What the Bear Ate

The bear tattoo on Marcus's shoulder twitched as he reached for his coffee mug. A grizzly, mid-roar, inked during a bachelor weekend he'd never fully explained. Twelve years of marriage, and I still didn't know who he'd been then. Who either of us had been.

"You're staring," he said, not looking up from his iPhone.

"Just thinking."

"About?"

The colander of spinach I'd washed sat wilting on the counter. We were supposed to eat healthier, start trying again. The third round of IVF had failed two weeks ago. Marcus hadn't cried. He'd just downloaded a meditation app and gone back to work.

"Your hair," I said. "You should cut it."

He ran a hand through it, thicker now than when we'd met, shot with silver at the temples. "You used to love my hair."

"I do. It's just... you look like your father."

The silence filled the kitchen. His father had left when Marcus was seven. No forward address, no goodbye. Just a note about not being cut out for fatherhood. Marcus had sworn he'd be different. But fertility treatments had stripped him down to something I didn't recognize — something remote and increasingly absent, even when he was sitting right there.

My phone buzzed. The clinic. Another appointment, another cycle, another fifteen thousand dollars we didn't have.

"Marcus?"

"Hmm?" Still scrolling.

"What did the bear eat?"

He finally looked up. "What?"

"Your tattoo. What's it eating?"

"Nothing. It's roaring. Why?"

"It looks like it's eating something. Like it consumed something whole and it's roaring about it."

He set down the phone. "You're projecting."

"Maybe."

"What do you think it ate?"

I thought about the nursery we'd never furnish. The names we'd never call out. The version of him that used to hold me while I sobbed after negative tests, who now told me to stay positive and breathe through it.

"Itself," I said. "I think it ate itself."

Marcus stared at me. The spinach continued its slow collapse in the colander. Somewhere in the bedroom, my phone stopped buzzing.

"That's dark," he said quietly.

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"Then explain it to me," I said, and for the first time in months, he put down his phone and really looked at me, and I let myself hope the bear might still be willing to cough up what it had swallowed.