What We Carry

The lake water was mercury-cold against Elena's ankles as she waded in, each step sending ripples toward the horizon where the mountains doubled themselves in the glass-still surface. She'd come here every summer for thirty years, first with her parents, then alone after the funeral, now with Marcus—though Marcus stayed in the cabin, claiming an allergy to nature that Elena knew was actually an allergy to conversations they'd been avoiding for months.

She'd told herself this trip would fix everything. Three days of swimming and sunset dinners and whatever passed for intimacy when you'd forgotten how to touch each other without flinching. Instead, Marcus spent his time on conference calls while Elena cooked meals neither of them ate. Last night she'd made salmon with spinach, his favorite before everything, and he'd pushed it around his plate like he was solving a puzzle he couldn't quite care about.

Now, floating on her back, Elena thought about bears—how they were supposed to be hibernating but sometimes woke up starving, roaming through cabins and tents, their hunger making them dangerous in ways they didn't choose. She felt like that sometimes: awake when she should have been dormant, hungry for something she couldn't name.

Her father had taught her to swim in this lake. He'd been a minor league baseball player before an injury ended his career, and he'd taught her to throw a perfect spiral before she could read. He'd spin stories about bears while they sat on the dock, his arm heavy around her shoulders, smelling of lake water and pipe tobacco. He'd died when she was twenty-two, and she'd never quite learned to float without the weight of his expectations holding her down.

Marcus was standing on the dock now, watching her. His silhouette was familiar and suddenly strange. Elena trod water, wondering what he would say if she told him about the baby she'd lost five years ago—the one she'd never told him about because they'd only been dating six months and she hadn't wanted to be too much too soon. Some secrets calcified; others rotted.

She thought about spinach, how it looked hearty but wilted under heat, how sometimes you could hide it in smoothies and no one would know they were eating something good for them. She'd been hiding pieces of herself for years, small concessions that accumulated like silt at the bottom of a lake.

"Elena," Marcus called, and something in his voice made her turn. He was holding something—a baseball glove, hers, leather worn soft as butter. "Your dad's glove. I found it in the closet. Want to play catch?"

She treaded water for a long moment. The lake was deep enough to hold everything she'd never said. Then she began swimming toward shore, toward the man asking to meet her somewhere between who they were and who they might still become.