Salt in the Wounds

The gray at my temples had been spreading faster since David died — each new strand like a time marker I couldn't stop running. Standing on the balcony of the beach house we'd rented every July for fifteen years, I touched the hair at my temple and remembered how David used to pull the grays from my chin, laughing, saying they were evidence of a life well-lived.

Behind me, Mateo slept. The new lover, twenty-two years my junior, who hadn't understood why I'd needed one last morning alone in this place. He said he was being supportive. I knew he was being patient.

I went down to the water at dawn, swimming past the breakers until the hotel pool and abandoned baseball diamond — where David had once hit home runs for my amusement, playing pitch-and-catch with phantom children we'd never have — became smudges on the shore. The cold shocked something awake in me. Not clarity, exactly. Just the physical realization of how much time had passed.

"Find yourself yet?" David's ghost whispered, and for a moment I expected him to surface beside me, treading water with that easy grace he'd had even toward the end. Instead, a fox appeared on the shoreline — impossibly bright russet against the pale sand. It paused, watching me with an intelligence that felt almost judgmental, then melted back into the dunes like it had never existed.

Back at the house, Mateo was awake, making coffee with terrible efficiency. He pressed a shell into my palm — something brown and withered, spiraled like a galaxy in miniature.

"Look how beautiful this is, Elena." His enthusiasm was earnest, boyish, exhausting.

I looked at the shell, then at him — really looked. His skin smooth where David's had been weathered, his eyes unlined by life, his hands unscarred by work and worry. He wanted a future. I was still swimming through the past, and I wasn't sure I remembered how to come up for air.

"I saw a fox this morning," I said.

He kissed my forehead, missing everything. "That's lucky, isn't it?"

No, I thought. Some things you don't come back from. Some currents you just let pull you under.