Tropical Decay

Mara watched the papaya turning to mush on her breakfast plate, its once-vibrant orange flesh now collapsing under its own weight. Three days at this couples retreat and they hadn't spoken a true word to each other. Beside her, David's thumb moved across his iphone screen with practiced indifference, scrolling through emails that surely could wait until they returned to lives that didn't include matching his-and-hers robes and mandatory meditation sessions.

"Did you hear me?" she asked, and he looked up with the thousand-yard stare of a man who'd stopped listening months ago.

"The cat," she said, pointing toward the garden where a rust-colored creature moved through the bromeliads. "It's been watching us since yesterday."

"That's a fox, Mara."

"It doesn't matter what it is. It's watching."

That afternoon, she found him at the pool, floating on his back like something abandoned. The water had that unsettling blue of artificial things, and she thought about how they'd paid for this — paid to learn how to want each other again, paid strangers to teach them intimacy techniques that felt like homework assignments.

She slid into the water beside him. The shock of cold made her gasp.

"I saw the fox again," he said, eyes closed against the sun. "It was eating something by the cabana. A bird, maybe."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I don't know."

"David."

"What?"

"The iphone is still in your pocket. You took it into the pool."

He scrambled to check it, and she watched him — this man she'd loved for seven years, this stranger who checked his messages before he kissed her good morning, who knew her coffee order but not her dreams anymore. The fox appeared at the pool's edge, watching them with intelligent, predatory eyes.

"Let it ruin itself," she said, and swam to the other side.

Later, they would argue in their room with the door closed, their raised voices blending with the tropical sounds of a place designed to heal them. Later, she would pack her bag alone while he sat on the balcony with his ruined phone. But now she floated on her back, watching a single papaya leaf fall from a tree and spiral down toward the water, and for the first time in years, she didn't reach out to catch it before it landed.