That evening, I sat in the kitchen and added up what the Friday had cost me. Not only the $4,800 for the replastering, which was already signed for, but the rest of the season: the warm September afternoons when I would normally have swum after work, the quiet laps that had been part of my routine for twelve years. I was willing to pay that. I had decided on August 24, and the decision had not softened since. A pool that could be entered by anyone with an old code was not a pool I could leave full and walk away from. An empty pool, locked and scheduled for work, was a pool I could account for.
I also thought, sitting there, about what the empty pool would look like to anyone who saw it without knowing the estimate, the schedule, or the August log. It would look stark. It would look, to a careless eye, like a decision made in anger. I could not control that impression, and I did not try to, beyond keeping the paperwork in order. Tom's estimate was filed, the drain had been done by the same company that had installed the pool twelve years earlier, and the plaster crew was booked. If anyone asked, I could show the sequence. If no one asked, the sequence would still be true. That distinction had carried me through the summer: the difference between what something looked like from a fence, and what it was in a file. On Friday evening, with the gate locked and the new code set, I chose the file, as I had chosen it every day since March, and I went to bed earlier than usual, tired in the way that follows physical work done by other people in your yard all day.
On Friday evening, after the crew had gone and the gate was locked, Sandra came to the fence. I heard her before I saw her, because her shoes made a short, sharp sound on the path between our houses. She stood at the fence at 16 Cloverfield Road and looked into my backyard, at the empty pool, for a long moment without speaking. The light was going, and the pale plaster caught what was left of it, so the pool looked almost white against the darkening grass.
"You drained it," she said. It was not a question.
"Yes," I said. "The plaster work is scheduled."
She looked at me across the fence, her arms folded. "You drained it to keep us out."
I did not raise my voice. I had promised myself, that afternoon, that I would not say anything on a Friday evening that I would regret on a Saturday morning, and I kept the promise by saying very little. "I drained it because the plaster needs replacing and the pump needs replacing," I said. "Aqua Design did the estimate on September 2. The work is scheduled."
Sandra did not answer that directly. She looked down into the empty deep end, nine feet of pale plaster and shadow, and then back at me. "We used that pool all summer," she said. "You knew that."
"I knew that," I said. "I wrote it down."
That was a mistake, or it felt like one as soon as I said it, because her face changed. Not to anger, exactly, but to a kind of cold attention, as if she were filing the sentence away. She did not ask what I meant. She did not need to. We both knew what I meant, and we both knew that the conversation would not be finished at a fence in the evening light.
"I see," she said, and the words were short and cold. She did not say anything else. She turned and walked back toward her house, and I heard the side door at 16 Cloverfield Road close, not slammed, but shut with a firmness that was its own statement.
I stayed by the fence for a minute after she had gone. The pool was empty behind me, and the gate was locked, and the new code was in my kitchen on a card that only I had. I did not go back out to the deck that night. There was nothing to check that I had not already checked, and standing beside an empty pool in the dark would not have made Friday evening any clearer than it already was. I felt no satisfaction. I felt the particular tiredness that comes after a conversation that has not resolved anything, only made the positions clearer. Sandra had seen the empty pool. She had understood, correctly, that the season of open access was over. What she had not understood, or had chosen not to understand, was why.
I went inside and wrote down the exchange in the log, as I had written everything else: the date, the time, the words as close as I could remember them. I did not add commentary. I did not write down what I thought she would do next, because I did not know. I wrote down what she had said, and what I had said, and the fact that the pool was empty and locked. That was enough for a Friday evening. The rest would have to wait for Saturday, and Saturday, I already suspected, would not wait long.