What Happened to Sophie Wilder (27 page)

“I love you, too,” I said. We stood in each other's arms while the doorman brought Max's bags into the lobby.

 

Driving through Central Park to my mother's apartment, I remembered weekends growing up, when Max and I and our fathers would play two-on-two basketball. Max was always a little bit bigger, a little stronger, and since our dads were both indifferent players, he and my uncle would win game after game. I would start to get frustrated, then, and Max would ease off defending me in the post, or take a quick, lazy shot that he knew was out of his range. This would only infuriate me more, because I wanted to beat him at his best. At some point, as we grew up, Max came to suppress this natural protectiveness toward me, knowing how I hated it.

It had been a long time since I'd come uptown to see my mother. I tried to do it once a month, but it didn't work out that way. I had plenty of time in those days, so there was really no excuse. I took for granted that she would be home, though I didn't know much about how she spent her days. I let myself into the apartment and heard the television in her room. She was lying in bed with a glass of wine,
watching one of those forensic police procedurals in which some washed-up movie star spends an hour looking at semen under a microscope.

“Hey, Chazzie,” she said when she saw me in the doorway. “What a nice surprise.”

She didn't seem especially pleased.

“Hi, Mom. Sorry to sneak up on you.”

I tried to say more as she got up from bed and came over to me, but the words wouldn't come.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“Sophie's gone,” I said.

“She's gone? I didn't know she was back.”

“I mean she's dead.”

My mother reached out to run her hands through my hair, a familiar gesture from my childhood. She'd done this often in the days when my father was dying, and I remembered how inadequate it had seemed to me then, as if anything in her power would have been sufficient to the time. She withdrew her hands and looked at me, wobbly and damp-eyed.

“When did it happen?”

“A couple of days ago.”

“I'm so sorry.”

She seemed to want me to release her from feeling too much about this girl she half remembered, who'd come to stay with us a few times years ago.

“It happened in her sleep.”

“Why don't I make us a pot of coffee?”

We walked together into the hallway, and she saw the bag I'd brought uptown.

“Have you come to stay for a while?”

“No,” I said. “I'm leaving town, and I wanted to say good-bye.”

Once we were settled around the kitchen table, coffee mugs in hand, she asked, “How are you doing with this?”

“I'm lonely,” I said.

“Me, too,” my mother said.

I don't know why this struck me as it did. It was natural that a widow whose only child never visited should feel that way. I should have known all along that there had been someone whose suffering I could have done something about.

“I should come by more often.”

“It's hard for you up here,” she said. “And you have your life to live.”

“I could stay for a little while. I don't really have to leave town right away.”

“It wouldn't make much difference.”

She was right. I was too late. We sat there together in the sad recognition that the time when we might have been a comfort to each other had passed, that we had both failed a long time ago.

“I never understood why things didn't work out between the two of you,” she said. “I always liked Sophie.”

“So did I.”

We stayed up talking through most of the night, not about Sophie but about my dad. We told stories from my childhood, stories we'd both carried with us without ever thinking to express them to one another. My mother told me stories from before then, ones I'd never heard, that perhaps only she had known.

“He had an old cardigan,” she said. “And he used to tuck you into it and sit for hours, reading while you slept.”

The understanding that we couldn't fix each other's problems, that we were no longer expected to try, brought us closer than we'd been in years. At the end of the night,
I walked her back to her room. I left her there and spent a last night in my childhood bed.

 

Traffic kept me in the city longer than I wanted the next morning. Still uncertain behind the wheel, I watched all the signs carefully and drove with the perpetual sense that I'd missed a turn somewhere. I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd been on the road too long. But the exit came eventually, and I drove through town to the house. It didn't belong to me yet, I knew. Perhaps it never would, if Tom chose to create difficulties. But in the meantime, I knew that no one would keep me from staying there.

I stood in the driveway with my hand on the car's hood, feeling the living warmth beneath it. In front of me, the house sat waiting. Instead of going inside, I walked around back, beyond the pool to the work shed. The padlock on the door was open. It might have been that way for years, or Sophie might have left it unlocked in one of her last acts. There was a small wooden desk inside, and on it sat two marble notebooks, the kind we'd both used at school. There was also a lamp on the desk, and a chair beside it. Beneath the chair sat a pile of the same notebooks and a second pile of perhaps a half dozen manila folders, each with a number on it. There were also a few books, none of them familiar to me. Otherwise, the room was bare. The morning sun floated through the small oval window, illuminating the dust I'd unsettled with my arrival. I took a seat in the little room that Sophie and her father had built with their four hands.

Once it was too late to save anyone, even myself, I started to write.

CRANE ACCEPTED THE pills two at a time. His face showed no recognition that Sophie was granting his wish. If he felt anything, it may have been resentment that his wish remained hers to grant or not. He let out a string of short burps as he swallowed the pills but gave no other sign of their effect. She wasn't sure how many it would take, so she fed them to him until he stopped opening his mouth for more. Then she set the bottle down and waited.

His breathing gave way to short, desperate pleas for air. Between each one he remained completely still. Each breath seemed, in the moment that followed, to have been his last. The time separating his gasps grew longer. Every time she felt that the spirit had left, it fought to announce itself again. She already knew that she'd made a terrible mistake—had known it even as she'd done the thing—but there was no way now of undoing it.

Then it was over.

Sophie saw no difference between this new stillness and the stillnesses that had preceded it, so she waited a long time
before she was certain that another breath wouldn't come. She had never watched a person die before. There had been two of them in the room, and now she was alone. Strange how it had come to pass: not a violent rending of life from the body, but a slow unbinding of spirit and matter.

For years after her parents' deaths, Sophie had dreamed of violent ends. She saw the accident as it happened. She was inside the car with them. She didn't think of it as imagining but as watching; she saw it, she thought, just as it had been. Her father had had a drink or two, no more, and the warmth of those drinks had put him in mind to take a hand from the wheel and place it on his wife's knee. He wasn't speeding, or not irresponsibly so. Then something happened to make him lose grip of the car, to make the car lose grip of the road, and they were spinning wildly toward two thick elms.

In some dreams it was her very presence in the car that did it. Her father caught sight of her watching, and he turned his attention from the road to question her. She came to him as an angel of death. She was in the car because of what had to happen next. He took his other hand from the wheel to fulfill what her presence made necessary. She stayed with them as the car skidded off the road, as it flipped over, even to the moment when it struck the first tree. But then she was expelled. There was a line she couldn't will herself across. She'd never seen their death.

Bill's hands were clasped and settled on his chest as though they had been placed in a model of repose. If someone had wanted to assure her that she'd given him peace, they would have made her picture his body just as it was then. But it meant nothing. What was this body now, that it could be said to have peace? Whose were those restful hands? What remained of him had passed to the invisible world. Crane would find no rest.

Sophie kneeled alone beside the pile of flesh that Bill Crane had left behind and tried again to pray, as though the end of his suffering presence in the world had lifted whatever barrier had kept her from prayer. But even now she was unable to speak. Something more than his suffering had kept her silent in those days. Her belief had not been shaken, but she felt herself outside of God's attention. She had trespassed in His domain—the place where life was extended or withheld. She could have prayed for Crane's soul, but it was too late for that. He had died unrepentant, and there was no interceding for him now. She could have prayed to be forgiven, but the time for this too seemed past. She had known what she was doing as she did it. If he should surprise her now with another breath, if this mute stillness before her was to reawaken into life and go on, she would continue feeding him the pills.
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?

Anyone coming upon them would have understood the picture: a man just gone from the world and his child beside him in tears. She had told enough people in the past weeks that she was his daughter to start believing it to be in some way true. But she didn't mistake the meaning of her tears. She wasn't crying over him. The loss she felt was of something else entirely.

Once she had given up on prayer, she went into the other room to call hospice, as though Bill might overhear her announcing his death.

“This is Sophie Crane,” she said. “My father just died.”

The man who answered put her on hold to look up the name.

“You cancelled your service,” he said when he came back on the line.

“Yes,” Sophie said.

“I'm afraid we can't do anything for you. I can give you the name and number of a funeral director in the neighborhood.”

“That would be great.”

“It's nonsectarian,” he added, “so it doesn't matter what religion your family practices.”

Once the men from the funeral home were on their way, it occurred to Sophie for the first time that she could be in trouble. An autopsy or some kind of investigation might reveal what she'd done. She went back to the bedroom and took all the pill bottles from the floor. She put them into her bag, which sat near the bed.

But the men asked no questions at all, not even about the cause of death. He had not been so old, but he had been very sick, and there was nothing remarkable about his passing. Now that he was gone, it was their job to handle what remained. There were four of them, all wearing dark colors and the placidly sympathetic faces of professional mourners. She imagined them on call somewhere an hour earlier, playing cards or restlessly smoking cigarettes while they waited to be summoned to the dead. She brought them first to his body, then one of the men led her back out to the living room while the others went about whatever their business was.

“Did your father make any arrangements?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” she answered. “We didn't talk about it.”

“Is there anyone else in the family who would know?”

“He didn't tell anyone else.”

“Do you have some sense of what he would have wanted?”

He'd already gotten what he wanted.

“I don't think it made much of a difference to him,” she said. “He wasn't religious; he wouldn't have wanted a service of any kind. I suppose he should be cremated.”

“You don't have to make any decisions right now, if he didn't leave instructions. You should talk it over with your family.”

As they spoke the other men came out of the bedroom with a collapsible stretcher. On it was what looked like an oversized garment bag, large and black with a long zipper running its whole length. The first man continued talking, as if to distract her from the sight. She wanted to tell him there was no need; Bill Crane wasn't in that bag.

“Try to get some rest,” the man said. “We can speak in the morning.”

He handed her his card and followed the group out into the hallway, where they were preparing to navigate their load down the stairs. Sophie shut the door behind them. Once again she was alone.

 

She hadn't had to worry about any details when it came to her own parents, even though their deaths were so unexpected. Her father had left in his desk a set of papers making clear everything that would be needed, and he'd arranged it all in such a way that she wouldn't have to do the work herself. It was like a script for her to follow, so that in those first days her only job was to hit her marks and know her lines.

Only much later did she think of the strangeness of this. To others it spoke simply of her father's diligence, his thoughtfulness. But few people knew what a troubled man he'd been. It would have been easy enough to accomplish: turning the wheel just a quarter inch. In the worst of her dreams, she saw her mother screaming at him to stop, to guide them back to the road, telling him not to take her with him. Once it had been imagined, the picture never went away. In its wake, all his preparations for their death,
the way that everything was already handled for her, took on a frightening significance. Even the buying of the new car, leaving her with the Jaguar, meant something terrible.
Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?