The Last Lifeguard

Everyone in Shivergrove knew you didn't go near the old municipal pool after dark. It had been closed since 1987, back when the high dive still worked and the snack bar still sold blue raspberry ice pops. Now the fence was rusted through in three places, the water was drained to a crust of dead leaves, and a faded sign out front read POOL CLOSED — NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, which everybody agreed was funny, because the whole reason nobody swam there had nothing to do with a lack of lifeguards. It had to do with exactly one.

His name had been Warren Voss, and according to Priya Anand's older cousin, who had heard it from somebody who definitely wasn't making it up, Warren Voss worked the pool for thirty summers straight and never once left his chair before every last swimmer was out of the water. The story went that on his final night, a storm rolled in fast, and Warren stayed at his post blowing his whistle to clear the pool — and blew it, and blew it, and blew it — but the last kid never heard him over the thunder, and never came out, and Warren went in after him and neither of them came out at all. The town drained the pool the next week and never filled it again.

Of course, nobody believed you could still hear the whistle. Until Priya's little brother Dev bet her five dollars she wouldn't swim a single lap in the empty deep end at midnight.

"There's no water," Priya said. "That's not swimming, that's just lying on concrete."

"Then it should be easy money."

So at midnight on a warm Friday in October, Priya climbed the busted fence with a flashlight clipped to her collar and dropped into the deep end, which smelled like wet leaves and old pennies. She lay down on the cracked concrete and started doing an extremely undignified backstroke, mostly to make Dev laugh from the fence line.

That was when the water came back.

It didn't fill up so much as it simply was there, cool and silver and moonlit, lapping gently around her, and Priya was too startled to even scream before she realized she was floating, actually floating, in a pool that had been bone dry a second earlier. Up in the lifeguard chair, a figure sat with a whistle around his neck and a red cross on his old-fashioned swimsuit, watching the water the way lifeguards do — like it was the only thing in the world.

"Everybody out," he said, in a voice like it was echoing from the bottom of a well. "Pool's closing."

Priya's first instinct was to swim for the ladder as fast as she possibly could, and she nearly did. But something about the way he said it — tired, and a little sad, like he'd said it ten thousand times and never once gotten to mean it — made her stop paddling.

"Mr. Voss?" she said. "I think — I think the last kid already left. A long time ago."

The lifeguard turned his head. Up close, in the moonlight, he didn't look scary at all. He looked like someone who'd been waiting so long he'd forgotten what he was waiting for.

"Somebody has to hear the whistle," he said. "That's the rule. Everybody out, and somebody has to hear it, or I can't go off duty."

Priya thought about that. Then she swam to the ladder, climbed out, wrapped her arms around herself against the sudden cold, and looked up at him.

"I hear you," she called. "Pool's closed, Mr. Voss. Everybody's out. You can go home now."

For a moment nothing happened. Then Warren Voss lifted the whistle to his lips one last time and blew a single clear note that didn't sound sad at all — it sounded like a school bell on the last day of summer. The water vanished. The chair was empty. And the pool was just a cracked, leafy hole in the ground again, like it had been for thirty-six years.

Dev, still clinging to the fence, looked white as a sheet. "Did you just — was that —"

"Pay up," Priya said, climbing over. "I told you I'd do a lap."

She never went back after that, and neither did anyone else, but the NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY sign came down the following spring, and nobody in town could quite explain why that felt like the right thing to do.