What We Couldn't Bear

The bottle of prenatal vitamins sat on the bathroom counter for three months before Marcus finally threw them away. Not because we'd stopped trying, but because he'd stopped pretending. He'd started leaving his own bottles out instead—gray capsules for stamina, yellow ones for virility, a rainbow of pharmaceutical optimism arranged like a pathetic shrine to the marriage we used to have.

I found one of his gray pills in the sink, dissolving into a chalky smear. My hair was already doing the same thing—thinning at the temples, abandoning me in clumps around the shower drain, another thing my body had decided it couldn't sustain. Forty-two years old and I was coming apart like a cheap sweater.

Marcus brought the bear home on a Tuesday. He'd been hunting with his brother, something he used to do for sport but now did for hours of silence away from me. The cabin smelled like pine and whiskey and the metallic tang of blood. He'd shot it three times—too much, he said. He kept saying that while we hung it from the rafters, while he skinned it with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, while the thick pelt slid off in one heavy piece like a coat the animal was finally stepping out of.

"Look at this," he said, holding the bear's heart in his palms. It was massive, dark and glistening. "Still warm. Can you believe that?"

I couldn't. I couldn't believe anything anymore—not the thermometers full of pee, not the negative tests, not the way he looked at me like I was a stranger he'd married by mistake. The bear was the first real thing in our house in a year.

That night, Marcus cried into the fur he'd stretched over our living room wall. Not quiet tears—heaving, ugly sobs that woke the neighbors. He kept apologizing. For the bear. For the pills. For the baby we'd never have. His hair was falling out too. I reached across the bed and touched the thinning patch at his crown, feeling the scalp beneath, suddenly understanding that we were both becoming ghosts.

"I don't want a bear heart," I said. "I want to stop pretending this is enough."

He looked at me then, really looked at me, with eyes that had seen too much death in the woods. Something broke between us—not apart, but open. The bear on the wall seemed to exhale.

We moved to the city two weeks later. Left the vitamins. Left the bear pelt. Left the version of ourselves who thought we could fix everything with pills and patience. Sometimes you have to let the whole forest burn down before you can see the sky.