What We Bear in Summer

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter for three weeks before Mara could look at them without her chest tightening. Ethan had moved out in March, leaving her with the lake house, the golden retriever named Banjo, and a silence that felt like it was pressing against her eardrums.

That July, the heatwave broke and summer arrived proper. Banjo had stopped waiting by the door for Ethan's key in the lock. Progress, she supposed, of the saddest variety.

She found the bear tracks down by the dock at dawn. Fresh claw marks in the wood, gouged deep as if something large and desperate had hauled itself from the water. Banjo growled at the tree line, his hackles raised, and Mara remembered what the neighbor had said about bears becoming bold that year, hungry and disoriented by the changing climate.

The thing was, she didn't care.

She stood on the dock at midnight, the air thick with humidity and the scent of pine and decay. Her phone sat on the kitchen counter, Ethan's last text unread. He wanted to discuss the sale of the house. He wanted closure. He wanted many things he had not wanted during the eighteen years of their marriage.

Mara stripped down to nothing and walked to the end of the dock. The water was black as oil below her, reflecting a slice of moon. She thought about the bear out there in the darkness, about what it must feel like to wake up hungry in a world that no longer made sense. She thought about Ethan's new girlfriend, twenty-seven and named something like Kayla or Chloe, who probably didn't wake up at 3 AM with the feeling that she'd forgotten something important.

She dove.

The cold shocked her breathless. Swimming out into the dark, she struck for the center of the lake where the water was deepest. Her arms cut through the black surface, pulling her away from the house, away from the marriage, away from the woman she'd been for two decades. Banjo barked from the shore—a single sharp sound that carried across the water.

She treaded water in the middle of the lake, floating on her back, looking up at the stars. A meteor streaked above her, brief and brilliant and gone.

Something moved in the water beneath her. Something large.

Mara didn't swim back to shore immediately. She stayed there, suspended in the dark water between who she had been and whoever she was becoming, while whatever swam beneath her circled closer, and she thought about how easy it would be to just stop swimming, to let herself be pulled under.

Then she turned toward the dock. She kicked hard, her strokes strong and purposeful. Banjo was waiting when she hauled herself dripping onto the wood. He licked the water from her face, his tail thumping against the dock boards.

"Good boy," she said, wrapping herself in the towel she'd left there. "You're a good boy, Banjo."

Inside, she picked up her phone and texted Ethan back: Let's list it.

The bear would come back. The marriage was over. She would have to learn to bear the weight of her own life. But not tonight. Tonight, she had survived the water, and tomorrow was soon enough to figure out what came after.