The Drowning Girls. Paula DeBoard Treick
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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.
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