What Remains in the Water

The pool hadn't been drained since Marcus left three months ago. Elena stood at the edge in her cutoff shorts and oversized t-shirt, the smell of chlorine sharp in the November air. Her hair—once the color he'd insisted was expensive champagne, now grown out to mouse-brown roots—stuck to her neck in the humidity.

"You coming in?" called Jake from the deep end, treading water. Her husband's brother, now suddenly always there, helpful in ways that felt like an invasion.

She shook her head. The goldfish isolated in its bowl on the patio table caught the backyard light—a single orange survivor of the ecosystem their daughter had tried to build before the cancer took her too. Two years gone. Then Marcus, unable to bear the house that refused to stop smelling like her, unable to bear Elena who looked too much like the girl they'd buried.

"The dog needs walking," she said, though Buster lay asleep in the dirt, his muzzle graying, his loyalty transferred wholesale.

Jake swam to the ladder, water sheeting off shoulders that had Marcus's same broad frame. "Elena."

"Don't."

"He's not coming back."

She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "I know. That's why you're here, isn't it? Checking on your brother's crazy wife, making sure she hasn't drowned herself in the pool he paid for."

"I'm here because I asked Marcus if I could use the pool. He said sure, said you probably wouldn't mind. Said you never swam anyway." Jake climbed out, dripping on the concrete. "But you're out here every night, aren't you?"

She'd taught their daughter to swim in this water. Had held Marcus as he sobbed into her shoulder after the funeral, his tears saltier than the chlorine.

"What did you think would happen?" she asked. "That you'd just swim in our pool and I'd what? Bring you lemonade? Talk about how Marcus is doing in Phoenix?"

Jake looked at the goldfish, at the sleeping dog, at the woman who'd once been his sister-in-law and was now just this—a survivor treading water in a life she hadn't chosen.

"I thought," he said quietly, "that maybe you needed someone to swim with."

The goldfish stirred in its bowl, surfacing for flakes that wouldn't come. Elena kicked off her sandals and stepped to the edge.

"Race you to the other side."