What the Riddle Asked

The chemotherapy had taken Elena's hair first—the dark curls that David had run his fingers through a thousand times, now gone. She sat at the kitchen table in a silk scarf, staring at the bowl of spinach she couldn't bring herself to eat.

'You need the nutrients,' David said, his voice gentle but insistent. He'd been hovering since the diagnosis, his presence both a comfort and a suffocation.

'I'm not hungry.' She pushed the bowl away. 'What were you saying about the sphinx riddle?'

David brightened. He taught mythology at the university; stories were his refuge from medical waiting rooms. 'The sphinx asked Oedipus: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?'

Elena looked at her reflection in the darkened window. 'Man. We crawl, we walk, we lean on a cane.' She paused. 'Or maybe we learn we were never walking at all.'

Silence stretched between them, thick with everything unsaid. The spinach wilted in its bowl.

'I got the offer,' David said finally. 'The tenure track position. In Chicago.'

'You'd leave.' Not a question. They'd been together seven years, married three. This should have been a conversation.

'I thought—you know, with the treatment...'

'You thought I'd be dead by fall, so why not take the job?' Elena's voice was steady, which frightened him more than tears would have.

'That's not—I'm trying to be practical. Your mother could—'

'Your mother could move into our house, hold my hand while you start a new life three states away.' She stood up. 'The sphinx ate everyone who couldn't solve the riddle, David. But Oedipus answered correctly and still destroyed everything he touched.'

'What are you saying?'

'I'm saying maybe the riddle's not the point. Maybe the sphinx was just the thing standing in the road, and the real test was whether you walked around it or through it.' She touched her silk-covered head. 'I need to know if you're staying for me or because you feel guilty leaving.'

The spinach sat between them like an accusation. In the morning, they would call the doctor together or separately. Tonight, there was only this table, this silence, and the slow decay of things once living.

David reached across the table. His hand found hers.

'I'm scared,' he said.

'Me too.' She squeezed his fingers. 'But fear isn't love, David. You can love someone and still leave them.'

The riddle, she realized, had never been about legs or walking. It was about what you carried—and what you were willing to put down.