Chlorine and Shadows

The pool lights flickered underwater, casting wavering ribbons across Emma's pale skin. She floated on her back, the orange swim cover-up discarded on the lounge chair like shed skin. It was 2 AM, the hour when grief sharpened its teeth.

"You're going to turn into a prune," Mark called from the patio door, his baseball cap pulled low even in sleeplessness. He held out her prenatal vitamin—the ritual that had become a kind of prayer they both knew was futile.

"I don't want them," she said, not swimming, just suspended in the chemical blue. "Three years of vitamins. Three years of hoping."

Their tabby cat, Barnaby, wound around Mark's ankles, purring mindlessly. The cat would never understand that the nursery they'd painted would stay empty, that the crib they'd assembled was now just modern sculpture in a spare room.

Mark sat on the edge of the pool, letting his legs dangle in the water. "My father used to take me to baseball games," he said suddenly. "He'd buy me those orange sodas from the concession stand. Sticky fingers, summer heat, the crack of the bat. I thought I'd have that with someone."

Emma swam to him, water streaming from her hair. The chlorine stung her eyes, or maybe it was everything else. She rested her chin on his knee.

"We still have each other," she whispered, but the words felt hollow, like an echo in an empty stadium.

"Do we?" Mark's voice cracked. "Because sometimes I look at you and I see everything we lost, not everything we still have."

Barnaby meowed, indignant at being ignored, and jumped onto Mark's lap. The cat's purring became a third heartbeat between them.

Emma pulled herself out of the pool, water dripping onto the concrete. She took the vitamin from Mark's hand—the white tablet glowed under the moonlight—and dry-swallowed it.

"Tomorrow," she said. "We'll figure out tomorrow."

They sat there as the pool pump hummed its mechanical heartbeat, two people learning how to be whole again, while orange light from dawn began to paint the sky behind them.