What We Keep

Maya found the goldfish bowl in the back of her father's closet, three years after the funeral. She'd been avoiding this space—the way his old sweaters still held the ghost of his scent, cedar and pipe tobacco. But the lease was up, and someone had to sort through the remains of a life.

The bowl was clouded with mineral deposits, a failed terrarium her father had started during his brief, inexplicable fascination with bromeliads. Nothing had survived. He'd had that way with living things—the way he'd loved with the intensity of something that could also destroy.

"You're like him, you know," Colin had told her the night he left, standing in their kitchen with his back to the counter, defensive as a cornered bull. "You love things until they can't breathe anymore."

She'd thrown an orange at him. It had hit the cabinet and rolled across the floor, a perfect mandarin moon coming to rest against the baseboard. Neither of them had moved to pick it up. By morning, it had developed a soft spot where it had rested.

Now, Maya lifted the goldfish bowl. Something shifted inside—a dessicated plant, maybe, or the preserved memory of something that had never really grown.

Her phone buzzed. Colin's name lit up the screen.

"I'm in town," he said. "Remember that baseball game we talked about? The one we said we'd go to if we ever got our shit together?"

She hadn't remembered. She'd spent three years not-remembering, carving herself into someone who didn't need anything from anyone. But here she was, holding a dead garden in a glass bowl, feeling the way her father's love had felt—too much, not enough, everything at once.

"I found your hair tie," Colin said. "The red one. It was in my winter coat."

She'd lost that hair tie three years ago, the weekend they drove upstate and stayed in a cabin with no heat, making warmth with their bodies and arguments and the desperate intensity of people who know they're breaking each other but can't stop.

"Maya?"

"I'll be there," she said.

She set the goldfish bowl back on the shelf. Some things, she decided, should stay where they were—clouded and private, like the memory of love that had taught her how to survive it.