Deep End

The pool at the Ramada in Tulsa smelled like childhood summers and poor decisions. Elena floated on her back, her dark hair fanning out around her like ink in water, staring up at a sky so blue it hurt. She'd come here to think, or maybe to stop thinking entirely.

Her iPhone sat on the pool chair, a black rectangle on the white plastic, silent for the first time in three days. Mark had called forty-seven times since she'd walked out. She'd watched each notification bloom and die without answering, learning that she was capable of a cruelty she'd never recognized in herself.

She'd left spinach stuck in her teeth the night she walked out on him. She remembered seeing it in the rearview mirror as she drove away—a tiny green flag of surrender, or maybe just poor dental hygiene. Either way, she'd kept driving.

A splash broke her trance. A kid in the deep end, maybe twelve, tossing a baseball against the side of the pool. Thud. Splash. Thud. Splash. The rhythm of it was hypnotic, like a heartbeat.

"Your husband's looking for you," said an older woman in the adjacent lane, swimming laps with the slow determination of someone who'd outlived her own bad marriages. "He called the front desk."

Elena treaded water. "What did you tell them?"

"That I hadn't seen you." The woman adjusted her goggles. "My third husband did that—tracked me everywhere. Thought it was love. Turns out it was just control wearing a nice suit."

The kid's baseball missed the side of the pool and drifted toward Elena. She caught it, the leather still warm from his hand. Something about the weight of it, the stitched seams, brought back a memory of Mark at their first college game, how he'd explained the intricacies of a pitch he'd never thrown.

"You gonna throw it back?" the kid asked.

Elena looked at the phone on the chair, then at the ball, then at the woman swimming away from her toward the shallow end.

"No," she said, and placed it on the pool's edge. "I think I'm done throwing things back."

She climbed out, water streaming off her like she was being born again, and reached for the phone. Not to answer Mark. To delete him. The spinach in her teeth was gone, but something else had taken its place—something like backbone, something like the beginning of the rest of her life.