The Sphinx in the Garden

The papaya sat untouched on my breakfast plate, its orange flesh glistening like a wound I couldn't bring myself to lick. Across the table, Elena stirred her coffee with agonizing slowness, the silver spoon clinking against ceramic—the only sound between us since she'd come back from her morning swim.

"Your mother called," she said, not looking up. "Buster's not eating again."

Buster. Our aging golden retriever, back home in Chicago, the living anchor of a life we were both pretending wasn't already underwater. I'd wanted to put him down three months ago. Elena had insisted we couldn't.

"What did the vet say?" I asked, though I already knew.

"Same as last time. It could be days. It could be months." She finally met my eyes. "She thinks we should come home."

"We're supposed to be here until Friday."

"Are we?" A challenge, not a question. The sphinx statue in the resort garden watched us through the window—stone lips sealed, riddles unanswered, all that silent judgment frozen in Egyptian limestone. The staff called her "the guardian." I called her a monument to everything that couldn't be spoken.

"I'm going swimming," I said, standing up. My chair scraped loud against the tile.

"Marcus." Something in her voice made me pause. "The sphinx asks the question before it eats you. That's the part everyone forgets."

I looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time since we'd arrived in Mexico. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her swimsuit strap loose on one shoulder. She wasn't talking about the dog anymore. Maybe she never had been.

"What's the question?" I asked, though something in my chest already knew.

"Do you still love me enough to stay?"

The papaya on my plate had started to weep, its juices pooling beside my uneaten eggs. Outside, the pool glittered mercilessly blue. I thought of Buster back home, of the way he'd stopped eating the summer I fell out of love, how animals always seemed to know before the humans did.

I sat back down. I reached across the table and took her hand.

"Yes," I said. "But I'm terrified that's not enough anymore."

She squeezed my fingers once, hard enough to hurt, and finally, finally let herself cry.