Paula DeBoard - The Drowning Girls

“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.”