Riddles in the Deep End

The papaya sat on the counter, its mottled skin mocking her. Elise picked up the knife, the restaurant's morning light filtering through dust motes. She'd been prep chef at The Sphinx for seven years—seven years of chopping spinach, seeding fruit, watching couples at table four lean into each other while she stood alone.

Now Marcus was gone. The apartment echoed when she walked through it. Only Barnaby, his tabby cat, remained, weaving between her ankles with plaintive meows that sounded like accusations.

"You're the one who left," she told the cat, setting down his food bowl.

Her mother's voice was in her head: *You're too picky, Elise. Too independent. Nobody likes a woman who doesn't need them.*

At 3 AM, unable to sleep, she drove to the 24-hour gym. The swimming pool stretched before her, black water under fluorescent hum. She'd never learned properly—Marcus had promised to teach her, summer after summer, but there was always something more important.

She lowered herself into the shallow end, breath catching at the cold. The sphinx in the restaurant's courtyard watched her work every day, its stone face asking its eternal question: What walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man—the progression from crawling baby to upright adult to aged weakness.

But the real riddle was this: How do you learn to swim at thirty-seven? How do you start over when you've spent half a lifetime becoming someone who no longer exists?

She pushed off from the wall, legs flailing, water rushing into her nose. She surfaced sputtering, laughing in the empty pool. A lifeguard appeared in the doorway, concern etching his young face.

"I'm learning," she called. "I'm starting from scratch."

He nodded, lingering in the doorway. She swam again, clumsy and determined, through the blue chlorinated dark, thinking of papaya and spinach and breakfast prep, of the cat waiting at home, of the sphinx's stone lips sealed forever with their secrets.

Some riddles didn't have answers. Some questions you just had to keep swimming through until you found your way to the other side.