievert and Victor Mesbah as they made their way to the bar; we traded hellos with Daisy Asbill and her nanny, Ana, always a few feet behind, pushing the double-wide stroller that held the twins. Myriam stopped by to drop hints about the fund-raiser she was hosting for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society; Janet Neimeyer wondered if I would join her book club, a rival of the book club started by Helen Zhang. Deanna Sievert, effusive as always, dangled her cleavage over our soup and sandwiches. She’d spent her summer trying to convince Rich to take a cruise in the fall, and for some reason she’d taken to soliciting my advice. A stop in Bermuda? Skip Antigua altogether?
“Oh, no, you’ll definitely want to see Antigua,” I gushed. Phil kicked me under the table, and I managed not to laugh until she was safely out of the room.
I wrote to Allie, trying to capture what I couldn’t say out loud, not even to Phil. There’s a garden club, but they don’t actually get their hands dirty. They just vote on what annuals the gardeners should plant in the public areas. It didn’t take me long to realize that just about everything was outsourced at The Palms—child care and housekeeping and cooking, the running into town to grab something from Target. Deanna’s hair stylist came to her house before parties; Janet once referred to a personal shopper who bought her clothes for the entire season with one swipe of the debit card.
These women, I thought, amazed again at every turn. They were like modern-day fairy-tale princesses.
Phil was busy overseeing the final phase of construction at The Palms, sixteen luxury homes overlooking the foothills of the Altamont with its famous giant wind turbines. The community trail had been slightly rerouted to loop around the new construction, and a green area with a gazebo and outdoor kitchen was being added, so there were plans to approve and contractors to supervise. Phil was in his element, rushing between projects, keeping things on course. I joked with Allie that he was a politician on the campaign trail, shaking hands and trading good-natured hellos with anything that moved.
For their part, our neighbors treated him like a benevolent god, as if he could simply wave a hand and cause things to appear—new sprinkler heads, new bulbs in the carriage lights that lined The Palms’ cul-de-sacs. The women worshipped him; more than once, Janet laid a hand on my arm, saying, “He’s just an absolute doll, isn’t he?”
Phil grimaced when I repeated this to him. “That’s a compliment? A doll?”
“Well, they adore you, anyway.”
He shook this off, as if the attention were merely annoying. “They adore bossing me around. They like having me at their beck and call. It’s not exactly the same thing.”
Still—I noted it. Heads turned as he walked through the clubhouse; women touched him on the arm, the shoulder, the back; they laughed loudly at everything he said; they swooned over his accent. Even the dining room employees said g’day; asked if they could get him a draught or a burger with the lot. Phil treated all of them to the same generous dispensation of his time, the same friendly smile and listening ear. Maybe at times I was a bit jealous, or even a bit possessive, but I didn’t say anything to Phil. That would have given the issue more attention than it deserved.
It’s the accent, Allie speculated over email.
No, it’s the fact that he jumps to their every whim. He pays more attention to them than their husbands do.
How much attention? Allie asked, and then followed up about ten seconds later with a smiling emoticon, so I would know the question was a joke. When I didn’t reply, she wrote, Hey—you know I’m an idiot, right?
Of course, I replied.
I wouldn’t have minded so much, but they were so beautiful, so shiny and healthy and smooth. And once the suggestion was there, I had a hard time shaking it. Allie’s comment had touched a nerve, opened an old wound. When I was eleven and Allie was fourteen, my father had an affair. I never knew any specifics or learned how my mother found out, but I remembered their argument late one night, the house reverberating with her question: Who is she? Then he’d slammed the door and driven away in his truck, and I’d climbed into Allie’s bed and we’d cried ourselves to sleep. The following night Dad was back, joining us at the table in his PG&E uniform. I’d never heard them mention it again.
Sometimes as an adult, I thought I understood the affair. My mother had been beautiful—was, still—but blindness had robbed her confidence. Terrified of mismatching her clothes, she only wore black—shirts, pants, shoes. Even in the house, she wore her dark glasses. One of my earliest memories was of watching her get ready for a party, not long before her diagnosis—a red dress, lipstick, her hair in giant curlers. Blind, she was uncomfortable leaving the house, and my father had to coax her to visit friends, to try a new restaurant. Over the years I wondered who his other woman had been, what she was like—exciting and adventurous, scared of nothing? Had she worn bright colors, high heels? Or had it simply been the allure of the outside world, someone who would have a drink with him after work, someone who would dance in the middle of a crowded bar and not care who saw her or what she looked like?
Let it go, I told myself when Deanna strutted past in her shorts and heels, when Janet winked at him from across the room. Being friendly is just part of the job. Besides, as the summer passed, the languid days blending together, I had another worry, from a problem I’d created myself. Kelsey had taken my first invitation to dinner as a standing offer, arriving at our house late every afternoon for a swim with Danielle. Afterward, they lounged next to the pool, ruining their appetites with chips and Popsicles, their bodies fueled by mysterious teenage metabolism. We grilled burgers or mixed taco salads for a late dinner, and then there was always something on TV, even if it was a rerun of an episode they’d seen a dozen times. When it grew late, and I started yawning and dropping hints, Danielle would ask, “Is it okay if Kelsey spends the night?”
Later, when their giggles woke me, I wondered how we had become Kelsey’s unofficial caretakers without so much as a word from her parents. Tim was some kind of attorney, and on the rare occasions when I bumped into Sonia, she was either just back from a trip or packing for her next one.
In the mornings, Kelsey was still there, appearing on the stairs in a skimpy tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, her hair tousled. When she stretched, her tank top rode up, revealing the same flat, tanned stomach that was on display every afternoon but somehow looked obscene before my morning cup of coffee.
“Morning, Mrs. McGinnis, Mr. McGinnis,” she yawned, stepping past us on her way to grab a carton of juice from the refrigerator.
At least Danielle was happy. She’d never had a friend like this, a bestie. Her middle school friends were self-described nerds, shrieking number-themed jokes at each other on our way to once-a-month Saturday math meets. What about that girl Gabby? I wanted to ask her. What about Estrella?
The truth was, I missed the old Danielle, the one who would play epic games of Battleship with me, who would read upside down on the couch, her legs draped over the back, occasionally calling out passages. Mom, did you know that...? Now her interests were the same as Kelsey’s—sharing YouTube videos, snooping on other people’s Facebook pages, ogling Glamour and TMZ. Almost overnight, what I’d feared most had happened. She’d grown up.
Oh, to be young, Allie said.
But I don’t think I’d ever been that kind of young.
* * *
Sometimes, just to escape the house, I took walks after dinner, when the sky was turning from blue to purple to black, the white windmills on the horizon fading to a ghostly gray before disappearing altogether. I met the Browerses regularly and nodded at Trevor’s complaints about water usage at The Palms; didn’t anyone care that California was in a drought? I agreed with him, of course, but it was hard to get too excited. We weren’t in California; we were on our own island. It was easy to believe that what happened elsewhere didn’t concern us at The Palms. One night I heard giggling around a corner and spotted Janet Neimeyer and her boyfriend, both barefoot and taking swigs out of a bottle of champagne. Another time, the house stuffy and stifling even at midnight, I expected to be the only one on the streets and was surprised when I heard the slap of tennis shoes behind me.
“Oh, hello. I didn’t mean to scare you.” A woman emerged from the darkness, her hair a wild tangle of curls escaping a bun at the nape of her neck. Her face, where it wasn’t freckled, was a pinkish pale. She was pushing a boy in a wheelchair.
“I don’t think we’ve met yet. I’m Liz McGinnis. I live over—” I pointed behind me.
“Oh, I know where you live. I’m Fran Blevins, your next-door neighbor. We don’t get out too much, except late at night. Sometimes Elijah has a hard time settling down, and a walk calms him.” She gestured, and I bent lower, smiling. He wasn’t a boy at all, but a man in his midtwenties with a scruffy beard, his limbs pulled tightly to one side. “Elijah,” Fran said, her voice loud and cheerful. “This is Liz.”
“Hello, Elijah. It’s nice to meet you.”
His eyes regarded me, unblinking. I’d only heard the Blevins referenced occasionally—Doug (Dan?) was a commercial airline pilot with a San Francisco to Tokyo route; their son, Deanna had told me with a hand over her heart, had cerebral palsy.
Fran said, “I’ve been meaning to stop by to welcome you to The Palms.” While we talked, she rocked Elijah’s wheelchair slowly forward and back, the way I used to rock Danielle when we stood in line at the grocery store or the DMV. “We have a daytime caretaker, but she takes her vacation during the summer, so I’ve been on twenty-four-hour duty.”
“It’s good to meet you. I feel like I’ve been adequately welcomed, though. Everyone’s been so nice.”
Fran smiled at me, her head cocked to one side. “Have they?”
I laughed.
“I don’t find people here to be particularly nice, myself. But for the most part, it’s quiet, and they leave us alone.” Her voice wasn’t malicious or bitter, just matter-of-fact, as if we were talking about the weather. She bent over Elijah, dabbing a finger at the corner of his mouth, where a thin line of drool had appeared. When she straightened, she said, “I admit, I was a bit curious about your house, about how it all came out.”
“Oh, we haven’t done anything much to it,” I said, thinking of the three empty bedrooms, the dining room with its folding card table from Costco. I’d covered it with a tablecloth, but its general flimsiness was undeniable. “The house was pretty much move-in-ready.”
“No, I meant the repairs. From before you moved in.”
I stared at her. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Really? I figured you knew. Well, that house has had its share of bad luck. It was foreclosed on, and the owners had to be evicted. When they finally went, they’d stripped the house of everything—the fixtures, the plumbing, even the doorknobs.”
“Wow—that’s horrible.” Incidents like those had been common on the news when the housing bubble burst, but it was surprising to hear in connection with The Palms.
“That wasn’t even the worst of it. After they left, someone broke in, kicked holes in the walls, spray-painted obscenities, even scratched up the granite. The last I heard, everything had to be replaced.”
I shuddered. “I had no idea...”
“I suppose it’s the sort of thing Parker-Lane wouldn’t want to advertise. There was a big stink about it around here, as you can imagine. Myriam and her cronies insisted it was someone from outside the community, as if juvenile delinquents from Livermore drive all the way out here to scale the fences and wreak havoc.” She shook her head, freeing a few more wild strands of hair. “Look, I’ve lived here long enough to know that this place is a hotbox of discontent. The gates might be there to keep out the riffraff, but they don’t protect us from each other.”
“You think that—” But my words were lost in a sudden choking sound from Elijah. His eyes blinked wildly, and he thrust his head back.
“Oh, dear.” Fran bent down, tipping his head to one side, settling him. “We’d better keep going. He likes the constant motion. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Liz. We’ll have to bump into each other again like this.”
I called a goodbye and watched as she disappeared into a pocket of darkness between carriage lights, the soft slurring of Elijah’s wheels fading to nothing. I continued on to the entrance to the trail, which began and ended in front of the clubhouse, Fran’s words ringing in my ears. Someone had kicked holes in our walls, scratched the countertops. I didn’t know what was more unsettling, the idea of a vandal wielding a can of spray paint, or how easily it had been covered up, leaving no trace of the damage.
I paused along the trail when I reached the back of our Tudor. It was almost unrecognizable from this angle, as if the experience of living there was completely disconnected from what I was seeing now. There was the lawn and the pool, the patio with its topiaries in gigantic terra-cotta pots. Next to the door rose the hump of a forgotten beach towel. Darkness seeped from the windows.
I live here.
It not only didn’t seem real, it suddenly didn’t seem like a great idea.
That night my dreams were dogged with images of the vandalism I’d never seen, a reverse version of the shows I watched on HGTV, where the beautiful home was smashed apart by strong-armed men swinging willy-nilly with sledgehammers, leaving gaping holes in their wake.
And when I woke, the house didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t as solid and impenetrable, despite the security system, despite the Other Woman telling me when I was entering and exiting, what was locked and unlocked. That house had been a fantasy. It had existed in a dreamlike fugue, and now that was gone.
* * *
Eager to escape the stasis of The Palms, I went back to school a week early, before the office was filled with parents and students, new registrants and those pleading for a last-minute schedule change, the line five-deep out the door. It was nice to work without the distraction of an endless stream of Reply-All emails, the vaguely threatening administrative memos, the standard litany of complaints about the amount of homework in AP courses.
For now, I locked the door to the counseling office behind me and blasted the radio, sorting papers and settling unfinished business from the end of the past school year.
It was good to be back.
It would be good for Danielle, too. I’d been too lenient over the summer, lax on chores and responsibilities. School would mean essays and projects and speeches; it would mean clubs and activities and friends who weren’t Kelsey.
Deep down, I knew that was the trouble, the real trouble, with Kelsey: she was going to break my daughter’s heart. Sure, they were friends at The Palms, but what would happen when Kelsey had more options to choose from, when she decoded the social strata at Miles Landers and infiltrated the popular crowd? She wouldn’t hesitate to ditch my sweet, naive, awkward daughter who’d once spent a summer memorizing the periodic table just for fun. No, Danielle had been good for staving off boredom. She was a mere placeholder until Kelsey found her place among the jocks and mean girls of Miles Landers.
“Just tell her not to hang around Kelsey,” Phil said one night, while we watched the end of the Giants game in bed. Down the hall, a deep quiet emanated from Danielle’s room, punctuated by occasional shrill bursts of laughter.
I laughed. “You were never a teenage girl.”
“What tipped you off?” He shifted and I moved closer to him, my head in the crook of his neck.
“If I tell her not to hang around Kelsey, she’ll just want to hang around Kelsey more. That’s the first rule of being a teenager.” I yawned, pulling a sheet up to my chin. “Maybe they’ll have some kind of fight, some big blowup, and things will cool off for a bit.”
Over the roar of the crowd and the notes of the pipe organ, I heard Phil say, “We should be so lucky.”
* * *
No matter the amount of preplanning, the carefully posted directional signs, the color-coordinated packets, registration was always a zoo. I’d come to expect parents who ignored directions, the horde of unattended children, the inevitable air-conditioner malfunction. Basically, it was a three-day circus in a stuffy gymnasium.
I worked side by side with Aaron Harrigfeld, my colleague and closest friend at Miles Landers. In seven years, we’d formed a bond based on sarcastic insights about our coworkers and a mutual quest for interesting lunches within driving distance of campus. When there was a lull, we caught up on our summers: he’d broken up with Lauren, the girl he’d been dating since January, during a five-day cruise to Mexico.
“During?” I repeated.
He closed his eyes, as if to block out the memory. “During.”
“What happened? Not the hot-girl effect again?”
“Sadly, yes.”
I rolled my eyes, even though I was the one who coined the term years earlier to describe Aaron’s tendency to date stunning women in their early to midtwenties. I’d seen a whole parade of Laurens at this point—either he grew tired of them, or they moved on to bigger and better.
“And by the way,” he said, cracking open a water bottle the next time the line died down, “I’m still waiting for my dinner invitation.”
“It’s coming. Once we get a dining room table.”
He laughed. “All summer, I thought of you. Poor Liz, suffering with all that tennis and golf and swimming.”
“It was pretty rough,” I admitted.
“And now you’re back here, slumming with the rest of the working world,” he mused.
I gave him a friendly kick beneath the table. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the little people.” Just that morning, in fact, I’d taken a detour past our old house in Livermore—tiny, run-down, the lawn a patchwork of weeds, the street choked with cars. I was expecting to feel a rush of nostalgia, but from my drive-by perspective, it was hard to imagine we’d ever been happy there.
Aaron mock-bowed at the waist. “On behalf of the little people, I thank you. So, when do I get to see Danielle, anyway? Is Phil bringing her through?”
I hesitated. Danielle was supposed to be there with me now, helping with the registration table. I’d planned to take her around to the various stations when the line was low, reintroducing her to staff members she’d met over the years. But last night Sonia had called, offering to take the girls to the mall for back-to-school shopping in the morning, then to registration in the afternoon. “It’s the least I can do,” she gushed. “You’ve been so generous with Kelsey all summer, and now that she’ll be carpooling with you...”
She was right. It was the least she could do. I’d planned to offer occasional rides to Kelsey, figuring I left too early each morning to make that an attractive offer. But Sonia had embraced the idea enthusiastically. It wasn’t until later that I wondered if she saw me as part of her support staff, one of the sprawling, faceless army of people who performed her menial tasks.
I brushed off this thought and told Aaron, “Danielle’s coming with a friend. One of the girls in our neighborhood is starting here, too.”
“This place is getting overrun with millionaires,” he quipped.
All afternoon, I found myself scanning the cafeteria for a sight of them, two leggy blonde models and my own knock-kneed, dark-haired daughter, trailing behind in her Converse. When they did arrive, I spotted Kelsey first—a sheaf of white-blond hair, cutoffs so short the pockets hung below the hem. Sonia was next to her, tall in a pair of heels that dented the floor varnish. But even then, it took me a minute to recognize Danielle next to them.
“What the...” I stood, craning to get a better look, and Danielle spotted me at the same time. Her cheeks were red.
“Don’t be mad,” she blurted, coming toward me. “There was this place in the mall—”
“Your hair,” I breathed. Since kindergarten, she’d worn it long—ponytails, a braid, a dark waterfall down the middle of her back. I’d shampooed it for her, picked carefully through the wet knots, brushed it in the mornings, snapped it into place with an elastic band. Sure, she hadn’t needed that help for years—but now that her hair was gone, I was sharply nostalgic for those mother-daughter tasks. Danielle’s hair hadn’t just been cut, it was cropped short, ending above her ears, fitting her head like a dark skullcap.
Next to me, Aaron whistled. “You know who you look like? Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.”
Danielle laughed. “Is that good?”
“Absolutely,” he said, leaning across the table to give her a quick hug. “Ready for high school?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Do you like it, Mom?”
I touched her hair tentatively, trying to find a piece long enough to tuck behind her ears. She looked lovely, striking—but in a surreal way, as if this wasn’t my fourteen-year-old daughter in front of me, but a grown, postcollege version of herself, home for a visit. I tried to keep my tone light, tried not to let the hurt seep through. “You didn’t tell me you wanted a haircut.”
“Well, Kelsey was getting hers cut anyway, and Mrs. Jorgensen offered...”
“Kelsey’s mom paid for this?”
“I know. I told her I had money, but she insisted...”
“How much are we talking?”
Danielle bit her lip. “Seventy-eight dollars.”
“Seventy-eight dollars!” I hissed.
Next to me, Aaron whistled.
Then Sonia was there, oohing and aahing over the cut, offering a faux apology as if she simply couldn’t help herself. “I mean, with these cheekbones,” she gushed, “she was practically a diamond in the rough.”
She was a diamond already, I seethed.
“You know what we should do tonight?” Kelsey asked. “We should try on all our clothes, and I could do your makeup.”
Danielle laughed. “I don’t know. I look funny with makeup.”
“Seriously, I’ll give you a whole new look.”
I had a sick feeling, as if I were on a roller coaster and the momentum was building and building, and the whole thing might just go off the tracks.
“Let me get you girls your class schedules,” Aaron said, bustling behind me, saving me from whatever ugly thing was going to come out of my mouth. He found Danielle’s schedule under the M’s, and then hesitated, looking at Kelsey. “What’s your last name?”
“Jorgensen,” Sonia said. “Kelsey.”
Aaron thumbed through a stack and handed Kelsey her schedule. She glanced at it, then asked, “So which of you is going to be my counselor?”
“Oh,” I said, realizing. “You’ll be mine. I have H through M.”
She smiled. “Cool.”
Danielle held up both papers, looking back and forth between them. I couldn’t stop staring at her, as if she were some kind of mythical creature, half girl, half woman. “Hey,” she said. “We have a class together! Geometry.”
“Oh, my God, you would be in advanced math,” Kelsey teased, and Danielle blushed.
Sonia glanced at her cell phone, noting the time. “What’s next here? Why don’t we get in line for ID photos while we can.”
Danielle gave me an uncertain wave. “Bye.”
“Yes, bye,” Kelsey chorused.
I slumped back into the plastic cafeteria chair, watching them walk away from me. The crowd seemed to part at Sonia’s approach, and more than a few heads turned. They were looking at Danielle, too, I realized.
Aaron helped the next people in line and then took a seat beside me. “She does look great, you know.”
“Of course she does,” I breathed.
“But that friend. Whew.” He shook his head. “I’m glad she’s one of yours. She looks like a pack of trouble.”
* * *
“She might have asked me,” I huffed to Phil that night. “I have a phone. Would it have been too difficult for her to call me, to at least mention the idea? Oh, by the way, Liz, we’re going to stop by a salon. Would you mind if I had Danielle’s hair hacked all the way back to her scalp?”
“You did say you liked it.”
I sighed. “That’s not the point.”
The girls were upstairs, in the beginning stages of what promised to be a marathon clothes-trying-on session. They were using the mirror in our walk-in closet, so Phil and I were banished to the back deck, where we were slowly working our way through a forty-four-dollar bottle of wine from Victor Mesbah, a just-because gift he’d dropped by the office. I was slowly burning through my anger, too.
Phil sighed. “It’s hair, Liz. It’s not like it’s a neck tattoo. And she does look cute.”
“Of course she looks cute,” I bristled. “She couldn’t not look cute.” But she’d been cute before, when she’d been so patently herself.
Phil’s voice was calm, his words nearly lapped up by the pool. “You’re probably going to have to let this go.” He was distancing himself, I thought, playing the role of the disengaged stepfather.
Earlier, driving home, the blades of the wind generators on the Altamont rotated so slowly, they might have been giant house fans, barely displacing the warm air. Now the grass by the fourteenth hole was fading into a purplish blue, and sunset had brought with it a slight chill. I pulled my knees to my chest. “She’s becoming one of them.”
Phil laughed. “Who?”
“You know. The pretty girls.”
He leaned over, emptying the bottle between our glasses. “What pretty girls?”
“Please. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Look at Deanna Sievert. Look at Sonia Jorgensen. Look at Kelsey, for goodness’ sake. Those pretty girls, the ones the world smiles on, the ones who get everything they want without even trying for it.”
“I haven’t noticed, particularly.” But his voice was distant, his gaze far away.
Liar. I took a large gulp, savoring the slow trickle of wine down my throat, and set the half-empty glass at my feet.
The night had been so quiet that the sound of a car starting still registered a few minutes later, an echoic memory. Out of the darkness came another sound, a strangled cry.
“What was that?” I sat up, thinking the worst—the girls upstairs, Fran Blevins home alone with Elijah.
He held up a hand, shushing me. We waited, and the sound came again—clearly a scream this time, its shrill edge piercing the night. Phil didn’t have to think, he was on his feet, heading for the door. I stood, toppling my glass, which shattered on the concrete.
“Shit.” I stooped to gather the shards.
“Leave it,” Phil called over his shoulder. “We’ll get it later.”
Inside, Danielle and Kelsey were at the top of the stairs, looking down on us. From this angle I could see straight up Danielle’s skirt, a tiny white thing that was a waste of money, no matter what she’d spent.
Phil charged through the kitchen to the garage.
“What’s going on?” Danielle demanded.
The garage door slammed and Phil was back, flicking a flashlight on-off, on-off to test the battery.
“We heard a noise,” I told them. “Just stay put. We’ll check it out.”
But Danielle had started down the steps, Kelsey trailing her in a skimpy baby-doll dress. “I’m coming, too,” Danielle said. “I want to go with you.”
“Right? That’s always how it is in horror movies. The killer comes upstairs, and there’s nowhere left to go at that point,” Kelsey put in.
“I’m sure there’s no—”
“Absolutely not,” Phil snapped. “You’re staying here. And put some clothes on, both of you.”
Danielle looked down at her legs, as if she were seeing them for the first time. Kelsey only smiled.
“Stay,” I ordered, as if they were disobedient pets. I followed Phil as he barreled down the front walkway, the beam of his flashlight bringing into stark relief the rounded humps of our landscaping rocks. I saw a dark figure standing in the middle of the road, and he spotted me, moving into the yellow glow of an overhead carriage light. He was tall, gray hair cropped close to his head, a button-down shirt tucked firmly into his waistband.
“Everything all right at your house?” he called.
“We’re fine. I guess you heard that, too?”
“Sounded like a scream.” He extended a hand. “I’m Doug Blevins.”
“Liz—Liz McGinnis. That’s my husband, Phil,” I gestured to Phil’s retreating form, a dark shadow preceded by the beam of his flashlight. “I’ve met your wife and son a few times.”
“That’s what I hear. Fran said it was nice to have another normal person around.”
I laughed. “I feel the same way.”
Again, the scream came. It was louder this time, and definitely female. I whirled around, trying to get a sense of its origin.
“That’s it,” Doug said, digging in his pocket. “Woman screaming? I’m calling the police.”
Phil was coming back from the clubhouse, his flashlight zigzagging toward us.
Doug took a step away, speaking into his phone. “Yes, I’m calling from The Palms. Alameda County, outside Livermore.”
“It’s not coming from the clubhouse,” Phil panted. “Everything’s shut up for the night.” He frowned at Doug Blevins, overhearing part of his conversation.
The scream became a breathy wail, carried by someone coming off the trail at a sprint. Footsteps pounded closer, and Phil stepped in front of me. “Who’s out there?” he called.
The running figure became first a woman, then Deanna Sievert in a fitted running tank and shorts, hair escaping her ponytail. Seeing us, she cried out again, more sob than scream this time.
“Deanna? What happened?” I called.
She stopped short in front of us, nearly collapsing. Phil caught her by the arm. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Her breath came in ragged gasps, and when she straightened up, her face was blotchy with tears. “There was—something—” she wheezed. “On the golf course. These two glowing eyes—”
“You saw someone out there?” I asked.
“No, something. At first—I thought it was someone’s dog. But the way it moved—it was feline, just massive—” She doubled over again, hands on her knees. Phil still had her by the arm, as if he were propping her up. “It disappeared when I screamed, and then I ran like hell.”
Doug joined us, phone in hand. “Police are sending out a patrol. I’m supposed to call back to update them. What did you see, exactly?”
Deanna repeated her story, only this time the predator seemed larger, stronger, faster, like the great fish that got away. She seemed less scared now, enjoying her position as the center of attention. I focused on Phil’s thumb, which was rotating in a circle on Deanna’s twenty-four-year-old shoulder.
Doug nodded knowingly. “Sounds like a mountain lion. We’ve had those before, off and on. The drought brings them out here to the golf course. They see all that green and think they’ve got a better chance of finding food.”
Headlights rounded the curve at the end of the block, blinding us with sudden light in the middle of the street. We didn’t move. It was a dark sedan, but it couldn’t have been the police, especially if they were coming down the winding access road from Livermore.
“Hey! It’s the Mesbahs.” Deanna waved to them, and Victor rolled down the window. He was wearing a tuxedo, a bow tie unclasped at his neck.
Myriam leaned across his body, alarmed. “What’s going on?”
Deanna called into the sedan, “I just saw a mountain lion on the trail!”
“My God.” Victor shifted the car into Park. Heat radiated from the engine.
“Well, we don’t actually know—” Phil tried.
Doug said, “The police are on their way. Actually, I need to call them back, give them an update.” He took a few steps away, redialing.
Myriam stepped out of the car, holding up the hem of a midnight blue dress, its fabric pooling near her ankles. “You must be so terrified,” she said. Deanna collapsed immediately against her shoulder.
“You don’t want to mess around with mountain lions,” Victor boomed in his too-loud voice, as if he were educating all of us, everyone in The Palms. “Have you ever seen a mountain lion going after something? They’re just stupendous creatures.”
“My God, yes,” Myriam said, patting Deanna’s head. “They can just tear something from limb to limb.”
No one seemed to be listening to Phil, but he kept talking. “We need to keep cool heads here. Deanna’s not sure what she saw, exactly.”
“Who’s that?” Deanna sniffed, pointing down the street.
It was the Jorgensens, dressed in dark jeans and white shirts. The hard soles of Sonia’s sandals smacked the asphalt. “Is everyone okay?” she called.
“Sonia! It was horrible, you wouldn’t believe—” Deanna began.
“So horrible,” Myriam echoed, as if she had been on the trail, too, taking a lap in her evening gown.
Tim Jorgensen shook hands with Victor and Phil and nodded at me. Deanna repeated her story, trembling when she got to the glowing eyes.
Doug was back, sliding his cell phone into his pocket. “They’re going to send out some kind of wild animal team in the morning.”
“In the morning!” Myriam scoffed. “What good will that do?”
“I don’t suppose there’s much they can do out there in the middle of the night,” Doug said. “And we hardly want them driving out on the golf course.”
Tim looked shocked. “No, of course not. They could do a lot of damage out there.”
“But we need to let people know,” Deanna protested. “I mean, think of all the people who jog first thing in the morning. The Browerses, for one. Sometimes Daisy’s out there, too. And then there’s the Berglands, with all those kids. You don’t think a mountain lion could hop one of those fences along the course, do you?”
“I don’t see why not,” Victor said. He clapped Phil on the shoulder. “What do you say, mate? I’ve got a handgun. If you give me a minute to change out of this monkey suit, we could head out there in my cart and chase down some mountain lions.”
I could feel Phil’s annoyance. He hated the Crocodile Dundee act, the assumption that all Australians were swashbuckling men in dungarees and a hat rimmed with jagged teeth. “Let’s keep a cool head here,” he repeated.
“But we want to be sure,” Victor said. “It’s about keeping our women safe, right?”
“A handgun, Victor? You’re not serious.” Myriam shook her head. “And I don’t think the cart is charged, even. When’s the last time you went golfing?”
“Rich has a .22,” Deanna offered. “He’s in the city tonight, but you could take it. And I know our cart is charged. Mac was on it earlier today. He’s too lazy to walk anywhere.”
“We could make some phone calls,” Myriam said. “I have the HOA directory.”
“What do you say?” Victor said. “Give me ten minutes?”
Phil’s eyes met mine, a swift glance that told me everything he was thinking—that this was a ridiculous idea and these were ridiculous people, but it was his job to cater to them even at their most ridiculous. He nodded slowly. “Okay, then. We’ll just take a look around. But watch that trigger finger, Victor.”
Victor guffawed, slapping him on the shoulder. Myriam picked her way back to the car in her heels, and a moment later their sedan passed us, the taillights winking around the curve and disappearing. “Well, good night, all,” Doug called over his shoulder.
“Mom?”
I whirled around. Danielle was on the lawn, dressed in the cargo shorts and T-shirt she’d been wearing earlier that day. Again, it took me a moment to recognize this version of her, the adult version with the cropped hair. Kelsey was behind her on the lawn, barefoot in her baby-doll dress. One of her spaghetti straps trailed down her arm.
“Did you get your hair cut?” Deanna squealed, her previous terror forgotten.
Danielle came forward, grinning, and Deanna ruffled fingers through her hair, first mussing it and then rearranging it before pronouncing it “smashing.”
“Kelsey, come on,” Tim said. “You’re walking home with us.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a mountain lion out there, and I don’t want you walking home by yourself. That’s why.”
Kelsey dropped her sandals to the ground one by one and wiggled her feet into them.
“Faster,” Tim barked.
“We have things to do, Kelsey,” Sonia warned.
I watched as the three of them set off down the street, Kelsey trudging ten feet behind, as if she weren’t part of their group. I felt sorry for her, understanding suddenly why she preferred to be at our house.
“Doesn’t she look so grown up now?” Deanna was cooing. “You’ll have to beat off the boys with a stick.”
Danielle blushed.
Phil had loosened up a bit, maybe accepting the reality of the night ride with Victor. “Believe me, I have a big stick at the ready,” he said. There was a moment of embarrassed silence. “That came out wrong. I meant—”
But it was too late. Deanna had doubled over, laughing. “I bet you do. I bet you do...”
* * *
Later, I grabbed a broom and dustpan from the outdoor utility closet and swept up the remnants of my broken wineglass. Nothing bounded past me in the backyard, nothing bared its teeth, but I didn’t take any chances. It may have been nothing—I wouldn’t have put it past Deanna to exaggerate a house cat into a mountain lion—but I felt uneasy on our patio, as if I were being watched.
Upstairs, I puzzled over the mess on the floor of the master suite—jeans and skirts and complicated, sparkly tops—before remembering that Danielle and Kelsey had used the room for its full-length mirror. I scooped up the clothes and tossed them onto the floor of Danielle’s room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, thumbs tapping her phone’s keypad.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I forgot about those.”
“I’m not your maid,” I said, kicking at the clothes I’d just dropped, which already blended in with the other clothes on the floor.
She looked up. “I never said you were my maid.”
“Well, this place is a mess,” I said, stalking through the room. “Half of these clothes are Kelsey’s, and there are wet beach towels...”
“I know. I’m going to clean it up, don’t worry.”
I nudged a pair of shoes to the side of the room with my bare foot. “Tonight, before you go to bed.”
“It’s almost eleven o’clock. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Tonight,” I repeated, and something in my tone caused Danielle to finally put her phone down.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, bewildered. “Are you mad at me for something? Is it still the haircut?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. Everything, suddenly, felt wrong. Things were feeling more and more wrong from one moment to the next. “Just do what I said,” I told her—that parental cop-out, that all-purpose directive I’d hated when my parents used it on me.
I ran a bath and soaked in it, lights out, until the water ran cold. What was wrong with me? I closed my eyes, but I could still picture Phil’s hand on Deanna’s shoulder, the slow circling of his thumb. I wondered if there was a way I could turn it around, make a joke out of it. Poor Deanna. Thank goodness she had you to comfort her. No—it wasn’t even funny. Besides, Phil would be annoyed about his ride with Victor; he would be grumpy when he came upstairs. I waited until my skin was wrinkled and soft before toweling off and sliding, still damp, into my pajamas. I tossed the pile of throw pillows out of the way—a silly splurge, since neither of us could be bothered to make the bed properly in the morning—and that’s when I saw it: a tiny black strip of fabric, tucked along the bed skirt on Phil’s side. I stared at it for a long time before touching it with my toe, spreading it out to see what it was.
A thong.
Not mine. Not Danielle’s—unless she’d spent her back-to-school money on silky black underwear.
There was a brief, horrible moment where I could picture Deanna Sievert in our bedroom, shedding one thin layer, then another. It was possible, of course—Danielle and I had been out of the house, and Rich had been out of town. And then I laughed out loud, shocked at how easily that image came to mind.
Of course not.
The thong was Kelsey’s—she’d been changing clothes in here; she was exactly the sort of teenager who wore a black silk thong. Why she felt the need to strip down altogether when trying on a few skirts, I had no idea.
I shook my head, remembering her standing on the front lawn in her short baby-doll dress, then casually following her parents down the street, apparently au natural. Apparently not worried about sudden gusts of wind.
I thought about flinging the underwear into Danielle’s room, one more item for her to clean off the floor. She would express disgust, and I would say, “Tell Kelsey to keep her panties on next time.” But it wasn’t worth the mention. Instead, I pinched the thong between two fingers and airlifted it to the wastebasket in the bathroom, where I shoved it deep beneath crumpled tissues and an empty bottle of shampoo.
PHIL (#ulink_64334f93-7c5d-557b-a3dd-5fc55486b21a)
I didn’t say anything to Liz about Kelsey in the beginning, and then suddenly, it was too late. Liz was already suspicious of Deanna, who had nothing better to do than chat for half an hour here, an hour there. I could have said something about Kelsey, but it would have been more grist for the mill, more fodder for Liz’s jokes about The Palms. And that was when it was a mindless flirtation, a situation that I figured would blow over and be gone, like a bit of dandelion fluff.
Later, mentioning it would have given it too much weight in our lives. Even saying her name would have been dropping clues about an affair I wasn’t having. I tried it out in my head, worked on the phrasing. There’s this girl who has a bit of a fixation on me. It’s probably just a little crush. I haven’t done anything—much—to encourage it. It’s nothing. But it wouldn’t be nothing to Liz. She wouldn’t have been able to let it go. I knew how she was, how at her core was a kernel of insecurity, dormant until we’d moved to The Palms. She’d never been especially concerned with her own appearance before. She’d never obsessed about exercise. Her wardrobe had been a steady rotation of black pants and button-down shirts, the occasional jacket. In the mornings, every morning of our lives before moving to The Palms, she simply ran her fingers through her wet hair, added a bit of lip gloss, and was ready to go.
I’d loved that about her.
Now, she weighed herself each morning, frowned at her face an inch from the mirror. She bought expensive clothes that hung in our closet, receipts dangling, while she made a final decision.
“You look sexy,” I’d murmur in her ear, nuzzling along her neck, and she would frown, not buying it.
“I love you,” I said.
She wrinkled her nose. “You just said that ten minutes ago.”
“It’s still true.”
* * *
I thought that Kelsey’s friendship with Danielle would be a good thing, that she would drop the flirtation when those worlds intersected. What kind of fifteen-year-old girl was interested in her friend’s stepfather? But overnight, she wormed her way into our lives. I hadn’t figured on the logistics of Kelsey in my home, coming out of the bathroom late at night when I climbed the stairs, eating a bowl of cereal in the morning, her nipples outlined against the thin fabric of her tank top. In the afternoons, she paraded through our house in her bikini, letting the strap slip over her shoulder until the top of her breast was exposed. She’d already caught me looking. One night at dinner she brushed her leg against mine under the table and I jumped up, saying that I wanted to catch the end of the game.
I tried, in a general way, to get rid of her. I joked: she’s eating all our food. I complained: they’re too loud at night, and I’m not getting enough sleep. I coaxed: I wish we could just be alone, the two of us, without the girls always in our hair.
I wanted Liz to see it, without me having to say it.
It was a mess, but I told myself I could ride it out. What other choice did I have? Kelsey Jorgensen would outgrow me eventually. School would start, and she would find a real boyfriend, someone her own age. She would look at me and see thinning hair, wrinkles around my eyes. If I didn’t encourage her, she would wander off—like a stray dog.
* * *
The morning after the mountain lion sighting—the “alleged” mountain lion sighting, I told Jeff Parker, checking in—Deanna came by my office to make copies. In giant, bold font, her flier said WARNING: PROTECT YOUR FAMILIES AND YOURSELVES, with a picture of a mountain lion, jaws bared, feline haunches rolling. She offered to walk the fliers door-to-door herself, no doubt planning to relive the experience for anyone unlucky enough to be at home. When Deanna left, clutching an armful of thick orange card stock, Marja Browers stopped by, wondering if I could draw up some kind of schedule for “running buddies.” I was fumbling my way through a spreadsheet when Kelsey came into my office, draping herself across the chair in front of me. I was already in a foul mood, not to mention exhausted from spending half the night on the golf course with Victor Mesbah, who’d been so full of bloodlust I was afraid he would shoot himself in the foot. Or worse, shoot me. Liz had already been asleep when I came in, and she’d been frosty this morning, as if I’d been out for a night on the town without her.
“I’m very busy, Kelsey,” I said, stabbing at a few keys to emphasize the point.
She leaned forward, centering my nameplate on my desk. She lifted the framed photo of Liz and me at a friend’s wedding in Napa, studying us closely.
“Kelsey, I’m serious. Did you need something?”
“I was just wondering if you found what I left for you.” She was close enough for me to smell her lotion, both nutty and sweet at the same time.
I looked around the room slowly, as if I were scanning for a booby trap or a car bomb.
She placed her palms on my desk and leaned forward, giving me a straight shot down her shirt. “Not here. In your bedroom, silly.”
I pushed back my chair, wanting to stand. My legs felt as substantial as jelly. “What do you mean?”
When she straightened, she flung her hair over her shoulder in a dramatic arc. It was a calculated move. Everything she did was calculated, designed for attention. Had she learned about life from reading men’s magazines, from watching porn on her laptop? She smiled at me. “If I told you what it was, that would take away all the fun.”
I watched her leave, trying to stay calm. I wanted to race out of the office, tear through the clubhouse, across the parking lot, down the street. Count to a hundred, I ordered myself. I didn’t make it past ten.
She wasn’t in the hall or the dining room, although I expected her around every corner, stretching out a hand and inviting me to follow her, like the White Rabbit, down, down, down. I took deliberate steps, one foot in front of the other. I said hello to a waitress emerging from the dining room with three plates balanced on her arms. I passed Myriam and told her I’d be back in my office in just a few minutes. I clapped Rich on the back and declined his offer of a Bloody Mary.
“I hear you were out there keeping us safe,” he said. “I bet we’re out of danger now.”
Not at all, I thought. Not a bit.
It was bright outside, a deceptively cold East Bay morning. I let myself in through the front door and took the stairs two at a time. Danielle met me on the landing, surprised. My mind had been reeling with worst-case scenarios, and I’d simply forgotten about her.
“Why are you here?” Danielle asked.
“I live here. Why are you here?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not feeling so great. I need a private bathroom.”
“Ewwwww...” she groaned, waving me past.
I locked the bedroom doors behind me and surveyed the scene. My clothes were draped over a chair, where I’d left them last night. Liz’s pajamas were balled next to them. I’d made the bed haphazardly this morning, and the duvet hung low on my side. Nothing looked out of place, nothing looked as if it didn’t belong. But I wasn’t the most observant guy under the best of circumstances. I was the wrong person for this sick little game.
I pulled back the sheets, running my hand under the pillows and along the foot of the mattress, gingerly, as though I was away at summer camp, feeling in my sleeping bag for a snake. I opened my nightstand drawer, then Liz’s, rifling through the junk that had accumulated there in only a couple of months. I was beginning to feel queasy, imagining Kelsey in our room, touching our sheets, holding the tube of K-Y Jelly in Liz’s nightstand. I bent to the floor, lifting the bed skirt. Nothing. I rifled through my dresser, upsetting the folded stacks of boxers, the balled pairs of socks. Nothing. I was more careful with Liz’s dresser. If she came in the room right now, or Danielle did, how would I explain myself?
But there was nothing.
Fuck.
Maybe it was there, but I just didn’t know what I was supposed to find. What would an obsessed teenager leave in the bedroom of a man three times her age? A folded love letter, a heart drawn in lipstick on the vanity mirror?
She was sick—that was it. She was a sick person, this was a sick joke. And somehow I was the punch line. I’d fallen right into it.
I flushed the toilet twice before leaving the master suite, and called, “All better now,” as I passed Danielle’s room.
She was lying on her bed, reading a book, and she grimaced at me. “Seriously? TMI.”
* * *
I didn’t see Kelsey again that day, but I jumped every time someone passed in the hallway. In the dining room, I chose a seat with my back to the corner, like a character in a gangster movie. I wasn’t going to be surprised by her again.
That night in bed, Liz ran her hand down my back in a quiet invitation, and I rolled over to face her. I slid my hands beneath her top, helped her wriggle out of the bottoms. But I wasn’t able to shut out the image of Kelsey in this very room, invading what had been a sacred space. Eyes closed, I could picture her in detail—the long line of her legs, the pink scar on her kneecap. When I opened my eyes, I had a vision of her standing just over Liz’s shoulder, smiling that teasing smile.
“Hey,” Liz said, sliding off me, her skin clammy with sweat. “What’s wrong?”
I claimed exhaustion, which was true. I’d hardly slept the night before, and my mind had been racing, endlessly, around the same track. I’d pawed through our room like a cat burglar sniffing out a dirty secret.
“You’re sure that’s it?” she asked, and when I glanced at her, she’d gone still, as if she were holding her breath, waiting for my reply.
Tell her.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
* * *
From that point on, I resolved not to look at Kelsey, not to talk to her, not to give her the slightest acknowledgment. School started, which meant that five days a week, she was out of sight until four thirty. After that, I locked my office door, citing a call to make, business that couldn’t be interrupted.
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Paula Treick DeBoard
Critically acclaimed author of The Mourning Hours and The Fragile World, Paula Treick DeBoard returns with a tale of dark secrets, shocking lies and a dangerous obsession that will change one neighbourhood forever Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she's felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she's determined to make it work—if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who's about to enter high school.Yet underneath the glossy veneer of The Palms, life is far from idyllic. In a place where reputation is everything, Liz soon discovers that even the friendliest residents can't be trusted. So when the gorgeous girl next door befriends Danielle, Liz can't help but find sophisticated Kelsey's interest in her shy and slightly nerdy daughter a bit suspicious.But while Kelsey quickly becomes a fixture in the McGinnis home, Liz's relationships with both Danielle and Phil grow strained. Now even her own family seems to be hiding things, and it's not long before their dream of living the high life quickly spirals out of control…
Critically acclaimed author of The Mourning Hours and The Fragile World, Paula Treick DeBoard returns with a tale of dark secrets, shocking lies and a dangerous obsession that will change one neighborhood forever
Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she’s felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she’s determined to make it work—if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who’s about to enter high school.
Yet underneath the glossy veneer of The Palms, life is far from idyllic. In a place where reputation is everything, Liz soon discovers that even the friendliest residents can’t be trusted. So when the gorgeous girl next door befriends Danielle, Liz can’t help but find sophisticated Kelsey’s interest in her shy and slightly nerdy daughter a bit suspicious.
But while Kelsey quickly becomes a fixture in the McGinnis home, Liz’s relationships with both Danielle and Phil grow strained. Now even her own family seems to be hiding things, and it’s not long before their dream of living the high life quickly spirals out of control...
Praise for the novels of Paula Treick DeBoard (#ulink_996b812e-19e3-56df-9bcf-295a0a2da525)
“In Paula Treick DeBoard’s latest breathtaking thriller, she paints a stark and chillingly real portrayal of a family torn apart by teenage transgressions. Gritty and inauspicious from the start, The Drowning Girls left me awestruck, revealing DeBoard’s true brilliance as an author. Spellbinding.”
—Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Girl
“The Drowning Girls by Paula Treick DeBoard is cleverly plotted, full of twists and turns and so well-written that it pulls you in from page one. Genuinely suspenseful, Treick DeBoard delivers a disturbing, multilayered, provocative novel that is impossible to put down.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence
“A heart-pounding look at what lies behind the deceptively placid veneer of the well-to-do suburbs. The kaleidoscopic view of innocence, danger, and malice shifts and twists as it races to a shattering conclusion.”
—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One on The Drowning Girls
“In The Drowning Girls, DeBoard pulls you right into her world and holds you in her grip until the book’s final twist. Fans of The Good Girl and The Luckiest Girl Alive, and really anyone who enjoys great suspense, have found their next must-read. Sure to be the book everyone is talking about in 2016, I could not put it down.”
—Catherine McKenzie, bestselling author of Hidden and Smoke
“The Drowning Girls casts a spell as brilliant and alluring as the gated community of its setting. Paula Treick DeBoard maps this world of privilege and secrets with a deft hand, and from the novel’s terrifying opening pages reveals a family’s tragic unraveling. These characters long for love and happiness, but the trail of duplicity that ultimately ensnares them creates a suspenseful and compelling page-turner I couldn’t put down.”
—Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls
“A coming-of-age tale about a family in crisis expertly told by Ms. DeBoard. The Fragile World examines how profound loss changes all who are forced to come to terms with it. Touching and compelling, it will move you.”
—Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing
“Assured storytelling propels DeBoard’s first novel.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Mourning Hours
“Rich and evocative…compelling.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Mourning Hours
“Tautly written and beautifully evocative, The Mourning Hours is a gripping portrayal of a family straining against extraordinary pressure, and a powerful tale of loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness.”
—Bookreporter.com (http://www.Bookreporter.com)
The Drowning Girls
Paula Treick DeBoard
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Will, for always.
“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything is Illuminated
Contents
Cover (#u4b0305e6-1d7d-5b3e-8f31-b5fb7556a90f)
Back Cover Text (#u0e6e5224-b8eb-5869-95e5-32086eb8b0a2)
Praise (#u3b6a4e6b-29dd-5ee2-a98d-f1c9eb591d86)
Title Page (#u7252ddbe-0938-5e3d-a20c-302c951e9602)
Dedication (#u3565d0c9-1aa3-53d0-a596-6ee15e1551b4)
Quote (#u49c2c2c3-669d-50d9-a909-8edd8e616d16)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:40 P.M. (#u1d851ca4-8343-5773-a020-339e8ed649ee)
LIZ (#u037d2488-1c96-5cfa-b7cd-7e3db3531bca)
JUNE 2014—LIZ (#ucb2be916-92d9-5c12-943c-e8e070fcdd94)
PHIL (#u1f3fa1eb-e4ae-59d2-9545-29bdd61934f5)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:43 P.M. (#udd4231f7-4348-5898-ac8f-5568d3b052ea)
LIZ (#u5432d22c-775e-59ee-9fe2-82ac45e04e0a)
JULY 2014—LIZ (#u9d5552c0-8155-56e4-acaf-70e6fe81ca76)
PHIL (#ua09b9404-cd19-57d0-bd04-d2ca0726caf7)
JUNE 19, 2015—5:56 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
AUGUST 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:02 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
SEPTEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:14 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
OCTOBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:21 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
NOVEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:32 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
DECEMBER 2014—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—6:57 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
JANUARY 2015—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—7:09 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
FEBRUARY 2015—LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
PHIL (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015—8:42 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
LIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (#litres_trial_promo)
A CONVERSATION WITH PAULA TREICK DEBOARD (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
JUNE 19, 2015 5:40 P.M. (#ulink_b263d429-8ece-5fa6-a8f7-b647014024fa)
LIZ (#ulink_431cabd6-53cc-5c9c-bd80-87f5d4743186)
Someone was screaming.
For a moment, with the ceiling fan whirring quietly over my head, I allowed myself to believe it was a benign sound—the kids next door on their play structure, maybe, sliding and swinging and climbing, their voices carrying on a breeze.
I propped myself up on my elbows, blinking myself awake. How long had I been sleeping? Twenty minutes, an hour? The tank top I was wearing was streaked with dust and damp with sweat. Dizzy, I focused on my bare feet, where chipped red polish dotted my toes. On the dresser was a nearly empty bottle of Riesling, a slick ring of condensation bubbling on the wood.
I reached a hand onto Phil’s side of the bed, groping and coming up empty. Of course. Phil was gone, and he’d taken everything with him—armfuls of shirts and pants, suit coats and blazers, slippery mounds of ties and belts, even the dry cleaning in its plastic sheeting. Shoes, too: wing tips, loafers, sneakers, the pair of black Converse I’d never once seen him wear. He’d taken the neatly folded stacks of T-shirts and boxers, the lumps of paired socks, the heavy woolen sweater that smelled like a Greek fishing village—or at least, how I’d imagined a Greek fishing village would smell, briny and deep-down damp.
After he left, I’d searched the floor for a button, a collar stay, a lonely sock, as if I could keep that one discarded thing as evidence of our life together. For a long time, I’d wanted to go back, to pin our relationship to a wall and study it, like a specimen, from every angle. I wanted to be able to say: Here. This is where it all went wrong. This was the point at which the inevitable was still evitable.
But that was a long time ago. Months now.
I shook my head, chasing away the thoughts, and heard the screams again, over a relentless pounding of bass. Was the television on downstairs? That was the simple explanation, and for a moment, I allowed myself to be reassured by the thought of actors following a script, raising their voices on cue.
And then I remembered: the girls.
The pool.
The screams were coming from outside, distorted by the triple-paned windows, as if they were being filtered through a kaleidoscope, splitting and fracturing.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and moved toward the door. My head pounded, an angry thing.
Danielle.
My baby.
No—not a baby. Fifteen and so angry we’d barely exchanged more than a sentence in a month.
I stumbled on the stairs, catching myself with a hand on the rail. Steady, Liz. I had to navigate around the stacks of boxes in the foyer marked Towels and Office and, helpfully, Stuff.
Closer now, the screams became words, and the words became language, mixed with the thumping of the stereo, the music that had been playing all afternoon.
Help!
Mom!
Ohmygodno!
I yanked open the sliding door, catching my foot on the frame in my hurry. A bright bloom of pain flowered in my vision. After the interior darkness, the outside was a trick of sunlight, bright against the water, a shimmering, endless blue. I squinted into the glare, trying to understand what I was seeing.
It looked at first like a game of tug-of-war, a three-headed, six-armed monster writhing in the water.
But of course, it wasn’t a game.
It was another inevitable, a thing that had been coming and coming, a thing I’d let come. There were three girls in the water and one of them was limp, her head flopped forward, blond hair plastered over her face.
Still the shouts came, an unrelenting swirl of voices. In that half second while my mind puzzled, before my body could snap into action, I realized that the loudest voice, the one that couldn’t stop screaming, belonged to me.
JUNE 2014 LIZ (#ulink_e72a9c3e-e396-5535-bff2-566ec3d73dbb)
The Mesbahs’ house was only a block away, but it was a long block, outsize the way everything else was at The Palms—half-acre lots, semicircular driveways, the occasional six-foot frond dropped from one of the signature palm trees like the feather of an exotic, towering bird. Next to me, Phil had his hands in his pockets, his legs shooting forward in confident strides. I kept my eyes on my feet, sure that one of my heels would snag in a sidewalk crack.
“It’s the Spanish Revival, right around the corner from you,” Myriam Mesbah had said during our sole conversation the week before, when I’d called to RSVP for the party. I’d scribbled Spanish revival? on the back of a receipt so I’d remember to look it up on Google later. “The whole neighborhood will be there,” she’d said. “You can’t miss it.”
Her words always carried that sense of emphasis—as if they needed italics, air quotes, long deliberate stresses. What I have to say is important.
Spanish Revival meant curves and arches, white stucco and terra-cotta tile and ornamental ironwork. It meant courtyards and balconies and quiet little nooks. For the Mesbahs and everyone else in The Palms, it meant a minimum of four thousand square feet and a resale value that was climbing—an asset they could list in a portfolio along with the apartment on the Upper East Side, the villa in Tuscany, the time-shares in Bali and Saint Thomas and little islands with names I couldn’t pronounce or locate on a map.
To me, it was just intimidating.
As we passed through the ornamental gate and entered the courtyard, Phil squeezed my hand, already damp and tacky with sweat. His grin belied a fierce kind of optimism.
We were three weeks into our new life, our boxes mostly unpacked, the strong leathery smell beginning to wear off the couches, fingerprints already smearing our stainless appliances. Still, I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that it was an experiment, like one of Danielle’s science projects on trifold cardboard: hypothesis, observation, data, conclusion.
Hypothesis: the McGinnises will never fit in with these people.
The observations were in progress, the data accumulating.
But I figured it was a foregone conclusion: we didn’t belong.
The Mesbahs’ house was humming with energy—outside the ten-foot mahogany doors, we heard the low pulse of music, a woman’s high-pitched laugh over the other voices. It was seven twenty, late enough to avoid the awkwardness of being too early, of having to stand around and explain ourselves, the new people. I’d taken my time in the bathroom, selecting a pair of earrings, spraying my hair repeatedly, dabbing the dregs of an old perfume bottle on my wrists—anything to avoid this moment, to prolong the inevitable.
Phil made a minuscule adjustment to his collar and breathed a short huff into his cupped palm, checking his breath. “Ready?”
I caught his fist halfway to the knock, imagining them all standing just inside the door, turning to look at us. “No.”
“Liz...”
“I know. Just give me...” I bent down and began to fiddle with the straps on my sandals. They’d been a last-minute purchase only this afternoon, after I’d rejected every single thing in my closet as being wrong for this kind of event. The trouble was that I didn’t understand the event. It wasn’t a barbecue; it was no one’s birthday. The invitation had read An instruction on wine and cheese pairing, as if we were meant to come armed with spiral notebooks and expect an exam at the end. In the dressing room at Macy’s, I’d felt good enough about the silky black pants to put them on my credit card; now, bent nearly double in the Mesbahs’ courtyard, I noticed that the fabric across my thighs was creased horizontally with hash marks. I loosened the skinny strap on one shoe and rebuckled it into the next hole before shifting my attention to the other foot.
“Come on,” Phil breathed.
Sure—I was stalling. Every minute spent on the Mesbahs’ porch was a minute I wouldn’t have to spend inside their house. In our previous lives, Phil and I had lived in a three-bedroom rental a few blocks off the freeway. When friends invited us over, we stopped by Trader Joe’s for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of microbrew. That was a social convention I understood. On the bottom of this invitation had been printed, in delicate scroll: Donations will be accepted for Shriners Hospital, Sacramento.
“So this is a thing?” I’d asked Phil, showing him the invitation. “Come to our house, bring your checkbook and we’ll teach you about wine?”
He’d shrugged. “It’s just an excuse to get together. It sounds fun.”
“We’re going?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
I’d been saying it in a hundred ways, and he hadn’t heard me yet. Because these aren’t our kind of people. Because we don’t belong. It was all a mistake, beginning with Phil’s new job and our move to The Palms, and ending with me standing in front of the Mesbahs’ front door in these silly pants and uncomfortable shoes.
“All right,” Phil said now in the voice he sometimes used with Danielle, when she took too long in the bathroom or kept him waiting in the car. I secured the second buckle and straightened, spotting the outline of the folded envelope in his breast pocket. Two hundred dollars, payable to the Shriners Hospital of Sacramento, the going rate of admission into the social world of The Palms. It was both more than we could afford and ridiculously cheap, considering the heavy door knocker and the immaculate tile work.
“We wouldn’t want to miss any instruction,” I said, trying to bring back a note of levity, of shared camaraderie and let’s-make-the-best-of-it. But Phil was looking away from me, the door was opening and the joke was lost.
Victor Mesbah stood in the doorway, a glass of wine in one hand. In the golden light from the wall sconces, it looked like blood sloshing in his glass. “Here they are!” he boomed in a voice that echoed off the floors. “Just when we were beginning to think you wouldn’t show.”
Phil met his aggressive handshake. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
I extended a hand, too, but Victor threw his free arm around my shoulder. “It’s so nice to meet you,” I said, but his neck smothered my words.
“Liz, finally,” Myriam said, and I disentangled myself from Victor’s half hug. She was slender and severely beautiful, with a nose that would have been too much on another woman. She hooked me by the arm and led me through a wide foyer to an open great room, our heels clattering on the mahogany floors. “Our new neighbors, the McGinnises,” she announced to the room at large, where at least a dozen couples were gathered in polite clusters. Everyone turned, chorusing their hellos. They looked so smooth and shiny, as if they’d all arrived, en masse, from appointments at the salon. Overhead, an enormous ceiling fan moved like a sluggish insect.
“Of course, most of us have met Phil by now. But you’ve been so elusive. I’ve wondered about you, alone in that house all day,” Myriam continued.
“Not alone, exactly. My daughter, Danielle...we’ve been unpacking, getting things in order,” I said. This was only half-true. Danielle was gone for the week, and after a few days of diligent unpacking, I’d stacked the rest of the boxes in the living room, with vague plans to tackle one a day for the rest of the summer.
Next to me, I could feel Myriam’s interest waning, her eyes roving the room. “Come on,” she said, her hand still at my elbow. “Let me get you something to drink and I’ll make some introductions.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Phil, who had already forgotten his promise to stay by my side. That was one of the benefits of being a couple, after all—in new situations, we could share the little anecdotes about each other that we wouldn’t have mentioned about ourselves, play off each other like a straight man and a comic. But already a few of the men had stepped forward to talk to Phil, and Victor had a possessive arm clapped to his back.
I smiled at Myriam. “That would be wonderful.” She released my arm and left me standing alone, in front of the frank stares of my neighbors. It was the adult equivalent of a naked-at-school nightmare. I felt the blush rising up my neck, settling in rosy splotches on my cheeks. It was funny—back in our old lives, I never gave much thought to who my neighbors were or what they thought of me. But The Palms was so exclusive, so tightly knit, it was like living in a fishbowl.
“So, you’re in the Rameys’ house,” someone said, the voice rising disembodied from a corner. “Thank goodness. That place was empty for what...eight months?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, it was more than eight months,” someone else answered. “Don’t you remember how the lawn just about died out?”
“Well, however long it was, I’m so glad someone finally bought the place.”
“Actually, we—” I began, then stopped. Didn’t everyone know? The house had come with Phil’s job, a package deal. Parker-Lane covered our lease and $1,495 in monthly HOA fees, or room and board, as I’d come to think of it, with a salary that left us house-rich, cash-poor. In practical terms, this meant that the people who were fawning over us now were also paying dearly for the right to hit tennis balls and jog along the community trail, while we could do those things for free. I tried again, feeling the need to set the record straight. “My husband, Phil, is...”
But my husband, at that moment, let out a hearty laugh from somewhere behind me. He was telling a story, his accent strong despite two decades away from Melbourne. Men and women alike were drawn to that accent—imagining, I supposed, a swashbuckling hero in the outback. Heads turned to look in his direction, and in the swirl of voices, my words were lost.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Myriam said, stepping in to clarify. She handed me a glass, saying, “Cabernet.” Then to the room at large, she announced, “Phil is our new community relations specialist, but they’ll be living right here, on-site. Isn’t that fantastic?”
I nodded, ducking my head as if to study the wine more closely. Maybe she thought of us as charity cases, worthy of a fund-raiser. Donations will be accepted on behalf of the McGinnises, who have only been able to furnish half of their four thousand square feet.
“Let’s see,” Myriam said. “Where should we start? I suppose you’ve met the Sieverts.”
“I haven’t really met anyone,” I confessed. “What with all the unpacking...”
“Well, then, here we go,” Myriam said, taking a swallow from her own glass, as if to fortify herself.
For the past three weeks, I’d been watching my neighbors from the safety of my front porch with a morning cup of coffee, like an anthropologist afraid to actually encounter the natives. I’d seen them entering and exiting the community trail in their jogging clothes, the men with their long shinbones, the women with their tight ponytails. Our greetings had never gone beyond a raised hand of solidarity, a brisk Hello! Who were these people? I’d wondered. What did they do, how could they afford such extravagant lives? The answers were in a stack of file boxes temporarily relocated to our dining room while Phil’s office was being repainted. I knew it was wrong, or at least wrongish, as my sister, Allie, and I used to say, to sneak these clandestine peeks into strangers’ lives, but from the moment I opened the first manila folder, I lacked all willpower to stop. I pawed through housing applications, ogled the lists of assets (three thousand acres in Montana! The yacht, the wine collection, the jewelry!) and raised an eyebrow at the alphabet soup that trailed their names—CEO, CFO, MBA, MD. Someone in Phase 2 had paid $750,000 for a racehorse, and I still had four years of payments on my student loan.
I’d emailed Allie in Chicago: One of my neighbors has an actual Picasso.
She replied, I have a set of four Picasso coasters. I’d fit right in.
Being at the Mesbahs’ party was like playing a real-life game of Memory—matching the faces of the people in front of me with the snippets of information I already knew.
The Sieverts were our closest neighbors across the street. Rich owned a string of fast-food restaurants in the Bay Area; Deanna (only twenty-four, I remembered from their file), was his second wife. It was Rich’s son, Mac, from his first marriage, who drove the monster truck that blasted to life several times a day and was often parked crookedly in their four-car driveway.
“Don’t you just love living in The Palms?” Deanna asked. She shimmered next to me in a strapless green pantsuit, her question punctuated by the grip of her glittery fingernails on my forearm. Up close, her hair was a brassy, yellowish blond.
“I do,” I said, and then with more emphasis, as if I were performing for a lie detector test, “It’s really great.”
“Moving on,” Myriam murmured, her hand at my elbow.
The Berglands owned the colonial farmhouse closest to the clubhouse; they passed by our house a few times each day in a burgundy Suburban loaded with kids. Carly Bergland was so petite, her baby bump stood out like a ledge, perfectly positioned to hold a glass of mineral water. “You’d think we’d learn,” she said, rubbing her belly. “This is number six. But babies are our business, I guess you could say.”
“Carly and Jeremy own Nah-Nah Foods,” Myriam explained.
I remembered this from their files—Nah-Nah Foods was an organic baby food business. “That’s fantastic,” I said.
Carly smiled. “Have you seen our displays in Whole Foods? We mostly do formula, but we’ve been venturing into the world of purees.”
The one time I’d gone into Whole Foods, I’d left with a twelve-dollar carton of blueberries and vowed never to return. “I’ll have to look for it,” I said.
Carly took a sip of her water. “I have a mommy blog, too. Between the two ventures, we’ve been very successful.” There was no trace of modesty in her voice, none of the sarcasm or self-deprecation that was my staple. In his first weeks, Phil had received a number of complaints about the Berglands—kids’ toys on the lawn, bikes left at the curb. I wondered if she knew that.
“My oldest must be about the age of your daughter,” Carly continued. “Hannah. She’s fifteen.”
I smiled. “Danielle’s fourteen. Just starting high school. Where does Hannah go?”
Carly blinked. “Oh, no. She’s homeschooled. We won’t even dream of it anymore, with the state of public education—”
Myriam steered me away, her grip insistent. This was her task as a hostess, I realized, an obligation she was determined to fulfill so she could be done with me.
I recognized Trevor and Marja Browers as the couple who walked past my house each morning at sunrise, their two white heads bobbing in sync, their hands raised in benevolent hellos. I’d come to think of them as the grandparents of the community. Trevor was a laser specialist, officially retired from Lawrence-Livermore Labs, although he still consulted part-time. “He has top-level security clearance,” Myriam said. “And Marja, dear Marja...”
“It’s very secluded here, ja?” Marja asked, her Dutch accent strong. Her face was soft and friendly, accented with a slash of red lipstick.
I stopped myself, but only barely, from agreeing with a ja in return.
She smiled, revealing teeth that were charmingly crooked. “Sometimes too secluded, if you know what I mean?”
I did.
Oh, I did.
We were only a few feet away when Myriam whispered, “We call those socialist teeth,” with a wicked laugh at her own joke. I realized it was the same laugh she would utter when I left. We call those sales-rack shoes.
I decided right there that I hated her—that I hated all of them—as we worked our way through the room: the Roche-Edwardses, the Navarres, the Coffeys. They blended together, along with their details: the Mediterranean with the blue mosaic inlay, the husband in finance, the daughter who had been homecoming queen. I nodded along, my feet aching in my heels. Was it too early to leave, to grab Phil’s arm and make a run for it, claiming exhaustion or food poisoning or cramps? When I got home, I promised myself, I would toss these sandals into the depths of our walk-in closet, which was large enough to guarantee I wouldn’t have to see them again, ever. I would avoid all other parties, all fund-raisers and wine-and-cheese pairings. Where was the cheese, anyway? It was a horrible trick of advertising.
Victor passed, touching my shoulder. “Are you having a good time?”
In a mirror over the fireplace, I saw my own wine-stained smile reflected back at me.
Myriam pointed out Janet Neimeyer, who was anywhere between forty and sixty, her body toned and deeply tanned next to her white dress, skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. “She got the house in the divorce settlement,” Myriam said casually. “She likes her men, but if she settles down, she’ll have to kiss this place goodbye.”
“Oh,” I said, not sure how I was supposed to react. I looked mournfully at the half inch of wine in my glass, wondering where the rest had gone.
“And that’s Helen Zhang,” Myriam continued. I sorted through my mental file, remembering that Helen and her husband were both dermatologists, parents of twin boys. Helen had short, almost boyish hair that somehow framed her face perfectly.
“Oh, sure. I’ve seen her walking a dog around the neighborhood.”
“Yes,” Myriam said, her mouth tight. “Isn’t he the most darling thing?”
Too late, I remembered something else Phil had told me—that the Mesbahs had filed various complaints against the Zhangs, whose darling dog had a tendency to bark at inconvenient hours.
And then there was Daisy Asbill, former Google employee turned wife of a Google executive. She was young and slim-hipped in a gray silk dress. “Does your daughter babysit?” she asked me. “I’ve got twins, and sometimes it’s about impossible to find someone...”
I hedged, recalling that Danielle’s sole babysitting effort for a neighbor down the street in Livermore had been a semidisaster.
“Oh, I don’t mean all the time,” Daisy qualified, sensing my hesitation. “Only when the nanny has the day off.”
“Of course,” I said, savoring this one: only when the nanny has the day off. Allie would get a kick out of that.
Over and over I said It’s so nice to meet you and We’re loving it out here and took miniscule sips of cabernet, trying to make it last as long as possible. My mouth ached from incessant smiling. At one point, Helen asked if Myriam’s closet was finished, and half the crowd trooped down the hallway to see the improvements. I spotted Phil next to Rich Sievert, a fresh glass in his hand. He smiled at me, and I took a relieved step toward him.
“Oh, here they are,” Deanna called, stepping between us. At the front door, Victor was fussing over another couple, so tall and blond and perfectly paired, they might have been a set of Barbies.
“So sorry we’re late,” the woman said, giving cheek kisses as she moved through the entryway. Her hair was so blond it was almost colorless, her eyes a piercing blue. As she came closer, I realized that she was an older version of a girl I’d seen walking through the neighborhood, her head bent, thumbs tapping the screen of her cell phone. “Oh, hello.” She smiled at me. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Sonia Jorgensen.”
“Liz McGinnis,” I said, shifting my glass so we could shake hands. Sonia’s nails were pale silver, her skin buttery soft.
“Liz’s husband is the one with the yummy British accent,” Deanna put in, suddenly at my side.
“Australian,” I corrected.
“Don’t you just love British accents? It’s like those episodes of, what’s it called? On Netflix?” Deanna wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Oh! Downton Abbey!”
Sonia Jorgensen smiled at me, the sort of smile that made us coconspirators. Isn’t she ridiculous? She half turned toward me, her shoulders subtly angling Deanna out of the conversation. “We’re your neighbors right around the corner, I think. The two-story Grecian—”
“Oh, with the columns,” I said. When we’d first passed the house, Danielle had gaped. “Who lives there?” And I’d answered, “A dead president.”
“Yes! Tim—that’s my husband—said he wasn’t sure about them, but when I saw the designs, I just knew.”
“It’s a beautiful house.”
“Sonia’s a party planner,” Deanna said, edging back into the conversation. “She flies all over the world, just putting on parties. Can you imagine?”
“Corporate events, mostly,” Sonia explained. “I try to stay as far from weddings as possible.”
Deanna shook her head. “I’m so jealous it makes me sick. I try to get Rich to go somewhere, and he looks at me like I’ve got three heads.”
Sonia looked at her pointedly. “You just got back from Hawaii.”
“Right, but it was just Hawaii. We go there all the time,” Deanna pouted. Her effusiveness was both familiar and uncomfortable—a slightly more polished version of a high school student. “You’ve been to— Where did you just get back from?”
“Corpus Christi,” Sonia said. “Hardly exotic.”
“Still,” Deanna whined.
Sonia turned to me, her eyes crinkling in a smile. “Liz. Is that short for Elizabeth?”
There was something engaging about her, something that made me lower my guard, my mouth relaxing into its first genuine smile of the night. “No, just Liz. I always wanted to be an Elizabeth, though. I used to sign my name that way on my papers in elementary school.”
Sonia’s laugh showed teeth so straight and white, they might have belonged to a dental hygienist. “What did your parents think about that?”
“Oh, you know, typical kid stuff.” I took a careful sip of wine. Of course she didn’t know; it wasn’t the sort of situation a person could guess. My mom was fully blind by the time I was in elementary school, so she never saw my name on any work sheets or permission slips or report cards. And my dad wouldn’t have noticed—he was too busy seeing everything else. Elizabeth had been my own private rebellion.
“So, Liz, then. What do you do?”
I finished the last drop of wine in my glass. Funny—but after all the introductions tonight, Sonia was the first person to ask about me. “I’m a high school counselor,” I said. “Miles Landers High School, in Livermore.”
Sonia’s eyes widened, and I braced myself for the cocked head, the subtle up-and-down assessment. Was she calculating my salary, my overall net worth? Was she recalling the sudden appearance of my seven-year-old Camry in the neighborhood, remembering that most of our clothes had been packed in black plastic garbage bags, toted from my trunk to the house? But she surprised me by grabbing my arm. “Oh, my God. That’s wonderful.”
“Well...” Wonderful was overstating it a bit, although I did love my job. In seven years, I’d never had the same day twice. “This year will be interesting, because my daughter will be there, too. She’s going to be a freshman.”
“Oh, this is fantastic. You don’t understand... My daughter, Kelsey, is starting there in the fall. She’ll be a sophomore. She used to go to Ashbury Prep, but...well, that’s a story for another time. It turns out those other kids were such bad influences. But this is such a fantastic coincidence. It’ll be so nice for Kelsey to have some friendly faces at Miles Landers, not to mention another responsible adult in her life.”
Her touch was warm, as if we’d known each other for years. I recognized it as the mom connection, a bond that had always been elusive for me. I’d been a single mom for most of Danielle’s life, those early years spent shuttling between her day care and my internships, and later between the carpool lane at her elementary school and the counseling office. There had never been time to get to know the other moms, and I’d envied their chummy closeness at back-to-school nights and honor-roll assemblies.
“That will be nice,” I agreed, allowing myself to get sucked into the moment. Of course, there was no guarantee that our daughters would be friends. Danielle spent most of her days with her nose in a book. Kelsey, from what I’d observed, was years ahead of her socially. I remembered her walking past in her microshorts and tank tops, her bra straps winking like a dirty secret.
“So, would it be weird...” Sonia began. “I’m just thinking out loud here, and you can feel free to say no. But maybe we could plan some kind of get-together for them?”
I grinned. “Like...a playdate?”
Sonia laughed. “Well—I don’t know. Is that silly? It could just be a little thing. I’d be happy to host.”
Deanna returned, as if she’d been listening in from just over my shoulder. “What a great idea! We could invite all the teenagers at The Palms. Let’s see—there’s Mac, the Zhang boys, Hannah Bergland...”
Sonia’s gaze crossed mine, tolerant and amused. How did she do it? How did she keep her composure, keep herself from laughing or rolling her eyes? Pay attention, I ordered myself, as if I were watching for clues on how to be a woman, on what to wear, on when to speak.
“Are you sure Mac would be interested?” she asked.
Deanna rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. He just hangs around the house all day doing nothing, driving me insane.”
And then I made the connection between the driver of the massive yellow truck and the name I’d heard often enough at school over the past three years. Mac Sievert, the chronic underachiever; Mac Sievert, the big man on campus. “I just realized Mac goes to Miles Landers. He’s a senior?”
Deanna laughed, taking an exaggerated sip of her wine. “Oh, poor you. I was waiting for you to figure that out. Just remember, when he fails Econ, the phone call goes to his dad, not to me. One of the benefits of being the stepmother,” she added with a wink.
“Noted,” I said.
“This is a great idea,” Deanna gushed. “I’ll go tell Helen.”
We watched her walk away, heels clacking on the hardwood.
Sonia cleared her throat. “Well, I guess I’m hosting the neighborhood. What about Saturday night? Would that work with Danielle’s schedule?”
“She gets back from science camp tomorrow, so—I’m sure that’s fine.”
Sonia mock-swooned, latching onto my sleeve. I was sure this was the most my arm had been touched, ever, and I had a blind mother. “Science camp. I love it. Hang on to that phase while you can. Kelsey’s into boys and clothes and drama. Fifteen going on thirty.”
I smiled. Danielle hadn’t yet discovered those things, but I knew it was coming. At the beginning of her eighth grade year, I’d had to hide her favorite pair of camo pants, purchased from the army surplus store, when she insisted on wearing them three days in a row. But for her graduation last month, we’d spent hours combing the mall for a dress. I commented, “Sometimes I think Danielle is still fourteen going on twelve.”
Victor breezed past, swapping out my empty glass for a full one, and Sonia and I smiled at each other. Wordlessly, we touched our glasses together, and they produced an inharmonious clink.
There was a burst of chatter as Myriam and the rest of the women filed back into the room, having exhausted the virtues of the remodeled closet. Janet Neimeyer just couldn’t get over the lighting; Helen Zhang was noting the name of the contractor.
I felt a hand on my back, a warm hand, the thumb running over the ridge of my spine. I glanced over my shoulder and Phil gave me a happy, sloppy grin, his cheeks flushed.
* * *
Halfway home, I propped myself against Phil and wiggled out of my shoes, not able to tolerate them for another step. I tipped to one side, laughing, and he caught me. Were the neighbors watching from their windows, behind their custom drapes, the slats of their plantation blinds? Somehow it didn’t matter as much anymore.
“So we survived,” Phil said. “It wasn’t the horror show we imagined.”
“I suppose it could have been worse.”
He pulled me close and I leaned against him, warm and light-headed. His breath smelled like the wine Victor had foisted on us, refilling our glasses until I’d lost count.
Ahead of us, our house loomed, a towering behemoth. I’d begun to think of it as a chameleon—neutral beige in the morning, so dark just after sunset that it became almost invisible. Despite several attempts with the manual, neither of us had figured out the automated lighting system, so the front porch was rendered a dark alcove, hidden in the sloped overhang of the Tudor roofline. While Phil fumbled with the house key, I tugged his shirt from his waistband, pressing my hand against the flat of his back.
He threw open the door, grinning. “I like where this is going.”
“I’m a horrible drunk,” I confessed, backing into the house, dropping my sandals onto the tile entry. With one hand, I undid the buttons of my blouse.
“That’s what I love about you,” Phil said, letting the door click shut behind him. My blouse fell open and he whistled. “Anyway, define horrible.”
It was too hard to talk. My words felt slurred, my tongue thick. It was easier to kiss him, to show rather than tell.
We were good at this; I’d come to realize that we were maybe best at this. It had been there from the beginning—a playful physical attraction, the foresight that our bodies would be good together. We’d met at a Sharks game, neither of us particularly hockey fans, both of us accompanying friends with extra tickets. Phil, seated behind me, had spilled beer on my sweatshirt and spent the rest of the night apologizing over my shoulder, then flirting, charming me with that accent. I’d had a few beers, too, which was the only way I could explain the kiss I gave him in the parking lot after the game, one that was long and ripe and full of promise, as if I didn’t have a child at home, an early morning ahead of me. On the train back to Livermore, I’d laughed at myself, so stupid for thinking that a kiss with a stranger was anything more than a kiss with a stranger. And then twelve hours later, he’d walked into the counseling office at Miles Landers, a bouquet of daisies in one hand.
That was five years ago.
We pulled apart now, and I sloughed off my blouse, the fabric fluttering to the floor. Phil’s hands were on my bra, struggling with the back clasp, his breath hot in my ear. “Danielle should go away more often. One of those summer-long camps.”
“Mmm.”
“Or a study-abroad program. Foreign exchange, whatever you call it. An entire semester, maybe.”
“Early college,” I murmured. “Send her off at sixteen.”
He groaned, nudging me toward the stairs, our king-size bed beckoning. We’d had it for three weeks now, relegating our queen-size mattress to a spare bedroom, and it still felt spacious, as if we were splurging on an expensive hotel every night.
Maybe it was the wine; maybe it was the feeling that had been coming over me slowly since our move to The Palms, the realization that I didn’t have to be me anymore. I’d left the old Liz Haney behind—pregnant in college, dependent on financial aid and a half-dozen part-time jobs and Section 8 housing until I landed my counseling position, but still struggling with the rent when I met Phil. Now she was a ghost, wisp-thin and floating away, that old Liz. Because look at us. Here we were, hobnobbing with the rich and the very rich, and almost blending in.
“I have a better idea,” I told him.
“I’m all ears.”
“Follow me,” I said, and he did—past the living room stacked with boxes, the unfurnished dining room, the gleaming granite of the kitchen. I opened the sliding door off the den, and the Other Woman, the electronic narrator of our lives, warned, “Back door open.”
But once I was through the door, I hesitated. The backyard was almost too bright, with tasteful landscaping lights aimed at the potted topiaries, the dripping strands of crepe myrtle. Overhead, the moon was a crescent sliver, its gleam reflected on the surface of the pool, where an invisible hand pulled the water gradually toward the infinity edge. Beyond the pool, the yard sloped downward and beyond that was the flat, seamless green of the fairway.
I faced Phil and undid the button on my waistband slowly, watching him watch me. I hooked my thumbs in my underwear and let them shimmy down my thighs.
Phil was motionless in the doorway.
I must have been drunk; my body felt good in the moonlight, strong and sexy, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, before that pesky snake. “Aren’t you going to join me?”
Phil grinned. “I was just appreciating the view.” He worked his way out of his dress shoes and toed them off in separate directions. One sailed onto the grass, landing upside down with a soft thud.
I turned, breaking the surface of the water with one foot, then another. We had neighbors on either side, but these were one-acre lots, and they might have been miles away. Too secluded, Marja Browers had said. I took a few tentative strokes in the water and flipped onto my back, wetting my hair. Phil was undressing clumsily, struggling with his socks. My breasts rose above the ripples of the water, and I closed my eyes. Maybe this was what a house at The Palms could give you—a sense of owning something, of deserving the license that came with it.
When I looked up, Phil was standing at the edge of the pool, his clothes shed in untidy piles at his feet. From the water, he looked larger than life—on the scale of Michelangelo’s David, rather than a mere human. He lowered one foot in the water.
“No, wait a second,” I said. “It’s my turn to appreciate the view.”
He gave me a mock pose, muscles flexed. I laughed and kicked water in his direction.
“That’s it,” he said, splashing into the water. We reached for each other.
The neighbors, I thought.
And then: forget the neighbors.
Afterward, we let our bodies drift, float, slide next to and over each other, pulled by the current of gravity, the slow drift toward the infinity edge. It was an illusion, of course—but with my eyes closed, it felt as if I could float past the lawn, out to the golf course, where it was green and green and green forever.
Sometimes, dangling my feet over the edge of the pool, a book in one hand, I’d heard sounds from the golf course—the thwack that sent a ball soaring, the occasional raised voice. From the neighborhood, I’d heard cars starting, engines revving and disappearing; I’d caught snatches of conversation, carried on a breeze. But mostly, I’d grown used to the quiet of The Palms, beginning with the empty rooms in our house, so well carpeted and insulated that I could hear my own breath. This week, with Danielle gone and Phil moving into his office in the clubhouse, I’d found myself singing along with the radio, testing out my voice in the emptiness just to hear another sound.
Now the quiet was peaceful, calming, broken only by the occasional ripple in the water when our bodies broke the surface.
But then there was a clanging sound, the rattle of metal on metal, the sound I recognized as the latch and hook of our back gate.
I looked over at Phil, floating with his chest and shoulders above water, a blissed-out smile on his face. “Someone’s out there,” I hissed.
He shook his head. “Probably just sound carrying.”
But then I heard someone laughing.
Instinctively, I shrank into the water, my eyes scanning the dark pockets of the backyard. The euphoria was gone, the feeling of freedom and invincibility and entitlement. Or maybe I was just sobering, fast. Now I was a flabby, naked woman with a potential audience. “Phil—”
He worked his way toward the shallow end, his chest and shoulders bright in the moonlight. “Probably someone in their backyard.”
“What if there’s someone out on the golf course?”
“I don’t think anyone could see us, anyway.”
But I’d spotted the occasional heads of joggers and walkers bobbing past, the quick, colorful blurs of polo shirts and checkered pants. There was no way to gauge how close this laugh had been, whether someone was standing twenty feet away or all the way at the clubhouse. “I’m going inside,” I said, swimming for the steps.
“Oh, come on.” Phil laughed. “Really?”
But the moment was broken, the fantasy evaporating fast. The Liz who could float naked and free beneath the stars was gone, a once-in-a-lifetime flash of a comet, an anomaly. My clothes were scattered on the deck and inside the house, but I could make a run for it, heading straight for the downstairs laundry room, where a load of towels was waiting in the dryer.
“Liz.”
I sloshed up the pool steps, not realizing until I hit the concrete that I wasn’t entirely sober. My feet were heavy, uncooperative. And then I heard the laugh again, echoing off the tile surround, bouncing off the stucco exterior of our house. I turned, half expecting to spot someone in our bushes. Instead, I caught a flash in the distance, out on the walking trail—the tiny, bright screen of a cell phone. I bent double, clutching at my breasts with one hand.
In the water, Phil was laughing. “It was just someone walking by. Get back in here. Come on. I’ll plant a hedge out there. I’ll plant a goddamned forest, if that’s what you want.”
But I was already moving toward my reflection in the sliding door—a pale, lumpy mass of flesh, hair dripping, mascara streaked across my face. I’d felt so weightless, sliding into the water. Now I saw the sag of my breasts, the width of my hips, the fourteen-year-old flap of skin hanging low on my belly.
I was still the old Liz, after all.
* * *
Danielle was waiting for me at the BART station the following afternoon, considerably dirtier than when I’d dropped her off on Monday. Her feet were crammed into her old hiking books, laces flopping. She waved and ran around to the driver’s side to kiss me through the window.
I pulled back, feigning disgust. “You smell like nature.”
“I actually showered this year, not that it made much difference,” she said, tossing her backpack into the backseat. Her shoulders were sunburned, her cheeks dotted with new freckles. Red welts of mosquito bites pockmarked her legs.
“So? Tell me everything.”
We eased into traffic, and she did: the wasp nest in her cabin, the nature hikes, the bonfires, the visiting botanist from UC Davis. It was her last year as a camper; next summer, when she was fifteen, she could apply as a counselor.
“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 (#ulink_4feb53d9-66b8-5155-b44a-03ae806caafb)
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.
Still, I tried. “Isn’t there something else you want to do today, Kelsey? Play tennis, maybe?”
She shrugged.
“It’s just that I have work to do,” I told her.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re a community relations specialist, and I’m part of the community. So by definition, isn’t it your job to have relations with me?”
I found it was best not to be in my office at all—to have long lunches with Liz in the clubhouse, to chat with Rich Sievert at the bar, to try out the putting green with the Zhang boys or check on the progress of the homes in Phase 3. Still, hardly a day went by without her crossing my field of vision, blindsiding me with a wave, a wink.
And then one afternoon she was in my backyard, on my diving board, adjusting her bikini. She couldn’t have known I was there, watching her through the kitchen window with Liz standing next to me. And yet it was almost choreographed—the languid walk, the stretching, the perfect swan dive, the bathing suit top that slipped off, revealing her firm breast. I closed my eyes, swallowing hard. My palms went clammy, my heart hammered in my chest. Upstairs, I stripped off my shirt and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what the hell I was going to do.
JUNE 19, 2015 5:43 P.M. (#ulink_67a0cc1c-7582-5740-a9ad-82153c9f9c35)
LIZ (#ulink_a0d2ef70-3a38-5a61-ab50-3daba73c4230)
By the time I reached them, Danielle had hoisted herself over the edge. “Mom, help me!” she screamed.
In the pool, Hannah was pushing clumsily against the limp mass of Kelsey’s body.
Kelsey.
But I’d known that, hadn’t I, from the first scream that penetrated my sleep?
Her head flopped backward at a strange angle, like a marionette with no one pulling her strings. A red stain flowered on the back of her head. She was wearing the clothes I’d seen her in earlier, cutoff shorts and a T-shirt that billowed around her in the water. At the bottom of the pool, something magenta shimmered—her cell phone.
I asked the question even as I hooked an arm through Kelsey’s, even as the three of us pushed and heaved and Kelsey’s body emerged from the pool, followed by her dangling legs, scraping the concrete surround. She was wearing one sandal. “What is she doing here?”
“I don’t know! We were inside and I saw her floating,” Danielle panted.
“She was just out here all of a sudden,” Hannah sobbed.
Kelsey’s face stared up at me, her blue eyes unnervingly open. I pressed my hand over the cut on the back of her head, a gash several inches long, gaping wide. “Kelsey, can you hear me?” I slapped lightly against her cheeks, giving her shoulders a shake as if she were merely sleeping, as if this were the scene of a late-afternoon nap. My mind was a wild thing, racing backward and forward. I remembered Kelsey in my driveway earlier that afternoon, remembered shouting at her as the door closed.
Think, Liz. Think. I could picture the flip chart near the door of the counseling office—In Case of Emergency, with a dozen color-coded tabs for every conceivable situation.
And then something kicked in—a hyperfocus, the world narrowing to a single element, a sole requirement. My mother instinct, dormant over these past hard months, came out of the cave now, roaring. I snapped into action, ordering Danielle to turn off the music that pulsed in the background and call 911, and Hannah to run over to the Jorgensens’ house to see if Kelsey’s parents were home. Danielle, teeth chattering, ran inside and returned with her cell phone. Hannah’s footsteps thundered through the house and disappeared.
Airway, Breathing, Circulation. How long since I’d taken a CPR class? The procedure had changed, but how, to what? I felt along Kelsey’s neck for a pulse. Just one beat. Anything.
I heard Danielle’s voice, but dimly, as if it were a sound track dubbed in to the background. “Hello? Hello? There’s been an accident. 4017 Fairview. My friend—I don’t know. She was in the pool. She’s not responding.”
I tilted Kelsey’s head back—Airway—my cheek to her face, hoping for a whisper of breath. Say something. Wake up and tell me to get the hell away from you. I watched her chest, alert for a single, small rise, a slight fall, but it was still, her sodden T-shirt cold. My fingers, unsure, found the notch beneath Kelsey’s ribs, just beneath the clasp of her bra. I steadied myself, remembering those long-ago lessons with Annie the plastic dummy, her synthetic lips reeking of hydrogen peroxide. Annie’s torso had been smooth and pliable, her face a plastic, colorless mask.
But this was Kelsey, not a life-size doll.
This was an all-too-real nightmare.
JULY 2014 LIZ (#ulink_55da28a5-07b6-5fc2-9e14-45f265f7fa6a)
With school done for the summer, my days fell into a pattern: wake late, meet Phil for lunch in the clubhouse, swim in the afternoons, have dinner in front of the television, drink a glass or two of wine in the evenings. Anything more required an energy I didn’t have. My previous life and the things I used to do in it were only half an hour away, but somehow elusive now—the library, the farmers’ market, the public swimming pool where I’d spent hours on a blanket in a shady corner with a novel, looking up occasionally to spot Danielle’s head bobbing in the water.
“Aren’t we going anywhere on vacation?” Danielle asked once, almost waking me from the dream fugue of The Palms. But why would we go anywhere when we were practically living in a resort, down to the marble floors in our very own bathrooms?
Lunch at the clubhouse was Phil’s idea, his way of solidifying our place in the community. Danielle came sometimes, but mostly it was just Phil and me, ordering the overpriced panini of the day. “It’s all schmoozing and boozing here,” he told me. “Not bad for a day’s work.” From our table looking over the driving range, we nodded to Rich Sievert and Victor Mesbah as they made their way to the bar; we traded hellos with Daisy Asbill and her nanny, Ana, always a few feet behind, pushing the double-wide stroller that held the twins. Myriam stopped by to drop hints about the fund-raiser she was hosting for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society; Janet Neimeyer wondered if I would join her book club, a rival of the book club started by Helen Zhang. Deanna Sievert, effusive as always, dangled her cleavage over our soup and sandwiches. She’d spent her summer trying to convince Rich to take a cruise in the fall, and for some reason she’d taken to soliciting my advice. A stop in Bermuda? Skip Antigua altogether?
“Oh, no, you’ll definitely want to see Antigua,” I gushed. Phil kicked me under the table, and I managed not to laugh until she was safely out of the room.
I wrote to Allie, trying to capture what I couldn’t say out loud, not even to Phil. There’s a garden club, but they don’t actually get their hands dirty. They just vote on what annuals the gardeners should plant in the public areas. It didn’t take me long to realize that just about everything was outsourced at The Palms—child care and housekeeping and cooking, the running into town to grab something from Target. Deanna’s hair stylist came to her house before parties; Janet once referred to a personal shopper who bought her clothes for the entire season with one swipe of the debit card.
These women, I thought, amazed again at every turn. They were like modern-day fairy-tale princesses.
Phil was busy overseeing the final phase of construction at The Palms, sixteen luxury homes overlooking the foothills of the Altamont with its famous giant wind turbines. The community trail had been slightly rerouted to loop around the new construction, and a green area with a gazebo and outdoor kitchen was being added, so there were plans to approve and contractors to supervise. Phil was in his element, rushing between projects, keeping things on course. I joked with Allie that he was a politician on the campaign trail, shaking hands and trading good-natured hellos with anything that moved.
For their part, our neighbors treated him like a benevolent god, as if he could simply wave a hand and cause things to appear—new sprinkler heads, new bulbs in the carriage lights that lined The Palms’ cul-de-sacs. The women worshipped him; more than once, Janet laid a hand on my arm, saying, “He’s just an absolute doll, isn’t he?”
Phil grimaced when I repeated this to him. “That’s a compliment? A doll?”
“Well, they adore you, anyway.”
He shook this off, as if the attention were merely annoying. “They adore bossing me around. They like having me at their beck and call. It’s not exactly the same thing.”
Still—I noted it. Heads turned as he walked through the clubhouse; women touched him on the arm, the shoulder, the back; they laughed loudly at everything he said; they swooned over his accent. Even the dining room employees said g’day; asked if they could get him a draught or a burger with the lot. Phil treated all of them to the same generous dispensation of his time, the same friendly smile and listening ear. Maybe at times I was a bit jealous, or even a bit possessive, but I didn’t say anything to Phil. That would have given the issue more attention than it deserved.
It’s the accent, Allie speculated over email.
No, it’s the fact that he jumps to their every whim. He pays more attention to them than their husbands do.
How much attention? Allie asked, and then followed up about ten seconds later with a smiling emoticon, so I would know the question was a joke. When I didn’t reply, she wrote, Hey—you know I’m an idiot, right?
Of course, I replied.
I wouldn’t have minded so much, but they were so beautiful, so shiny and healthy and smooth. And once the suggestion was there, I had a hard time shaking it. Allie’s comment had touched a nerve, opened an old wound. When I was eleven and Allie was fourteen, my father had an affair. I never knew any specifics or learned how my mother found out, but I remembered their argument late one night, the house reverberating with her question: Who is she? Then he’d slammed the door and driven away in his truck, and I’d climbed into Allie’s bed and we’d cried ourselves to sleep. The following night Dad was back, joining us at the table in his PG&E uniform. I’d never heard them mention it again.
Sometimes as an adult, I thought I understood the affair. My mother had been beautiful—was, still—but blindness had robbed her confidence. Terrified of mismatching her clothes, she only wore black—shirts, pants, shoes. Even in the house, she wore her dark glasses. One of my earliest memories was of watching her get ready for a party, not long before her diagnosis—a red dress, lipstick, her hair in giant curlers. Blind, she was uncomfortable leaving the house, and my father had to coax her to visit friends, to try a new restaurant. Over the years I wondered who his other woman had been, what she was like—exciting and adventurous, scared of nothing? Had she worn bright colors, high heels? Or had it simply been the allure of the outside world, someone who would have a drink with him after work, someone who would dance in the middle of a crowded bar and not care who saw her or what she looked like?
Let it go, I told myself when Deanna strutted past in her shorts and heels, when Janet winked at him from across the room. Being friendly is just part of the job. Besides, as the summer passed, the languid days blending together, I had another worry, from a problem I’d created myself. Kelsey had taken my first invitation to dinner as a standing offer, arriving at our house late every afternoon for a swim with Danielle. Afterward, they lounged next to the pool, ruining their appetites with chips and Popsicles, their bodies fueled by mysterious teenage metabolism. We grilled burgers or mixed taco salads for a late dinner, and then there was always something on TV, even if it was a rerun of an episode they’d seen a dozen times. When it grew late, and I started yawning and dropping hints, Danielle would ask, “Is it okay if Kelsey spends the night?”
Later, when their giggles woke me, I wondered how we had become Kelsey’s unofficial caretakers without so much as a word from her parents. Tim was some kind of attorney, and on the rare occasions when I bumped into Sonia, she was either just back from a trip or packing for her next one.
In the mornings, Kelsey was still there, appearing on the stairs in a skimpy tank top and a pair of men’s boxers, her hair tousled. When she stretched, her tank top rode up, revealing the same flat, tanned stomach that was on display every afternoon but somehow looked obscene before my morning cup of coffee.
“Morning, Mrs. McGinnis, Mr. McGinnis,” she yawned, stepping past us on her way to grab a carton of juice from the refrigerator.
At least Danielle was happy. She’d never had a friend like this, a bestie. Her middle school friends were self-described nerds, shrieking number-themed jokes at each other on our way to once-a-month Saturday math meets. What about that girl Gabby? I wanted to ask her. What about Estrella?
The truth was, I missed the old Danielle, the one who would play epic games of Battleship with me, who would read upside down on the couch, her legs draped over the back, occasionally calling out passages. Mom, did you know that...? Now her interests were the same as Kelsey’s—sharing YouTube videos, snooping on other people’s Facebook pages, ogling Glamour and TMZ. Almost overnight, what I’d feared most had happened. She’d grown up.
Oh, to be young, Allie said.
But I don’t think I’d ever been that kind of young.
* * *
Sometimes, just to escape the house, I took walks after dinner, when the sky was turning from blue to purple to black, the white windmills on the horizon fading to a ghostly gray before disappearing altogether. I met the Browerses regularly and nodded at Trevor’s complaints about water usage at The Palms; didn’t anyone care that California was in a drought? I agreed with him, of course, but it was hard to get too excited. We weren’t in California; we were on our own island. It was easy to believe that what happened elsewhere didn’t concern us at The Palms. One night I heard giggling around a corner and spotted Janet Neimeyer and her boyfriend, both barefoot and taking swigs out of a bottle of champagne. Another time, the house stuffy and stifling even at midnight, I expected to be the only one on the streets and was surprised when I heard the slap of tennis shoes behind me.
“Oh, hello. I didn’t mean to scare you.” A woman emerged from the darkness, her hair a wild tangle of curls escaping a bun at the nape of her neck. Her face, where it wasn’t freckled, was a pinkish pale. She was pushing a boy in a wheelchair.
“I don’t think we’ve met yet. I’m Liz McGinnis. I live over—” I pointed behind me.
“Oh, I know where you live. I’m Fran Blevins, your next-door neighbor. We don’t get out too much, except late at night. Sometimes Elijah has a hard time settling down, and a walk calms him.” She gestured, and I bent lower, smiling. He wasn’t a boy at all, but a man in his midtwenties with a scruffy beard, his limbs pulled tightly to one side. “Elijah,” Fran said, her voice loud and cheerful. “This is Liz.”
“Hello, Elijah. It’s nice to meet you.”
His eyes regarded me, unblinking. I’d only heard the Blevins referenced occasionally—Doug (Dan?) was a commercial airline pilot with a San Francisco to Tokyo route; their son, Deanna had told me with a hand over her heart, had cerebral palsy.
Fran said, “I’ve been meaning to stop by to welcome you to The Palms.” While we talked, she rocked Elijah’s wheelchair slowly forward and back, the way I used to rock Danielle when we stood in line at the grocery store or the DMV. “We have a daytime caretaker, but she takes her vacation during the summer, so I’ve been on twenty-four-hour duty.”
“It’s good to meet you. I feel like I’ve been adequately welcomed, though. Everyone’s been so nice.”
Fran smiled at me, her head cocked to one side. “Have they?”
I laughed.
“I don’t find people here to be particularly nice, myself. But for the most part, it’s quiet, and they leave us alone.” Her voice wasn’t malicious or bitter, just matter-of-fact, as if we were talking about the weather. She bent over Elijah, dabbing a finger at the corner of his mouth, where a thin line of drool had appeared. When she straightened, she said, “I admit, I was a bit curious about your house, about how it all came out.”
“Oh, we haven’t done anything much to it,” I said, thinking of the three empty bedrooms, the dining room with its folding card table from Costco. I’d covered it with a tablecloth, but its general flimsiness was undeniable. “The house was pretty much move-in-ready.”
“No, I meant the repairs. From before you moved in.”
I stared at her. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Really? I figured you knew. Well, that house has had its share of bad luck. It was foreclosed on, and the owners had to be evicted. When they finally went, they’d stripped the house of everything—the fixtures, the plumbing, even the doorknobs.”
“Wow—that’s horrible.” Incidents like those had been common on the news when the housing bubble burst, but it was surprising to hear in connection with The Palms.
“That wasn’t even the worst of it. After they left, someone broke in, kicked holes in the walls, spray-painted obscenities, even scratched up the granite. The last I heard, everything had to be replaced.”
I shuddered. “I had no idea...”
“I suppose it’s the sort of thing Parker-Lane wouldn’t want to advertise. There was a big stink about it around here, as you can imagine. Myriam and her cronies insisted it was someone from outside the community, as if juvenile delinquents from Livermore drive all the way out here to scale the fences and wreak havoc.” She shook her head, freeing a few more wild strands of hair. “Look, I’ve lived here long enough to know that this place is a hotbox of discontent. The gates might be there to keep out the riffraff, but they don’t protect us from each other.”
“You think that—” But my words were lost in a sudden choking sound from Elijah. His eyes blinked wildly, and he thrust his head back.
“Oh, dear.” Fran bent down, tipping his head to one side, settling him. “We’d better keep going. He likes the constant motion. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Liz. We’ll have to bump into each other again like this.”
I called a goodbye and watched as she disappeared into a pocket of darkness between carriage lights, the soft slurring of Elijah’s wheels fading to nothing. I continued on to the entrance to the trail, which began and ended in front of the clubhouse, Fran’s words ringing in my ears. Someone had kicked holes in our walls, scratched the countertops. I didn’t know what was more unsettling, the idea of a vandal wielding a can of spray paint, or how easily it had been covered up, leaving no trace of the damage.
I paused along the trail when I reached the back of our Tudor. It was almost unrecognizable from this angle, as if the experience of living there was completely disconnected from what I was seeing now. There was the lawn and the pool, the patio with its topiaries in gigantic terra-cotta pots. Next to the door rose the hump of a forgotten beach towel. Darkness seeped from the windows.
I live here.
It not only didn’t seem real, it suddenly didn’t seem like a great idea.
That night my dreams were dogged with images of the vandalism I’d never seen, a reverse version of the shows I watched on HGTV, where the beautiful home was smashed apart by strong-armed men swinging willy-nilly with sledgehammers, leaving gaping holes in their wake.
And when I woke, the house didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t as solid and impenetrable, despite the security system, despite the Other Woman telling me when I was entering and exiting, what was locked and unlocked. That house had been a fantasy. It had existed in a dreamlike fugue, and now that was gone.
* * *
Eager to escape the stasis of The Palms, I went back to school a week early, before the office was filled with parents and students, new registrants and those pleading for a last-minute schedule change, the line five-deep out the door. It was nice to work without the distraction of an endless stream of Reply-All emails, the vaguely threatening administrative memos, the standard litany of complaints about the amount of homework in AP courses.
For now, I locked the door to the counseling office behind me and blasted the radio, sorting papers and settling unfinished business from the end of the past school year.
It was good to be back.
It would be good for Danielle, too. I’d been too lenient over the summer, lax on chores and responsibilities. School would mean essays and projects and speeches; it would mean clubs and activities and friends who weren’t Kelsey.
Deep down, I knew that was the trouble, the real trouble, with Kelsey: she was going to break my daughter’s heart. Sure, they were friends at The Palms, but what would happen when Kelsey had more options to choose from, when she decoded the social strata at Miles Landers and infiltrated the popular crowd? She wouldn’t hesitate to ditch my sweet, naive, awkward daughter who’d once spent a summer memorizing the periodic table just for fun. No, Danielle had been good for staving off boredom. She was a mere placeholder until Kelsey found her place among the jocks and mean girls of Miles Landers.
“Just tell her not to hang around Kelsey,” Phil said one night, while we watched the end of the Giants game in bed. Down the hall, a deep quiet emanated from Danielle’s room, punctuated by occasional shrill bursts of laughter.
I laughed. “You were never a teenage girl.”
“What tipped you off?” He shifted and I moved closer to him, my head in the crook of his neck.
“If I tell her not to hang around Kelsey, she’ll just want to hang around Kelsey more. That’s the first rule of being a teenager.” I yawned, pulling a sheet up to my chin. “Maybe they’ll have some kind of fight, some big blowup, and things will cool off for a bit.”
Over the roar of the crowd and the notes of the pipe organ, I heard Phil say, “We should be so lucky.”
* * *
No matter the amount of preplanning, the carefully posted directional signs, the color-coordinated packets, registration was always a zoo. I’d come to expect parents who ignored directions, the horde of unattended children, the inevitable air-conditioner malfunction. Basically, it was a three-day circus in a stuffy gymnasium.
I worked side by side with Aaron Harrigfeld, my colleague and closest friend at Miles Landers. In seven years, we’d formed a bond based on sarcastic insights about our coworkers and a mutual quest for interesting lunches within driving distance of campus. When there was a lull, we caught up on our summers: he’d broken up with Lauren, the girl he’d been dating since January, during a five-day cruise to Mexico.
“During?” I repeated.
He closed his eyes, as if to block out the memory. “During.”
“What happened? Not the hot-girl effect again?”
“Sadly, yes.”
I rolled my eyes, even though I was the one who coined the term years earlier to describe Aaron’s tendency to date stunning women in their early to midtwenties. I’d seen a whole parade of Laurens at this point—either he grew tired of them, or they moved on to bigger and better.
“And by the way,” he said, cracking open a water bottle the next time the line died down, “I’m still waiting for my dinner invitation.”
“It’s coming. Once we get a dining room table.”
He laughed. “All summer, I thought of you. Poor Liz, suffering with all that tennis and golf and swimming.”
“It was pretty rough,” I admitted.
“And now you’re back here, slumming with the rest of the working world,” he mused.
I gave him a friendly kick beneath the table. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the little people.” Just that morning, in fact, I’d taken a detour past our old house in Livermore—tiny, run-down, the lawn a patchwork of weeds, the street choked with cars. I was expecting to feel a rush of nostalgia, but from my drive-by perspective, it was hard to imagine we’d ever been happy there.
Aaron mock-bowed at the waist. “On behalf of the little people, I thank you. So, when do I get to see Danielle, anyway? Is Phil bringing her through?”
I hesitated. Danielle was supposed to be there with me now, helping with the registration table. I’d planned to take her around to the various stations when the line was low, reintroducing her to staff members she’d met over the years. But last night Sonia had called, offering to take the girls to the mall for back-to-school shopping in the morning, then to registration in the afternoon. “It’s the least I can do,” she gushed. “You’ve been so generous with Kelsey all summer, and now that she’ll be carpooling with you...”
She was right. It was the least she could do. I’d planned to offer occasional rides to Kelsey, figuring I left too early each morning to make that an attractive offer. But Sonia had embraced the idea enthusiastically. It wasn’t until later that I wondered if she saw me as part of her support staff, one of the sprawling, faceless army of people who performed her menial tasks.
I brushed off this thought and told Aaron, “Danielle’s coming with a friend. One of the girls in our neighborhood is starting here, too.”
“This place is getting overrun with millionaires,” he quipped.
All afternoon, I found myself scanning the cafeteria for a sight of them, two leggy blonde models and my own knock-kneed, dark-haired daughter, trailing behind in her Converse. When they did arrive, I spotted Kelsey first—a sheaf of white-blond hair, cutoffs so short the pockets hung below the hem. Sonia was next to her, tall in a pair of heels that dented the floor varnish. But even then, it took me a minute to recognize Danielle next to them.
“What the...” I stood, craning to get a better look, and Danielle spotted me at the same time. Her cheeks were red.
“Don’t be mad,” she blurted, coming toward me. “There was this place in the mall—”
“Your hair,” I breathed. Since kindergarten, she’d worn it long—ponytails, a braid, a dark waterfall down the middle of her back. I’d shampooed it for her, picked carefully through the wet knots, brushed it in the mornings, snapped it into place with an elastic band. Sure, she hadn’t needed that help for years—but now that her hair was gone, I was sharply nostalgic for those mother-daughter tasks. Danielle’s hair hadn’t just been cut, it was cropped short, ending above her ears, fitting her head like a dark skullcap.
Next to me, Aaron whistled. “You know who you look like? Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.”
Danielle laughed. “Is that good?”
“Absolutely,” he said, leaning across the table to give her a quick hug. “Ready for high school?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Do you like it, Mom?”
I touched her hair tentatively, trying to find a piece long enough to tuck behind her ears. She looked lovely, striking—but in a surreal way, as if this wasn’t my fourteen-year-old daughter in front of me, but a grown, postcollege version of herself, home for a visit. I tried to keep my tone light, tried not to let the hurt seep through. “You didn’t tell me you wanted a haircut.”
“Well, Kelsey was getting hers cut anyway, and Mrs. Jorgensen offered...”
“Kelsey’s mom paid for this?”
“I know. I told her I had money, but she insisted...”
“How much are we talking?”
Danielle bit her lip. “Seventy-eight dollars.”
“Seventy-eight dollars!” I hissed.
Next to me, Aaron whistled.
Then Sonia was there, oohing and aahing over the cut, offering a faux apology as if she simply couldn’t help herself. “I mean, with these cheekbones,” she gushed, “she was practically a diamond in the rough.”
She was a diamond already, I seethed.
“You know what we should do tonight?” Kelsey asked. “We should try on all our clothes, and I could do your makeup.”
Danielle laughed. “I don’t know. I look funny with makeup.”
“Seriously, I’ll give you a whole new look.”
I had a sick feeling, as if I were on a roller coaster and the momentum was building and building, and the whole thing might just go off the tracks.
“Let me get you girls your class schedules,” Aaron said, bustling behind me, saving me from whatever ugly thing was going to come out of my mouth. He found Danielle’s schedule under the M’s, and then hesitated, looking at Kelsey. “What’s your last name?”
“Jorgensen,” Sonia said. “Kelsey.”
Aaron thumbed through a stack and handed Kelsey her schedule. She glanced at it, then asked, “So which of you is going to be my counselor?”
“Oh,” I said, realizing. “You’ll be mine. I have H through M.”
She smiled. “Cool.”
Danielle held up both papers, looking back and forth between them. I couldn’t stop staring at her, as if she were some kind of mythical creature, half girl, half woman. “Hey,” she said. “We have a class together! Geometry.”
“Oh, my God, you would be in advanced math,” Kelsey teased, and Danielle blushed.
Sonia glanced at her cell phone, noting the time. “What’s next here? Why don’t we get in line for ID photos while we can.”
Danielle gave me an uncertain wave. “Bye.”
“Yes, bye,” Kelsey chorused.
I slumped back into the plastic cafeteria chair, watching them walk away from me. The crowd seemed to part at Sonia’s approach, and more than a few heads turned. They were looking at Danielle, too, I realized.
Aaron helped the next people in line and then took a seat beside me. “She does look great, you know.”
“Of course she does,” I breathed.
“But that friend. Whew.” He shook his head. “I’m glad she’s one of yours. She looks like a pack of trouble.”
* * *
“She might have asked me,” I huffed to Phil that night. “I have a phone. Would it have been too difficult for her to call me, to at least mention the idea? Oh, by the way, Liz, we’re going to stop by a salon. Would you mind if I had Danielle’s hair hacked all the way back to her scalp?”
“You did say you liked it.”
I sighed. “That’s not the point.”
The girls were upstairs, in the beginning stages of what promised to be a marathon clothes-trying-on session. They were using the mirror in our walk-in closet, so Phil and I were banished to the back deck, where we were slowly working our way through a forty-four-dollar bottle of wine from Victor Mesbah, a just-because gift he’d dropped by the office. I was slowly burning through my anger, too.
Phil sighed. “It’s hair, Liz. It’s not like it’s a neck tattoo. And she does look cute.”
“Of course she looks cute,” I bristled. “She couldn’t not look cute.” But she’d been cute before, when she’d been so patently herself.
Phil’s voice was calm, his words nearly lapped up by the pool. “You’re probably going to have to let this go.” He was distancing himself, I thought, playing the role of the disengaged stepfather.
Earlier, driving home, the blades of the wind generators on the Altamont rotated so slowly, they might have been giant house fans, barely displacing the warm air. Now the grass by the fourteenth hole was fading into a purplish blue, and sunset had brought with it a slight chill. I pulled my knees to my chest. “She’s becoming one of them.”
Phil laughed. “Who?”
“You know. The pretty girls.”
He leaned over, emptying the bottle between our glasses. “What pretty girls?”
“Please. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Look at Deanna Sievert. Look at Sonia Jorgensen. Look at Kelsey, for goodness’ sake. Those pretty girls, the ones the world smiles on, the ones who get everything they want without even trying for it.”
“I haven’t noticed, particularly.” But his voice was distant, his gaze far away.
Liar. I took a large gulp, savoring the slow trickle of wine down my throat, and set the half-empty glass at my feet.
The night had been so quiet that the sound of a car starting still registered a few minutes later, an echoic memory. Out of the darkness came another sound, a strangled cry.
“What was that?” I sat up, thinking the worst—the girls upstairs, Fran Blevins home alone with Elijah.
He held up a hand, shushing me. We waited, and the sound came again—clearly a scream this time, its shrill edge piercing the night. Phil didn’t have to think, he was on his feet, heading for the door. I stood, toppling my glass, which shattered on the concrete.
“Shit.” I stooped to gather the shards.
“Leave it,” Phil called over his shoulder. “We’ll get it later.”
Inside, Danielle and Kelsey were at the top of the stairs, looking down on us. From this angle I could see straight up Danielle’s skirt, a tiny white thing that was a waste of money, no matter what she’d spent.
Phil charged through the kitchen to the garage.
“What’s going on?” Danielle demanded.
The garage door slammed and Phil was back, flicking a flashlight on-off, on-off to test the battery.
“We heard a noise,” I told them. “Just stay put. We’ll check it out.”
But Danielle had started down the steps, Kelsey trailing her in a skimpy baby-doll dress. “I’m coming, too,” Danielle said. “I want to go with you.”
“Right? That’s always how it is in horror movies. The killer comes upstairs, and there’s nowhere left to go at that point,” Kelsey put in.
“I’m sure there’s no—”
“Absolutely not,” Phil snapped. “You’re staying here. And put some clothes on, both of you.”
Danielle looked down at her legs, as if she were seeing them for the first time. Kelsey only smiled.
“Stay,” I ordered, as if they were disobedient pets. I followed Phil as he barreled down the front walkway, the beam of his flashlight bringing into stark relief the rounded humps of our landscaping rocks. I saw a dark figure standing in the middle of the road, and he spotted me, moving into the yellow glow of an overhead carriage light. He was tall, gray hair cropped close to his head, a button-down shirt tucked firmly into his waistband.
“Everything all right at your house?” he called.
“We’re fine. I guess you heard that, too?”
“Sounded like a scream.” He extended a hand. “I’m Doug Blevins.”
“Liz—Liz McGinnis. That’s my husband, Phil,” I gestured to Phil’s retreating form, a dark shadow preceded by the beam of his flashlight. “I’ve met your wife and son a few times.”
“That’s what I hear. Fran said it was nice to have another normal person around.”
I laughed. “I feel the same way.”
Again, the scream came. It was louder this time, and definitely female. I whirled around, trying to get a sense of its origin.
“That’s it,” Doug said, digging in his pocket. “Woman screaming? I’m calling the police.”
Phil was coming back from the clubhouse, his flashlight zigzagging toward us.
Doug took a step away, speaking into his phone. “Yes, I’m calling from The Palms. Alameda County, outside Livermore.”
“It’s not coming from the clubhouse,” Phil panted. “Everything’s shut up for the night.” He frowned at Doug Blevins, overhearing part of his conversation.
The scream became a breathy wail, carried by someone coming off the trail at a sprint. Footsteps pounded closer, and Phil stepped in front of me. “Who’s out there?” he called.
The running figure became first a woman, then Deanna Sievert in a fitted running tank and shorts, hair escaping her ponytail. Seeing us, she cried out again, more sob than scream this time.
“Deanna? What happened?” I called.
She stopped short in front of us, nearly collapsing. Phil caught her by the arm. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Her breath came in ragged gasps, and when she straightened up, her face was blotchy with tears. “There was—something—” she wheezed. “On the golf course. These two glowing eyes—”
“You saw someone out there?” I asked.
“No, something. At first—I thought it was someone’s dog. But the way it moved—it was feline, just massive—” She doubled over again, hands on her knees. Phil still had her by the arm, as if he were propping her up. “It disappeared when I screamed, and then I ran like hell.”
Doug joined us, phone in hand. “Police are sending out a patrol. I’m supposed to call back to update them. What did you see, exactly?”
Deanna repeated her story, only this time the predator seemed larger, stronger, faster, like the great fish that got away. She seemed less scared now, enjoying her position as the center of attention. I focused on Phil’s thumb, which was rotating in a circle on Deanna’s twenty-four-year-old shoulder.
Doug nodded knowingly. “Sounds like a mountain lion. We’ve had those before, off and on. The drought brings them out here to the golf course. They see all that green and think they’ve got a better chance of finding food.”
Headlights rounded the curve at the end of the block, blinding us with sudden light in the middle of the street. We didn’t move. It was a dark sedan, but it couldn’t have been the police, especially if they were coming down the winding access road from Livermore.
“Hey! It’s the Mesbahs.” Deanna waved to them, and Victor rolled down the window. He was wearing a tuxedo, a bow tie unclasped at his neck.
Myriam leaned across his body, alarmed. “What’s going on?”
Deanna called into the sedan, “I just saw a mountain lion on the trail!”
“My God.” Victor shifted the car into Park. Heat radiated from the engine.
“Well, we don’t actually know—” Phil tried.
Doug said, “The police are on their way. Actually, I need to call them back, give them an update.” He took a few steps away, redialing.
Myriam stepped out of the car, holding up the hem of a midnight blue dress, its fabric pooling near her ankles. “You must be so terrified,” she said. Deanna collapsed immediately against her shoulder.
“You don’t want to mess around with mountain lions,” Victor boomed in his too-loud voice, as if he were educating all of us, everyone in The Palms. “Have you ever seen a mountain lion going after something? They’re just stupendous creatures.”
“My God, yes,” Myriam said, patting Deanna’s head. “They can just tear something from limb to limb.”
No one seemed to be listening to Phil, but he kept talking. “We need to keep cool heads here. Deanna’s not sure what she saw, exactly.”
“Who’s that?” Deanna sniffed, pointing down the street.
It was the Jorgensens, dressed in dark jeans and white shirts. The hard soles of Sonia’s sandals smacked the asphalt. “Is everyone okay?” she called.
“Sonia! It was horrible, you wouldn’t believe—” Deanna began.
“So horrible,” Myriam echoed, as if she had been on the trail, too, taking a lap in her evening gown.
Tim Jorgensen shook hands with Victor and Phil and nodded at me. Deanna repeated her story, trembling when she got to the glowing eyes.
Doug was back, sliding his cell phone into his pocket. “They’re going to send out some kind of wild animal team in the morning.”
“In the morning!” Myriam scoffed. “What good will that do?”
“I don’t suppose there’s much they can do out there in the middle of the night,” Doug said. “And we hardly want them driving out on the golf course.”
Tim looked shocked. “No, of course not. They could do a lot of damage out there.”
“But we need to let people know,” Deanna protested. “I mean, think of all the people who jog first thing in the morning. The Browerses, for one. Sometimes Daisy’s out there, too. And then there’s the Berglands, with all those kids. You don’t think a mountain lion could hop one of those fences along the course, do you?”
“I don’t see why not,” Victor said. He clapped Phil on the shoulder. “What do you say, mate? I’ve got a handgun. If you give me a minute to change out of this monkey suit, we could head out there in my cart and chase down some mountain lions.”
I could feel Phil’s annoyance. He hated the Crocodile Dundee act, the assumption that all Australians were swashbuckling men in dungarees and a hat rimmed with jagged teeth. “Let’s keep a cool head here,” he repeated.
“But we want to be sure,” Victor said. “It’s about keeping our women safe, right?”
“A handgun, Victor? You’re not serious.” Myriam shook her head. “And I don’t think the cart is charged, even. When’s the last time you went golfing?”
“Rich has a .22,” Deanna offered. “He’s in the city tonight, but you could take it. And I know our cart is charged. Mac was on it earlier today. He’s too lazy to walk anywhere.”
“We could make some phone calls,” Myriam said. “I have the HOA directory.”
“What do you say?” Victor said. “Give me ten minutes?”
Phil’s eyes met mine, a swift glance that told me everything he was thinking—that this was a ridiculous idea and these were ridiculous people, but it was his job to cater to them even at their most ridiculous. He nodded slowly. “Okay, then. We’ll just take a look around. But watch that trigger finger, Victor.”
Victor guffawed, slapping him on the shoulder. Myriam picked her way back to the car in her heels, and a moment later their sedan passed us, the taillights winking around the curve and disappearing. “Well, good night, all,” Doug called over his shoulder.
“Mom?”
I whirled around. Danielle was on the lawn, dressed in the cargo shorts and T-shirt she’d been wearing earlier that day. Again, it took me a moment to recognize this version of her, the adult version with the cropped hair. Kelsey was behind her on the lawn, barefoot in her baby-doll dress. One of her spaghetti straps trailed down her arm.
“Did you get your hair cut?” Deanna squealed, her previous terror forgotten.
Danielle came forward, grinning, and Deanna ruffled fingers through her hair, first mussing it and then rearranging it before pronouncing it “smashing.”
“Kelsey, come on,” Tim said. “You’re walking home with us.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a mountain lion out there, and I don’t want you walking home by yourself. That’s why.”
Kelsey dropped her sandals to the ground one by one and wiggled her feet into them.
“Faster,” Tim barked.
“We have things to do, Kelsey,” Sonia warned.
I watched as the three of them set off down the street, Kelsey trudging ten feet behind, as if she weren’t part of their group. I felt sorry for her, understanding suddenly why she preferred to be at our house.
“Doesn’t she look so grown up now?” Deanna was cooing. “You’ll have to beat off the boys with a stick.”
Danielle blushed.
Phil had loosened up a bit, maybe accepting the reality of the night ride with Victor. “Believe me, I have a big stick at the ready,” he said. There was a moment of embarrassed silence. “That came out wrong. I meant—”
But it was too late. Deanna had doubled over, laughing. “I bet you do. I bet you do...”
* * *
Later, I grabbed a broom and dustpan from the outdoor utility closet and swept up the remnants of my broken wineglass. Nothing bounded past me in the backyard, nothing bared its teeth, but I didn’t take any chances. It may have been nothing—I wouldn’t have put it past Deanna to exaggerate a house cat into a mountain lion—but I felt uneasy on our patio, as if I were being watched.
Upstairs, I puzzled over the mess on the floor of the master suite—jeans and skirts and complicated, sparkly tops—before remembering that Danielle and Kelsey had used the room for its full-length mirror. I scooped up the clothes and tossed them onto the floor of Danielle’s room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, thumbs tapping her phone’s keypad.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I forgot about those.”
“I’m not your maid,” I said, kicking at the clothes I’d just dropped, which already blended in with the other clothes on the floor.
She looked up. “I never said you were my maid.”
“Well, this place is a mess,” I said, stalking through the room. “Half of these clothes are Kelsey’s, and there are wet beach towels...”
“I know. I’m going to clean it up, don’t worry.”
I nudged a pair of shoes to the side of the room with my bare foot. “Tonight, before you go to bed.”
“It’s almost eleven o’clock. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Tonight,” I repeated, and something in my tone caused Danielle to finally put her phone down.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, bewildered. “Are you mad at me for something? Is it still the haircut?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. Everything, suddenly, felt wrong. Things were feeling more and more wrong from one moment to the next. “Just do what I said,” I told her—that parental cop-out, that all-purpose directive I’d hated when my parents used it on me.
I ran a bath and soaked in it, lights out, until the water ran cold. What was wrong with me? I closed my eyes, but I could still picture Phil’s hand on Deanna’s shoulder, the slow circling of his thumb. I wondered if there was a way I could turn it around, make a joke out of it. Poor Deanna. Thank goodness she had you to comfort her. No—it wasn’t even funny. Besides, Phil would be annoyed about his ride with Victor; he would be grumpy when he came upstairs. I waited until my skin was wrinkled and soft before toweling off and sliding, still damp, into my pajamas. I tossed the pile of throw pillows out of the way—a silly splurge, since neither of us could be bothered to make the bed properly in the morning—and that’s when I saw it: a tiny black strip of fabric, tucked along the bed skirt on Phil’s side. I stared at it for a long time before touching it with my toe, spreading it out to see what it was.
A thong.
Not mine. Not Danielle’s—unless she’d spent her back-to-school money on silky black underwear.
There was a brief, horrible moment where I could picture Deanna Sievert in our bedroom, shedding one thin layer, then another. It was possible, of course—Danielle and I had been out of the house, and Rich had been out of town. And then I laughed out loud, shocked at how easily that image came to mind.
Of course not.
The thong was Kelsey’s—she’d been changing clothes in here; she was exactly the sort of teenager who wore a black silk thong. Why she felt the need to strip down altogether when trying on a few skirts, I had no idea.
I shook my head, remembering her standing on the front lawn in her short baby-doll dress, then casually following her parents down the street, apparently au natural. Apparently not worried about sudden gusts of wind.
I thought about flinging the underwear into Danielle’s room, one more item for her to clean off the floor. She would express disgust, and I would say, “Tell Kelsey to keep her panties on next time.” But it wasn’t worth the mention. Instead, I pinched the thong between two fingers and airlifted it to the wastebasket in the bathroom, where I shoved it deep beneath crumpled tissues and an empty bottle of shampoo.
PHIL (#ulink_64334f93-7c5d-557b-a3dd-5fc55486b21a)
I didn’t say anything to Liz about Kelsey in the beginning, and then suddenly, it was too late. Liz was already suspicious of Deanna, who had nothing better to do than chat for half an hour here, an hour there. I could have said something about Kelsey, but it would have been more grist for the mill, more fodder for Liz’s jokes about The Palms. And that was when it was a mindless flirtation, a situation that I figured would blow over and be gone, like a bit of dandelion fluff.
Later, mentioning it would have given it too much weight in our lives. Even saying her name would have been dropping clues about an affair I wasn’t having. I tried it out in my head, worked on the phrasing. There’s this girl who has a bit of a fixation on me. It’s probably just a little crush. I haven’t done anything—much—to encourage it. It’s nothing. But it wouldn’t be nothing to Liz. She wouldn’t have been able to let it go. I knew how she was, how at her core was a kernel of insecurity, dormant until we’d moved to The Palms. She’d never been especially concerned with her own appearance before. She’d never obsessed about exercise. Her wardrobe had been a steady rotation of black pants and button-down shirts, the occasional jacket. In the mornings, every morning of our lives before moving to The Palms, she simply ran her fingers through her wet hair, added a bit of lip gloss, and was ready to go.
I’d loved that about her.
Now, she weighed herself each morning, frowned at her face an inch from the mirror. She bought expensive clothes that hung in our closet, receipts dangling, while she made a final decision.
“You look sexy,” I’d murmur in her ear, nuzzling along her neck, and she would frown, not buying it.
“I love you,” I said.
She wrinkled her nose. “You just said that ten minutes ago.”
“It’s still true.”
* * *
I thought that Kelsey’s friendship with Danielle would be a good thing, that she would drop the flirtation when those worlds intersected. What kind of fifteen-year-old girl was interested in her friend’s stepfather? But overnight, she wormed her way into our lives. I hadn’t figured on the logistics of Kelsey in my home, coming out of the bathroom late at night when I climbed the stairs, eating a bowl of cereal in the morning, her nipples outlined against the thin fabric of her tank top. In the afternoons, she paraded through our house in her bikini, letting the strap slip over her shoulder until the top of her breast was exposed. She’d already caught me looking. One night at dinner she brushed her leg against mine under the table and I jumped up, saying that I wanted to catch the end of the game.
I tried, in a general way, to get rid of her. I joked: she’s eating all our food. I complained: they’re too loud at night, and I’m not getting enough sleep. I coaxed: I wish we could just be alone, the two of us, without the girls always in our hair.
I wanted Liz to see it, without me having to say it.
It was a mess, but I told myself I could ride it out. What other choice did I have? Kelsey Jorgensen would outgrow me eventually. School would start, and she would find a real boyfriend, someone her own age. She would look at me and see thinning hair, wrinkles around my eyes. If I didn’t encourage her, she would wander off—like a stray dog.
* * *
The morning after the mountain lion sighting—the “alleged” mountain lion sighting, I told Jeff Parker, checking in—Deanna came by my office to make copies. In giant, bold font, her flier said WARNING: PROTECT YOUR FAMILIES AND YOURSELVES, with a picture of a mountain lion, jaws bared, feline haunches rolling. She offered to walk the fliers door-to-door herself, no doubt planning to relive the experience for anyone unlucky enough to be at home. When Deanna left, clutching an armful of thick orange card stock, Marja Browers stopped by, wondering if I could draw up some kind of schedule for “running buddies.” I was fumbling my way through a spreadsheet when Kelsey came into my office, draping herself across the chair in front of me. I was already in a foul mood, not to mention exhausted from spending half the night on the golf course with Victor Mesbah, who’d been so full of bloodlust I was afraid he would shoot himself in the foot. Or worse, shoot me. Liz had already been asleep when I came in, and she’d been frosty this morning, as if I’d been out for a night on the town without her.
“I’m very busy, Kelsey,” I said, stabbing at a few keys to emphasize the point.
She leaned forward, centering my nameplate on my desk. She lifted the framed photo of Liz and me at a friend’s wedding in Napa, studying us closely.
“Kelsey, I’m serious. Did you need something?”
“I was just wondering if you found what I left for you.” She was close enough for me to smell her lotion, both nutty and sweet at the same time.
I looked around the room slowly, as if I were scanning for a booby trap or a car bomb.
She placed her palms on my desk and leaned forward, giving me a straight shot down her shirt. “Not here. In your bedroom, silly.”
I pushed back my chair, wanting to stand. My legs felt as substantial as jelly. “What do you mean?”
When she straightened, she flung her hair over her shoulder in a dramatic arc. It was a calculated move. Everything she did was calculated, designed for attention. Had she learned about life from reading men’s magazines, from watching porn on her laptop? She smiled at me. “If I told you what it was, that would take away all the fun.”
I watched her leave, trying to stay calm. I wanted to race out of the office, tear through the clubhouse, across the parking lot, down the street. Count to a hundred, I ordered myself. I didn’t make it past ten.
She wasn’t in the hall or the dining room, although I expected her around every corner, stretching out a hand and inviting me to follow her, like the White Rabbit, down, down, down. I took deliberate steps, one foot in front of the other. I said hello to a waitress emerging from the dining room with three plates balanced on her arms. I passed Myriam and told her I’d be back in my office in just a few minutes. I clapped Rich on the back and declined his offer of a Bloody Mary.
“I hear you were out there keeping us safe,” he said. “I bet we’re out of danger now.”
Not at all, I thought. Not a bit.
It was bright outside, a deceptively cold East Bay morning. I let myself in through the front door and took the stairs two at a time. Danielle met me on the landing, surprised. My mind had been reeling with worst-case scenarios, and I’d simply forgotten about her.
“Why are you here?” Danielle asked.
“I live here. Why are you here?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not feeling so great. I need a private bathroom.”
“Ewwwww...” she groaned, waving me past.
I locked the bedroom doors behind me and surveyed the scene. My clothes were draped over a chair, where I’d left them last night. Liz’s pajamas were balled next to them. I’d made the bed haphazardly this morning, and the duvet hung low on my side. Nothing looked out of place, nothing looked as if it didn’t belong. But I wasn’t the most observant guy under the best of circumstances. I was the wrong person for this sick little game.
I pulled back the sheets, running my hand under the pillows and along the foot of the mattress, gingerly, as though I was away at summer camp, feeling in my sleeping bag for a snake. I opened my nightstand drawer, then Liz’s, rifling through the junk that had accumulated there in only a couple of months. I was beginning to feel queasy, imagining Kelsey in our room, touching our sheets, holding the tube of K-Y Jelly in Liz’s nightstand. I bent to the floor, lifting the bed skirt. Nothing. I rifled through my dresser, upsetting the folded stacks of boxers, the balled pairs of socks. Nothing. I was more careful with Liz’s dresser. If she came in the room right now, or Danielle did, how would I explain myself?
But there was nothing.
Fuck.
Maybe it was there, but I just didn’t know what I was supposed to find. What would an obsessed teenager leave in the bedroom of a man three times her age? A folded love letter, a heart drawn in lipstick on the vanity mirror?
She was sick—that was it. She was a sick person, this was a sick joke. And somehow I was the punch line. I’d fallen right into it.
I flushed the toilet twice before leaving the master suite, and called, “All better now,” as I passed Danielle’s room.
She was lying on her bed, reading a book, and she grimaced at me. “Seriously? TMI.”
* * *
I didn’t see Kelsey again that day, but I jumped every time someone passed in the hallway. In the dining room, I chose a seat with my back to the corner, like a character in a gangster movie. I wasn’t going to be surprised by her again.
That night in bed, Liz ran her hand down my back in a quiet invitation, and I rolled over to face her. I slid my hands beneath her top, helped her wriggle out of the bottoms. But I wasn’t able to shut out the image of Kelsey in this very room, invading what had been a sacred space. Eyes closed, I could picture her in detail—the long line of her legs, the pink scar on her kneecap. When I opened my eyes, I had a vision of her standing just over Liz’s shoulder, smiling that teasing smile.
“Hey,” Liz said, sliding off me, her skin clammy with sweat. “What’s wrong?”
I claimed exhaustion, which was true. I’d hardly slept the night before, and my mind had been racing, endlessly, around the same track. I’d pawed through our room like a cat burglar sniffing out a dirty secret.
“You’re sure that’s it?” she asked, and when I glanced at her, she’d gone still, as if she were holding her breath, waiting for my reply.
Tell her.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
* * *
From that point on, I resolved not to look at Kelsey, not to talk to her, not to give her the slightest acknowledgment. School started, which meant that five days a week, she was out of sight until four thirty. After that, I locked my office door, citing a call to make, business that couldn’t be interrupted.
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Paula DeBoard
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Critically acclaimed author of The Mourning Hours and The Fragile World, Paula Treick DeBoard returns with a tale of dark secrets, shocking lies and a dangerous obsession that will change one neighbourhood forever Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she′s felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she′s determined to make it work—if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who′s about to enter high school.Yet underneath the glossy veneer of The Palms, life is far from idyllic. In a place where reputation is everything, Liz soon discovers that even the friendliest residents can′t be trusted. So when the gorgeous girl next door befriends Danielle, Liz can′t help but find sophisticated Kelsey′s interest in her shy and slightly nerdy daughter a bit suspicious.But while Kelsey quickly becomes a fixture in the McGinnis home, Liz′s relationships with both Danielle and Phil grow strained. Now even her own family seems to be hiding things, and it′s not long before their dream of living the high life quickly spirals out of control…