The Pool Where We Drowned

The vitamin D supplements sat on her nightstand, a little orange pharmacy army she'd been taking since the diagnosis. Sarah's skin had lost its summer glow two years ago, around the time Mark stopped touching her with the kind of urgency that makes you forget you're mortal.

Now she lay by the pool at their condominium complex, watching the water reflect November's indifferent gray sky. The pool was empty, as it had been all season. The only other soul was a maintenance man whose nametag read BEAR — improbable, given his slight frame, hair thinning at forty, the kind of man who seemed to apologize for his own existence with every careful movement.

He skimmed leaves from the water's surface with a practiced tenderness that made something ache in her chest.

"You're gonna freeze out here," he called, not unkindly.

"Just getting my vitamin," she said, then realized how pathetic that sounded. She was forty-three, and everything in her life had become about maintenance — the vitamins, the pool she never swam in, the marriage she and Mark polished like an object they'd stopped using.

Bear leaned against his skimmer, watching her. "My wife used to lay out like that. Before."

"Before what?"

"Before I learned that some things you can't bear to keep, and you can't bear to lose either." His voice was gentle, almost clinical. "She's in Phoenix now. The dry air helps her joints."

Sarah thought of Mark's voicemail from yesterday: *Working late again. Order pizza.* He'd stopped asking how her days were eight months ago. The vitamins were the only thing either of them still cared about keeping alive.

"I don't remember the last time I swam," she heard herself say.

Bear nodded once, like she'd said something profound. Then he walked to the pool's edge and tested the water with his hand. "Sixty-eight degrees. Could be worse."

She stood up, her beach towel forgotten. Something about the way he'd said *bear* — as a verb, not a name, as if carrying weight was something you learned and forgot and learned again. She stepped to the pool's edge and let herself slide into the cold, shocking blue.

When she surfaced, gasping, Bear was watching with the smallest smile she'd ever seen. "Sometimes," he said, "you have to drown a little to remember what keeps you up."