What the Water Keeps

The pool in Sarah's backyard had turned a shade of green that no amount of chlorine could fix anymore. Mia stood at the edge, holding the net she'd used to fish out three weeks of rotting leaves and something that used to be a child's lost toy. Three months since Sarah died, and still Mia came over every Sunday, as if keeping up appearances for a ghost who couldn't care less about property values.

"You're too good to her," Sarah's sister had said last week, thrusting a cardboard box of Sarah's belongings into Mia's arms. "She stopped speaking to you two years ago. You know that, right?"

Mia had nodded, taken the box, driven home, and cried until she threw up. Some friend she'd been — showing up at the funeral, standing in the back row, pretending she belonged among the people Sarah had actually loved.

She reached into the pool water, her palm breaking the surface. Something brushed against her fingers, and she startled, nearly dropping the net. A goldfish — impossibly, improbably — surfaced, its orange scales flashing in the afternoon light. Sarah's niece must have dumped it here, a carnival prize freed into stagnant water. It circled Mia's hand, mouth opening and closing at the surface.

"You shouldn't be alive either," Mia told it.

The goldfish regarded her with what looked remarkably like judgment.

From the open kitchen window, Mia's phone started ringing. She didn't move to answer it. Probably Mark, wanting to know why she'd walked out of dinner last night when he'd brought up his promotion again, how his team was doing so well, how he was basically killing it this quarter. He'd used that word — killing it — while she stared at her wine and thought about how Sarah had once told her, over cheap margaritas, that Mark would eventually crush the soft parts of her. That had been the night they'd fought, the night Sarah said things Mia still couldn't repeat without flushing hot with shame.

Mia sat at the pool's edge, legs dangling in the murky water, and watched the goldfish swim slow, deliberate laps. The two of them in this abandoned backyard, in this house that would be sold any day now, in a city that felt too large for one person and too small for two. She thought about how Sarah had kept a baseball on her desk, signed by some player she'd met once, a symbol of some ordinary joy she'd never let herself quite have.

"I miss you," Mia said to the water, to the goldfish, to the ghost of a friend who had known exactly how to hurt her and had done it anyway. "God, I fucking miss you."

The goldfish jumped, a tiny perfect arc, and splashed back down. Mia laughed, and the sound startled something loose in her chest. She reached into the water with both hands, let the fish swim between her fingers, and wondered if Sarah would have hated her for crying, or hated her for not crying sooner, or simply not cared at all. Some things, she realized, you don't get to know. Some endings stay unfinished.