Buoyancy

The dog had been his, not mine—a fact she reminded me of every morning with those accusing eyes. Baxter, a lumpy golden retriever with a habit of sighing dramatically, lay across the threshold of the bathroom doorway while I brushed my teeth. It had been three weeks since Marcus's funeral, and Baxter still treated me like an impostor in our shared life.

That first morning, I drove to the lake where we'd scattered his ashes. The water was glass-calm, reflecting the sunrise in bands of apricot and bruised purple. I'd brought my swimsuit—something I hadn't worn since before the wedding, when Marcus and I still did things together. I'd stopped swimming when he got sick. There hadn't been time.

The water closed over my head, shocking and absolute. For the first time in three years, I wasn't anyone's caregiver. I wasn't the dutiful wife, the grieving widow, the strong one holding it together. I was just arms and lungs and motion, cutting through the cold dark, surfacing gasping, alive in a way I'd forgotten was possible.

When I emerged, shivering and pulling myself onto the dock, an orange rolled out of my beach bag. Marcus had packed it—a perfect, bright sphere in the grey dawn. He must have bought it the week before he died, when he still believed in vitamins and second chances and a future we'd never have.

Baxter, who I'd left in the car, was howling. I could hear him through the closed windows—a raw, broken sound I hadn't known a dog could make. I sat on the dock in my wet swimsuit, peeling the orange, its juice stinging the small cuts on my hands I hadn't noticed until now. The sections burst in my mouth, impossibly sweet, impossibly sad.

He'd planned this. Marcus, who'd arranged everything right down to the music at his memorial, had left me one final task: learn to swim again.

I opened the car door and Baxter collapsed against my legs, pressing his wet nose into my wet suit, and we stayed like that as the sun burned off the morning mist—two survivors learning how to float.