The Long Swim Home

Margot cut into the papaya with a serrated knife, its flesh the color of a bruise. They'd been in Hawaii when he'd first tasted it, Aaron with juice running down his chin, laughing like he'd discovered something revolutionary. That was three years ago, before the zombie emerged—not the shambling, cinematic kind, but something worse: the slow erosion of the man she'd married, replaced by something that wore his face and spoke with his voice but held none of his light.

"You cut it wrong," he said from the kitchen table, not looking up from his tablet. "Always cut it lengthwise. You know this."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she was. Sorry for cutting it wrong, sorry for cutting it at all, sorry that the papaya would taste like grief and salt water.

She'd taken to swimming at the municipal pool at dawn, slicing through water so chlorinated it burned her eyes. Sixty laps, back and forth, until her arms burned and her mind went blank. For those forty-five minutes, she wasn't the wife of a man who was becoming a stranger. She wasn't the daughter who'd fielded her mother's panicked phone call at 2 AM, convinced she was dying again. She was just arms, legs, breath, forward motion.

The hat sat on the passenger seat of her car—a beige fedora with a silk band, lifted from a thrift store on impulse. She'd never worn hats before. Aaron had always said they looked ridiculous on everyone, affected and theatrical. She wore it now when she drove to the pool, and sometimes she kept it on during her coffee after, feeling like someone else, someone daring and opaque. A woman who might leave.

She swallowed her vitamin C supplement with the papaya, thinking about how her grandmother had sworn by vitamin C for everything—colds, heartbreak, the diffuse malaise of being alive. A pill for the ache in her chest. A pill for the way Aaron looked through her now, like she was a piece of furniture he'd misplaced his affection for.

"Are you going to eat that?" he asked, gesturing at the papaya.

She pushed the plate toward him. "No. I don't want it anymore."

He ate it without comment, chewing methodically, and she watched his jaw work and thought about how she used to trace the line of it with her thumb when they lay in bed together, before he started turning away from her touch, before he became something that walked and spoke and ate but didn't really seem to be there at all.

The zombie, she thought. And then: and I am his keeper.