Vitamin Deficiency

Maria stood on the balcony of the tenth-floor office, her palm pressed against the cool glass. Below, the city stretched like a bruised landscape, all gray concrete and distant sirens. In her other hand, she held an orange — a blood orange, really, with flesh the color of something broken open.

"You're staring again," said David, behind her. He was the kind of man who noticed things and pretended not to care.

"I'm thinking," she said.

"About Richard?"

Richard, with his red face and his stock options and his persistent questions about when she'd finally have children. Richard, who kept a goldfish in a bowl on his desk and called it Leadership.

"Richard is a bull," Maria said. "And you know what they say about bulls in china shops."

"They break things."

"They get broken."

She'd started taking the vitamin D supplements after the miscarriage. The doctor had prescribed them, along with the usual platitudes about trying again, about her age, about statistics that no longer felt like they belonged to anyone human. Now the orange pill bottles lined her bathroom counter like a tiny army she'd forgotten how to command.

David came closer, his hand finding the small of her back. They'd been sleeping together for three months, since the Christmas party where everyone had too much champagne and Richard had made a joke about biological clocks that still echoed in the hollow parts of her.

"Leave him," David said. It wasn't a question.

"He's my husband."

"He's a metaphor you're afraid to finish writing."

She peeled the orange in her hand, the spray of citrus sharp and sudden. The fruit inside was impossibly vibrant, alive in a way she hadn't felt in months. She thought about the goldfish swimming in endless circles, about the palm reader who'd told her she'd have three children, about the way Richard looked at her sometimes like she was a calculation he hadn't quite solved.

"My mother called yesterday," Maria said. "She asked if I was happy."

"What did you say?"

"I told her I was taking my vitamins."

David laughed, a short, sharp sound. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have left."

Below them, the city lights flickered on, one by one, like stars trying to remember their purpose. She ate a segment of the orange, the juice flooding her mouth with something like sweetness and something like loss. Behind her, David waited, patient as someone who'd already decided how the story would end.

She thought about vitamins — about how they were supposed to fix what was missing, but some deficiencies couldn't be solved with pills. Some gaps were meant to stay empty.

"The goldfish died," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"Richard's fish. Leadership. It died yesterday. He cried in his office with the door open."

David was quiet for a moment. "And?"

"And I felt jealous."

The confession hung there, terrible and true. She'd been jealous of a dead goldfish because it had escaped its bowl, because someone had mourned it publicly, because its small circle had finally broken.

"Maria," David said, turning her around. His palms were warm against her cheeks. "You don't have to live in the bowl."

She looked at him — at his familiar eyes, at the stubble on his chin, at the way he watched her like she was something worth saving. She thought about the orange she'd eaten, the acid burning on her tongue. She thought about the vitamins, the bull, the goldfish, the palm of her hand against the glass of a life that had become transparent.

"No," she said, stepping back. "But I have to find my own way out of it."

She walked past him, back into the office where Richard was probably still working, where Leadership had been flushed down the toilet three days ago, where she would sit at her desk tomorrow and the day after that. Some exits were slow. Some were barely exits at all.

But she started thinking about leases, about apartments with balconies, about buying oranges that weren't blood oranges. About living somewhere where the windows opened all the way.

That night, for the first time in years, she didn't take her vitamin.