The Vitamin Pyramid

Sarah's husband had been dead for three months when she finally opened his bedside drawer. Inside, a pyramid of vitamin bottles stood like some absurd monument to his faith in longevity. Vitamin D for bones he'd never break, omega-3 for a heart that had stopped at forty-seven, B-complex for energy he'd never need again. She'd told him to throw them out a dozen times. "Investment in the future," he'd say, that infuriating grin that made her want to kiss him or scream at him.

Now she stood in their kitchen at 2 AM, holding a bottle of orange-flavored gummy vitamins he'd bought as a joke. The streetlamp outside cast an orange glow through the window, the same sickly sodium light that had illuminated his hospital room. She remembered him making her laugh by pretending the gummies were illegal contraband. "These'll kill you faster than cigarettes," he'd wheezed, even as the cancer ate him from the inside.

She found herself driving to the YMCA, membership card still in her wallet from the couples' swimming classes they'd never taken. The pool was empty at this hour, water still and dark as a mirror. Sarah stripped to her underwear—she hadn't brought a suit—and slipped into the cold water. It shocked her lungs, this feeling of weightlessness, of suspension between surface and bottom.

She'd forgotten how to swim properly, so she just let herself sink, then kick back up, again and again. The chlorine smell filled her nose. Her father's voice: "The trick isn't fighting the water. It's learning to let it hold you."

She floated on her back, staring at the ceiling where fluorescent lights buzzed like trapped insects. The orange vitamin bottle sat on the pool edge, a tiny sentinel. Tomorrow she'd go back to work at the insurance firm, back to her cubicle at the base of another pyramid, processing claims for people who thought they could insure against the inevitable.

But tonight, she'd keep swimming. Not toward anything. Just moving through the water, learning again how to breathe.