The Things We Carry

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, its yellow-orange skin freckled with brown, like something aging before its time. Elena stared at it, waiting for the courage to cut it open. It was supposed to help with fertility. Everything these days was supposed to help with fertility.

Her hair had started falling out three months after the third round of IVF failed. Not clumps, just enough that she noticed extra strands in the shower drain, on her pillow, tangled in her hairbrush. At forty, her body was reminding her of all the ways it had already betrayed her.

"You need more iron," Marcus had said yesterday, placing a bag of spinach on the counter. He meant well. He always meant well. But there was something condescending about the way he'd become an amateur nutritionist, as if the right combination of vitamins and vegetables could reverse what three specialists had called "unlikely."

She sliced the papaya. Its seeds clustered in the center like a tiny, dark secret, scooped out easily. The flesh was sweet and soft, too soft, almost rotten. Just like her.

"Your sister's pregnant again," Marcus said over breakfast, not looking up from his phone. "Bull market on babies, apparently."

The fork paused halfway to Elena's mouth. "Her third? She's twenty-six."

"Twenty-seven now. They're happy."

"We're happy too," Elena said, but the words tasted like the papaya—too sweet, cloying, wrong.

They weren't happy. They were something else: two people who'd built a decade on the assumption of children they might never have, who'd bought a house with extra bedrooms, who'd discussed names in the dark of their bedroom until the conversation became too painful to continue. Now they spoke in vitamins and vegetables, in papaya and spinach, in anything except what was actually happening between them.

Marcus looked up then, and she saw it: the way he looked at her hair, thinner at the temples, the way he looked at her body, which had refused them what they wanted. Not disappointment. Something worse.

Indifference.

"You're not eating," he said.

Elena set down the papaya. "I'm not hungry."

She went into the bathroom and closed the door. In the mirror, she saw herself—really saw herself—for the first time in months. Hair thinning. Eyes tired. A woman she didn't recognize. She opened the medicine cabinet and swept all the bottles into the trash. Prenatal vitamins. CoQ10. Folic acid. All the things that were supposed to make her into something she couldn't become.

When she emerged, Marcus was still at the table, phone in hand.

"We need to talk," she said. "Not about babies. About us."

For the first time in a year, he looked at her. Really looked at her.

"Okay," he said.

The papaya continued to soften on the counter. It didn't matter anymore.