The Silence Between Ripples

The pool at the Hampton Inn had seen better days. Its concrete was cracked in places, and the water possessed that murky, uncertain quality of things abandoned. Marcus sat on the plastic lounge chair, nursing a warm gin and tonic, watching his daughter chase pigeons across the patio. She was eight now — the same age he'd been when his father took him to his first baseball game.

"Daddy, look!" Chloe shouted, pointing at the rusted metal statue near the pool entrance. Someone had spray-painted a mustache on the hotel's attempt at a sphinx, giving the ancient guardian of secrets an absurd, comical leer. He'd wanted to take a photo of it for Sarah, send it as a joke — we stayed at the place with the defaced sphinx, the one with the pool that looked more like a swamp — but the phones were dead. They'd agreed to disconnect, truly disconnect, during this weekend away.

They'd bought goldfish the week they moved in together. Three of them, each named after a different baseball player from the 1996 Braves. Tom, John, Ryan. Sarah had laughed so hard she cried when he suggested it, that wonderful throat-clearing laugh that had made him fall in love with her in the first place. They'd watched the goldfish swimming in their glass bowl, lazy and indifferent, while they ate their first dinner as cohabitants — terrible Chinese takeout that they'd pretended was gourmet. The fish had all died within a month. The relationship had lasted eight years.

Chloe was swimming now, or attempting to, creating small chaotic ripples that disrupted the surface's stillness. Marcus thought about all the things he should have said, all the conversations they'd postponed until better moments. The sphinx had known something about riddles, about questions without answers, about the weight of what remains unsaid.

"Daddy, are you crying?" Chloe asked, standing over him, dripping pool water onto his shoes.

He hadn't realized he was crying.

"No," he said. "Just the chlorine."

She nodded, accepting this easily, as children do, and returned to the pool. The water settled around her, and for a moment, everything was still again. He thought about calling Sarah, telling her about the sphinx, about the goldfish they'd once had, about how much he still missed that baseball game they'd never finished watching together. Some things, he realized, you never stop swimming through — you just learn to breathe underwater.