Riddles in the Empty Room

The vitamin supplements sat on the kitchen counter in their amber pharmacy bottle, a daily reminder of everything she couldn't fix. Elena smoothed her mother's thinning hair, the strands like dried grass between her fingers. Her mother had once been a woman who'd solved every riddle life posed, but now she just stared at the television with the blank patience of a stone creature.

"What day is it?" her mother asked, not for the first time.

"Tuesday, Mom."

"Tuesday," she repeated, testing the word like it might be a sphinx's riddle she needed to solve to survive another day.

Elena peeled an orange in the silence that followed, the citrus scent sharp and clean against the stale smell of the apartment. She'd been carrying this particular bear for three years now—the weight of her mother's decline, the guilt of wanting to leave, the way her own life had condensed into doctor's appointments and medication schedules and the slow erosion of a woman who'd once taught her how to be strong.

"Your father loved oranges," her mother said suddenly, lucid for a moment. "He said they tasted like sunshine."

Her father had been dead for fifteen years. The sharp pain of that loss had dulled to something manageable, but this—this slow losing of her mother, piece by piece, memory by memory—was a different kind of grief. It was a bear that kept coming back, heavier each time.

Elena looked at her own reflection in the darkened window. She'd started finding silver hairs in her brush last month. Time was wearing her down too.

"I should go," she said, but didn't move.

Her mother smiled, a flicker of the woman she'd been. "Stay. Tell me about the oranges."

And Elena stayed, because sometimes love was just sitting in the empty room together, letting the silence be enough, letting the riddles remain unsolved.