Forty-One Thousand Gallons
The backyard lights came on when I flipped the switch by the sliding door, and they revealed an empty blue shell where forty-one thousand gallons of water had been just five days earlier. I stood there on the threshold with my keys still in my hand and the smell of the long drive still in my clothes, and for a moment my mind simply refused to make sense of what my eyes were showing me. A pool is a thing that is supposed to be full. That is its entire nature. An empty pool is like an empty grave, a wrongness that the eye registers before the brain can catch up, and I stood there in the doorway to my own backyard and felt the ground tilt slightly under me.
The vinyl liner had pulled away from the walls where the weight of the water was no longer holding it in place, hanging in loose wrinkled sheets like shed skin. Mud, thick and dark, coated the deep end where the drain sat exposed. The pool equipment, the pump and the filter housing that I had maintained meticulously for four summers, was cracked and broken, one component knocked clean off its mounting. And across the patio, someone had overturned the large planters that Sarah and I had spent a weekend arranging, spilling black soil and broken ceramic across the flagstones, so that the whole yard looked less like the site of a party and more like the site of something deliberate, something that had wanted to leave a mark.
Sarah came up behind me, dragging the last of the camping bags, and she stopped, and I heard the breath go out of her.
Oh my God, she said.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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