Strike Zone

The pool was still—glass-flat, the color of bruises—when Elena came outside. Baseball drifted from the patio speaker, some midwest announcer droning about innings and ERAs, the crack of the bat thin across the water.

"You're going to miss it," she said.

Marcus didn't turn from the lounge chair. "I'm not going anywhere."

"The funeral's at three. You have to bear witness, Marc. She was your mother."

He laughed, dark and abrupt. "Bear witness. Like that means something. Like sitting in a room with people who hated her changes anything."

Elena stepped into the water. It swallowed her legs, then her waist, then her chest. She'd been doing this for months—slipping into other people's grief, other people's marriages. She was good at it. That was the problem.

"The forecast says lightning by noon," he said finally. "We should go inside."

"Let it strike."

"El."

"What?" She turned then, water slicking her hair against her neck. "You want to talk about the weather now? Six years of lying to each other and suddenly we're talking about the forecast?"

The baseball game crackled. Someone hit a home run. The crowd roared, tinny and distant, like applause from another lifetime.

"I didn't lie," Marcus said. "I just didn't say it."

"Same thing."

"Is it?"

Elena waded deeper. The water touched her chin. "You knew about David. You knew about the house in Phoenix. You knew I wasn't happy. And you said nothing. That's not love, Marc. That's cowardice."

"I was waiting."

"For what?"

"For the other shoe to drop. For the storm to break." He gestured at the sky, purple-black and gathering. "And here we are."

Lightning flashed then—white, silent, a camera shutter capturing everything they'd become.

Elena went under.

For a moment, there was only water. The muffled world of holding your breath, making choices. Then she surfaced, gasping, and Marcus was standing at the edge of the pool, hand outstretched, his face raw with something that might have been love once.

"El," he said.

She looked at his hand. She looked at the storm-darkened sky. She looked at the empty patio chair where his mother used to sit, watching baseball and drinking iced tea, pretending everything was fine.

"Game's over," Elena said.

She swam to the other side.