Dead Things Grow

Mara caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror—thirty-nine, hollowed out, moving through her days like something undead. A zombie in a pencil skirt, that's what she'd become. She and Mark hadn't really spoken in three months, not since the third failed IVF cycle. The fertility vitamins sat in the cabinet, a colorful promise of life that felt like a cruel joke.

Down the hall, Mark was obsessively styling his hair again. Two hair transplants already, and he was researching a third. He said it was for the promotion at work. She knew it was because he was terrified of aging without the legacy they'd planned. The expensive cable package they kept renewing streamed into rooms neither of them inhabited together anymore.

"Mara?" His voice through the door. "We need to talk about the car."

The cable bill. Always the cable bill. Never: How are you? Never: I'm sorry we're lonely.

She flushed the vitamin she'd been dry-swallowing, watched it dissolve like their savings, like the embryos that never took. In the bedroom, she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, hair gel on his temples, staring at nothing.

"Mark." She sat beside him. "We're living like dead people."

He laughed, bitter and short. "What do you want me to say? That I'm scared? That I asked for that promotion because I thought if we had money, it would fix everything?"

"I don't want things to be fixed. I want to feel something real again."

He turned to her then, really looked at her. She saw the hunger in his eyes, the same desperate need she felt. Not for children anymore, but for connection. For something that wasn't mediated through medication or television screens or hair products.

His hand found hers. "Start now. Tell me something true."

"I'm tired of pretending this life is enough."

"Me too." He pulled her down beside him, and for the first time in months, they held each other without agenda. The vitamins could wait. The hair could keep graying. The cable could keep broadcasting to empty rooms.

Some things had to die so something else could grow. She wasn't sure what yet. But she felt her heart beating again, and that was a start.