She thought, as she said it, about the difference between maintaining a place and constantly defending it — the thought that had come to her that morning while she gathered leaves, and that now returned with a sharper edge. Maintenance had been quiet: checking plants, straightening a chair, making sure a space was ready before she used it. Defense was something else. It required a person to stand in her own backyard, in her own afternoon, and explain to a stranger that the stranger did not belong there. It required sentences spoken in full, without apology, to a woman who had arrived certain that no such sentences would be spoken. Alicia had enjoyed maintenance without thinking much about defense, until recently. Now defense had arrived uninvited, wearing a floral blouse and carrying a clipboard, and it was standing between her and her pool.
She did not let the thought make her hurry. Hurrying would have looked like fear, and she was not afraid; she was, if anything, unusually clear-headed. She noticed the way Karen's hand tightened on the clipboard when Alicia said the word "permission," as if the clipboard itself had been challenged and needed defending. She noticed the way Karen's eyes flicked, just for a second, toward the house, as if checking whether anyone inside might come out and settle the matter in her favour — and then flicked back, when no one did, with a renewed determination. No one was going to come out. Alicia lived alone, and she had chosen this afternoon alone, and there was no one else to appeal to. The conversation, such as it was, would be settled between the two women standing on the patio, or it would not be settled at all.
Karen's mouth tightened. She did not leave. She stepped closer again, and then, as if to emphasize a point she had not yet made, she turned slightly and stepped back, waving the clipboard in the air — a broad, dismissive gesture, meant to end the conversation by sheer force of movement.
It was then that the geography asserted itself.
Karen's foot found the wet stone at the pool edge.
Alicia saw it happen in the space of a breath, and later she would remember it in that same compressed way: the clipboard waving, the step back, the sandal meeting stone that was slick with splashed water, the sudden loss of balance that had nothing to do with anyone pushing and everything to do with a person stepping backward without looking where she was going. Karen's arms went out, the clipboard flying from her hand in a wide arc, papers scattering, and then she was falling — not gracefully, not dramatically, but with the ordinary, undignified physics of a slip — backward and sideways into the shallow end.
The water received her with a splash that seemed louder than it should have been in the quiet afternoon. It closed over her white capri trousers, over her floral blouse, over her stiff blonde bob, which lost its discipline at once and flattened against her head in wet strands. The clipboard hit the water beside her and floated for a moment before sinking slightly, its papers already darkening and curling at the edges. One sheet drifted free and settled on the surface like a small, sodden flag. Karen surfaced, sputtering, her hands scrabbling at the pool edge, her sharply drawn eyebrows now smudged and uneven, her expression no longer certain but startled, furious, and wet.
Alicia did not touch her. She did not reach for her as she fell, did not grab at her blouse or her arm, did not step forward into the space where Karen had been standing. She stepped back, deliberately, giving the falling woman room, and she stood still on the dry stone with her hands at her sides, watching, making sure she understood what had happened before she did anything else. There had been no contact. There had been no push. There had been only a step backward, a wet stone, and a fall that belonged entirely to the person who had taken the step.
It was important, in that moment, to be clear about that — not for an audience, because there was no audience, and not for a later argument, because Alicia was not yet thinking about arguments, but because clarity was her habit. She worked with records. She knew that what happened in the first seconds after an event determined how the event would be remembered, and she wanted her own memory to be exact: Karen had stepped back. Karen had waved the clipboard. Karen had slipped. Alicia had stepped back. Alicia had not touched her.
Karen was in the shallow end, sitting in water up to her waist, her white capris soaked through and clinging to her legs, her flat sandals — dry at entry, dry as she crossed the patio — now wet, darkened, and slipping on the pool floor as she tried to find her footing. She clutched at her wrist with her other hand, her face tightening with pain, and Alicia saw at once that the wrist was hurt, not badly, perhaps, but enough to make climbing out difficult. The clipboard lay in the water near Karen's knee, its papers sodden. The afternoon, which had been quiet and then loud with the gate and the argument, was quiet again, except for the sound of water dripping from Karen's blouse onto the pool's surface and Karen's own ragged breathing.