What We Keep

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottled with yellow and green, a soldier standing guard over a battlefield already lost. Elena had bought it three days ago, when she still believed that if she just made the right things—if she cooked the right meals, said the right words, kept the house exactly as he liked it—David might stay.

Now the fruit was softening, its flesh growing translucent at the edges, and David was in the guest room with his suitcase. She could hear him moving around, the familiar rhythm of his footsteps, the sound of him pulling things from drawers. Outside, the rain tapped against the window like nervous fingers.

They'd bought the goldfish on their anniversary, five years of marriage marked by a trip to the county fair and a plastic bag containing two orange fish swimming in confused circles. They'd named them Buster and Keaton, after the silent film stars David loved. Now only Buster remained, gliding through his bowl with that terrible, open-mouthed expression fish always had, as if perpetually surprised by the water.

Elena touched her hair, still thick and dark at forty-two, thank God. It was the one thing about herself that hadn't changed, that didn't carry the weight of all the things she'd failed to protect. Her mother's hair had thinned in her forties. Her sister's had gone gray at thirty-eight. But Elena's hair remained defiantly itself, a small, cosmetic victory that felt increasingly hollow.

"I'm taking the fish," David said from the doorway.

She turned. He looked older than he had three weeks ago, when he'd first started sleeping in the guest room. There were new lines around his mouth, a darkness under his eyes that coffee couldn't fix.

"You're taking Buster?"

"He was partly mine. We won him together."

"You won him by guessing his weight."

"You guessed the other one's weight. We were both there." He rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture she knew so well it made her chest ache. "Elena, I don't want to fight about the fish."

"No," she said. "Of course not. We wouldn't want to fight about anything."

The papaya's scent had grown stronger, sickly sweet and faintly fermented. The whole house smelled like something dying quietly in the corner.

"I'm sorry," he said, and it was the first time he'd said it since he'd told her he didn't think he could do this anymore—this marriage, this life, this effort of two people trying to occupy the same space without crushing each other.

"For what?" she asked, though she knew he couldn't give her a real answer. Not for the fish, not for the papaya rotting on the counter, not for the years they'd spent carefully not discussing the things that actually mattered.

"For everything," he said, and he looked like he might cry, which would have been easier than his careful, composed face. "For not being enough."

Later, after he'd gone, after the bowl with its solitary orange swimmer was removed from the windowsill, Elena cut open the papaya. It was overripe, the flesh collapsing under her knife, releasing a smell that was both tropical and vaguely rotten. She ate it standing at the sink, watching the rain streak the glass, thinking about how the things we keep are never the things we meant to keep, and the things we lose were never really ours to begin with.