Riddles at the Edge of the Pool

The rooftop pool at the Carlton was empty when Elena arrived, just as she'd hoped. The thunderstorm gathering over downtown Chicago turned the water the color of bruised iron. She'd left her phone in the room, left Mark sleeping off his third scotch, left herself at the mercy of whatever bad decisions had led her to this conference in the first place.

She dove in anyway. The shock of cold water felt like revelation. Swimming had always been her way of processing things she couldn't say aloud—her father's funeral, her divorce, the way she'd slept with her boss last night and didn't feel guilty about it at all. The water held secrets better than people did.

Lightning cracked the sky open as she surfaced, gasping. For a second, the whole world went white, and in that flash she saw it: the riddle her life had become. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The sphinx had asked Oedipus, and the answer was man. But Elena was thirty-seven and still asking the wrong questions. What creature wakes up one morning realizing she's become someone she doesn't recognize?

She dragged herself from the pool, shivering. A black cat sat on one of the lounge chairs, watching her with yellow eyes that seemed to know everything. It wasn't hers—it must belong to someone on another floor—but it regarded her with the exact judgment she deserved.

"You're wondering why I'm not more miserable," she told the cat. It licked its paw and ignored her.

Elena wrung out her hair and reached for her beach towel, knocking over someone's forgotten hat in the process—a straw thing with a ridiculous pink band that looked exactly like something her ex-husband's new girlfriend would wear. She righted it gently, strangely tender toward this object that belonged to a stranger.

The storm broke. Rain sheeted down, warm and heavy. Elena stood at the edge of the pool, lightning illuminating the city below, and realized she wasn't going back upstairs. She wasn't going back to Mark, or to her job, or to the carefully constructed life that felt like a performance she'd been rehearsing for years.

The cat meowed once, emphatic, and disappeared into the stairwell.

Elena wrapped herself in the towel and followed.