What We Carry Into the Water

The baseball game crackled from the radio on the porch, third inning, score tied at nothing. Ellie watched the lake through the screen door, the way the water smoothed itself over like nothing had ever disturbed it.

"You coming to bed?" Mark asked from the hallway.

"In a minute."

She wasn't. She stood at the edge of the dock, the same dock where Mark's father had taught him to skip stones, where Mark had proposed with a ring that caught the sunset like fire. Now she wanted to know what it would feel like — to slip beneath the surface, to let the water take whatever it wanted.

They'd come here to fix things. That's what you did when the silence between you grew loud enough to drown out everything else. You rented a cabin, you turned off your phones, you pretended that proximity alone could knit together what had unraveled thread by thread over seven years.

Behind her, the radio announcer's voice rose with a pitch. Full count. The weight of the moment.

Mark appeared in the doorway with two glasses of whiskey. "Bear," he said.

"What?"

He pointed past her shoulder. She turned and saw it at the tree line — a massive black bear, still as something carved from shadow, watching them with ancient patient eyes. Something about stillness calling to stillness.

They stood frozen, whiskey sweating in their hands, while the radio erupted with cheers. Someone had hit it out of the park. The bear watched them for another long moment, then turned and melted back into the dark.

"Did you see that?" Mark whispered, like speaking louder might break something.

"Yes."

They sat on the dock, shoulders touching for the first time in months, listening to the game fade to static. The water lapped at the pilings, steady and small.

"I'm sorry," Mark said. "For whatever I haven't been."

"I'm sorry too," she said. And she realized she didn't want to slip beneath the surface anymore. She wanted to bear the weight of it — all of it, the messy and the beautiful — with him.

They stayed until the sun came up, watching the water turn silver, then gold, then blue again. The radio long silent. The bear gone. Just the two of them, starting over, one inning at a time.