What We Buried in Egypt

The view from our balcony at the Marriott was of the Great Pyramid, its limestone casing glowing like something not quite of this world in the sunset. Marcus stood at the railing, his silhouette sharp against the cairo sky. He hadn't touched me since we'd left New York.

"They found your hat," he said without turning around. "Housekeeping left a voicemail."

My sun hat, forgotten on the flight from JFK. A stupid straw thing with a ribbon I'd bought at a discount store three years ago, back when I still made small purchases without thinking about IVF payments or adoption lawyers or the increasingly silent spaces between us.

"Marcus."

"What, Elena?" His voice cracked. Just once. Like a tree branch giving way under too much weight.

He turned. His hair, once thick and dark like mine, had thinned at the temples this year. Stress, the doctor had said. Stress and something else he hadn't named. We'd stopped asking.

"We can't keep swimming in this," I said, and the metaphor was clumsy, too raw for what we were doing to each other. "We're just—"

"Drowning?" He laughed, dark humor that wasn't really humor at all. "That's the point of swimming, Elena. You don't drown. That's the whole goddamn trick."

Later that night, in the pool far below our room, the water cool against my skin, I floated on my back and looked up at the same stars that had watched the pyramid rise from the desert sands four thousand years ago. Marcus had gone to the hotel bar. I could hear distant laughter from European tourists, the clink of glasses, someone playing guitar badly.

I thought about the sonogram photos in my purse, black and white ghosts we'd never shown anyone. The bear nursery we'd started painting before the second miscarriage. The way my hair had started coming out in clumps in the shower after the third.

The weight I'd been carrying wasn't a child anymore. It was us. It was this marriage we kept trying to resuscitate, this Egypt trip we'd booked because couples were supposed to travel when things got hard, as if geography could heal what time and patience hadn't.

I swam to the edge of the pool and pulled myself up, water dripping from my skin onto the concrete. The pyramid rose in the distance, ancient and patient and utterly indifferent to human grief. Some things outlasted love. Some things were meant to be buried beneath the sand and left there.

Marcus was right. The trick was not to drown. The trick was knowing when to stop swimming against the current and let yourself be carried somewhere else entirely.