What We Keep
Maya watched the goldfish circle its bowl, infinite loops in seven liters of water. Three years of therapy, two years of marriage, and now she understood the fish better than she understood the man sitting across from her.
The dinner party was David's idea. His boss was here, with a wife who kept asking Maya about her dissertation with the polite enthusiasm of someone who had already decided the answer didn't matter.
"So thoughtful," David had said when he gave her the fish, after she'd miscarried in the second trimester. "Something small to take care of."
She ran her fingers through her hair, something she did when she wanted to cut it all off. The stylist had told her last week that she had the kind of face that could go short. "Liberating," the woman had said.
David was telling a story about someone from work. The phrase smart like a fox came up, and Maya remembered her mother saying that about her father's old business partner, the same man who'd stolen their savings when Maya was twelve.
She thought about the bear exhibit they'd visited on their honeymoon. The animal had paced, its coat matted, eyes dull with the recognition of its own captivity. David had taken a picture and posted it with some caption about nature's majesty. He'd never seen what was actually there.
"You're quiet tonight," David said, when the others had moved to the living room.
"Just thinking."
"About what?"
About how they'd become friends first, in that way that feels like discovering something you'd lost. About how he used to look at her like she was the only person in the room who truly understood him.
About how none of that mattered anymore.
She took another drink. The fish circled. The evening wore on like something that needed to end.
"I'm going to sleep," she said.
"Now? It's early."
The bear in the exhibit had stopped pacing eventually. It had just lain down, resignation settling into the heavy lines of its body.
"I know," she said.
She left him there with his boss and his wife, with the fish and its small world, and went upstairs to pack a suitcase, feeling the way her mother must have felt after the money was gone: hollowed out, but finally, terribly awake.