The Drowning Girls. Paula Treick DeBoard

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,