Storm's Last Inning

The papaya sat on the counter, oxidizing in the humidity like a bruise Elena couldn't stop pressing. Marcus was outside, swimming laps in the pool as the sky purpled toward evening. She watched him through the kitchen window, his stroke steady, relentless—the way he did everything now that he'd decided their marriage was something to be fixed rather than felt.

The goldfish bowl on the windowsink caught what remained of the day's light. Their daughter's fish, won at a carnival last summer, circled its glass prison in endless loops. Sarah was at her father's house this weekend, spared the spectacle of whatever tonight would become.

Lightning cracked the sky—a white fissure, sudden and violent. Marcus kept swimming.

Elena remembered lightning from that summer they'd both pretended to be other people. He'd coached baseball, she'd taken up photography like it might explain something about perspective. They'd picnicked in the park during a game, his students shagging flies in the distance while the sky bruised purple behind the outfield fence. He'd told her he loved her between innings, his mouth salt-sweet from pretzels. She'd believed him because she needed to.

Now he climbed from the pool, water sheeting off shoulders that had broadened with middle age. He didn't look at the sky, where lightning stuttered again, closer this time.

"Storm's coming," he said, dripping onto the patio.

"I know."

He reached for the papaya, not meeting her eyes. "You were going to cut this."

"I was waiting."

"For what?"

For lightning to strike, she thought. For the goldfish to stop swimming. For either of them to finally say what they'd both known since before Sarah was born: that some innings stretch too long, that love doesn't always win, that sometimes you just keep swimming because stopping means admitting you're drowning.

"For the rain," she said.

He picked up the knife. The first drop fell just as he pierced the fruit's skin, and then they were both laughing helplessly in the darkening kitchen, wet from the storm that had finally arrived, the goldfish swimming oblivious in its bowl, the papaya bleeding orange onto the cutting board like a wound that wouldn't close.