The first summer, I lived in it the way a person lives in a new pair of shoes: carefully, noticing everything. I learned which floorboard creaked outside the bedroom, which window caught the morning light, how the kitchen sounded at seven in the evening when the street went quiet. I planted nothing ambitious. I mowed the empty rectangle of lawn. I sat on the back steps in the evenings with a glass of water and looked at the space where a pool might one day go, and I did not hurry. An accountant learns early that the best decisions are often the ones you let sit for a year, to see if they still look sensible when the weather changes.
By the second summer, the decision still looked sensible. I was working long hours, and I wanted exercise that did not require a gym, a schedule, or conversation. I wanted to come home, change, and swim in my own yard until the day's numbers stopped humming in my head. I wanted quiet, and order, and a small, private luxury that I had paid for myself and would maintain myself. I did not want a showpiece. I did not want a pool that neighbors would photograph. I wanted a rectangle of blue water, kept clean, kept to a schedule, that belonged to the house the way the roof belonged to the house: unremarkably, and completely.
In the third year, I started to ask for quotes. I did not rush that either. I got three, I compared them line by line, I checked references, I asked about permits and inspections and drainage and what happened to a pool in a winter when no one swam in it. I kept the quotes in a folder, and I read them the way I had read the house disclosure, looking for the sentence that did not quite add up. Two of the quotes had such sentences. One did not. That was the one I chose, and that choice, made slowly and on paper, would matter more than I could have known, twelve years later, on a September Saturday with two officers on my deck.
I did not know, standing in that empty backyard with a glass of water, that a pool would one day become a story other people told about me. I knew only that the yard was mine, that the house was mine, and that I intended to fill the empty rectangle with something I had chosen, paid for, and would keep. That intention, plain and unadorned, was the beginning of everything that followed.
Three years after I moved in, Aqua Design Solutions came to 14 Cloverfield Road and built my pool. They arrived on a Tuesday morning in early spring, with trucks and string lines and a foreman who walked the yard with a tape measure and nodded as if the ground had already agreed with him. I had signed the contract the week before, after reading it twice, and I had written the deposit check in my own hand, in the kitchen, at the table where I did my own accounts. The foreman's name was on the contract. My name was on it too, as owner. That symmetry mattered to me then, and it mattered to me later, though I did not know how much.
The county permit came first, before any digging. I remember the permit because I had to wait for it, and waiting for a piece of paper is a particular kind of test for a person who likes things to move in order. The permit had conditions: setbacks from the fence, depth markings, a fence and a gate that locked, a final inspection before the pool could be filled. I read the conditions and I filed the permit in a folder, and when the inspector came, I was home, and I answered his questions without embellishment. He measured. He checked the fence. He checked the gate latch. He wrote things down in a notebook that reminded me, pleasantly, of my own.
The digging took a week. I watched it from the kitchen window in the mornings before work, the way you watch any large, expensive thing being made in your yard: with a mixture of fascination and a low, accountant's anxiety about whether the hole in the ground would, in the end, resemble the drawing on the contract. It did. By Friday, the shape was there, clean and rectangular, with the deep end dug deeper than the shallow, sloping down in a smooth, deliberate grade. The men worked quietly and well, and they left the yard tidy at the end of each day, which told me more about them than any reference letter had.