What the Water Took

Margaret stood at the edge of the pool, Richard's hat in her hands. It was a ridiculous thing—a beige fedora he'd bought on impulse in Rome, worn exactly twice before the accident. Now it smelled of him: tobacco and rosewater and that particular scent of a man who'd stopped trying.

The pool lights cast rippling reflections across the backyard, transforming the water into something alive. Margaret had hired people to drain it three months ago. They'd come, looked at the thick layer of leaves and algae, given her estimates that made her laugh. She'd paid them anyway. The pool remained, a green mouth swallowing more of the yard each week.

"You're doing it again," Elena said from the patio door. "The staring thing."

"It's not staring. It's remembering."

"It's obsessing." Elena stepped closer, her bare feet silent on the concrete. "Richard's been gone eight months, Mom. The hat isn't him. The pool isn't him. None of this brings him back."

Margaret's fingers traced the hat's frayed brim. "He bought this because he said my hair looked like silver fire in the Italian sun. Said he wanted to be the kind of man who wore hats to dinner with his beautiful wife."

"He was never that man."

"No. He was the kind who bought the hat, then left it in the closet. The kind who promised Rome and delivered a weekend in Atlantic City. The kind who—" Margaret's voice cracked. "The kind who drowned fully clothed because he couldn't bother to take off his shoes before wading in after his phone."

The pool's surface stirred in the wind. A single leaf drifted across the water, arabesque and slow.

"Mom."

"I keep thinking," Margaret said, her eyes on the dark water, "if I'd cut my hair sooner, or worn more hats, or been someone worth buying fedoras for—"

"Stop."

"—maybe he'd have been someone worth staying alive for."

Elena's arms came around her then, her daughter's hair—chestnut, stubborn, so unlike her own—tickling Margaret's cheek. They stood like that until the pool lights clicked off on their timer, until the yard became nothing but shadows and the distant sound of traffic, until Margaret let the hat drop into the water.

It floated for a moment. Then sank.