What the Storm Takes

The lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating her face as she leaned over the hotel room balcony. Her wet hair dripped onto the concrete, dark tendrils plastered to her cheeks like veins of grief.

"They're going to drain the pool tomorrow," she said without turning around. "Maintenance found a dead goldfish in the filter. Can you imagine? Someone's pet, flushed down a toilet, swimming all the way here just to die in a resort chlorine pool."

I sat on the edge of the bed, the sheets still rumpled from our last attempt—our third try this weekend—to conceive. The fertility specialist had warned us about stress, about how the body knows what the mind won't admit. But here we were, in this overpriced bungalow in Belize, trying to manufacture joy through sheer force of will.

She turned then, and I saw it: the papaya-colored dress I'd surprised her with yesterday hung loosely on her frame. She'd lost weight since the miscarriage. Since she stopped painting. Since she started looking at me like I was a stranger she'd agreed to share a mortgage with.

"Your hair," I said. "It's shorter."

She'd cut it herself, jagged and defiant.

"It was getting caught in everything." She walked past me to the dresser, where a knife lay next to a halved papaya, seeds exposed like a secret. "I'm tired of carrying things around."

Another flash of lightning. The thunder followed close enough to rattle the glass doors to the balcony.

"Is this about us?" I asked, though I already knew. You always know.

"It's about the goldfish," she said, slicing through the fruit's flesh. "It spent its whole life in a bowl, swimming in circles, thinking it was going somewhere. Then someone sets it free, and where does it end up? Stuck in a filter, far from everything it ever knew."

She took a bite of the papaya, juice running down her chin. Not looking at me. Not crying. Just eating, like survival was the only thing left that made sense.

"I don't want to swim in circles anymore," she said.

Outside, the rain began to fall, and I watched her through the glass doors—small, defiant, impossibly far away—and realized that sometimes the people you love most become the things you have to let survive without you.