What the Sphinx Asked

The baseball stadium loomed like a temple to outdated gods. I sat in section 203, row 12, seat 8—the same seat my father had occupied for forty-three years until the cancer made climbing stairs impossible. Now his ashes were somewhere in the Hudson, and I was here alone, watching the Yankees lose, surrounded by drunk businessmen and families pretending to be happy.

Above the left-field foul pole, absurdly, rose a stone sphinx. Some architect's joke from the 1970s renovation—a riddle-guarding creature watching over American's pastime. *What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?* My father had loved that riddle. He'd told it to me at his hospital bedside, oxygen whistling, voice thin as paper. Man. The answer was always man.

The crowd roared. A home run. I didn't stand.

After the seventh inning stretch, I couldn't breathe. The walls pressed in. I walked out into the humid August night, past the sphinx with its enigmatic stone smile, and kept walking until I reached the river. The same river.

I stripped to my boxers and waded in. The water was silty, warm, wrong. But I needed to be submerged. I needed to feel weightless. I began swimming—no graceful strokes, just clumsy forward motion through water that held everything my father had become.

*What creature,* the sphinx seemed to whisper from somewhere upstream, *loves a son it cannot touch, misses games it cannot attend, and dies before it learns how to say the words that mattered?*

I trod water, staring at the stadium lights reflecting on the dark surface. My father had never said I love you. Not once. Not in thirty-six years. He'd shown up at every baseball game I'd played from age seven through seventeen. He'd sat in the stands, quiet, attentive. He'd taught me to swim in this same river when I was six, holding me steady as I panicked.

The riddle wasn't about legs or time. It was about all the ways we fail each other.

I swam back to shore, climbed onto the concrete, and lay on my back, dripping. The sphinx was gone—just a trick of memory, or maybe I'd seen it in a museum once, or maybe grief makes architecture of anything you need it to.

My phone buzzed in my discarded jeans. My mother. *Come home. It's okay to come home.*

I dressed slowly, water evaporating cool against my skin, and began walking toward the train. The game was over. The riddle remained.