The Last Supper

The vitamin bottles lined the kitchen counter like sentinels of a siege that had lasted three years. Elena counted them out—D3, B12, iron, calcium—each tiny soldier in her husband's losing war against his own body. David sat at the table, his once-vibrant hair now thinning silver, pushing scrambled eggs around his plate with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

"You need to eat," she said, not for the first time. Her voice had developed a flat quality lately, like water finding its own level.

He looked up, and for a moment she saw the man she'd fallen in love with at twenty-five, before the diagnosis, before the mortgage, before life had calcified into routine. "Not hungry, El."

She reached across the table, and his palm—cool, papery skin over prominent bones—pressed against hers. They'd been married thirty-two years. She'd memorized the topography of his hands. Now they felt like maps to a country that no longer existed.

"The doctor says—"

"Fuck what the doctor says." David pushed back from the table, sudden violence in the motion. His chair scraped against the floor. "I'm tired of being a project, Elena. I'm tired of the vitamins and the appointments and the way you look at me like I'm breaking."

"You are breaking," she said quietly.

The silence between them swelled, filled with everything they'd stopped saying. She remembered how he used to run his hands through her hair in the morning, half-asleep, mumbling about coffee. How they'd dance in the kitchen while water boiled for pasta. She remembered the vacation in Barbados where they'd gotten drunk on rum and he'd tried to read her palm in the moonlight, inventing a future that turned out to be wishful thinking.

"I'm sorry," he said finally. "I'm just tired."

"I know," she said. "Me too."

She watched him walk back to the bedroom, his step slower than last month. She cleared the plates, the water glass half-empty, the vitamins scattered like abandoned prayers. Tomorrow she'd line them up again. Tomorrow she'd make the eggs, hold his hand, pretend this was a life they'd chosen. But tonight, she sat alone at the table and let herself imagine what it would be like to stop fighting the current, to finally just let the water take her under.