Watermarks

The pool was empty at 3 AM, save for Marco floating on his back like a discarded raft. Chlorine hung thick in the air, sharp enough to taste on the back of my tongue. I'd been his best friend since we were seven, since the day he'd thrown a baseball through my living room window and his mother had made him come apologize with a handwritten note and twenty dollars from his piggy bank.

That baseball was sitting on the deck beside my towel now, scuffed and ancient, a relic from the summer we'd turned twelve and everything still felt possible. Marco had cancer now. The kind that doesn't get better, just manages.

"You remember," he said, staring up at the high ceiling where humidity condensed and dripped like artificial rain, "when we thought life was a game we could win?"

I sank into the water beside him, letting it swallow me to the neck. We were forty-two, both divorced, both alone in different ways. Marco had never forgiven himself for cheating on Sarah. I'd never forgiven myself for never having the courage to tell him I'd slept with her first, at that office party, when they were already separated but not yet divorced.

"Baseball," Marco said, like he was tasting the word. "Nine innings. Three outs. Everything structured. Nothing makes sense anymore."

He'd called me yesterday from the hospital, asked if I could break into the community center after hours. Said he wanted to swim one last time before the radiation made his skin too sensitive for chlorine. I'd picked the lock with a credit card, felt like a teenager again.

"I slept with Sarah," I said to the water. "The night of your engagement party."

Marco didn't move. The water lapped against the tile edges, gentle and relentless.

"I know," he said. "She told me, the morning after the wedding. She said she married me anyway. Said she loved us both, in different ways. Said she chose the one who didn't lie."

I turned to look at him. Marco wasn't crying. He was just floating, perfectly still, watching something I couldn't see.

"Why are you telling me now?" he asked.

"Because you're dying, Marco. Because some balls get hit and some get dropped, and the difference between them is just a matter of inches, of timing, of the way the wind catches."

He laughed, a soft defeated sound. "The pool is shallow, you know. Both ends. But in the middle? In the middle, it's deep enough to drown in."

We swam until dawn, two men who had loved the same woman, who had loved each other more honestly than either of them had ever loved anything, and when the morning staff found us, we were sitting side by side on the deck, watching the baseball turn grey in the breaking light.