Vitamin Deficiency

Emma sat at the kitchen table, staring at the amber bottle of vitamin D pills she'd bought three months ago and never opened. The expiration date was still two years away, but the same couldn't be said for her marriage.

"You're doing that thing again," Marcus said from the doorway. He was wearing the orange tie she'd given him for their fifth anniversary—last week, when they'd still been pretending things might get better.

"What thing?" Emma didn't look up.

"That thing where you exist in a photograph instead of the room."

She touched her hair, which she'd dyed back to its natural brown last week. The blonde highlights had been for him, he'd told her once, early on, when he still made comments like that without seeming to realize they hurt.

"I'm thinking about the vitamins," she said. "How I keep forgetting to take them. How I keep forgetting to take care of myself."

Marcus laughed, that short sharp sound she'd learned meant something else was coming. "Right. Because vitamins are the real problem here."

"They're metaphorical vitamins, Marcus."

"Everything's metaphorical with you. Nothing's just—what it is." He stepped closer, and she could smell the orange juice he'd been drinking. He always drank orange juice when he was nervous, something she'd learned after five years of marriage and seven together. "You want to talk about what we're not talking about?"

"The orange light on the router's been blinking for three weeks," she said instead. "We have no internet. We're living in 1998 and neither of us has called to fix it."

"Because we're busy falling apart, Emma. That takes up a lot of time."

She finally looked at him. Really looked. The gray hair at his temples that had appeared when his mother died two years ago. The way his left eye twitched when he was holding something back.

"I'm not taking them anymore," she said. "The vitamins. Or the metaphorical ones. I'm done pretending everything's fine when it's not."

Marcus's shoulders dropped an inch. "So what happens now?"

"Now we stop pretending we're happy. Now we figure out what happens next." She stood up, and the movement felt like stepping off a ledge. "Starting with the internet. Then maybe everything else."

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe." The word hung between them like possibility itself—terrible and bright and absolutely necessary.