The Orange Hat at the Bottom of the Pool

Martin hadn't been swimming since the funeral. Three months of avoiding the community pool, three months of his wife's swimsuit hanging unused behind the bathroom door like a ghost. But tonight, with the bottle of whiskey empty and the silence of their apartment pressing against his chest, he found himself standing at the edge of the water at 2 AM, trespassing.

The night guard at the apartment complex owed him favors—Martin had handled his brother's divorce pro bono—and so here Martin was, forty-seven years old and stripped down to his boxers, preparing to plunge into the chlorinated dark.

He'd brought her orange hat. The ridiculous wide-brimmed thing she'd worn to garden parties, the color of a sunset they'd watched in Santorini on their tenth anniversary. She'd looked at him over wine that night, eyes wet, and said she wanted to grow old with him. Instead, the aneurysm had stolen her at forty-three, while Martin was at a deposition, while he was billing $450 an hour, while she was alone in their kitchen probably cooking spinach because she'd decided that week they needed to eat healthier.

Spinach. God, he hated spinach. He'd eat it every meal for the rest of his life if it meant she could complain about him leaving his socks on the floor again.

Martin lowered himself into the pool. The shock of cold water against his skin made him gasp, made him think of the hospital air conditioning, of how her skin had felt when he'd kissed her cold forehead one last time. He began to swim, clumsy strokes through water that felt thick as grief. He wasn't swimming toward anything. He wasn't swimming away from anything. He was just moving through darkness, alone.

Until he heard the splash.

Martin surfaced, sputtering, to find a woman in a black dress standing at the pool's edge, barefoot, holding a takeout container. She looked maybe thirty, with mascara running down her cheeks in dark rivers.

"My husband left," she said, as if Martin were a priest instead of a middle-aged man in wet boxets. "Today. Moved out while I was at work. I came here because I didn't know where else to go."

She sat down at the edge, legs dangling in the water. "You're swimming with your clothes on."

"I'm swimming with my wife's hat." Martin realized he was still clutching the orange brim. It was ruined now. Chlorine would destroy the fabric. But somehow, watching this stranger cry into the night, it felt right.

"My name's Elena."

"Martin."

She opened the takeout container—spinach gnocchi in cream sauce. "You want some? It's still warm."

Martin treaded water, feeling the weight of the hat in his hand, the absurdity of this moment, two strangers broken in different ways meeting at the bottom of a pool at 2 AM.

"Yes," he said. "I'm starving."

And later, when they sat together on the concrete eating cold pasta with their hands, when he told her about the aneurysm and she told him about the other woman, Martin thought maybe this was what swimming meant. Not staying above water forever, but finding someone to tread water with when you were too tired to keep kicking alone.