After they left, I stood on the deck and looked at the pool, twenty-two feet by forty-four, blue and still in the late light. I thought about what could have happened if the boy had gone to the deep end, which was nine feet, or if he had slipped on the coping, or if no one had come home when I did. I thought about the gate, which I had locked the night before and which had been opened again that day by someone who had the code. I thought about the letter, which had said, plainly, not to enter the property for the purpose of using the pool. The letter had not stopped the use. The locked gate had not stopped the use, because the code was known.
That evening, my decision crystallized in a way it had not before. It was not anger, exactly, although anger was present. It was a calculation. An unlocked, trespassed pool with a child in it was a liability I would not carry through another month. I would have the pool drained and locked, for the replastering I already knew it needed and for safety, and I would not wait for a worse afternoon to prove the point. I wrote that decision in the log in one sentence, dated August 24, and I did not add an explanation. The entries before it were the explanation.
Before I went to bed, I walked the backyard once more in the fading light. I checked the gate latch with my hand, twice, and I stood by the shallow-end steps where the boy had stood that afternoon. The water was still, and the tile border was just visible under the surface, a clean line that seemed, in that light, like a boundary drawn in blue. I thought about the original permission, given years earlier with edges I had stated plainly: weekend afternoons only, when I was home, household only, no guests, no keys, no code. Every edge had been sanded away, one polite request at a time, until a child I did not know could walk through a gate I had locked the night before and stand alone in water that belonged to a house he had never entered. That was not neighborliness anymore. That was a risk, and risks, unlike favors, have to be closed out. I locked the back door behind me, filed the August 24 entry at the front of the log rather than the back, so I would see it first, and slept without dreaming about the pool for the first time in weeks.
On September 2, Tom Alvarez of Aqua Design Solutions came to 14 Cloverfield Road to look at the pool. I had called the company the week before, after the August 24 incident, and had asked specifically for someone who knew the installation. Tom had been with Aqua Design for years, and he walked the deck slowly, the way a man walks around work he intends to stand behind. He looked at the plaster, which was worn and rough in places, and at the tile border, and at the pump equipment by the side of the house. He did not hurry, and he did not try to sell me anything I had not asked about.
He told me, plainly, that the plaster had reached the end of its useful life. The surface was pitted, he said, and the roughness would only get worse through another winter. The pump, too, was tired. It still ran, but it ran loudly, and it would not be reliable for another full season. He recommended replastering the pool and replacing the pump, and he recommended doing the drain now, while the weather was still warm enough for the plaster work to cure properly. He wrote the figures on a printed estimate form, in a clear hand, and handed it to me on the deck.
The replastering was $4,800. I read the number twice, the way I read any number that will go into a file, and I checked that the scope was written out: drain the pool, prepare the surface, replaster, and refill when the work was complete. The pump replacement was listed as a separate item on the same estimate, scheduled for the same job, so the pool would not have to be drained twice. I asked him how long the pool would be empty. He said the draining itself would take most of a day, and the plaster work would follow, and the pool would stay empty until the work was finished and the water could go back in. That meant the rest of the swim season. I already knew that. I had known it since August 24.
I signed the estimate on the deck, on top of the coping, using a pen from my kitchen. My signature was the same one that was on the original Aqua Design contract twelve years earlier, and on the two canceled checks for the deposit and the balance. Tom dated the form September 2 and gave me a copy. I filed it that evening, not in the binder, but in a separate folder I kept for current work, because the binder was for the record of what had already happened. The new folder was for what would happen next.