Palm Springs

The pool at the Desert Inn motel hadn't seen water in twenty years. Now it was just a depression in the concrete, collecting whatever debris the wind carried—fallen leaves, brittle palm fronds, the occasional plastic cup blown from some nearby party.

Mara stood at the edge, staring down into the dry pool basin where she'd once learned to swim, where her father had held her floating body while she kicked and screamed, certain she would drown. He'd died three years ago, and she'd come back to this place on what would have been his seventieth birthday, trying to find something she couldn't name.

A cat appeared from somewhere—a scrawny tabby with a torn ear and one eye clouded with cataracts. It wound around Mara's legs, purring so loudly she could feel it in her shins. She crouched, extending a hand, and the cat pressed its bony skull against her palm. The contact startled her—how starved for touch she was, how the simple warmth of another living thing could nearly undo her.

"You miss him too, huh?" she whispered, though she knew the cat had never met her father. Or maybe it had. Strays lived long lives in this heat, fed by tourists who mistook endurance for resilience.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket—David, her husband, asking if she'd booked her flight back yet. She'd told him she needed time alone. What she hadn't said: she wasn't sure she was coming back. Not to him, not to their life in Seattle with its mortgages and scheduled intimacy and the way he looked through her instead of at her, like she was something he'd already finished reading.

The cat climbed into her lap, settled there with a sigh. Its heartbeat against her stomach felt impossibly fast, so alive it hurt. Above them, palm fronds rattled in the wind, a sound like dry applause.

Mara understood something then, watching the cat's breathing slow, its good eye fixed on something in the distance she couldn't see. You could stay in one place your whole life and still be lost. You could be known completely and not be seen.

She took out her phone. "Not yet," she typed to David. "I need a little more time."

The cat purred, and for the first time in years, Mara felt like maybe she was finally learning to swim.