What the Sphinx Remembers

The pool at the Hotel Encantada shimmered like spilled mercury under the Mexican sun. Elena, forty-seven and suddenly conscious of every heartbeat, sat at the edge with her legs submerged, watching the water ripple around her ankles.

"You're going to prune up like a raisin," said Sam, dropping onto the lounge chair beside her. He set down two margaritas with casual precision, the condensation already beading on the glasses. They'd been friends for twenty years, through two divorces and his dead wife's funeral, through the publication of her three novels and his nervous breakdown.

"Let me prune," she said, accepting the glass. "I'm thinking about the sphinx."

"The riddle lady?" Sam raised an eyebrow. "What's she got to do with us drinking midday in Mexico?"

"She asked what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening." Elena swirled her drink, the ice clinking softly. "We're at noon, Sam. The prime of it. And I keep thinking about the evening part. The cane. The weakness."

"We're not dead yet, El."

"No. But we're not who we were." She reached for the small bowl of spinach leaves she'd insisted on ordering from the kitchen, something about iron and blood pressure. "My doctor called yesterday. Just some tests, nothing definite. But she used the word 'concerning.'"

Sam went quiet. The hotel grounds stretched beyond them—palm trees, bougainvillea, and yes, a concrete sphinx near the gardens, its painted face cracked and enigmatic. He'd once loved her, years ago, in the desperate months after his first marriage collapsed. She'd pretended not to notice. That was what friends did sometimes—pretended not to see the obvious, even when it stood between them like a riddle they refused to solve.

"You want to know what I think?" he said finally. "I think the sphinx's mistake was making it sound like a progression. Like you lose something and that's it. But maybe three legs means you've got something to lean on. Maybe that's not weakness."

Elena looked at him, really looked, and saw the lines around his eyes, the gray in his beard, the man who'd stayed when he could have left. She ate a spinach leaf, bitter and earthy on her tongue.

"Maybe," she said. "Or maybe the sphinx was just messing with us."

"Probably." Sam clinked his glass against hers. "To the riddles, then. To not solving them."

"To not solving them," she echoed, and drank, and for a moment the future didn't seem quite so much like a riddle to be solved as a story still being written, with no clear ending in sight.