The Drowning House Read Online Free PDF Page B

twined her arms around his neck. So it was not something I could discuss with him. No one else appeared to notice any difference.
    Bailey loved to show people how I took the shot. It became a feature of her play dates. Richie had given us one of the cardboard cutouts and it stood in Bailey’s bedroom. It was worn, one corner was broken, but when I tried to throw it out, Bailey shrieked.
    “Why this sudden interest in housekeeping?” Michael asked. “If you want to pick up around here, why don’t you consider moving some of your stuff”—he meant my equipment, the lenses and other things I kept within easy reach—“out of the living room.”
    “Because it’s convenient to have it here.”
    “Okay. You have your things around, let her have hers.”
    “But it’s broken.”
    “It will fall apart soon enough.”
    I had no answer. And so the cutout stayed.
    But when Bailey had friends over, I found myself doing things I wouldn’t have ordinarily, dreaming up errands or excursions to get her out of the house, proposing games, once even making cookies from a worm of dough I’d bought at the supermarket to distract her. It rarely worked. Eventually the suggestion would be made.
    “Let’s play something in the yard,” she would say. This was the inevitable prelude to the reenactment. It was intentionally vague and totally disingenuous. There was only one game Bailey wanted to play.
    I didn’t watch anymore. It was too hard to see her doing a bad imitation of herself—a performance drained of all the spontaneity the marketing people had prized. But even with the kitchen door shut, I would hear occasional fragments of dialogue, Bailey’s newly complacent voice explaining the order of things. Insisting, “Now watch!”
    Even her playmates tired of it, all except Phoebe, who was not popular because she had a lisp and a tendency to spit. Poor Phoebe, starved for any sense of belonging, would play the game over and over.
    Like all mothers, I had tried to protect my child. From the stranger, a woman with oddly cropped hair and a shapeless coat, who talked to her in the park, who reappeared too often and seemed a little too friendly. From the dog next door, pacing and drooling behind the fence. There were more generalized worries too—poison, small objects, anything sharp, swimming pools, sash cords, traffic. There were car wrecks, plane wrecks, wrecks of all kinds. For a parent, the news was a nightly catalogue of disasters waiting to happen. But it had never occurred to me to worry about our own backyard. Even now, when I recall the worn grass, the shaggy tree and makeshift swing, nothing in that scene speaks to me of danger or gives off any alarm.
    I couldn’t hear everything from where I was in the kitchen. I was looking over prints. I had a dozen or so spread across the kitchen table. The rhythm of the exchanges had, I suppose, become familiar, so that what I noticed first that morning was a silence that lastedtoo long. And I remember that I got up slowly, slowly set down the magnifier, because I disliked what I knew Bailey was doing and didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t until I opened the kitchen door that I heard Phoebe’s thin wail and then a sound that was like the beating of a hundred wings, a sound I knew was only in my own ears. The air that was suddenly full of fear rushed in and hit me in the face and I saw the swing in a tangle.
    I have been told that my going to her sooner would have made no difference. That she died almost immediately. I think a lot about that. Almost immediately . What does it mean? Was there a moment when she looked up, her neck at an implausible angle, and searching for someone, saw just the gray board fence? Was she confused? Frightened? Did she call my name?
    Remember, I am a doctor’s daughter. I know what asphyxiation is. I know how long it takes.
    “An accident,” Michael said, as though that explained it. When he, more than anyone, with his experience assessing