What We Bear

The spinach lay wilted in Mara's refrigerator, a forgotten purchase from three weeks ago. She'd bought it with such optimism—green smoothies, fresh starts, all the rituals of renewal people perform when they're trying to convince themselves that everything will be fine. Now the leaves were slimy with decay, much like the hope she'd been nursing since David's diagnosis.

He sat at their kitchen table, watching her with those eyes that had grown somehow more translucent in the past six months. The water glass beside him was always full, always untouched. The doctor had told him to stay hydrated, as if water could wash away the cells that were dismantling him from the inside.

"You should throw that out," David said, nodding toward the refrigerator drawer she'd left open.

"I know." Mara closed it gently, the same way she'd been closing doors lately—softly, as if loud noises might accelerate things. "I'll get to it."

"You always say that."

"I always will get to it. Eventually."

He smiled, and she saw how thin he'd become, how his wrists were beginning to look like delicate bird wings. David had always carried himself with a certain heaviness—not fat, but gravitas. He was someone you'd trust to bear difficult news, to shoulder a friend's crisis, to carry what needed carrying. Now the weight had redistributed, become something internal and invisible.

"My mother had a bear," he said, apropos of nothing, the way he'd been speaking lately—in associations that made sense only to him. "Stuffed animal. Lost an eye when I was seven. I kept it on my pillow until college."

Mara waited. There was usually more.

"I think about that bear. How it kept being a bear even with one eye. It didn't stop being what it was just because it wasn't whole anymore."

The water in his glass caught the afternoon light, casting rippled shadows across the table. Mara thought about all the things she couldn't bear to say. That she'd already started imagining her apartment without his books. That she'd Googled "widow support groups" at 3 AM and felt like a traitor. That sometimes, when he slept, she practiced the shape of her future name, alone.

"You're still David," she said, because it was true and it was all she had.

"Am I?" He touched his chest, over the heart that was failing them both. "Sometimes I feel like I'm mostly absence now. A bear with one eye."

"You're here."

"For now."

"For now is all we've ever had."

She went to the sink, filled her own glass with water, and watched him through her reflection in the window. The spinach would keep for now. Some things could wait. Some things couldn't. She drank the water down, cold and clean, and sat back across from him, bearing witness as best she could.