Breathing Under Palms

The hospice facility smelled of artificial lavender and something sweeter underneath—decay. Elena's father sat beneath the artificial palm tree in the atrium, his hands curled in his lap like dried husks. He hadn't recognized her in three years.

"You're looking well, Dad," she said, though he looked like something that had forgotten how to die.

He stared past her, his eyes milky and distant. She reached out and traced the lines on his palm, something she hadn't done since she was a child, when he'd pretended to read her future. There were no futures left in those lines now.

"Your mother," he murmured, the first words he'd spoken all afternoon. "She loved the swimming pool."

Elena's throat tightened. Her mother had been dead for seven years.

Later that night, unable to sleep, she found herself at the hotel pool. The water was black and still, reflecting the moon. She stripped down to her underwear and slipped into the pool, the cool shock of it electric against her skin. She began swimming, one stroke after another, cutting through the water until her arms burned and her breath came ragged.

This was what she'd been running from all these years—the drowning feeling of being their daughter, of carrying their grief, of becoming a zombie version of herself, going through the motions of a life she'd chosen because it was safe. Her father's vacant eyes had become her own, reflected in bathroom mirrors and office windows.

She surfaced, gasping, and floated on her back. The real palm trees swayed above her against the starlit sky. She thought about how she'd spent forty years waiting for permission to live, and how her father, in his own zombie way, had finally given it to her—by forgetting who she was supposed to be.

Elena swam to the edge and pulled herself out, water streaming from her body like she was being born again. Some things, she realized, you had to drown before you could learn to breathe.