What Lingers at the Pool

She stared at her husband across the hotel pool, his pale torso floating like a dead fish in the turquoise water. Marcus had been chalking **vitamin** supplements on the bedside table for months—D3 for mood, B12 for energy, magnesium for sleep—as if his gradual withdrawal from their marriage could be solved with a daily regimen.

They'd come to Tulum for a second honeymoon, or what Ella had secretly begun calling their farewell tour. The resort featured a concrete **sphinx** at the garden entrance, its nose weathered away by tropical storms, its painted eyes staring blankly at guests who posed for photos beside it. Ella had found the statue grotesque, but Marcus had insisted on taking their picture there that first morning, his arm heavy around her shoulders, his smile not quite reaching his eyes.

Now, as the sun dipped toward the jungle canopy, Ella watched a single orange **goldfish** dart between the pool's decorative tiles. She remembered the bowl she'd kept on her desk in graduate school, how she'd named each successive fish Sisyphus as they died one after another, their three-second memories perhaps a blessing. Sometimes she wondered if Marcus had already forgotten the woman she'd been when they married—the one who laughed at her own jokes, who painted watercolors in their tiny apartment, who believed love was something you built rather than something you maintained.

"You coming in?" Marcus called, treading water.

Ella shook her head. She'd forgotten her swimsuit upstairs, or maybe she just hadn't wanted to bring it. The distance between them felt wider than the pool, wider than the years they'd spent together. Some sphinx-like riddle had been posed between them, and she still didn't know the answer.

"Just watching," she said.

The goldfish surfaced, gasping, then vanished beneath the water's surface. Ella thought about how memories worked—how they surfaced unexpectedly, how some things dissolved while others hardened like stone. She stood up, the heat still radiating from her lounge chair, and walked toward the hotel room where her husband's vitamins waited in a neat row, where her own reflection would greet her in the bathroom mirror, asking the same question the sphinx asked every traveler: who are you now, really, when no one is watching?