The Weight of Wild Things

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly why Mara had come. Her hair—still wet from the shower she'd taken three hours earlier—clung to her neck like seaweed. Forty-two years old and she was sneaking down to the pool like a teenager breaking curfew, except she wasn't breaking anything. She'd paid for this room with her own money, earned from fourteen years of corporate loyalty that had dissolved into a severance package and a cardboard box.

She dipped her foot into the water. Cold. Not shocking cold, but the kind that seeped into your bones and made you wonder if you'd ever feel warm again. That's what her mother had said about grief—its not a storm, it's a temperature change. You wake up one day and realize you've been cold for months.

"Mind if I join?"

Mara jumped, water sloshing over the edge. A man stood at the pool's edge—maybe fifty, silver temples, eyes that had seen enough to find everything funny. He wore a bathrobe that had seen better decades.

"I was just leaving," she said, though she'd only just arrived.

"Bear with me," he said, already untying his robe. "I promise not to make conversation. My wife's asleep upstairs. Comes here every year for the arthritis. Says the water helps."

They sat in silence for exactly forty-seven seconds before he spoke again. "She's a fox, you know. Still catches me off guard. Thirty years and sometimes I look at her and think—who is this brilliant stranger?"

Mara thought of Tom. How he'd looked at her across their kitchen table the night he told her about the other woman. Not like a stranger. Like she was a piece of furniture he'd outgrown.

"I'm getting divorced," she heard herself say. The words felt foreign, like she was trying on someone else's coat.

The man nodded slowly. "That's rough. My daughter went through that last year. She said the hardest part wasn't losing him—it was losing who she was when she was with him."

Mara looked at her reflection in the pool's dark surface. The woman staring back had the same hair, the same eyes, the same mouth she'd always had. But somehow she couldn't remember how to wear her own face.

"You know what she does now?" the man continued. "She bought herself a motorcycle. Says she spent twenty years being someone's passenger. Now she decides where they're going."

Mara stood up, water dripping from her thighs onto the concrete. She'd check out tomorrow. Drive north. Maybe stop at that pottery studio in Asheville she'd circled in magazines for years. Or maybe she'd just keep driving until the road ran out.

"Your wife's lucky," she said.

"Don't tell her that," he smiled. "She'll expect me to remember it."