Alicia took a breath, steadied herself, and then, only after Karen was already in the water, only after the fall was complete and there was no longer any question of who had done what, she moved forward to the pool edge — not to the place where Karen had stood, but to a safe distance from it — and offered help.
"Are you hurt?" Alicia asked, and her voice was calm, though her heart was beating faster than she would have liked. "Let me help you out. Take my hand."
She extended her hand toward Karen, slowly, without leaning too far over the edge, and with her other hand she reached for the towel folded on the lounger behind her, holding it out as well, so that Karen could see both offers plainly: a hand, and a towel, and a way out of the water that did not require her to climb alone with a hurt wrist.
Karen stared at the hand as if it were another insult. For a moment Alicia thought she might refuse it out of sheer pride, might insist on climbing out unaided to preserve the fiction that she had never needed help at all. But the wrist was clearly pained, and the pool floor was slippery, and pride, Alicia thought, was a poor foothold. After a hesitation that lasted only a second or two, Karen took the hand — gripped it hard, with her unhurt hand — and Alicia, bracing herself on the dry stone, helped her up the shallow steps and onto the patio, where Karen stood dripping, her blouse plastered to her shoulders, her capris heavy with water, her sandals squelching with every small movement.
Alicia wrapped the towel around Karen's shoulders without waiting to be asked, and Karen, to Alicia's surprise, did not throw it off. She stood there, shivering slightly though the day was warm, water pooling at her feet on the patio stone, and looked down at herself as if she were seeing her own clothes for the first time. The immaculate white was gone. The dry sandals were gone. The clipboard was still in the shallow end, and one of its papers was floating, face down, slowly turning in the gentle movement of the water.
"Is anyone else here?" Alicia asked, because she needed to know whether to call for help, and because calm questions were the best way she knew to keep a situation from getting worse. "Do you need me to call someone?"
Karen did not answer at first. She was looking at her wrist, turning it carefully, wincing. Then she looked up at Alicia, and the certainty returned to her face, though it sat differently now, wet and smudged and furious, like makeup applied over a bruise.
"You pushed me," she said.
Alicia did not argue. She had learned, long ago, that arguing with a person in the first minute after a shock rarely changed what that person believed, and often made the record messier than it needed to be. She kept her voice level. "I did not touch you. You slipped on the wet stone when you stepped back. But you are hurt, and you are wet, and I want to make sure you are all right. Sit down, please. Let me get you another towel."
"I don't want your towels," Karen said, shrugging off the towel Alicia had placed around her shoulders so that it fell to the wet stone. "I don't want your help. You will hear from the association about this. You will hear from me. This is assault, and there will be a fine, and there will be a report. You think you can refuse an inspection and push an inspector into a pool and walk away from it? You cannot."
She was already moving toward the gate, leaving wet footprints across the patio, her sodden capris clinging to her legs, her sandals making a wet, slapping sound with every step. Alicia did not follow her. She did not call after her. She stood by the pool, watching Karen go, and she noted, with the same precise attention she gave to everything else, the trail of water Karen left behind her, the gate swinging open again as Karen pushed through it without pausing, and the sound of the gate settling into its latch behind her — a sound Alicia knew well, and which now sounded different, as if the afternoon had changed the meaning of a noise she had once found comforting.
When the gate had closed, Alicia was alone again in her backyard. The pool moved gently in clear daylight. The clipboard lay in the shallow end. A wet paper floated on the surface.