The Weight of Wet Hair
The papaya had been sitting on the nightstand for three days, its skin mottled with brown like a bruise. Elena hadn't touched it. She hadn't touched much of anything since arriving at this washed-out resort in CancĂşn, trying to remember how to be a person who wasn't someone's wife.
Now she stood at the edge of the pool at midnight, the water a black mouth waiting to swallow her. The air smelled of chlorine and something sweet—rotting fruit, maybe, or just memory.
"You going in, or just philosophizing?"
Elena jumped. A woman emerged from the shadows at the far end of the pool deck, cigarette cherry bright in the darkness. swimming would have been too energetic a word for what Elena was doing—contemplating drowning seemed more accurate.
"I'm thinking about it," Elena said.
The woman approached, and Elena's breath caught. Impossible hair—a storm of red curls tumbling past her shoulders, the kind of hair that announced itself before its owner did. But it was the face that stopped Elena cold. Sarah. The friend who had drifted away six years ago when Elena's grief became too heavy, too inconvenient.
"Sarah?"
"Elena." Sarah stubbed out her cigarette. "Heard about Richard." No condolences. Just the truth, stripped bare.
Elena's hand went to her own hair—still long, still brown, still the same. Richard had loved it. Had loved to wrap it around his fist. "I cut it all off once," she found herself saying. "After the funeral. But it grew back."
"Things do that." Sarah leaned against the pool railing. "I'm divorced now, by the way."
"Since when?"
"Since I realized I'd been swimming upstream for a decade and didn't even like the river."
The papaya on Elena's nightstand had been Richard's favorite. He'd bought it the morning before the accident, pressing it into her palm like a promise. 'For breakfast,' he'd said. 'Tomorrow.'
"I never ate it," Elena said.
Sarah's eyes sharpened. "What?"
"The papaya. It's rotting in my room. I keep thinking if I throw it away, I'm throwing him away again."
Sarah reached out and took Elena's hand. Her fingers were warm, alive. "You're not swimming, Elena. You're just treading water."
"I'm tired."
"Then let yourself sink. Then come up for air. There's a third option besides drowning and pretending you're fine."
Elena looked at the pool, at Sarah, at the moon caught on the water's surface like a piece of cut glass. She kicked off her sandals and stepped down into the shallow end. The water was cold, shocking. Real.
"Coming?"
Sarah laughed, and it was the most honest sound Elena had heard in years. "I haven't gone swimming in the dark since we were seventeen."
"Then it's past time."
They waded into the dark together, the weight of wet hair like a blessing, like a curse, like finally, finally learning how to breathe.