The Last Vitamin

Marco stood in the bathroom, the morning light cutting sharp through the window. He held the vitamin bottle in his palm—her vitamin bottle, still half-full. Three months since Elena died, and he couldn't bring himself to throw it away. The orange plastic cylinder sat there like an accusation.

He dumped two pills into his hand anyway. They rattled against his skin, the sound too loud in the silence.

Downstairs, his father sat at the kitchen table, staring at a glass of water like it might reveal the secrets of the universe. The old man had moved in two weeks ago, bringing nothing but a suitcase and that stubborn, bull-headed silence that had driven Marco away twenty years ago.

"You take yours?" his father asked, not looking up.

"Yeah."

"Good. Your mother never took hers. Look what happened to her."

Marco flinched. The comparison hung in the air—Elena, dead at forty-two from an aneurysm that had nothing to do with vitamins. But grief made people stupid. Made them reach for patterns in chaos, for cause and effect where there was only physics and bad luck.

He poured coffee and remembered: the baseball field behind their first apartment. Elena in the stands, spring sunlight catching her hair. He'd pitched a perfect game that afternoon. Not because he was good—because she was watching, and some part of him had known, even then, that perfect things don't last.

"I'm going for a walk," Marco said.

His father nodded, still studying the water glass like a mystic.

Outside, the morning was already hot. Marco walked past the corner store where he'd bought the pregnancy test that came back positive three times before they stopped looking. Past the park where they'd spread Elena's ashes because she'd made him promise, laughing through tears, "Don't make me haunt some depressing cemetery."

He found himself at the baseball field. Empty. Someone had left a glove on home plate.

Marco sat in the dugout, dug something from his pocket. The vitamin bottle. He unscrewed the cap and dumped all the pills onto the dirt—dozens of them, scattered like confetti at a party nobody wanted to attend.

A groundskeeper appeared at the edge of the field.

"You lose something, buddy?"

Marco looked at the mess he'd made. Then at the water fountain beyond center field, where Elena had once hiked her dress and splashed herself on a dare.

"No," he said, standing up. "I think I finally found it."