Watermarks

Margaret's hair fell out in clumps that spring—first in the shower drain, then on her pillowcase, like small dark birds fleeing their nest. The chemotherapy was working, her oncologist said, but her body was becoming a stranger's. She started swimming at dawn, before the neighborhood woke, when the pool water was still and cold enough to numb her to everything.

That was when David found the padel court near their subdivision. He'd never been one for sports—they'd met at a bookstore, bonded over shared silence and coffee—but suddenly he was playing every evening with a woman named Elena from his accounting department. Margaret saw them once through the chain-link fence: Elena's laughter bright as wind chimes, David's back to her, his swing confident in a way it hadn't been in years.

"It's just exercise," he said when she asked, but he was already pulling away, dressing in the bathroom, leaving his wedding ring on the nightstand.

The divorce papers came the same week Margaret finished treatment. She was cancer-free, she told herself, but something else had metastasized. She drove to her childhood home, where her father sat watching baseball games he no longer understood, his hands trembling on a beer he couldn't remember buying.

"You remember when I played shortstop?" he asked, though she never had. "Your mother, she'd sit right behind home plate. Cold as anything, she'd be, but she never missed a game."

Margaret walked to the old community pool where she'd spent every summer of her youth. The water was still glassy at dawn. She slipped in without a suit, her body scarred and bald and unrecognizable, and began swimming laps. The water held her. The water didn't care that her marriage had ended, that her father was disappearing, that she was thirty-nine and starting over. She moved through the silence, pulling herself forward one stroke at a time, while somewhere in the distance, someone began another day of everything she'd lost.