Where the Water Goes

Marcus stood at the edge of the property line, watching through the chain-link fence as his childhood home was dismantled by strangers. The for sale sign had gone up three weeks ago, after the funeral, after the reading of the will that left him everything and nothing at all.

The old golden retriever—Bella, his mother had named her twelve years ago—lay in the neighbor's yard, watching him with milky eyes. She'd been given to the Johnsons when the nursing home took his father. Now she thumped her tail once, twice, against the grass, recognizing something in him despite everything.

"You remember," Marcus said, and the dog lifted her head, letting out a low whine that pulled at something hollow in his chest.

He'd come for the baseball cards. His father had promised them to him when he was twelve, then promptly forgotten, and now they were somewhere in the garage, buried under decades of accumulated things. Marcus had spent yesterday afternoon digging through boxes, finding nothing but cancelled checks from 1998 and a rusted toolbox.

What he'd found instead was the photograph—his father, young and laughing in a baseball uniform, arm draped around a woman Marcus had never met. Not his mother. Someone else's smile, someone else's memory tucked away in a box marked TAXES 1992.

Marcus was thirty-four now, the same age his father had been in that photograph. He wondered what secrets he'd accumulate by the time he was the old man in the nursing home, what photographs he'd hide in boxes his children would find too late.

The pool was still full—miraculously, the real estate agent had maintained it. The water caught the afternoon light, blue and inviting and utterly still. Marcus had learned to swim in this pool. His father had stood on the deck, beer in hand, shouting instructions from a folding chair, never once getting in himself.

Marcus found himself at the pool's edge, toes curled against the concrete. He could simply strip down and dive. Let the water take everything—the house, the photograph, the years of silent dinners and messages left unreturned. He could stay under until his lungs burned, until the world narrowed to the elemental need for breath.

Bella barked once, sharp and insistent.

Marcus stepped back from the edge. The dog was right about that much, at least.

He walked to his car without the baseball cards, without answers, without closure. Some things, he was learning, didn't get resolved. They just got carried, like a stone in your pocket that you forgot was there until you reached in and found it still heavy, still present, still yours.

The highway stretched out before him, and Marcus drove toward whatever came next, leaving behind the house where he'd learned to swim, to play, to be a son. Leaving behind the dog who remembered him better than he remembered himself.

Some losses, he supposed, were just another kind of swimming.