What the Water Takes

The lake was the same shade of green as the spinach rotting in Elena's refrigerator—the one she kept forgetting to throw away, along with her marriage, her career, the life she'd outgrown three years ago.

"You going to swim or just stand there freezing your ass off?" David called from the dock. Her best friend since college, the one who'd held her hair while she puked tequila at 23, who'd sat silent beside her at her mother's funeral. Now he looked at her like she was a stranger.

"I'm thinking," she said.

"About what?"

"About how much of ourselves we leave behind in things. In people."

David's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Deep thoughts for midnight."

They'd come here every summer for twelve years. The cabin belonged to his family, then to him after his father died. Now he was selling it—another thing the water would take.

She stripped to her underwear and dove in. The cold seized her chest, seized everything, and for a moment she thought about just keeping going. Down into the dark where nothing expected anything from her. Where she didn't have to want things she couldn't name.

But she surfaced anyway.

David was watching her from the dock, his silhouette against the moon. "You know what Karen said?" he asked quietly. "She said I love you like a friend. Like there's something wrong with that. Like it's not enough."

Elena treaded water, cold seeping into her bones. "Is it?"

"I don't know anymore." He sat on the edge, feet dangling above the surface. "I saw a bear this morning. Down by the creek. Just stood there watching me like it knew something I didn't."

"What did it know?"

"That we're all just pretending we're not terrified. All the time."

Elena swam to the dock and pulled herself up, water streaming from her hair, from her skin, from everything she was carrying. She sat beside him, their shoulders not quite touching.

"Maybe that's enough," she said. "Being terrified together."

David turned to her, and in his face she saw every year they'd known each other, every unsaid thing, every almost. "I'm selling the cabin, Elena."

"I know."

"I'm not coming back here."

"I know that too."

They sat until the moon crossed the sky, until the cold made them shiver, until the only sound was water against wood and their own careful breathing. Some things you don't say. Some things you let the water take. Some things you carry forever, like spinach in your teeth, like hair in the drain, like love that won't shape itself into something you can name.