Saving Sofia

by Linda Seed

  “It is about me, though,” he said. “Isn’t it? Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel so terrible right now.”

  “Point taken.”

  “I know it’s about your parents,” he said. “But I don’t know how to get her past this.”

  “You can’t get her past it,” Bianca said. “She has to get past it herself. If you push her, she’s just going to run farther away.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands, suddenly feeling older than he had just a couple of days earlier. “I can’t just do nothing.”

  “I think you have to,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

  He’d managed to hold back his frustration until now, but he couldn’t anymore, and it came rushing out. “I wasn’t even going to propose! I mean, that’s what spooked her, right? But it wasn’t a ring! It was a necklace! For God’s sake, I should have just gotten her a … a sweater, or a purse, or a gift card or something, and none of this would have happened.”

  And that reminded him of the other thing he needed to do. He reached into the backseat of the car and pulled out the wrapped gift that Sofia had intended to give him.

  “Here.” He handed it to Bianca. “Give this back to Sofia. I’m not sure she even wants me to have it anymore.”

  Bianca took the package and turned it over in her hands. “She never gave it to you?”

  “She left before she had the chance.”

  She handed it back to him. “Open it.”

  “But …”

  “Just open it.”

  He carefully untied the ribbon and tore off the wrapping paper. He recognized the book immediately. It was Sofia’s mother’s first-edition To Kill a Mockingbird. It was valuable in its own right, even before he considered the sentimental value to the family.

  He opened the front cover and read an inscription that had been written to Carmela from the suitor who’d given it to her.

  “I can’t keep this.” He pushed the book back into Bianca’s hands.

  “Yes, you can.”

  “But it’s important to your family. It’s—”

  “That’s why I want you to keep it. This is how Sofia feels about you. This is how important you are to her. She was going to give you this. You know she would never give this to someone she didn’t think would be a permanent part of her life. And the rest of us would never have agreed to it if we hadn’t thought you were the one.”

  He looked at the book and then at Bianca. “But she didn’t give it to me. Did she?”

  “Keep the book,” Bianca said. “If things don’t work out between you and Sofia, you can give it back. Think of it as a bet. I’m putting my money on you.” She reached over and kissed him on the cheek, then got out of the car. “Hang in there, Patrick.”

  He watched her go back up the walk and disappear into the house.

  31

  The New Year came and went, and Patrick had to go back to work. Winter break was over, and he had to think about launching the new semester. It was his least favorite part of any school year: the paperwork; students pleading with him to be let into classes that were already full; the flood of questions that were transparently designed to determine how little work a student could do while still passing his class; the angry complaints from students who hadn’t attended the first week of classes but were outraged at having been dropped.

  As much as he usually dreaded all of that, this time, it was something of a relief. The more he had to think about his classes and his students—and even the bureaucratic red tape—the less time he had to think about Sofia.

  Not that he actually could accomplish the feat of getting his mind off her.

  He did a pretty good job of focusing on work during the school day, but as soon as he got home, everything reminded him of her: a show on television that she’d particularly enjoyed; the box of tea in the pantry that he’d bought because she liked it; the way it felt to lie in his bed alone.

  At first, he’d tried avoiding the things that reminded him. When that hadn’t worked, he decided to take the opposite approach: he threw himself into his memories of her.

  He had set aside the poetry he’d been writing for her, but now he was working on it again. She might never read it now, but that wasn’t the point. Patrick had always best understood his own feelings when he saw them in writing. The images, the couplets, the very flavor of the words on his tongue when he spoke them aloud helped him to process everything that had happened.

  He wouldn’t die without her—that was part of what he came to understand as he crafted each line. The feelings he had for her were sweet and painful and gorgeous in their intensity, and that, alone, was a thing worth experiencing, whether she chose to come back to him or not.

  But he really hoped she would.

  He was following Bianca’s advice because she knew Sofia even better than he did, and she seemed to be on his side in this. He was letting Sofia process things in her own time.

  But he didn’t know how much longer he could stay away. What if Bianca was wrong? What if Sofia interpreted his silence as indifference? What if she thought his primary emotion wasn’t sadness or love, but anger? What if she thought he was through with her?

  “Maybe I’m doing this wrong,” he told Ramon one day when they met for coffee after his midmorning class. “Maybe I should go over there and make her listen to me.”

  “Maybe.” Ramon was unusually subdued. Where was his easy confidence that he had all the answers?

  “That’s all you have to say about it? ‘Maybe’?”

  “If you’d asked me for advice before, I’d have told you not to put anything in a ring box except a ring. But now? I’ve got nothing.”

  According to Sofia’s sisters, her default mode in any uncomfortable situation was to ignore and avoid whatever was bothering her. Maybe they were right. She knew she needed to be working through whatever she needed to work through, but she didn’t know how to start, and it was so much easier not to face it at all.

  As a result, Sofia had exactly three priorities in the days and weeks following Christmas:

  1. Don’t think about Patrick.

  2. Don’t talk about Patrick.

  3. Don’t let anyone else think or talk about Patrick.

  The first two were hard enough to accomplish, but the last one was impossible. Bianca, in particular, proved stubborn on the matter.

  “When are you going to talk to him?” she asked one Tuesday in January while the office was closed for lunch.

  “Talk to who?” Sofia asked. Of course, she was being intentionally dense to annoy her sister.

  “It’s whom,” Bianca said. “And you know exactly who I’m talking about.”

  “Didn’t you mean to say about whom I’m talking?” Sofia was unable to resist the taunt.

  “Shut up. You’re being an ass. He doesn’t deserve this.”

  Bianca was right. Patrick didn’t deserve this. He deserved much better than an emotionally stunted woman who couldn’t express her feelings, who couldn’t even properly grieve her parents.

  A week later, when Sofia still hadn’t talked about it, Bianca came to her at the medical office and slapped a piece of paper onto the desk in front of her. It was a flyer advertising a grief support group.

  “You need to go to this.” Her big-sister voice shut down any possibility of an argument.

  Sofia tried arguing anyway. “Whatever’s going on between me and Patrick is none of your—”

  “This isn’t about Patrick,” Bianca said. “It’s about you. This has gone on long enough. You need to go.”

  Then she’d gone into her office and closed the door.

  Sofia’s impulse was to crumple up the flyer and throw it into the wastebasket. Instead, she made herself look at it. The group met at a church in San Luis Obispo on Wednesday evenings.

  She didn’t want to go.

  If she went, she’d be expected to talk about her feelings. Talking about them would feed them, and they would come roaring to life, uncontrollable, destruct
ive and threatening.

  Was it possible, though, that it might not work that way? Was it possible that the opposite might be true?

  She didn’t go the next night, and she didn’t go the Wednesday after that. But she didn’t throw the flyer away.

  “Have you thought about it?” Bianca asked one night at dinner. She didn’t have to say what she was talking about.

  “I’m considering it.”

  Bianca’s eyes widened in surprise. “Are you? Well, that’s something.”

  The Wednesday she finally decided to go, all three of her sisters offered to go with her for moral support. They’d been through the same grief Sofia had, they reasoned. Maybe the group would have something to offer them, too.

  But Sofia turned them down. Having them there would make her too self-conscious. Besides, their grief wasn’t the same as hers. Yes, it had been just as devastating. But the three of them were models for how to handle their sorrow. All of them had cried, talked, shared their feelings. And they’d continued to function normally.

  Sofia was the only one who seemed to be stunted by her loss. She was the only one who couldn’t seem to accept love in the wake of her parents’ deaths. It was probably time to find out why, but that didn’t mean she needed her sisters hovering over her as she did it.

  “I’ll be fine,” she told them on a Wednesday in late January when she finally got up the nerve to attend the group. “Don’t worry. I can do this.”

  It sounded good, but privately, she didn’t know if she believed it. Maybe she wasn’t up to it. Maybe she was too broken to recover.

  The group gathered in a church meeting room, a bland, utilitarian space with folding tables and molded plastic chairs. The tables had been shoved against the wall, and the chairs had been arranged in a circle in the center of the room. An urn of coffee stood on a counter next to a plate of grocery store cookies.

  She told them her name—that was all. They invited her to talk, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. But she didn’t flee, and that was something. She stayed until the end, then left as soon as the meeting broke up so she wouldn’t have to field any questions.

  Afterward, she was a little bit ashamed of herself. Why hadn’t she been able to talk? Why couldn’t she have at least said the minimum—that she’d lost her parents, and that, as a result, she’d deliberately sabotaged the most promising romantic relationship she’d ever had?

  Baby steps, she reminded herself. And then she went back the next week.

  32

  Patrick still had the necklace, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He could return it to the store. He could sell it on eBay. He’d hoped to simply hold it until he and Sofia got back together, but he was growing increasingly pessimistic about that happening.

  He was giving her space, the way she’d asked him to do. He’d been waiting patiently. But the waiting was, more and more, starting to feel like giving up.

  Patrick knew he should return the necklace, stop thinking about Sofia, and move on. But he didn’t want to move on.

  Moving on sucked.

  Alone in his cottage after work, as the sun fell in the sky and the shadows lengthened, he found the little, wrapped box in the bottom of his sock drawer and took it out. He looked at it and thought about how Christmas should have been: He should have given her the gift, and she should have opened it. They should have kissed. It should have been the first of many holidays they would spend together, spanning years, decades. A lifetime.

  He wouldn’t have any of that, maybe, but Sofia could still have this one gift he’d selected for her, this one thing he’d chosen with his heart.

  Maybe giving her the gift wasn’t waiting, the way he was supposed to do. Maybe it wasn’t giving her space. But he wanted her to have it. And, if he were being honest, that was an excuse. He just needed to see her face again, even if it was for the last time.

  He thought about going to her house to do it. But the risk in that scenario was high. If all three of Sofia’s sisters thought he needed to wait quietly for her to come back to him, any one of them was likely to stop him at the front door and turn him away. And even if they didn’t, they were certainly going to ask him to leave at the first sign that Sofia didn’t want to see him.

  The other option was to catch her as she was leaving work. Yes, Bianca would be there. But if they didn’t leave the office together, then he might catch Sofia alone. And even if they did leave together, dealing with one sister was better than dealing with three.

  He drove to the medical park at 4:45, because the website said Bianca’s office closed at five. He saw Sofia’s motorcycle in the parking lot—that was a good sign. He positioned his car in a spot behind a tree so he could be inconspicuous if Bianca came out first.

  He waited, feeling like a private investigator or maybe a stalker, as five o’clock came and went. Patients and their parents came out and went to their cars. A woman Patrick recognized as Bianca’s nurse emerged, got into a Honda Civic, and drove away.

  Bianca came out at about 5:10. He was grateful that she didn’t notice him.

  Patrick was just starting to wonder whether Sofia had even worked that day, and whether it was someone else’s bike he’d seen, when she came out of the building and started walking across the parking lot.

  He wasn’t prepared for seeing her again after so long. It felt like a hard punch to the gut—the knowledge that she was it for him and there was no moving on. Not now, not ever. He would wait for her forever if he had to. It was impossible to do anything else.

  But, God, he hoped he wouldn’t have to wait forever.

  He was so stunned with love that he almost forgot to get out of the car. But at the last minute, as she was getting ready to put on her helmet, he got out and walked toward her, his heart pounding.

  “Sofia.”

  She looked up in surprise, and the expression on her face broke his heart: a combination of love, joy, fear, and sorrow. He could see it all in the way her eyes grew wide, in the set of her chin. She still wanted him. She just didn’t know how to be with him.

  “Patrick.” In the space of a second she gathered herself and shut down. “I was just leaving.”

  “I’ll only take a minute.” He pulled the gift out of his pocket and held it out to her. “I didn’t know what to do with this. I bought it for you, so … I want you to have it.”

  “Patrick …”

  “In retrospect, I can see why you thought it might be a ring. The box size … I should have seen that coming. If I’d known what would happen, I would have bought you something big. A refrigerator, maybe, or a large-screen TV.” His attempt at humor sounded lame even to himself. He swallowed hard. “Just … please, take it.”

  She took the package from him and looked at it but made no move to open it.

  “All right, well … I’ll just go.” He turned and started to walk to his car.

  “Patrick.”

  He paused and waited.

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m working on this. On myself.”

  He felt a surge of reckless hope. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying … don’t give up on me yet.”

  “Never,” he said. And he meant it. As long as there was a chance, he would hold onto it as though he were clinging to his own life. Because that felt like what he was doing, exactly.

  It wasn’t the support group meeting itself that made a difference for Sofia. It was what happened after the meetings.

  She still hadn’t talked to the group, but she’d stopped fleeing immediately after the meeting broke up, and she’d begun to make a habit of staying afterward for coffee and cookies, chatting a little with members of the group, excusing herself when it began to get personal.

  One week, she was approached by an older blond woman she’d seen a few times. The woman’s name was Debra, she recalled, though Sofia couldn’t remember any details of why she was here.

  They held cookies sprinkled in green sugar and Styrofoam cups of substanda
rd coffee and chatted about the weather, a new grocery store that had opened in Morro Bay, the best place to get a good pizza with just the right amount of cheese.

  Then, just as Sofia was preparing to excuse herself, the woman leaned forward and said, “You’re doing fine, you know. It seems like a little thing—just showing up every week—but it’s not a little thing. You’ll talk about it when you’re ready, sweetie.”

  That bit of validation shouldn’t have been a big deal, but for some reason, it was. Sofia’s eyes felt hot, though no tears came.

  She excused herself and left before anything more could be said, but the next Wednesday, she sought out the same woman again.

  “Thank you for what you said last week,” Sofia told her.

  “Oh, well.” Debra shrugged. “Sometimes you just have to hear that what you’re doing is enough.”

  They chatted for a while about something in the news—a storm that was due to hit in a few days—and then Debra looked ruefully into her coffee cup and said, “You know, this stuff is crap. You want to go get some decent coffee?”

  Much to her own surprise, Sofia said yes, she’d like that very much.

  Maybe it was the fact that Debra didn’t ask any questions. Maybe it was the fact that she was a relative stranger who had no expectations, no preconceived notions about Sofia and her family. Maybe it was the fact that the woman reminded Sofia a little bit of her mom.

  Whatever it was, Sofia found herself sitting at a café table across from the woman and talking—really talking—about her parents.

  She’d never said more than she had to about her parents’ deaths—not to Patrick, not even to her sisters. But here she was, talking to this soft-looking fiftysomething woman with her long, acrylic nails, her bleached hair, and her cheap sweater, telling her more than she’d ever said to anyone.