Later that afternoon, I checked the gate again, out of habit, and found it locked, as I had left it. I walked the deck once, slowly, and picked two leaves out of the shallow end, because leaving them there felt untidy, even in an empty pool. The plaster was dry now, and the tile border caught the light in a clean line. There was nothing to do out there, and that was, in a small way, a relief. For seven months, the backyard had required watching. Now it required only waiting: for the plaster crew, for the pump, for whatever paperwork followed a Saturday morning visit. I could wait. Waiting, with a file in order, was a different condition from waiting without one, and I understood that difference better on that Saturday afternoon than I had on any day before it.
In the week after that Saturday, the neighborhood did what neighborhoods do. It talked. I heard about it first on a Tuesday, when Doug came for his usual visit, and then again on a Wednesday, when I was collecting the mail, and then in fragments over the following days. By the end of the week, there were two versions of what had happened circulating on Cloverfield Road, and I knew both of them by heart, because I had heard each of them more than once.
The first version was Sandra's. In that version, I had drained the pool out of spite, to punish her family for using a pool they had always used, and I had destroyed something that was practically shared. In that version, the officers had come because I had done something wrong, and the empty pool was proof of it: a woman who would drain a pool in September, rather than share it, was a woman who had lost all sense of neighborliness. I heard this version from a neighbor across the street, who told it to me carefully, as if she were testing whether I would argue. She did not say Sandra had told her directly. She said she had heard it, which is how these things are always said.
The second version was closer to the record. In that version, I owned the pool, I had paid for it, I had maintained it for twelve years, I had withdrawn permission in writing in July, and I had drained it for replastering and safety after use had continued anyway. I heard this version less often, and usually from people who had seen the binder, or who had heard about the binder, or who simply knew how long Doug had been coming on Tuesdays. It was not dramatic. It did not travel as fast as the first version, because it did not have a villain in it, only a file.
I did not correct Sandra's version in public. I was tempted, more than once, especially when the neighbor across the street repeated the phrase about destroying property, and I could feel the old urge to explain, to lay out the dates and the receipts, rise up in my throat. But I had learned something in seven months of logging: correcting a story in a driveway does not correct it. It only gives it a second telling, with you in it, louder than before. So I listened, I nodded politely, and I went inside.
Once inside, I wrote it down. I wrote down the date, the neighbor's words as close as I could remember them, and the fact that I had not answered. I wrote down Sandra's version in full, in my own hand, on a clean page at the back of the log, under the heading of that week's date. It felt strange, writing down a story I knew was not true, but it was also useful. A record is not only a record of what happened. It is also a record of what people said happened, and the difference between the two is often the whole case.
By the end of the week, the grapevine had quieted, as grapevines do when there is no new event to feed it. Sandra did not come to the pool. The gate stayed locked. The pool stayed empty, waiting for plaster work. I went to work, came home, and checked the gate each evening, the way I had checked it all summer. The two versions continued to circulate, one louder than the other, but I had mine written down, and the binder was on the shelf, and I knew which version would survive a reading of the file. That was enough for that week. I did not need the street to agree with me. I needed the record to be complete.
On Friday of that week, I added one more note to the page, because completeness requires it. I wrote that I had heard Sandra's version three times in total, in slightly different wording each time, and that the core of it had not changed: the drain as punishment, the pool as shared, the officers as proof of wrongdoing. I wrote that I had heard the other version twice, and that it had not changed either. I did not write the names of the neighbors who had told me, because they had not asked to be entered into a file, and I saw no reason to make them parties to a dispute that was not theirs. The grapevine, I noted, is not evidence. It is weather. It passes, and what remains after it is the paperwork, the dates, and the locked gate, which do not change their story from one telling to the next.