The Things We Hold

Maya's palm hovered over the iPhone screen, her thumb trembling just above his name. Three years since David's voicemail had gone quiet, yet her body still remembered the weight of his hand in hers—the callus on his middle finger from years of pitching, the way his palm would press against her lower back while they waited for the subway, that unconscious claiming of space that she hadn't realized she'd miss until it was gone.

The vitamins sat in a neat orange bottle on her nightstand, twenty-three capsules left. She'd started taking them after the diagnosis, some desperate bid at control when everything else felt like falling. The oncologist had smiled gently, the kind of smile that says she's seen this before, this very human attempt to bargain with biology through supplements and prayer and Internet research at 3 AM.

"You still watching?" Elena called from the living room, where the baseball game was rendering players as pixels of motion across the television screen. The Giants were down by two. David had loved baseball—the rhythm of it, the way a single afternoon could stretch into something sacred and meaningless all at once. He'd taken her to a game once, early on, bought them overpriced beers and explained the statistics like they were poetry.

Maya finally pressed the call button. It went straight to voicemail, of course. She knew it would. She'd deleted his number months ago, then typed it back in from memory like someone learning to walk after an accident. The voicemail greeting was still there, his voice preserved in amber: "Hey, you've reached David. Leave a message, I'll get back to you."

The optimism of it made her chest ache. The way he'd said "I'll get back to you" like it was a promise instead of habit.

"Maya?" Elena's voice softened, footsteps approaching the bedroom door. "You okay?"

Maya placed the iPhone on the nightstand next to the vitamins. In the morning, she would delete the number again. But not tonight.

"Yeah," she said, and something about the word felt true, or at least truer than it had yesterday. "Just watching the game."