The Vitamin Regimen

Margot had become religious about her supplements. Every morning at precisely seven, she'd line up the bottles on the marble countertop—Vitamin D for the bones she claimed were aging prematurely, B-complex for the energy she swore she'd lost, magnesium for the sleep that eluded her. I watched her from the doorway, noticing how her hands trembled slightly as she twisted off the child-proof caps. The pharmacist had told her the tremors were stress-related. I knew better.

Three weeks earlier, I'd followed her to that dive bar on 4th Street. The one with the broken neon sign that flickered like a dying heart. She'd met him there—some minor league baseball player turned used car salesman, with hands too large for his wrists and a smile that promised everything but delivered nothing. I'd sat in my car across the street, counting the bottles in her purse, wondering when she'd started drinking again, when she'd started lying about working late.

"You're staring," she said now, swallowing the last pill with a grimace. I'd always hated that sound—the dry click of her throat, like something stuck.

"Just thinking about that fox," I said.

She froze. "What fox?"

"The one in the backyard last night. The one staring at us through the glass doors while you were pouring that second glass of wine. The one that looked exactly like the stuffed fox your father kept in his study. The one you made me promise to shoot if I ever saw it again."

She turned slowly, and I saw it then—the recognition in her eyes, the fear that I'd finally noticed what she'd been doing all along. Not the baseball player. Not the affair. It was the emptiness she'd been trying to fill, with pills and lies and dead things that kept coming back to life when she wasn't looking.

"I thought that was a dream," she whispered.

"So did I," I said, reaching for the Vitamin D bottle. "But some things are real whether we want them to be or not."