What We Bear in Summer

The pregnancy tests accumulated like fallen leaves in the bathroom wastebasket—each one another small death. Marc stood at the sink, methodically cutting his **vitamin** supplements in half with a pill splitter, the rhythmic click-click-click the only sound in the lake house we'd rented for what was supposed to be our babymoon, before we knew there would be no baby.

I watched him through the doorway, my towel wrapped tight against the morning chill. The indoor **pool** glittered behind me, its surface still and artificial—a chlorinated womb I'd been **swimming** in daily, laps back and forth, trying to drown out the sound of my own biological clock ticking loudly enough to wake the dead. The water made me weightless, if only for an hour.

"There's a **cat** on the deck," Marc said, not turning around. "Been there since dawn."

I followed his gaze to the glass door. A calico sat motionless on the weathered wood, staring at us with an intensity that felt judgmental. Wild, unowned, indifferent to our carefully planned tragedy.

"They say animals can sense when something's wrong," I said. "When a marriage is failing."

Marc finally turned, the pill splitter forgotten in his hand. His eyes held that specific exhaustion I'd come to know—the weight of **bear**ing witness to someone's pain without being able to fix it. We'd become roommates who shared a bed and a history, strangers who knew exactly how to hurt each other.

"My grandfather told me once," he said quietly, "that in the old country, they believed bears couldn't die. That they just slept through winter and woke again, carrying all the accumulated sorrow of the world in their bones."

"And?" I shivered, dripping pool water onto the hardwood floor.

"And I keep wondering what happens when the winter lasts too long. When you forget what it felt like to be warm."

The cat outside stood, stretched, and vanished into the forest. I wanted to follow it—into the wild, into something real and untamed, away from this manufactured grief and the carefully curated tragedy of bodies that refused to do what we needed them to do. But I stood rooted in the puddle of my own making, watching the man who once promised me everything finish cutting his vitamins in half, as if smaller portions might finally be enough to sustain us both.