The Riddle in the Garden

The sphinx watched from the garden corner, its limestone face eroded by three decades of rain, its wings chipped where the dog—Buster, gone two years now—had once used it as a chewing toy. Mara stood at the kitchen window, coffee cup cold in her hands, watching her husband Marcus kneel before the statue with a trowel.

"You're going to hurt yourself," she said, not turning around.

"It needs weeding."

Everything needed weeding these days. The garden. The marriage. The silence that had grown like kudzu between them, choking the conversation they used to have about nothing and everything.

Marcus came inside smelling of damp earth. His knees popped as he stood—fifty-three felt different than forty-three. He washed his hands at the sink, water running too long. Conservation. That's what the couples therapist had called it—the way they'd stopped sharing the small things. The way they'd stopped swimming in each other's waters, instead choosing to wade in the shallow end where it was safe.

"Cable's out again," he said, drying his hands on a towel that should have been washed three days ago. "Probably the storm."

The cable had been their third partner for years. Something to watch when there was nothing left to say. Tonight, with it dead, they'd have to face each other across the dinner table without the buffer of other people's scripted lives.

Mara set down her cup. "Marcus."

"Yeah?"

"What's the riddle?"

He turned. "What?"

"The sphinx. It asks a riddle before it lets you pass. What's ours?"

He looked at her, really looked at her, for what felt like the first time in months. The lines around her mouth had deepened. She'd stopped wearing the lipstick he used to like. She'd started swimming at the Y again—her escape, her baptism into whatever came next.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "Maybe it's: what do you do when you wake up one morning and realize you've built a life with someone you no longer know?"

"Or maybe," she said, her voice steadier than she felt, "the riddle is: what creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening—and forgets how to love somewhere in between?"

The silence stretched between them, taut as a cable about to snap.

Then Marcus did something he hadn't done in years. He crossed the kitchen and pulled her into a hug that smelled like dirt and possibility. The sphinx watched through the window, its secret face almost smiling in the twilight.

"Let's order Thai," he said into her hair. "And maybe figure out who we are now."