The Riddles We Don't Ask

Claire stood in the kitchen, staring at the wilted spinach in the colander like it held the answers she couldn't give him. The morning light was orange and brutal across the countertops, exposing everything she'd been trying to hide in the shadows.

They'd agreed to talk this morning — really talk — but now David was in the backyard, throwing the baseball against the garage wall. Thwack. Thwack. The sound had been going on for twenty minutes, a metronome counting down to something they couldn't name.

She remembered the sphinx statue they'd seen in Cairo, on that trip where everything still felt possible before the miscarriage, before the distance between them had grown into something they couldn't cross. "She's got the right idea," David had said, pointing at the stone creature's inscrutable face. "Ask the impossible riddle, let them fail, eat them alive."

Back then, Claire had laughed, pressing her palm against the warm stone. Now she wondered if they'd both been sphinxes all along, guarding their own impossible riddles, watching the other person approach with hope and crushing them when they couldn't guess the answer.

The spinach needed to be cooked or thrown away. One of those options. Isn't that what her therapist kept saying? That you couldn't let things sit in the colander forever — you had to choose.

David came in, baseball in hand, smelling of cut grass and sweat. He looked younger than he'd looked in years, and older too. "You okay?"

"Fine," she said, automatic as the garage door opener. The word fell out of her mouth before she could stop it.

"You always say that," he said, and his voice cracked in a way that terrified her. "You know what the sphinx's riddle was? What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?"

"Man," she said. "We learned that in school."

"Right. But what she really meant was: everything changes, and you can't stop it, and the harder you try to hold on, the more it hurts." He set the baseball on the counter between them, a white sphere with red stitches like wounds. "I'm not asking you to stay married, Claire. I'm just asking you to stop acting like you're not in pain."

She looked at the spinach, at the orange light pooling on his face like something molten, at the baseball sitting between their stories like a period at the end of a sentence they'd both been avoiding.

"I don't know how to be in pain and still be okay," she said, and it was the first true thing she'd said in months. The words tasted like something she'd been holding in her throat for years.

"Nobody does," he said. "That's the riddle."

Outside, a neighbor started up a lawnmower. Inside, Claire picked up the spinach and began to tear the leaves into pieces, watching them fall like small green flags of surrender, one by one, into the waiting bowl.