My Neighbor Thought I Was Away and Dumped Broken Glass Into My Pool

Chapter 5

We were at the hospital by nine that night.

Ava's rash had reached her jawline. The urgent care doctor in Cincinnati had said to come back if it spread to her face, and it had. So I drove her to the emergency department at the hospital off Wendover, and we waited four hours in plastic chairs while a television played a cooking show nobody watched and Ava dozed against my shoulder, waking up every twenty minutes to ask if it was our turn yet.

The ER doctor was a woman in her forties with tired eyes and kind hands. She looked at the rash, asked about the stomach pain, pressed gently on Ava's belly, and took her temperature. Then she sat down on the rolling stool, which doctors only do when they're going to ask real questions.

"Has this happened before?" she asked.

"Three times," I said. "In the last six months."

She looked up from the chart. "Three times with the same symptoms?"

"Nausea, headache, rash. Every time." I counted them off on my fingers because I'd memorized the list by now, the way you memorize something you wish you'd written down sooner. "October — we thought it was a stomach bug. She missed two days of school, and her teacher sent the homework home in a folder. January — we thought it was the flu, even though the test came back negative and the pediatrician said sometimes the tests just miss it. March — the rash was the worst that time, all up her arms, so we thought it was the chlorine in the pool, and I cut back her swim time for a week and felt very responsible about it."

"What did her pediatrician say?"

"That kids get rashes. That the headaches were probably dehydration, and I should push fluids." I heard the edge in my own voice and tried to sand it down. The pediatrician hadn't done anything wrong. I hadn't done anything wrong. None of us had connected anything, because there was nothing to connect — just a kid who got sick three times in six months, which is what kids do.

The doctor ordered blood work. A nurse drew four vials from Ava's arm, and Ava watched the tubes fill without flinching. She'd gotten good at needles. That bothered me more than anything else that night — that my ten-year-old had a practiced look for blood draws, like a traveler who knows the airport routine.

While we waited, Ava fell asleep with her head on my arm, and I sat there in the plastic chair and did the math I should have done months ago. October, January, March. Three episodes, three explanations, zero connections. I'd been so careful about everything else — the bike helmet, the sunscreen, the locked medicine cabinet — and I'd missed the pattern sitting right in front of me because each time, separately, it had looked like nothing.

While we waited for the labs, the doctor asked about our home. Any new detergents. Any new foods. Any mold, any pests, any recent renovations.

"No," I said. Then I thought about the pool, and the glass, and the woman on the fence, and I said, "There was an incident today. With our pool."

I told her about Ellen — the fence, the bags, the video, the arrest. The doctor listened without interrupting, and when I finished she made a note and said the labs would tell us more. She didn't say what "more" meant, and I didn't ask, because I wasn't sure I wanted to know yet.

"Is it the pool, Dad?" Ava asked on the drive home. It was past one in the morning, and the streets were empty, and the traffic lights swung over intersections with nobody under them.

"The doctor doesn't know yet," I said.

"But the glass lady put something in the pool."

"The police are handling that part."

She was quiet for a while, watching the streetlights go by. Then she said, very small, "I've been swimming in it all summer."

I gripped the steering wheel harder. All summer, every day after school, Ava in that pool with her goggles on, doing handstands in the shallow end, begging for ten more minutes. I'd sat on the deck with my laptop and watched her and thought we were lucky to have it. I'd bought the house partly for that pool — the listing photo with the blue water had been the thing that sold me.

The worry I'd been carrying for two days — since Cincinnati, since the rash — changed shape in that car. It got colder. Heavier.

It started to feel like suspicion.