What the Water Took

The hat sat on the edge of the pool like a question I didn't want to answer. His hat — that ridiculous beige fedora he'd worn to our daughter's wedding, to her graduation, to every occasion that called for something resembling dignity. He'd bought it on a whim in Rome, three years into our marriage, when we still believed in grand gestures and the possibility of becoming people we weren't.

I'd come to the hotel pool at midnight, seeking the kind of anonymity that only exists in fluorescent-lit emptiness. The water rippled softly, indifferent to the weight of what I carried. Three weeks since the funeral. Two weeks since I cleared out his closet. One week since I realized I didn't know who I was without the constant work of being his wife.

The pool's surface reflected my distorted face — a funhouse version of grief, all hollow eyes and sagging skin. I'd spent thirty-five years learning to love a man who never quite learned how to love me back. Not in the ways that mattered. Not in the ways that didn't feel like a favor he was doing.

"You going to take that, or just stare at it all night?"

I hadn't heard the attendant approach. A young woman — twenty, maybe twenty-two — with a tattoo of a snake curling around her ankle and eyes that had already seen too much. She held a net, like the one I'd used to skim leaves from our backyard pool, before we filled it in because he said maintenance was too much.

"It's not mine," I said.

She shrugged. "Everything in the water becomes yours eventually."

Something in her voice — not unkind, just tired — made me look at her really look. The wedding ring on a chain around her neck. The careful way she stood, like something inside her had broken and been mended crooked.

"You can leave it," I said. "Maybe someone will come back for it."

"Or maybe the water will take it." She dipped her net into the pool, and the hat bobbed, then sank slowly, like it was giving up. "Water takes everything worth keeping in the end."

I watched it disappear beneath the blue-tiled surface, my chest hollow with something too large to name. She was right. The water would take it all — the hat, the memory, the ache that had become my geography. And somewhere in that loss, I might finally learn how to swim.