The Last Inning

Maggie found him in the dark, the glow of his iPhone illuminating Richard's face like a ghostly vigil. On the screen, a baseball game streamed live—the bottom of the ninth, two outs, full count. He hadn't come to bed. Again.

"She's gone, Richard."

The goldfish—Bubbles, their daughter's college leaving present—floated belly-up at the top of the bowl. Three years of silent swimming, and now this. Maggie felt absurdly grief-stricken over a creature with a three-second memory, a pet she'd secretly resented for its weekly cleaning and its tacit judgment of their marriage.

Richard didn't look up. "One more inning."

"The game's in extra innings. It's been extra innings for months."

The coaxial cable lay severed on the floor where she'd cut it with garden shears—an act of spontaneous violence that shocked her more than him. No more television, no more drowning out the silence between them with other people's scripted dramas.

He'd been running since the diagnosis. Not literally—though the expensive jogging shoes gathered dust in the closet—but emotionally, strategically, relentlessly. Running from conversations about treatment options, running from her tears in the shower, running toward any screen that offered distraction.

"I ordered a new cable," he said. "Amazon Prime. Tomorrow morning."

"That's not the point."

"What IS the point, Maggie? The fish died. It's a fish. We'll buy Emma another one."

"Emma's twenty-three, Richard. She lives in Seattle. She forgot about the fish the day she moved out."

The baseball game erupted—homerun. Richard finally looked at her, his eyes hollowed by something deeper than fatigue. She realized then that he wasn't watching baseball. He was watching men do something competently, decisively, with clear rules and defined endings. Nothing about their life had clear endings anymore.

"I'm tired of running," she said. "Aren't you?"

In the fishbowl's reflection, she saw them both—stalled, suspended, waiting for something that wasn't coming. The goldfish had known something they didn't: sometimes you just stop swimming.

Richard's phone buzzed with a notification. He silenced it without looking.

"We could go away," he said quietly. "Just for the weekend. No phones. No cable. Just..."

"Just what?"

He finally set the phone down. In the sudden darkness, she felt the mattress shift as he turned toward her for the first time in months.

"Just figure out what comes after extra innings."