What Remains in the Water

The backyard smelled of chlorine and expensive wine when Elena arrived, fashionably late to David's Fourth of July party. Three years after the divorce, she still couldn't quite escape these gatherings—David had a talent for maintaining friendships with everyone, including the women who left him.

He spotted her from across the pool, where he floated on his back like some aging god of suburbia. "Elena!" he called, splashing water over the edge. "You came."

"Wouldn't miss it," she said, though they both knew she'd considered five excuses before finding one that didn't sound pathetic. The pool shimmered behind him, its surface broken by children's screams and the lazy laps of the more serious swimmers.

She found herself standing next to Sarah, David's new girlfriend—twenty-six, optimistic, the kind of woman who believed relationships could be saved through communication exercises and scheduled date nights. Sarah offered her a drink.

"You okay?" Sarah asked. "You look like you're watching a funeral procession."

"Just remembering," Elena said. "This is where I learned to swim, you know. David taught me. I was twenty-eight and afraid of putting my face underwater."

Somewhere in the garden, a cat screamed—a sharp, guttural sound that made several guests turn their heads. Then silence. Later, she'd learn it was a fox that had been roaming the neighborhood all summer, snatching pets from beneath porches, clever and cruel and hungry in ways wild things always were.

"Do you ever miss him?" Sarah asked, and the question hung there like smoke.

Elena watched David climb out of the pool, water streaming from his hair, his chest thinning but still familiar as her own hands. She remembered how he'd held her in this backyard fifteen years ago, both of them drunk on wedding champagne and the terrifying certainty that they'd chosen right.

"Sometimes," Elena said finally. "But mostly I miss who I thought he was. Who I thought we'd be."

A fox darted through the hydrangeas then, a flash of rust and movement that no one else seemed to notice. It paused at the garden's edge, watching the party with intelligent, assessing eyes, before slipping away into the darkness.

"You're still his friend," Sarah said quietly. "After everything."

"That's the tragedy, isn't it?" Elena set down her drink. "Some loves become friendships. Some friendships become stories you tell yourself when you can't sleep. And sometimes, sometimes you realize the water was never deep enough to hold what you'd lost."

She left before the fireworks, driving past David's house as the first bursts of color illuminated the sky, wondering why the people who stay are always harder to mourn than the ones who leave.