The Weight of Wet Things

Miranda stood by the edge of the pool, clutching her martini glass like it was the last solid thing in a dissolving world. The June heat pressed against her skin, sticky and intimate, while around her the CEO's pool party churned with the artificial laughter of people who'd stopped being interesting three promotions ago.

"You're not eating," David said, materializing beside her with a plate of spinach dip that looked, even in the golden hour light, like something scraped from the bottom of a swamp. "It's actually good."

She glanced at him—David from Accounting, who always smelled like fabric softener and quiet desperation. His hair was thinning. He wore a hat now, indoors, like he was trying to hide the evidence of a life slowly wearing him down.

"I'm not hungry," she said, which was true. She hadn't been hungry in months. "The spinach looks... verdant."

"It's organic," he said, like the word meant something. "Sarah made it. She's into that whole—whole foods thing now. Since the miscarriage."

The miscarriage hung there between them, a small bitter thing. Sarah had miscarried in February. David had still sent his quarterly reports on time. That was the thing about grief—it waited for no one, but it especially didn't wait for accountants.

Miranda looked down at the pool. Someone's child was doing cannonballs, sending up geysers of chlorinated water that caught the light and fractured it into a thousand temporary rainbows. Underneath the surface, the pool drain looked like a dark mouth, waiting.

"I almost did it once," she said quietly. "The pool thing. When I was twenty-five. I climbed over the fence of this place in Tucson, at three AM. The water was so still. Like it had never been touched."

David looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in three years of working together. "What stopped you?"

"The guard dog," she said. "It started barking. Ruined the whole—just completely ruined the aesthetic."

She laughed, and David laughed too, a startled bark that sounded almost real.

"Your hat," she said. "You didn't used to wear one."

He touched the brim self-consciously. "Sarah says I look distinguished. You think she's right?"

"I think," Miranda said, setting her martini glass down on a table that wobbled beneath its weight, "that we should probably stop lying about being happy. Even at pool parties. Especially at pool parties."

"They'll notice," David said. "If we stop smiling."

"Then we'll drown," she said, and she wasn't entirely kidding. "In the spinach dip of it all."

David took off his hat. His hair was thinning, yes, but his eyes were unexpectedly kind.

"I can swim," he said. "If you want to learn."

The pool water rippled in the evening breeze, catching fragments of twilight, and for the first time in months, Miranda thought about stepping into something deep instead of just standing at the edge watching her reflection distort.