The Riddle of the Sphinx

The sun hat had been her mother's—wide-brimmed, elegant, smelling faintly of Estée Lauder and the garden she'd tended until the end. Elena pressed it to her face, inhaling, as she sat on the balcony of the timeshare she couldn't really afford. Three weeks after the funeral, and still she was waiting for the woman to walk through the door, explaining some final riddle.

The papaya on the table was overripe, its flesh giving way too easily under her spoon. Sweet and cloying, like the condolence calls that had finally stopped coming. Her father had loved papaya. Had eaten it every morning until the cancer made swallowing an act of courage. Now Elena ate it in his name, some weird penance she couldn't explain to anyone.

Her iPhone buzzed against the table—Mark again. Three months of separation, and still he called at the same time every evening. Some nights she answered. Some nights she let it ring until he gave up, imagining him in their kitchen, probably in that ugly sphinx statue she'd bought at a flea market, the one he'd hated. "It's watching me," he'd said. "It knows things."

He wasn't wrong about that.

Tonight she answered. "I was thinking about Egypt," he said without preamble. His voice was rougher than she remembered. "About how the sphinxes guard tombs. How they're supposed to protect the dead, but they're the ones everyone forgets."

"Are you drunk?"

"I'm at the museum. There's an exhibit. Ancient funerary rites." A pause. "I keep thinking about what we buried. What we're still burying."

Elena looked at the hat, the papaya, the phone that held three years of messages she couldn't delete. "Some things should stay buried, Mark."

"But what if—" His voice cracked. "What if we dug it up? Just to see if it's really dead?"

The sphinx in their hallway had known, she realized. It had watched them destroy each other with kindness, with sacrifice, with all the things that looked like love but weren't.

"It's not dead," she said quietly. "It's just a tomb now."

"I still love you," he said, and the words sounded like a confession, like something pulled from him against his will.

"I know," she said. "That's the problem."

She ended the call and placed the hat on her head. Tomorrow she would drive to the coast. Tomorrow she would do something that wasn't waiting. But tonight, she sat with the ghosts and ate her papaya in the dark, letting the sweetness fill her mouth, letting herself pretend, for just a moment, that it was enough.