The Drowning Girls. Paula Treick DeBoard

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.