Riddles in the Garden

The riddle was not in the stone sphinx that guarded their neglected garden, but in the space between them in bed each night—two bodies breathing in sync, touching nowhere.

Mark had become something like a zombie, hollowed out by three years of fertility treatments, the disappointment calcifying into a dull ache he carried behind his eyes. He'd stopped asking about the vitamins Elaine took each morning, the regimented colorful pills spread across the kitchen counter like hopeful little soldiers in an unwinnable war.

"You're pitching Saturday?" Elaine asked without turning from her coffee.

"Yeah." His weekend baseball league had become his church—dirt and sweat and the satisfying crack of a bat, the rare moments when his body remembered how to move without fear, without the weight of expectation pressing down on his lungs. Last season he'd pitched a no-hitter and wept in the shower afterward, something he'd never explained to her.

She nodded. "I have a doctor's appointment."

The sphinx stared at them both through the kitchen window, its limestone face worn smooth by decades of rain, its wings folded in eternal patience. It had been her mother's, some estate sale find from the eighties. Elaine had started leaving offerings at its base—first coins, then flowers, now the empty vitamin bottles, like the creature might somehow decode the chemistry of their longing and transmute it into what they couldn't make themselves.

"I was thinking," Mark said, his voice catching, "maybe we stop. For a while."

Elaine turned then, and he saw it: the same deadening behind her eyes, the same zombie weariness that had crept into his own reflection. "Stop what?"

"Everything. The vitamins. The doctors. The—trying."

She looked past him to the garden, where the sphinx sat surrounded by a constellation of amber plastic bottles catching the morning light. Outside, a baseball practice echoed from the park down the street—some child calling for the ball, the pure unburdened joy of a game that still meant play.

"If we stop," she said quietly, "what do we do with all this hope?"

The riddle, he realized, wasn't about solving anything. It was about learning to live inside the mystery.

"We put it somewhere else," he said. "We find something else to make mean something."

She took his hand across the table. Her fingers were warm, which he'd forgotten.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."