The Answerless Riddle

Miranda watched her husband across the dinner table, his face illuminated by the harsh overhead light, and thought about how he had become a sphinx in their marriage—inscrutable, distant, posed with an eternal question she could never quite answer. Not that he asked questions anymore. That was the problem.

"Pass the salt?" he asked, and she complied automatically, her body remembering the choreography of seven years while her mind wandered to the sphinx moth she'd seen earlier that day, battered itself against their porch light in endless, desperate orbits.

"I got the promotion," she said instead of sitting down. The words felt like stones in her mouth. "We'd have to move to Chicago."

Arthur looked up from his plate of orange-glazed salmon—his favorite, which she'd made for his birthday three days ago and forgotten to mention. The orange reduction had congealed into an unappetizing lacquer.

"Chicago," he repeated, his voice flat. "You're just deciding this now?"

A storm had been brewing all afternoon, the sky bruising purple and sickly yellow. The first crack of lightning chose that moment to split the sky, whitening the kitchen windows, throwing Arthur's face into sharp relief. For a second, she saw how tired he looked, the lines around his mouth deepened by thousands of unsaid things.

"I'm not deciding," she said, her voice rising. "I'm telling you. This is what's happening. I've been waiting for you to—you know what? Never mind."

She'd been waiting for him to fight for her. For them. To look up from his work, his routines, his careful constructed life and notice she was drifting away like that moth, knocking herself against something she couldn't reach.

Another lightning flash, closer this time. The thunder followed immediately, shaking the floor beneath her feet.

"You know," Arthur said, setting down his fork, "I asked you to marry me in a storm like this. You laughed because you thought it was romantic."

"And now it's just weather," she whispered.

"Now it's just weather," he agreed, and his eyes were so sad she had to look away. Outside, the rain began to fall, washing over the orange tree in their backyard, its fruit already splitting from too much rain, too little care, everything happening at once and somehow still too late.