Riddles at Midnight

The university pool closed at ten, but Marcus had his own key. Forty-two years old, recently divorced, swimming laps until his muscles burned and his thoughts finally quieted. The water was the only place where the riddles of his life didn't demand answers.

He surfaced after his twentieth lap, gasping, and there she was—Sarah, the new Egyptology professor, sitting on the pool deck with an ancient sphinx statue between her knees. She'd been bringing it to the museum for weeks; now she'd brought it here.

"Research," she said, her voice echoing off the tiles. "The ancient Egyptians believed water held memories. Thought I'd test the theory."

Marcus pulled himself up, water streaming off his shoulders. "And?"

"And this particular sphinx has been staring at me for three hours, and I still don't know what it's hiding." She set the limestone creature down. "Your turn. What are you hiding in the water?"

The question caught him off guard. He'd been hiding from everything—his father's death, the baseball scholarship he'd thrown away, the marriage that had dissolved like sugar in warm water. But he didn't say that.

Instead, he told her about the dog. His ex-wife's golden retriever, Buster, who'd slept beside him through seventeen years of marriage and now wandered through his empty house, searching for her.

"Grief is a sphinx," Sarah said, pulling her knees to her chest. "It asks you riddles you can't solve until you stop trying to solve them."

Marcus laughed, startled. "That's the most academic thing anyone's ever said to me at midnight."

"I specialize in dead civilizations." She stood up, sphinx tucked under her arm like a football. "Tomorrow's my department head meeting. They want to eliminate my position. Budget cuts."

"That's terrible."

"Is it?" She considered this. "Or is it just another riddle?" She looked at him, really looked at him. "You swim every night. I bring ancient statues to pools. We're both running from something, Marcus."

The silence stretched between them, charged and sudden.

"I have season tickets," he heard himself say. "Baseball. Downtown stadium."

"I've never been to a baseball game."

"Tomorrow night."

She smiled. "I'll bring the sphinx. He deserves to see America too."

Marcus watched her walk away, sphinx and all, and realized he wasn't tired anymore. The water held no memories, only possibility. Some riddles, he thought, weren't meant to be solved—only lived through.