The Breath Before Diving

The hotel pool was empty at 3 AM, which was exactly what Maya needed. She'd left the iphone on the nightstand back in room 412—no more texts from David asking if she was coming back, no more notifications about tomorrow's presentation that could determine whether she still had a job come Monday. The screen had been lighting up like a pulse she couldn't find anymore.

She slipped into the water. Swimming had always been her meditation, the only time her mind stopped its endless indexing of failures and what-ifs. Her arms cut through the chlorinated dark, each stroke a sentence she didn't have to say out loud. I'm done. I can't do this anymore. I don't know who I'm becoming.

Earlier, at the hotel restaurant that no one in their right mind would call gourmet, she'd ordered a salad that came with actual wilted spinach and orange segments that tasted like they'd been cut sometime during the Bush administration. The waiter had given her this look—the kind that said, alone on a Tuesday, miss?—and she'd nearly choked on a piece of fruit that was more rind than anything, fighting back something that wasn't laughter exactly.

David's hand had felt different lately. When they'd walked through Orlando airport two days ago, his palm had been sweating through that whole TSA situation, and she'd thought: he's nervous about the conference. But now, floating on her back in this too-cold water, she understood—he hadn't been nervous about the presentation. He'd been nervous about her.

The morning sickness had started three weeks ago. She'd told herself it was stress, the spinach smoothies she'd started drinking for energy, the project that was consuming her life. But standing in that airport bathroom, staring at a stick she'd bought from a vending machine with cramps twisting through her like a warning, she'd known. And she hadn't said a word. Not to David, who'd been planning vasectomy consults for months. Not to herself, really.

The underwater lights cast everything in a wavering blue, like the world before birth. She thought about the way David's face looked when he was asleep—how she used to trace the line of his jaw and imagine their hypothetical child's features, a little game she played before she knew the imagining might actually matter. Now the imagining felt like a different kind of drowning.

She broke the surface, gasping. The iphone was back in the room. David was asleep in room 412. Her career was hanging by a thread, and inside her, something was dividing, cells multiplying, a future she hadn't agreed to taking root regardless.

Maya swam to the edge and pulled herself up, water streaming from her skin. The orange glow of the exit sign pulsed like a heartbeat. She could keep swimming, or she could get out, walk back to the room, and begin whatever came next.