Water Memory

The pool had been empty for years. Sarah stood at the edge, the way the afternoon light caught the cracked tile reminding her of how her mother's hands used to look—veins branching like drought rivers, knuckles swollen with arthritis. She'd come back to sell the house, but the paperwork could wait.

From her pocket, she withdrew a bottle of vitamin D pills. The doctor said she was deficient, said it might explain the hollowed-out feeling she'd been carrying since the divorce. As if something you could buy at CVS could fix what broke when she found the texts on his phone. As if deficiency was something that could be measured.

A baseball rolled out from under the deck where she and Tommy had played for hours as children. She picked it up, the leather still recognizably the same brand their father had bought them—the summer before the accident, the summer before everything.

Her brother had been the athlete. She was the one who kept score, the one who learned to measure her worth in what she could provide, what she could fix. Now she fixed nothing. She was thirty-eight, alone, and standing in a backyard that smelled like childhood and chlorine and time passing.

Sarah stripped down to her underwear and lowered herself into the pool. The water was brackish, stained with leaves and memory, but she didn't care. She floated on her back, staring up at the sky so blue it made her teeth ache, and finally let herself cry—not the polite tears of therapy sessions, but the ugly, gasping kind. The kind that lived underwater.

When she emerged, she left the baseball on the deck and poured the vitamins into the water. Little white capsules spreading outward like time-lapse flowers, blooming, then sinking. Some deficiencies couldn't be fixed. Some things you carried. The trick was learning how to float anyway.