The Caretaking of Ghosts

Marcus stood in the kitchen, his movements practiced and hollow, chopping spinach with rhythmic detachment. He'd been this way for six months since the accident—alive in the technical sense, but something essential had been excised. A relationship zombie, really, animated by habit and inertia rather than pulse or want.

Sarah watched from the doorway, papaya in hand, its flesh weeping onto her palm. She'd spent hours researching which foods might help him regenerate, which antioxidants might knit together whatever had fractured in his brain. The vitamin supplements cluttered the counter, a graveyard of good intentions.

"You're staring," Marcus said, not looking up from the cutting board.

"I'm not."

"You are. It's that look. Like I'm something that needs fixing."

"I made you a smoothie," she said, setting the papaya down. "Papaya and spinach. The woman at the health food store said it helps with cognitive—"

"I don't want your fucking smoothie, Sarah."

The dog, Buster, wheezed from his bed in the corner. They'd gotten him together in those first giddy months when their future felt unwritten and vast. Now he was seventeen, his spine visible through his coat, his cloudy eyes tracking voices more than shapes. Sarah sometimes wondered which of them would go first—the dog who'd outlived his prognosis by two years, or the marriage that had been on life support since before the accident.

"I'm trying, Marcus."

"Are you?" He finally looked at her, and the absence behind his eyes was more devastating than anger. "Or are you just performing care so you can feel like a good person while I'm trapped in here?"

She didn't have an answer. The truth was, she didn't know who she was without someone to save. The vitamins, the research, the obsessive meal prep—it was all just displacement activity. A way to avoid the simple, terrifying fact that some damage doesn't heal. Some ghosts don't want to be fed.

Buster lifted his head, whining softly, and Sarah crossed to him, burying her face in his fur. He smelled like corn chips and earth and unconditional love, all the things her marriage no longer held.

"Maybe we should stop," she said to the dog, not to Marcus. "Maybe we should just let things be what they are."

Behind her, the knife stopped. For the first time in months, the kitchen felt quiet rather than empty.