What We Leave Behind

The pool hadn't been drained in years. Green scum floated on the surface, like some terrible experiment in neglect. Janet stood on the cracked concrete deck, clutching her mother's iPhone—still charged, still full of contacts who'd been dead for decades.

"You should sell the house," her brother had said last night, too many drinks in. "Mom's gone. Dad's gone. It's just... stuff now."

But it wasn't just stuff. It was her father's hair still caught in the bathroom drainbrush—gray strands coiled like questions. It was the spinach seeds in the garden that kept coming back every spring, volunteer plants from a man who'd cooked with furious joy during those brief, bright years before everything fell apart. Before the trembling hands. Before the hospital stays became longer than the returns.

The water in the pool had once been blue. She'd learned to swim here, her father holding her waist while she kicked, shouting that she was a natural, a mermaid, a champion. Now the stagnant water reflected nothing but sky and three years of accumulated leaves.

Janet scrolled through the photos on her mother's phone. There was the birthday party, the one where Dad had pretended to choke on a spinach leaf to make her laugh. There was the vacation where they'd all stood ankle-deep in ocean water, salty and bright. There was the last photo—Dad thin, hollow, but still smiling, his hair sparse against the pillow.

Her brother wanted the pool filled in. Said it was a liability. Said neighborhood kids could fall in, though they never had. The fence was too high. The warning signs too clear.

But Janet couldn't do it. Couldn't fill in what remained of the place where she'd been happy, where she'd been a mermaid, where her father had still believed the world was good enough to bring children into. Where the worst thing that could happen was getting water up your nose.

She scrolled through the photos until she found it: her father underwater in the pool, looking up through the camera lens, distorted by ripples but undeniably present. Not gone. Just beneath the surface.

The spinach seeds would come back next spring. She could live with that. Some things, once planted, don't stop growing just because you stop tending them.