The Bear in the Living Room

The baseball game droned on, another meaningless Tuesday in July. Sarah had taken the dog out hours ago, leaving me alone with the cable news flickering like a heartbeat monitor for a coma patient. Our marriage had been flatlining for six months, and neither of us wanted to be the one to call the time of death.

I found myself thinking about that weekend in Montana—the last time we'd really laughed together. We'd gone swimming in that glacial lake, gasping at the shock of cold, then huddled naked on the shore while Sarah made fun of my shriveled dignity. Later that night, a bear raided our campsite. I remember the sound of it ripping through our cooler, the primal terror of being something else's prey. Sarah had squeezed my hand so hard I thought she'd break my fingers.

"What are you thinking about?" Sarah's voice startled me. She stood in the doorway, the dog panting beside her.

"Montana," I said. "The bear."

She nodded slowly. "I was just thinking about that too."

The cable news anchor was saying something about the economy, about how we were all supposed to keep swinging for the fences even when the pitching machine was broken. Baseball metaphors for a broken country.

"Remember what you said that night?" Sarah asked, sitting beside me on the couch. "You said if we made it through the bear, we could make it through anything."

"I was wrong," I said. "Some things you don't survive together. You just survive them separately."

The dog rested his head on my knee. I looked at Sarah—really looked at her, maybe for the first time in months. She was exhausted. We both were.

"You're right," she said, and there was relief in her voice. "But god, I loved you then."

"I loved you too," I said.

Outside, summer faded toward autumn. The baseball season would end soon enough. The cable would keep broadcasting its endless stream of catastrophes. The dog would need walking tomorrow, and the next day, and the next after that. Some creatures, it turned out, you really could keep loving even after you stopped living with them.