Pool of Lies

The swimming pool at the YMCA had that particular smell—chlorine mixed with something like childhood, though hers had been neither happy nor innocent. Maya floated on her back, staring at the ceiling where water stains mapped continents she would never visit. Her iphone sat in the locker, silent. David had called seventeen times yesterday, and she had let each one ring until voicemail picked up, until finally he'd stopped trying. She imagined him now—his dark hair wet with sweat, the Greek fisherman's hat he'd worn to their anniversary dinner that night, the one he'd laughed off when she'd asked why he was dressed like an undergraduate studying abroad. The hat sat on her kitchen counter. She hadn't been able to throw it away. That was the thing about betrayal. It came in pieces, not all at once. First there were the late nights at work. Then the password on his phone that changed weekly. Then the scent of another woman's perfume—vanilla and tobacco, nothing like Maya's jasmine. He'd fed her line after line, and she'd swallowed them whole. The stories about his boss, the emergencies, the client who couldn't meet until midnight. Bull, all of it. She'd found the texts on his phone while he slept. Pictures. Plans. A woman named Elena who wore vanilla perfume and lived in an apartment with exposed brick walls. Maya dipped her head underwater, let the silence fill her ears, dense and complete. This was what she had now. The weightlessness. The truth. The slow work of learning to breathe again. She surfaced, gasping, and heard her phone buzz from the locker. Not David. Never David again. It would be her sister, or her mother, or someone who still believed in the possibility of healing. She wiped water from her eyes and began the long swim back to the edge.