Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  The dark-haired young woman eyed me curiously, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer. My voice was gentle, even if my words weren’t especially sweet. “Excuse me—I’ve met everyone in the room but you, and you seem to be soaking up every word we’re saying like some sort of sponge. Did you know my father? I mean—okay, this may sound rude, but hell, I can’t keep it to myself anymore—damn it, you look like him. Would you mind introducing yourself?”

  Cap Gaines lifted his hand. “This young lady e-mailed me after she read your father’s obituary. Sent a wild pitch my way, so to speak. It seems she’s quite adept at Internet searches. Her interest in today’s proceedings is not monetary; it’s purely personal.” The lawyer looked at Weed and Fredericks, Argent and Fernando. “Gentlemen, would you give us a moment, please?”

  The men rose to leave; Cap Gaines waited until the soundproof glass door had shut behind them with a sharp click. The bright room felt suddenly claustrophobic. I was certain Cap was about to tell me that the young woman was Augie’s late-in-life by-blow, preserving her dignity by sharing this information with me privately, well outside of the Cheers guys’ earshot.

  “Ms. deMarley, I would like to introduce you to Sophie Ashe. Ms. Ashe has reason to believe that she is your daughter.”

  Bottom of the First

  My jaw hit the floor, followed by a series of uncontrollable sobs that burst from my gut like a volcanic explosion. There certainly had been a Sophie. She was the reason I’d left Harvard. A fling with a former Red Sox infielder, whom I’d met while I was dancing in Waltham, led to an unplanned pregnancy. In an agonizing decision, I’d dropped out of school and then opted for adoption. The player very publicly went back to his wife, after he got suspended from the team for—frequently—attending a local burlesque revue. Not his finest hour. Or mine.

  Seeing Sophie, who must be twenty years old now, renewed the torrent of emotions, and there was nothing I could do but stand there, still barefoot—Gaines had caught me so off guard that I hadn’t time to shove my feet into my slingbacks—repeatedly blubbering “Oh my God, Sophie.”

  I threw my arms around her and held her close. In her flats, Sophie was about two inches shorter than me. I stroked her silky dark hair, thinking she’d inherited that from her father.

  When I finally disengaged from our embrace, I noticed that Sophie’s eyes, though moist, were devoid of tears. Now I realized why I’d thought of Dad when I looked at her: she had his eyes.

  My gut told me no DNA test was necessary. I didn’t doubt for a minute that she was mine.

  In all these years, I’ve never tried to find my daughter; it was the deal I’d made with the devil, so to speak, when I let her go. I’d been her age at the time, rebellious and clueless and estranged from my only surviving parent. Under those circumstances, she never would have had the life I’d wanted to give her. On the other hand, I’d never really wanted to remain anonymous forever. And now that Sophie had managed to track me down, I didn’t want to let her go. We had so much catching up to do, so much to learn about each other. After the distribution, I insisted that she come back to my apartment and I bombarded her en route with a stream of questions that scarcely left the poor kid with a chance to catch her breath.

  At the subway, I wouldn’t let her swipe her own MetroCard; let Mommy take care of it, I was thinking. She was a lovely young woman. I wanted to shout out to everyone in the subway car: “Hey, this is my long-lost daughter!” Yet Sophie’s perpetually ambivalent expression pricked at my heart. It put me in mind of a somewhat curious puppy who gives every impression of wanting you to take her home, but when you actually pick her up and cuddle her, she starts to go all gun-shy.

  “Sit across from me so I can get a better look at you,” I told her. She had my long legs, but not my narrow waistline, and certainly not the boobs. She did have broad shoulders, though, like her father had. I have no idea where he is, by the way. He hung up his glove years ago, and for all I know he’s selling real estate in Phoenix. I gazed at Sophie and continued my inventory of her features: my cheekbones, her dad’s jawline, my dad’s eyes, and, alas, Augie’s eyebrows, too. So much for nature. But what about nurture? What had the Ashes passed along to her? Who was this stranger who had sprung from my loins half a lifetime ago?

  We stepped out of the subway on West Twenty-third Street and walked along Eighth Avenue. The sidewalk cafés were doing a brisk business. “There’s a super ice cream place just up the block, if you want to stop in—I feel like I should take you for ice cream—all those Mom-daughter things we never did.” She gave me that ambivalent face again. “Well…it’s never too late…is it?” I asked hesitantly.

  Sophie shrugged. “I can’t.” Followed by an apologetic look. “I’m a vegan.” And when I didn’t seem to get it, she gave a little sigh that seemed to indicate that I was either very clueless or totally pathetic. “No dairy products.”

  “Oh.” I felt disappointed. A bit rejected, even though I rarely indulged in desserts. “Sorry. I mean not sorry you’re a vegan—I’m sure you’re happy with your life choice—I mean sorry…well, you know what I meant.” Turning west toward my duplex we passed a charming little bistro on a Chelsea side street that sold terrific homemade scones. “Can you drink tea?”

  “Of course!” She caught my relieved sigh in mid-bounce. “But no caffeine.”

  I’ve raised a frickin’ health nut, I thought, followed immediately by the reminder that in fact I hadn’t. I’m not sure which of those notions bothered me more.

  I chose an outdoor table offering maximum people-watching opportunities in case our first-ever conversation turned a little tense and I craved the safety of multiple distractions. People who don’t know me well have mentioned that I emit an aura of supreme confidence. Maybe it’s my height that fools them. And I confess that part of it is deliberate. It’s my armor. Why should strangers see the seams and glimpse my vulnerabilities? But if they had X-ray vision, they’d see my nerve endings tying themselves into an intricate macramé. At the moment they’d made enough knots for a good-sized hammock. My heart beat within my chest the same way it did when I sensed that a beau was about to call it a day. I wondered what Sophie was thinking. After all, she’d gone to a good deal of time and effort to find me. Was she as nervous? Those eyes—that feature she so clearly shared with her grandfather—I couldn’t read them. I could never read Dad’s either, except in the most extreme cases, where they conveyed displeasure and disappointment in 72-point type.

  Neither of us knew what to say. The waitress finally flipped her cell phone closed and decided to get back to work, truculently dropping the menus in front of us. Still, Sophie and I were both relieved at the chance to focus on something benign.

  “What’s good?” she asked me.

  “I always get an iced chai in weather like this.” As if on cue, a bead of perspiration trickled down my cleavage. Another good reason to move to the Rockies. I wasn’t going to miss this climate. I’ve always hated the heat. Las Vegas made me miserable. Indoors it was faux frigid and outside it was being thrust into a giant Easy-Bake oven. “Chai okay for you?”

  Sophie shook her head. “Caffeine. And milk products. I think I’ll have one of the tisanes.”

  “Oh—then I’ll have that, too!” I said, thinking that ordering the same thing would be a nice little way to begin to bond. “How does the apricot infusion sound?”

  She pointed to something else instead. “The mango-blueberry is better for you. Blueberries are high in antioxidants. I’m surprised you don’t know that,” she said brightly.

  Who says I don’t know about antioxidants? Maybe I just didn’t feel like ingesting them this afternoon. Wait—who’s the mother at this table?

  We ordered Sophie’s choice.

  “How did you feel when you gave me up for adoption?” she suddenly blurted out, as if she was relieved to get the words out after so many years of storing them up.

  She’d dealt me a body blow for which I was unprepared
and undefended. Perhaps I expected the question—just not so soon. I felt winded, and it took me a few moments before I could breathe normally again. I tried not to cry when I told her it had been the hardest decision of my life. “And at the same time, I felt like I had no choice. I…I thought we’d both have a better shot at life…a better life, I mean…than if I was a single mom barely out of her teens. The wealth and privilege I’d been raised with was never going to be part of the equation, Soph. Maybe I could have somehow managed my final year in college with an infant in tow, but…” My eyes stung with tears. “The me who was me twenty years ago just wasn’t equipped to handle motherhood. I’d gotten in way over my head—that much, at least, I knew—and if I was going to drown, I didn’t want to drag you under, too.”

  “Did you ever think about me?” Sophie asked, her expression still unreadable.

  I reached for her hand. “All the time,” I told her. It was the truth. But I’d always force myself to let the moods pass, figuring what actually was, was the way things were supposed to be.

  She’d allowed me to touch her, but her physical passivity stung. Still, I suppose I might have acted the same way if I’d been in Sophie’s shoes. “Any regrets?” she asked me.

  “Sometimes. Of course I wondered what our lives might have been like if…if I’d kept you.” I tried to smile. “It helps to imagine that you’ve had more opportunities than I could have given you.”

  “I guess it’s not black and white,” Sophie said. “It’s always helped me to imagine that it was.”

  I folded my hands in my lap, giving Sophie her space. I realized I needed it, too, though my instinct was to learn everything about my daughter as quickly as possible. Instead, I gazed at the stranger seated across from me, looking for signs of myself.

  “In case you’re wondering, I found you through the Adoption Information Registry—four months ago—but I was too freaked to do anything about it. Then I saw your name in Augie’s obit and figured it was karma. I was supposed to meet you now. I looked up my biological father, too,” said Sophie, after the iced infusions arrived. Her brown eyes betrayed no emotion beyond mild curiosity. “He used to be a baseball player.”

  I nodded. “He played for the Red Sox. Did you speak to him? I haven’t spoken to him since you were in utero.” Funny how I hardly remembered anything about him but the way his hair felt when I ran my fingers through it, and the faint scent of his Brut aftershave. “Sadly, I couldn’t even tell you how his voice sounded.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I sent him a card in June for Father’s Day, but he didn’t reply.”

  I nodded grimly. “I know the feeling.” Truth told, I was only politely intrigued about the whereabouts of Rodney the Red Sock, but it dispelled some of my anxiety about discussing Sophie and me instead. “What’s your bio-dad doing with himself these days?”

  “Selling time-shares in Taos. Why are you smiling?”

  I shrugged it off. “Nothing.” Score one for me on a lucky supposition. Taos…Arizona…close enough.

  Then I sucked down a gulp of healthy iced tisane, froze my nerves, and bit the bullet. “So tell me about yourself—I want to know everything—who are you? I mean—I haven’t seen you since I said good-bye to you at the hospital. I don’t suppose you’d remember that.” Funny, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was surprised, yet pleased, that the Ashes hadn’t changed the name I’d given her. “Sophie” means “wisdom.” When I’d put her up for adoption I hoped she’d grow up to be wiser than her mother had been when she’d conceived her.

  Sophie bit her lip, looking vulnerable for the first time since I’d seen her. Even at Dad’s memorial service she’d seemed an enigma. I looked into her eyes, but she glanced away and began to fiddle with her straw. I noticed she had the same three freckles on the right side of her nose as I do. I always cover mine with foundation.

  “You…you kind of intimidate me,” Sophie said when she finally found her words.

  “Me?” Honestly, I was thinking it was more like the other way around. She seemed so grounded.

  Sophie’s laugh was exceptionally welcome. “Yes, you! You’re—well, you’re gorgeous. You’re glamorous—even in mourning. Your hair—your figure, too—is like something out of a guy’s fantasy comic book. I’m such a frump!”

  I grabbed her hands. “No, you’re absolutely not, and don’t ever let me hear you say that about yourself again. We have different builds, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I’m probably built more like Rodney.”

  “Not quite.”

  Sophie shrugged. “At least the athletic physique is good for something. I’m at Clarendon College in Westchester on a softball scholarship. Well, a partial one. It’s all good, though. My parents pay only half what it would have cost to send me otherwise.”

  I tried not to react at her mention of the word parents. Maybe Sophie didn’t mean it cruelly—I’m sure she didn’t—but it hammered home the fact that although I was my daughter’s mother, I’d never been her parent.

  “What’s your major?”

  “Communications; I want to be a sports broadcaster.”

  I swallowed my pride along with another gulp of tea. “So, tell me about them—the Ashes. Are they good to you?”

  Sophie beamed. “They’re wonderful. Very…normal…I guess, is the best way to describe them. I’m their only kid, so they kind of spoiled me. Joy is a calligrapher and has a high-end stationery store in our town, and Glenn is a high school coach. He was my softball coach at Larchmont High, actually. And he coached our little league team, too, when I was a kid. He used to be a talent scout for the major leagues. Ever heard of him?”

  I shook my head. My two baseball connections have been acquired through blood in the one instance and through semen in the other, and I wasn’t about to point that out.

  I sucked down the last of my tea and flagged down the waitress for another round. “Well…Joy and Glenn seem to have done a very good job.” I fought the stab of envy that threatened to puncture my efforts at maintaining a pleasant expression.

  Sophie picked at her napkin. “I think you’d like them—Oli—I don’t know what to call you, actually.”

  I took one deep breath, then another. “Tom—my fiancé—calls me Ollie. And my girlfriends call me ‘V,’ But you…you can call me Mom,” I said softly.

  I spied just the tiniest beginnings of a tear in the lower-right corner of Sophie’s left eye. “But you’re not my mom. Except…”

  Ouch. “Except?”

  “Except…except, well…literally, I guess. Biologically.”

  I reached for her hands again. “Any time you want to give it a try…see how it feels on your tongue…well…I wouldn’t mind it.”

  Sophie swallowed hard. “Okay,” she nodded. But she didn’t say it. I had a feeling it would have been pretty neat to have heard, “Okay—Mom.”

  Rachel Bronstein, my real estate broker, looked like she was about to have a coronary at the prospect of kissing good-bye such a great commission. “You’re taking it off the market?” she exclaimed, her South African accent popping into her aghast vowel sounds. “You do realize that the peak is past, darling. We’re teetering on the top of a slippery slope. Ever since 2005, prices have been dropping at a rate of six percent a year. The longer you wait, the less it will be worth.”

  And the less you’ll make on the deal, I thought.

  “I wanted to sell the apartment because I’m planning to have a wedding, not to make a killing.”

  “You’re not getting married?”

  “I didn’t say that.” But I hadn’t told Tom the news yet. That after meeting my daughter, I’d suddenly considered changing my plans about selling my home and rushing back to Colorado on the next flight. Now I wanted to stay in New York for a bit to get to know her. Who knows when I’d ever have the same opportunity? Then again, I could say the same about marrying Tom. Oh God, this was not easy. I’d call Tom and ask if he might be able to come east for a few weeks. On the o
ther hand, I really coveted the chance for time alone with Sophie. Throwing a fiancé into the mix, especially one who hated everything about New York, would complicate things even further. She and I needed to get to know each other first. Otherwise, it wasn’t fair to any of us.

  “Right, then, what do you want me to tell the McNichols?” The bells on the hem of Rachel’s peasant skirt jangled with agitation.

  “Tell them I’d like to cancel the deal. Their down-payment check hasn’t been deposited, so no harm, no foul.”

  Rachel scowled at me as though I’d snatched the last crumb of food from the hands of a starving woman.

  “Don’t worry. When I decide to sell again, I’ll call you.” I figured I owed her that much. She’d made herself available at all hours to show the apartment in my absence, knowing how eager I’d been to move out and move on, uninterested in straddling the country—with one foot, and half my wardrobe, in each of two cities.

  I’d taken care of the easy stuff first. I’d make the last flight back to Denver in the evening, but I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation on the way home from the airport.

  “Everything go all right?”

  I’d phoned Tom when I got to New York, just to tell him I’d landed safe and sound, and had called him again before Augie’s memorial service to tell him how much I missed him and couldn’t wait to get home—having thoroughly wrapped my brain around the concept of his home being mine from now on—but so much had happened since then. Where to begin?

  I was pretty silent on the ride to Breckenridge, afraid that what I’d tell him might surprise him so much, he’d lose control of the wheel. And when we undressed for bed and our bodies began to melt into each other, the sensation of his warm skin against mine the ultimate comfort food, I wondered whether I should take his hand and sit up and say, “I met my long-lost daughter this weekend. You know—Sophie—the child I gave up for adoption when I was still pretty much of a kid myself. Not only that, my father’s will has this crazy clause in it where he’s making me the controlling owner of his minor league baseball team as long as I ‘close the circle,’ whatever that means.”