The Pool

We'd never had a pool before, but the house came with one, which was part of its appeal, at least in my eyes.

- T. Coraghessan Boyle

We were in our early thirties then, with two children Molly, four, and Jordan, twoand we were moving because we needed more space, not to mention a better neighborhood, with better schools. Lacey, who was pregnant with our third and final child, said she was worried about the kids drowning in the pool, though there was a standard six-foot wroughtiron fence around the entire thing, with two self-locking gates, one just off the patio and the other at the far end, where the diving board was. I could already picture myself afloat on a rubber raft, a tall gin-and-tonic balanced just over my navel while the birds harmonized in the trees and the sun ran a firm, hot hand down the length of my body. "The kids aren't going to drown," I said.

She liked the house, I could see that.

We were in the empty living room, pacing back and forth, invested in the fantasy of how it would look with our furniture in it where the couch would go, the easy chairs and coffee table, that sort of thing. There was a flowering hedge around the fence, and I told her I'd remove it myself so that we'd have a clear view of the pool from both the living room and the kitchen. "There's no way the kids could get in there, but, even if they did, we'd be able to see them, right? And the first thing, the very first thing, is to teach them to swim." The house, wood-frame with a low brick façade in front, bracketed the backyard pool, with upstairs bedrooms at both ends. Behind the pool was the steep canted slab of a hillside, which, as we were to discover, acted as a reflector to hammer us with heat all summer long.