Late Innings

The **vitamin** C tablets sat on her tongue like a prayer she'd stopped believing in—chemical promises of immunity in a body that still felt everything. Elena swallowed them dry, as if the bitterness might explain why David hadn't touched her in three months.

Their apartment was silent except for the baseball game droning from the television—another anonymous Tuesday night in late season. She watched the outfielder shag a fly ball, his graceful arc toward the warning track somehow more intimate than anything that happened between her and David anymore. They'd met at a game, seven years ago. Fifth inning, Dodgers down by two, his hand brushing hers as they both reached for the same beer. The crowd's roar had covered his nervous laugh.

Now the only thing connecting them was the coaxial **cable** snaking behind the entertainment unit, splitting their life into parallel streams that never quite converged. David worked late. She worked early. They passed each other in hallways like polite coworkers who'd exhausted their conversation topics.

"You're watching again," he said from the doorway, not quite entering the room. His tie was undone, suit rumpled. He looked like someone who'd been fighting a war of attrition in corporate beige.

"It's the playoffs."

"Right. The playoffs." He didn't move closer. "The cable bill came. We're still paying for the sports package you insisted on three years ago."

She finally turned to look at him. Really look. The vitamin C suddenly seemed absurd—a placebo for something that required surgery. "We're still paying for a lot of things we insisted on."

The baseball player rounded third, heading for home. Safe. The crowd erupted.

"Elena—"

"Do you even remember what inning we met in?" she asked quietly.

He stared at her, and she watched the realization dawn that he couldn't. That he'd forgotten the moment that had started everything, just as he'd forgotten to ask about her promotion, her mother's surgery, the way she still sometimes woke crying from dreams she couldn't explain.

The cable hummed behind the television, carrying a thousand channels they weren't watching, a thousand lives they weren't living. She turned back to the game where the score was bottom of the ninth, two outs, full count—and knew, with sudden terrible clarity, that this particular inning had ended long ago.

"I think," she said, reaching for the remote, "it's time to change the channel."