What Remains at the Tropics

The palm fronds rustled overhead, a sound like dry skin against silk. Elena sat at the edge of the pool, legs submerged in water that glittered with fraudulent brilliance. The resort had been David's idea—a last-ditch effort to salvage what fifteen years of marriage had slowly eroded.

She watched him across the deck, laughing at something the bartender said, his baseball cap backward like the college boy she'd fallen for. That boy had disappeared somewhere between the mortgage payments and the miscarriage, replaced by a man who learned to lie with his eyes open.

"Bearing witness," her therapist called it. This painful acknowledgment of what she'd tolerated, excused, swallowed like medicine.

The spinach stuck in David's teeth from dinner was almost poetic. He'd spent the evening avoiding her gaze, checking his phone beneath the table. She'd pretended not to notice, just as she'd pretended not to notice the perfume on his collar last month, or the charges from hotels in cities he'd never mentioned visiting.

Their daughter would be twelve next week. Elena wondered what she'd bear witness to—whether the cycle would repeat itself, whether betrayal was inherited like blue eyes or the tendency toward melancholy.

David came to the pool's edge, sitting beside her. "You okay?"

The question itself was a lie. If he really wanted to know, he wouldn't have asked. He would have noticed the way she'd stopped wearing her wedding ring three days ago, how she'd packed her bags before they'd even left home.

"The water's nice," she said instead.

He reached for her hand, palm against palm, and she let him. His touch was familiar and foreign at once, like a language she'd once been fluent in but had mostly forgotten.

"We should come back here," he said. "When things are less..."

He didn't finish. They both knew he meant when she stopped noticing, when she became the wife who didn't ask questions.

Elena stood, water dripping from her legs onto the concrete. She didn't look back at him as she walked toward their room, toward the packed bags, toward the version of herself she'd buried somewhere along the way.

The palm fronds continued their whispering above, indifferent to the small deaths that occurred beneath them, over and over again, in rooms just like theirs.