Paula DeBoard - The Drowning Girls

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.

LIZ

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

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?