Riddles by the Pool

The sphinx had been watching Elena take her vitamins for seven mornings. A concrete replica, its chipped paint flaking onto the resort's terrace where she sat each dawn, sorting supplements into little plastic compartments. Vitamin D for the bones that would someday betray her. Omega-3 for a heart she'd nearly given up protecting. B-complex for energy she no longer felt.

Below, in the pool, Richard sliced through the water. His swimming had improved over the course of their week in Mexico—more laps, fewer breaks. What he was swimming toward, or away from, she couldn't say.

They'd come here to fix something. That had been the agreement, spoken and unspoken. Twenty years of marriage deserved that much. But now she watched him on the padel court with the instructor, a woman named Sofia whose laughter carried across the resort like something that belonged to someone else's vacation. The way Richard looked at Sofia when she demonstrated a backhand—it wasn't new. That look had been in their marriage for years, just displaced. Redirected.

Elena swallowed her pills dry.

The sphinx's riddle: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man, the way life moved you through stages. But no one talked about what happened when you got to the third stage and couldn't remember why you'd started walking in the first place.

That evening, Richard found her by the sphinx again.

"You're missing dinner," he said.

"I ate earlier."

He sat beside her. "About Sofia—"

"You don't have to explain."

"I wasn't going to." He looked at her then, really looked. "I was going to say she reminds me of you. Twenty years ago."

The compliment landed like an accusation. "And what about the me now?"

Richard hesitated. "Now you're the one solving the riddle."

"What riddle?"

"How to stay."

They watched the pool's lights come on, illuminating the empty water where he'd swum that morning, where she sometimes floated at night, weightless and suspended, neither sinking nor rising. A sphinx without its answer.

"I take vitamins every day," she said. "Does that count?"

"No," he said. "But the fact that you're still here might."

She thought about her pills, organized by day and purpose. She thought about his laps, measured and determined. She thought about all the ways they'd learned to not leave each other.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Play padel with me instead."

"I'm terrible at it."

"So am I."

The sphinx watched them walk away, its painted smile cracking slightly in the heat, its riddle suspended for one more day.