What We Keep

The hotel pool glowed that artificial blue, the kind that looks like childhood but feels like regret. Marcia sat on the deck chair in her black one-piece swimsuit, unwrinkled as the day she bought it for a trip she never took. The spinach salad she'd ordered from room service sat wilting on the side table — six dollars for leaves that tasted like apology.

'I think he's gone,' Richard said, staring at the water. 'The goldfish. From the restaurant.' He was still wearing his conference nametag, RICHARD DAVIS, VP REGIONAL SALES, letters already starting to peel at the edges.

Marcia didn't look up. 'We never had a goldfish, Rich.'

'Not ours. The one in the tank at the Italian place. Where we had our anniversary. That bright orange one with the — ' He gestured vaguely at his own eye. 'The spot. Remember?'

She remembered. She remembered everything. The way he'd stopped noticing new things about her five years ago. The way he'd started noticing goldfish.

Lightning cracked across the artificial horizon of the Las Vegas skyline. No rain fell. Just that silent desert flash, bright and judgmental as an x-ray.

'I'm going back inside,' she said.

'You should eat your spinach. We paid six dollars.' He was still watching the pool, where a young couple floated on their backs, hands almost touching.

The thing about hotels, Marcia thought, is that you can see the shape of your life in miniature. The tiny shampoos. The single-serving everything. The way you look at someone you've known half your life and realize you don't know what they're thinking anymore. If you ever did.

She stood up, her joints making small sounds of surrender. The spinach salad would sit there until housekeeping came, another meal interrupted by the business of being married.

'The fish died three years ago, Rich,' she said, and meant something else entirely.

Outside, lightning flashed again, and for a second she could see herself reflected in the darkened patio door — a woman standing at the edge of something, deciding whether to jump.