He stood between me and that gate, breathing hard, and for a second I thought the smartest thing was to get in my truck and drive through the fence if I had to. But I have been doing this work in Spokane since I was a young man, and I have learned that panic is the thing that gets people hurt. So I made myself slow down and look.
What had risen to the surface was not what my gut had screamed at me. It was a bundle, wrapped tight in a blue plastic tarp and bound with rope, weighted with more of those cinder blocks. Not a person. A shape about the size of a duffel bag, and it had floated loose when I peeled the corner and let air under the cover.
The man was not dangerous. He was terrified. When I set the pump wand down and held my hands up, calm, and said we were going to figure this out together, the fight went out of him and he sat right down on the concrete and started to cry.
His name was Daniel. The house had been his mothers. She passed two years back, and in that time he had lost his job, then his marriage, then most of himself. He had let everything go. And down under that tarp, wrapped and weighted, was every bit of her he could not bear to throw away and could not afford to store. Her photo albums. Her letters. Her wedding dress. He had sealed them in plastic and sunk them because a storage unit cost money he did not have, and because some part of him could not stand to see the boxes sitting in an empty house.
He had not wanted me opening that pool at all. His brother had ordered the service, wanting the place sold. Daniel had panicked, thinking I would haul out his mothers things like trash.
I did not say a word about what a strange thing that was to do, because grief does strange things to a person, and I had done a few of my own after I lost my dad.
I unlocked that gate myself and we hauled the bundle out together, careful as pallbearers. The plastic had held. Everything inside was dry. We spread her albums out on the hood of my truck in the sun and Daniel showed me his mother at nineteen, laughing on a beach in a dress that was now folded in that same bundle.
I did not charge him for the visit. I called a buddy who runs a storage place and got Daniel a unit free for six months. And before I left, I helped him carry his mothers whole life into the back seat of his car, where it belonged, up in the light, where he could visit her whenever he needed to.