Читать книгу The Drowning Girls - Paula DeBoard Treick - Страница 14
ОглавлениеWith 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.
