After You (6 page)

11

T
he Secret Garden
is illuminated with the single bulb from Sophie’s Winnie-the-Pooh lamp, the big bear and his jar of honey holding up the base. The walls are a soft yellow, made softer by the light, and I remember when Lucy had them painted, when she didn’t know whether she was having a boy or a girl. A white rocker sits in the corner, where Lucy used to nurse and read bedtime stories and occasionally watch Sophie sleep. The mobiles of infancy have long been taken down, and the crib is packed away in the attic, but the yellow walls with their stenciled cartoon animals remain, like an artifact of a more hopeful time. I picture Sophie at age fourteen, with contact lenses and a nose piercing, perhaps a neck tattoo, demanding that her father repaint the room black.

I wonder now how many times Lucy sat in this exact spot, on Sophie’s bed, with the weight of Sophie’s head against her shoulder. If she, too, felt that sharing her favorite book was the purest way to express love, like telling your secrets or saying a prayer out loud.

“Hey, Soph, I bet you didn’t know that in certain cultures you aren’t supposed to put books on the floor or go near them with your feet. The idea is that they’re special, almost like magic or something.”

Sophie moves in a little closer, looks up at me, her expression impenetrable. I’ve dropped my kid tone, because I think I’ve been underselling her. I’ve noticed that she holds books with the same reverence as I do, taking a breath before she opens the cover, sitting still for a moment when she closes one. The way she gets lost in Nancy Drew, lets herself be carried off to one girl’s adventures in Indiana, tells me she has a much richer inner life than I’ve been giving her credit for.

“And you know what else? Books are almost a religion for me. Probably the only guaranteed way to get out of my own head and escape for a little while. You know what I mean?”

She doesn’t answer, and I don’t mind. I know she knows what I mean. I see it every day when I find her at The Pembridge Place School, dipping into a world where no one else can reach her. And I see it every night, when I tuck her in and we read
The Secret Garden
, both of us equally absorbed, finding delight in the unlikeliest of places—a fictional locked-up piece of earth behind a fictional manor house in England.

“So, tell me, what’s your favorite book?” I ask Sophie now.

She points to the book in my hands.
The Secret Garden
.

“Are you just saying that because you know it’s my favorite?”

She shrugs. She gives me a small gift: a
maybe
.

As I read chapter two out loud, Sophie follows along the page, guiding my words with her finger. We learn more about Mary Lennox, and her disagreeable nature, and how the other kids tease her and call her Mistress Mary Quite Contrary.

“Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. She had nothing to read or to look at, and she had folded her thin little black-gloved hands in her lap. Her black dress made her look yellower than ever, and her limp light hair straggled from under her black crepe hat,”
I read, but I stop because Sophie is looking at me instead of the book.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Sophie points to the word
crepe
on the page. I act as if I don’t understand.

“What? You can ask me. If you want, you can whisper your question in my ear.”

She takes a deep breath. Her face betrays her, her decision almost written in the air. To talk or not to talk.

This time I decide to push. Gently.

“Yeah? You want to ask me something?” I put my hand around my ear and lean in.

“Her … hat,” Sophie says, her voice soft, fragile, smaller than even she is. I try not to smile; I try to pretend that she has not just broken nearly a week of silence and that we are merely mid-conversation. “Don’t laugh, okay?”

“Of course I won’t laugh.” I lower my voice, match her tone.

“How can her hat … be made of crepes?”

“Really great question, Soph.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the word
crepe
has two meanings. It’s what you call a homonym, I think. I bet you’re thinking of the food, right? But here they mean the material. You know that dress I was wearing a couple of days ago? That’s made of crepe. That would be cool, though: a hat made out of a crepe. What would you put in yours? Chocolate? Strawberries? Spaghetti?”

“You don’t put spaghetti in crepes,” she says now, her voice back to its normal volume. “That’s just silly. Mummy says they have great crepes in Paris, that you can buy them from carts there.”

Hearing her voice is like an old song that transports me to a different time and place. It is two and a half years ago, and Lucy, Sophie, and I are having afternoon tea at the Ritz. I remember feeling vulnerable sitting under the grand chandeliers, pregnant and tired, and I whispered that thirty-seven pounds seemed like a lot to pay for some tea and minuscule sandwiches. My voice kept low so as not to be outed as a crude American unable to understand the satiety principles behind thinly sliced cucumber. And Sophie, at the age of six, turned to me and said, “Auntie Ellie, I think what we’re paying for here is the room.” It’s the look that I remember the most, almost visceral, the look Lucy gave me over Sophie’s head that said,
You believe I made her?
, that makes me burn with nostalgia.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Sophie asks me now, and her voice is still a thrill.
She’s talking, she’s actually talking
.

“Of course.”

“When I’m bored, I sometimes sneak into Mummy’s office and read her Encyclopedia Britannica. I am at the ALs right now. I know all about alopecia, that disease where you lose your hair—girls can get it, too—and aluminum, which has an atomic number of thirteen. I’m excited to get to AT to find out what an atomic number is. I made a rule that I can’t cheat and look ahead.” I am about to tell her about Wikipedia but then realize she probably already knows. Sophie, like me, just prefers the sturdy knowledge found in real books.

“That’s amazing. You’re going to have to teach me everything you know, because I’m a little rusty on my encyclopedic knowledge these days.” I can’t believe Lucy still has those books and that she bothered to have them shipped across the Atlantic. I remember when her dad first brought the set home—he had found them at a garage sale in the neighborhood—and the first thing Lucy and I did was look up the word
penis
. I still can see the pictures—an anatomical drawing, and a photograph, too, the pubic hair a full-on ’70s-style bush. Thank God, Sophie is a long way from the P’s. “Hey, you want to show me how well you can read?” Sophie takes the book out of my lap and puts it into hers. And so I answer Lucy’s rhetorical question—
You believe I made her?—
two and a half years later, while I sit on Sophie’s bed, listening to her read all of chapter three without stumbling once, watching the spitting image of my childhood friend reincarnated.
Yes, I can believe it, Luce. You’re the only person in the world who could have
.

Greg gets home about five hours later, and as soon as I hear his key in the lock, I run to the door, excited to be the bearer of good news.

“Sophie’s talking! She’s actually talking,” I say, before he even has a chance to drop his umbrella in the jug and take off his coat.

“What?” Greg stumbles through the door and steadies himself on the staircase banister. One look at him and I can tell he is more than a few drinks, maybe a whole bottle, past drunk. His blondish, uneven, and overgrown hair usually gives him a rakish charm, but tonight it’s unkempt, and his eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed. The top two buttons of his striped Thomas Pink shirt splay open, his purple tie is turned backward, loosened and thrown over his shoulder as if trying to escape. He is carrying his Savile Row jacket in a ball under his arm, like it’s a football.

He looks at me, surprised, as if he didn’t expect me to be in his house, and certainly not at two a.m. in my heart-themed pajama pants and matching long-sleeved top that Phillip bought me last year for Valentine’s Day from the Gap. The confusion crosses his face and transforms into pain when he remembers. He spent the night drinking to forget, and one look at me erases hours of his hard work.

“Right, then. So she’s, um, she’s talking. Yeah?”

“Are you okay? Would you like a drink of water or something?”

“Nah, I’m fine.”

“I thought you were at work.”

“Yeah, but went to the pub with a few mates after.” His accent deepens and he sounds even posher than usual. His syllables are drawn out, rounding over the tops of his teeth. If these were happier times, I would imitate him later for Phillip.
Went round to the pub with a few mates. I felt like getting pissed
.

“But Sophie—”

“I heard you the first time. She’s talking. Great. Really great.” He doesn’t make it sound great. He makes it sound like he’s sad there is this person Sophie to discuss in the first place.

“I know this is hard for you, Greg.”

“Not now, for fuck’s sake.” He makes his way over to the couch and sits down, but far away from me, which I appreciate. Based on how he smells, I am pretty sure he threw up on the way home. His head falls, cheeks to hands, and his body folds into itself, like a convertible sofa. “Please, not now.”

Within seconds he ends his day, passes out cold, without warning or sound. I take off his shoes before they stain the white cushions, tuck a blanket over his shoulders, and leave a wastebasket next to him, just in case.

Three in the morning London time, ten in the evening in Boston, and I’m in the guest bedroom, just down the hall from Sophie, unable to slip into sleep. While still riding the wave from the high of hearing her voice to the low of seeing Greg’s face, in that draining cycle of restless energy, I decide to call Phillip.

“Sophie’s talking,” I say. “Can you believe it? She’s actually talking.”

“That’s fantastic. I knew she’d come around. So when are you coming home?”

“I really don’t know.”

“But Sophie’s talking now, right? So she’ll be fine.”

“Her father is passed out drunk on the couch. Her nannies have all been fired. And it wasn’t so long ago she saw her mother murdered in broad daylight. I really don’t think it’s as simple as
she’s going to be fine
. She’s just a little girl.” I start to get choked up when I think of all the suffering that is to come, when Sophie understands the permanence of her loss. I think I would give my life to make Sophie better. Maybe that’s what I am doing right now. Maybe not my life, but very possibly my marriage. “It’s too much.”

“Please don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry, I just … I miss Lucy, and I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do, Phillip. Please tell me what to do.”

“You know what I think you should do.”

“You can’t really think I should just come home and leave her behind. You can’t think that.”

“Ellie, honestly, that’s what I think. This isn’t your job. Sophie has a father. And he’ll rally; you know he will. Greg’s a good guy, and I want my wife back.”

“So you’re making this about you.” We do this—a stupid finger-pointing trick—from time to time, a reflexive bending of a competing request into the other’s selfishness. I don’t know when our marriage started making caricatures of us both.

“No. Ellie, I just, I don’t know, you’re really far away. Too far away. The last thing we needed right now was for you to be a million miles—”

“Three thousand two hundred eighty-three and a half miles, actually. Mikey figured it out.”

“That sounds about right. You and me? We are three thousand two hundred eighty-three miles apart.”

12

H
igh-pitched screeching. My dream turns Amazonian and becomes cannibalistic, savage and violent. Human heads spin on large pikes in a circle around me in a humid jungle. The smell of death and blood and dinner. I am a mere witness, the center of a horror-show carousel of fire and flesh, and I am rigid with fear in the middle. My mission instinctual: I look for Lucy and Oliver among the skulls.

“Mummy! Mummy! Help. Please. Mummy!”

Sophie.

I am ripped out of my dream and wake up running across the hall. I must have heard her before I heard her, because I am already outside her door, out of breath, by the time I realize what is happening.

“Sophie, it’s okay. It’s okay.” I squat by her bed and try to wake her up. I stroke her hair, her cheek, like my mom used to do to me when I was little. She doesn’t feel it. Sophie’s too busy thrashing about, dodging an invisible foe with her eyes closed. Her forehead glistens with moisture, her covers knotted up and kicked to the foot of the bed. She looks likes she’s in the throes of an epileptic fit. “Sophie, everything’s going to be okay.”

I sit down next to her and scoop her into a full-body hug to still the convulsions. She’s light, even lighter than I would have imagined, and it seems impossible that this amount of weight adds up to a whole person. I rock her back and forth, patting her back, and finally she opens her eyes and looks at me with the same surprise and disappointment her father wore when he walked in the door just a couple of hours ago.

“Mummy. Where’s Mummy?” She looks around the room, hoping to find her in the dark shadows by the closet. There is no possessive, not “my mummy.” Just “Mummy.” “I need Mummy.”

“Soph, it’s me, Auntie Ellie. I’m here, I’m here. You just had a nightmare, that’s all. It was just a nightmare.”

Sophie’s gaze meets mine again, and reality seeps slowly back into her. The nightmare was less nightmare, more nightmarish memory. She’s not crying now, but her body goes stiff, like a corpse, when it dawns on her that Mummy isn’t coming to help make the fear go away. She will not bring a glass of warm milk, and rub her back, and stay with her until she falls back asleep. Her eyes are big and frozen with horror.

“But … but … I want Mummy.”

Her lower lip begins to tremble, but she’s trying to be strong. Sophie is that strange sort of kid who values manners. Throwing a fit and its consequential tears and mucus are shameful; fits are for children less self-controlled. I think she’s inherited this stoicism from her father. When I was here last time, and Sophie fell off her bicycle, Greg said, “We Staffords don’t cry. It’s not in our blood.” And Sophie, already forgetting her clotting knee, didn’t miss a beat: “You mean like in our DNA and stuff? That’s so cool. What else don’t we do?”

I am dealing with something much larger than a bloody knee now, and there are no distractions. Mummy will not be making an appearance, no matter how badly we both want her here. Substitutions are unacceptable.

“I know, sweetheart. I know you want your mummy. But I’m here, and I promise nothing is going to happen to you. You had a scary dream, huh?”

“He was here. And he was coming …” She hides her face against my neck and her breathing gets labored now; I feel her tears before I can see them. The shaking too. “I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t stop him.”

“No one is here. No one is coming to get you, I promise. No one is going to hurt you.” I rock her to the beat of my words, trying to loosen her body out of its pulsing.

“Not me. Mummy! He was after Mummy! And I didn’t help. I just, I just … I was naughty.”

“Oh, Sophie, you’re not naughty. You’re perfect. You’re just a little girl. And you were—you are—so brave.”

“But I … I … I need Mummy. Where’s Mummy?”

“Sophie.”

“Where’s Mummy!” She screams the question, her composure broken. She needs an answer, and I don’t have a good one.

“Remember you and your daddy talked about this? She’s in heaven.”

“Then I want to go to heaven. Now.”

“Sweetheart, you can’t go to heaven. Not yet. Not for a very, very long time. I’m sorry, heaven doesn’t work like that.” I say it like I know how heaven works, like I’m a believer. My performance is convincing.

“But what if he’s in heaven too?”

“He’s not in heaven. He’s in jail, and he’s never coming out.” There is clearly no need to specify who “he” is.

“But Mummy’s there all alone.” I am trying to hold back the tears, deep breaths through the nose, out the mouth, a hardening in my soul—I am the adult here—but these five words unravel me. Wherever Lucy is, Sophie is right; she’s all alone.

“Don’t worry. Your mummy’s not all alone. She’s with both of your grandfathers, and I promise they’ll take care of her, just like your daddy is going to take care of you.”

I lied to Sophie. Twice, maybe three times in the last thirty seconds. The man who killed Lucy has confessed and is locked up, though who knows for how long. His capture and immediate confession may have spared us a mystery—he was caught with Lucy’s blood all over his shirt, less than two blocks away—but it may buy him sentencing leniency. I saw his face on the cover of the
Daily Mail
yesterday, when I was walking by a newsstand. I saw his face, cold and blank, like the London rain. I saw his face, and I ran.

At the moment, I don’t know if Greg is even capable of taking care of himself, not to mention Sophie, and if there is such a place as heaven, if it’s reserved for believers, Lucy isn’t there. She was an aggressive atheist. But Sophie is a child and should believe in something, and if she loses that front tooth she’s been teasing, I hope she’ll think that the money under her pillow comes from the tooth fairy. And maybe she’ll grow up to be one of those people who believes in things like heaven and hell, and right and wrong, all clear-cut and distinguishable, so different from her mother and me. To be honest, I am not sure that would be such a bad thing. Maybe we overvalue nuance. Maybe it’s easier to see the world cleaved into two clunky categories, like caped characters in a comic book: good and evil.

“Does it rain in heaven?”

“Nope, it’s always sunny. Why?”

“Because Mummy left her brolly. What if it rains?”

“Oh, Soph. I promise she’ll stay dry. And happy too. That’s what heaven is all about. No cold. No rain.” I don’t know what Greg and Lucy have taught Sophie about religion, if anything. There is no one to ask right now, and I do my best. I kind of like the idea of Lucy in a warm, dry heaven, protected by her father, who always smelled like cigarettes when we were kids, back during the time when that smell was still comforting, and who would surprise us with Carvel chocolate crunchy ice cream cake on a summer evening. Lucy’s dad was gentle and funny, a professor of linguistics renowned for his scholarship as much as for his attention to his female students. Lucy adored him.

“Promise. You promise?”

“I promise. Cross my heart.”

“Auntie Ellie? Can you get me some other pajamas?” Her voice is so quiet, barely a voice, that I am worried she’ll slip into the crevice of silence once more. “I, uh …”

Her crying starts again, revving up fast like an engine. Sophie doesn’t want to have to say it out loud, and she shouldn’t have to.

“Don’t worry. I know, sweetheart. Not a big deal at all. I’ll get you some fresh pjs and some new sheets, and we’ll get you fixed up in no time. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And after we get you changed, I’ll stay here with you until you fall asleep. I’ll be right here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

We change the sheets together and leave the wet ones behind in a pile outside the door to be dealt with tomorrow. I help Sophie into a clean pair of pajamas, a kid-sized version of the Gap ones I am wearing. Phillip got her the same pair for Valentine’s Day.

Once she’s under the covers again, I rub her back and stay with her long after she has drifted off to sleep, watching the rise and fall of her rib cage, how the red hearts expand and contract with each breath. I say a silent prayer that she’s dreaming of a happy place, one with unicorns, and rainbows, and Lucy. And as I see the sun starting to rise, blotted light behind her yellow curtains, I close my eyes and hope that my dreams might take me away to that place too.

I wake up to Sophie’s chin digging into my back and a sharp pain in my neck. This mini-bed is way too small for the both of us. I tiptoe out of the room and pad down to the kitchen, hoping to catch Greg before he sneaks off to work. Other than last night’s brief encounter, I haven’t had a chance to talk to him since Monday morning. He’s been leaving for work long before Sophie and I wake up for school, and when I call him in his office in the City—what the Brits call the center square mile of London—his secretary gives me a repeat performance: “He’s not in at the moment, but I’ll leave word that you rang.” The casual dismissal is exactly the same every time.

He never calls back.

I wait in the kitchen booth, Greg’s kitchen booth, alert for the sound of him stirring upstairs but exhausted too. My head hurts from lack of sleep; my eyes burn. Today feels like something I’m not sure I can handle. Facing Greg, walking Sophie the long way around, getting through another day in this proxy life, suddenly seems to require a Herculean effort, a tireless stamina that is failing me this morning.

The smell of coffee brewing soothes my nerves; a promising smell, a hopeful reminder that this feeling could be temporary and that my stores of grit might soon be renewed. I try to remember the victories of yesterday, pre-drunk Greg, pre-talking-to-Phillip, pre-nightmares; try to recapture the sound of Sophie’s voice, its lilts and uncertainty, her soft words breaking through the barrier of silence. Sophie’s talking is a big deal, more than a baby step, and I should appreciate that, despite the regression back to wetting the bed. We have a long road, I know; contrary to what Phillip may think, an eight-year-old doesn’t bounce back from witnessing her mother’s murder in a matter of days.

He had the same issue after we lost Oliver. Phillip was sad, and then he wasn’t, and he couldn’t understand what I was still doing, all those months, even more than a year later, retaining the shape of a broken Ellie. He was ready to move on, ready to start trying again, so fast, fast, fast. If he could have, if it wouldn’t have been horrible of him, I think he would have said,
Come on, time to get over it already
.

Five years ago, I said vows. And I believe in vows. I meant them, and not just when I said them out loud for an audience to hear but as a motto and a life choice.
For as long as we both shall live
. I hadn’t anticipated the sandy flow of feeling, the yin-yang of love and dread, or the residual buildup of grievances and the slow draining of the benefit of doubt.
In good times and in bad
. Yes, sure, but in my naïveté, I interpreted this as external; we would support each other when the world imposed and intruded. No one tells you that it’s the internal that’s the real challenge: those moments of decisiveness equal to taking a vow, when you feel the clawing grip of your promises.

And now there are two vows in direct conflict. There was the ceremony eight years ago, when I became Sophie’s godmother. One that was less makeshift than our wedding, come to think of it, with catered platters of caviar and salmon on toast and crystal flutes of champagne. I flew to London for the event, even though I had been here only a few months before, immediately after Lucy gave birth.

When I got to this house, the day after Sophie was born—she was sleeping upstairs and I hadn’t even met her yet—Lucy was on the white couch, looking tired and desperate, dark hair fanned around her head like a halo or Medusa, depending on the angle. The baby monitor spurted occasional gurgles into the air, the dull punctuation the sound of thunder in the distance, far enough away to be safely ignored.

“I know, I know. I look like a fat mental patient in this robe,” Lucy said, and closed a ratty white fleece robe around her still-enlarged middle.

“You do not. You look like someone who just gave birth.”

“Thank God you’re here. L, I’m scared fucking shitless,” she had said, her eyes turning almost savage.

“I know.”

“Tell me I can do this. I’m not sure why I thought I could do this. This was insane. Huge mistake. I can’t do this.” And then Lucy started to cry, the first time I had seen tears since we were sixteen. She looked young and fragile with her porcelain tears and silly robe, too young to be responsible for anything but herself.

“You can do this. Of course you can do this. You’re just exhausted, that’s all. And scared. This—” I swept my hands around the room to take in the baby gifts, and the baby stroller, and the baby changing table, to include them in my verdict, as if announcing the fear was akin to its disappearing. “This, Luce, is scary and exhausting. If anyone can do this, though, it’s you.”

“I realized today that I just did the only irreversible thing in life. I’m an idiot that it took me this long to realize it. You know, I could always divorce Greg. Or move away. If you screw up, you can apologize. But the baby isn’t going anywhere. She’s only going to get bigger, and bigger, and I’m always going to be her mother. What have I done?”