Chapter 22
The demolition crew came for our pool on a Tuesday in June.
Ava wanted to watch. I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but she'd lived through everything else, and I decided she got to choose this one. We stood in the backyard with the fence open and watched a man in a hard hat spray-paint orange lines across the concrete.
"It'll take two days," the foreman told me. "Day one is the shell. Day two is the tank and the lines."
The jackhammer started at eight in the morning. It was louder than I expected — a deep, rattling violence that shook the windows. Ava covered her ears and laughed, the way kids do when something is awful and exciting at the same time.
By noon, the deep end was a pile of broken concrete. The light fixture — the one that had hidden the pipe — sat on the grass like a dead eye. I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. Behind where it had been mounted, the crew had already exposed the steel pipe, cut and capped, going nowhere now.
"That's it?" Ava shouted over the noise. "That's the bad pipe?"
"That's it."
She stared at it. "It doesn't look scary."
"It wasn't supposed to look scary," I said. "That was the whole point."
On the second day, they went after the tank. Not ours — the big one, under Ellen's garage. I walked over and stood on the sidewalk with half the street. Ellen's house was empty. The gray paint was peeling. The garage door stood open, and inside, the concrete floor had been cut away in a huge square.
A crane lifted the tank out in sections. It was enormous — a rusted steel cylinder, twenty feet long, streaked with black. When the first section cleared the garage, somebody in the crowd gasped. It looked like something from a submarine, something that belonged underwater and underground, not beneath a woman's garage on a suburban street.
"Twenty-two years," the man next to me said. It was Carl. "That thing was running for twenty-two years and none of us knew."
The crew loaded the sections onto flatbed trucks. They'd be cut up for scrap, Ortiz told me later, after the state finished testing every inch.
By evening, Ellen's garage was an empty concrete shell with a hole in the floor. The house stood quiet behind it. Somebody had taped a foreclosure notice to the front door months ago, and it was still there, faded by the sun.
I walked up to the house while the crews were packing up. I don't know why. The front steps were cracked. The mailbox was stuffed with flyers nobody would ever read. Through the front window I could see an empty living room — no furniture, just dust in the afternoon light.
A sheriff's deputy came around the side of the house. "Can I help you?" he asked.
"I live next door," I said. "Just looking."
He nodded like he'd heard that before. "She's not coming back. The state seized it."
"I know."
I stood there a minute longer. Twenty-two years of payments had flowed through that house. Emails at two in the morning. A shoebox under the bed. And now it was just an empty gray house with a hole in the garage floor, waiting for whatever came next.
Ava and I walked home past the worksite barriers. Our backyard was a crater — just dirt and broken rebar and the orange spray-paint lines, already fading.
"Are you sad?" Ava asked.
I thought about it. The pool had been the center of her childhood. Every summer, every birthday, every hot afternoon. And it had been poisoning her the whole time.
"I'm not sad," I said. "I'm done with it."
She nodded. "Me too."
We stood at the edge of the crater and looked down. At the bottom, half-buried in the dirt, I could see a piece of blue tile from the old shallow end. I climbed down, picked it up, and put it in my pocket.
Ava climbed down after me. She found another piece — a bigger one, with the grout still on the edges — and held it up.
"Can I keep this?"
"Sure."
She turned it over in her hands. "It was pretty," she said. "Before."
"It was," I said.
We climbed out and stood at the edge of the crater together. The sun was going down, and the construction lights were coming on across the street at Ellen's house. The whole of Alder Court glowed orange and white, like a stadium, like something important was happening.
And I suppose something was. An ending, anyway. You could feel it in the air, in the dust, in the quiet that fell when the machines finally stopped.
I didn't know why. I just didn't want to leave all of it behind.