Chapter 25
The tile setter was an older man named Roy. He had been laying mosaic for thirty years, and he worked the way some people play an instrument β slowly, and then suddenly finished.
He came on a Thursday. The pool shell was poured. The plaster was scheduled for the week after. Roy spread his tiles on a tarp in my driveway and studied the layout I'd drawn.
"A star," he said. "Where?"
"Deep end. Center. Where it used to be."
He nodded without asking what I meant by "used to be." Everyone on this street knew.
He started at the outer points and worked inward. I watched for a while. Each tile went down by hand, pressed into the mortar, tapped once with the flat of his thumb.
"Why a star?" Roy asked after a while.
"My daughter picked it."
"Good choice. Kids pick things for reasons they can't always say."
I thought about that. Ava had said it was so she would know exactly where the bottom was. But Roy was right too. There was more in it than that.
The old deep end was where the pipe had been. The light fixture. The place where the black liquid first seeped out. When I closed my eyes I could still see Dr. Chen's crew in their suits, and the smell β like a garage full of old engines.
Ava never went in the deep end that last summer. She said the water felt wrong. I thought she meant the temperature.
Roy finished the last center tile at about four in the afternoon. He stood back. The star was maybe three feet across. Bright blue against the pale shell. It looked like something from the bottom of the ocean.
"Come look," I called to Ava.
She was at the fence. She came down the ladder into the empty shell β carefully, the way you're supposed to β and stood on the star.
"I'm standing on it," she said.
"Does it feel different?"
"It's cold." She grinned. "Everything down here is cold."
Roy was packing his tools. "It'll look different underwater," he said. "Water changes everything. It'll shimmer."
"Is that okay?" Ava asked me.
"It's better than okay."
That evening, after Roy left, I went back out alone and stood at the edge of the empty pool. The star sat in the middle of the shell, catching the last of the light.
I had thought about leaving the bottom plain. That would have been the simple thing. Clean plaster. No markers. Nothing to look at.
But plain felt like another way of not saying something.
For a year, the worst part of all of this β worse than the trial, worse than the cleanup, worse than the blood tests β had been the not-knowing. The months when Ava's rashes came and went and nobody could tell me why. The chlorine explanation. The food explanation. The shrug.
A plain bottom would have been another shrug.
The star said: this is here. This is where the deepest part is. You can see it. I can see it. Nobody is going to pretend it isn't there.
Ava came out with two cups of hot chocolate. She handed me one.
"Do you like it?" she asked.
"I love it."
"When the water's in, can I touch it with my toes?"
"Every single day."
She sat on the edge of the shell and swung her legs over the side. "Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"The old pool didn't have a star."
"No."
"Maybe that's why it got sick."
I didn't correct her. It wasn't science. But it wasn't wrong either. The old pool had things in it nobody could see. The new one would have this star β bright, obvious, impossible to miss β sitting directly above the place where the hidden thing had been.
"Will it fade?" she asked. "The blue."
"Takes decades," I said. "Mosaic outlasts everything. Houses fall down around it. That's what Roy told me."
"So it'll still be here when I'm grown up."
"And when you have kids who swim in it and argue about whose turn it is to touch it first."
She laughed. "I'm never having kids."
"Write that down. I'll remind you."
She bumped my shoulder with hers. We finished the hot chocolate and left the cups on the coping, and the star sat below us in the darkening shell, still holding the last blue of the day.
That was my reason. That was the whole reason.
Not decoration. Not design. A marker.
Something you could point at and say: here. This is the deep end. Nothing here is hiding.
Roy called the next morning to say the mortar had set perfectly.
"Brightest blue I ever laid," he said.
"Good," I said. "That's exactly what I ordered."