Joplin, Wishing

by Diane Stanley

  I was happy for my mother and for Sofie too. But I had my own pain to deal with. It was like I’d already lost Sofie to Mom. Soon I’d lose her completely. She’d disappear into the past, and the moment she vanished, she’d already have been dead for hundreds of years. It made my insides quiver just to think of that. I’d never, ever see her again.

  But at least I had my mother back. I cried over that too.

  Our last night in the beach house, we had pasta Bolognese. The sky had been threatening all day, and toward evening it started to rain. We shut all the doors and windows. After dinner, Mom made a fire. We curled up in the living room on these cushy old sofas with their faded flowered slipcovers and piles of mismatched pillows, watching the flames and talking.

  I hated the thought of leaving. Everything had been so perfect, and now it was almost over. “If only we could stay here like this forever,” I said, “exactly the way we are. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “No,” Sofie said, softly but in a way that I knew she really meant it. “Nothing lasts forever. It would get stale after a while, like a shut-up house. This is perfect because it’s a moment. You will always remember it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s nice that we had such a wonderful time together in this beautiful place. Is that better?”

  Sofie smiled. “Much.”

  “And nice of Jackson to let us come,” Mom reminded us.

  “Yes, it was. Amazing. But why did he invite us in the first place? I mean, it’s not summer or anything. It’s a totally random time. It seems kind of weird.”

  Mom smiled. “Not at all. He knows about Sofie, and he thought we’d want some time together in a peaceful place. So he offered this house.”

  “You told him?”

  “No.” Now the smile was a full-on grin, positively merry. “My father did. Those boxes and boxes of papers of his—turns out, they were all about Sofie, though he called her Claire, of course. Apparently he wrote about her, and nothing else, for the last thirty years of his life. I think it became his reason for living.

  “I was trying to do the same thing myself, with the memoir. I wanted to capture my sister on paper, everything I could remember, so there would be a record that she’d walked this earth. But my memories were those of a very young child, without nuance or understanding.

  “I’m glad my father did it properly. Jackson says, from what he’s read so far, it feels like a grand nineteenth-century novel. It starts in Holland and carries her forward till the day she disappeared. A saga, I guess you’d call it.”

  “How much have you read?”

  “Not much. Jackson set some pages aside for me, just to give me the big picture. But they were still cataloging the boxes. And by the time there was anything to read, I was at home—you know, because of what happened at school. Still, I’ve read enough to know it’s a book about a girl named Claire who never ages and watches the world unfold over hundreds of years. It’s got these wonderful little details. Honestly, it’s like being transported back to Holland or old New York, but in very particular rooms where you meet very particular people. You can practically hear the clock ticking.

  “But it wasn’t till the other night, when I asked you about the platter and Sofie started telling her story, that I put it all together. I realized that Daddy hadn’t just used Claire’s name. The girl in my father’s book was my sister. She really had been ageless and timeless, which is why she’d had to leave. And now, by some miracle, she’d returned to me.

  “So, to answer your question: That’s what I told Jackson—that Sofie was Claire, that she’d come back, and that we were going to bring her saga to a happy end.”

  Sofie was stretched out on her own couch, propped up with pillows, her pale hair spread out like a mermaid’s, quietly listening and staring dreamily at the fire.

  “Do you want to read it?” I asked her. “The book?”

  She nodded. “We’re going up to the office when we get back. I’d like to see how he told it, but I already know the story. I’m the one who gave it to him. The story and all the details.

  “I’d be telling him about something and he’d break in to ask me questions. You know, ‘Where was the window—was the light coming in from behind or the side?’ ‘Tell me about the table setting, the dishes and the food.’ ‘What were the sounds from outside—horses and wagons, people selling things on the street, dogs barking?’

  “That’s when I felt closest to him. We hardly saw him during the day. He was always working. Then there was dinner and family time. But often after Anne went to bed”—she looked over at Mom—“we’d sit up in the living room and talk for hours. Mother too, but not that often. I think it made her sad to hear about my past. She thought of it as suffering.

  “But I was glad to tell my stories, to reimagine those moments completely. It helped me hold on to what I’d learned from the many houses I lived in, the moments I’d witnessed, all the people whose lives I watched.” She sort of drifted off at that point, like she was sleepy. Or maybe she was just soaking up more details—the flickering light of the fire, the soft pillows, the smell of sea air and tomato sauce.

  “I’m glad he asked those questions and wrote everything down,” I said. “What you told us in the park—that was just an outline. I want to know the rest.”

  “I’m glad too,” Sofie said. “Daddy will have told it better than I ever could. The way his mind worked, he was always digging deeper, looking for meaning. He asked me what was going on in my mind during those long days and longer nights, when I was looking out at the same wall, the same room, and nobody was there.

  “And you know—I was surprised, once I started trying to remember, how much thinking I’d done. How I’d changed over time. I’m not the same person who posed for Hans van der Brock. I look like her, but I’m older and wiser.”

  “Have you thought,” Mom asked, “how it’ll be when you go back home—being so changed, and accustomed to the comforts of modern life?”

  “I think about it all the time. That, and other things too. As a girl in that world, I’ll be kept in my place. And I want more than that. I’ll finally get the chance to lead a full life, and I want to do something important with it. I want that for Greta too. I’ll teach her to read. And if she can’t go to school, then I’ll teach her myself. I’ll need to take it slowly, though. If I just walk in the door one day and start making changes, my family will think I’ve lost my mind. But if I’m careful, I think I can help them all have a better life.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” Mom said.

  “Sofie?” I’d been playing with a thought for a while now. This seemed the moment to say it out loud. “If you can—I mean, I don’t know how you’d do it, but maybe you can figure out a way . . .”

  “What?”

  “Could you leave us a message? So we’d know you got home safely, that you still remembered it all. That you remembered us?”

  Sofie thought about that, staring at the fire. “Something that would last into the future.”

  “Yeah. So there’s some chance we might actually find it. I know that’s a tricky assignment.”

  “Don’t worry, Joplin. I’m old and wise. I’ll figure it out.”

  23

  A Force to Be Reckoned With

  ON TUESDAY NIGHT, WE HAD dinner at Jackson Sloan’s apartment, our whole little support group—Mom and Jackson, Jen and Leonard, Barrett, Sofie, and me. It was the last time we’d all be together, so Jackson went all out.

  There were candles in old-fashioned candlesticks, the kind that had lots of arms. There were flowers, and lacy napkins, and beautiful china and glasses. All these things looked old, like maybe they’d belonged to Great-Grandma Sloan.

  They’d probably been stored away for years. I mean, what does a single guy need with lacy napkins? But he’d brought them out for us.

  There was music playing softly in the background. I was pretty sure he’d picked the Bach especially for Mom. Probably the flowers too. When she saw them,
she said, “Oh! Peonies!”

  I bet he already knew they were her favorite.

  He turned the lights down low, so once the sun had set the room was lit by candlelight. And out the windows we could see the twinkly lights of the city.

  Like our wonderful days at the beach house, it was perfect. I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  Now the final day and hour had come.

  Mom stayed home with Jen keeping her company. She and Sofie had already said their good-byes in private. And this time apparently they did it right—nothing left unsaid, no mysteries, no regrets.

  The rest of us walked up Hudson in a tight little knot, Barrett on one side and Leonard, carrying the platter, on the other. We reached Abingdon Square and stopped in the same spot as before. Only this time, the mood was different.

  Sofie wouldn’t be coming back.

  We stalled for as long as we dared, till it was absolutely time to go. Leonard leaned down, gave Sofie a kiss on the cheek, and whispered something in her ear. Whatever it was, it made her smile.

  Then Barrett scooped Sofie up in his arms, lifting her off the ground and swinging her around, leaning into her hair to hide his tears. Finally, after what seemed a very long time, Barrett let go.

  Then Sofie and I went on together, holding hands. She looked back only once and waved.

  As we neared the pizza place, it occurred to me that Leonard (or Jackson) might have hired someone to watch us this time, some guy who looked like a slacker but was really a private detective.

  If there was such a person, it turned out he wasn’t needed. When we got to Manny’s, Lucius Doyle was already there, in the back booth by himself. A small pepperoni pizza was sitting on the table, untouched. I saw no sign of Manny or any of his waiters. We were completely alone.

  When we sat down, Doyle pushed the pizza tray aside, up against the shakers of parmesan, the pepper flakes, and the shiny napkin holder. I set the delftware platter down in the space he had cleared, and cut away the wrapping with my kindergarten scissors.

  I didn’t do it for Lucius Doyle; I did it for myself. I wanted to make sure that when Sofie disappeared, she didn’t return to the platter, trapped again for all time.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  We nodded.

  The exact timing was important. The contract gave him only ten seconds. So he laid his phone on the table with the stopwatch feature open. “Say whatever good-byes you need. Let me know when you’re done.”

  “We already have,” Sofie said. She seemed strangely confident all of a sudden. Her moment had arrived.

  “All right,” I said, following the script, “I transfer ownership of this platter and all the powers that go with it, for the purpose of making one wish only, according to the contract we have both signed. Your ownership begins now.”

  Doyle pressed start on the stopwatch. Numbers flew by on the screen.

  “I hereby reverse my wish for immortality, so that I may grow old gradually, in the manner of mortal men, beginning as I am now, at this time and place, in middle age.”

  He looked down at his phone. His time was up. The platter was mine again. But it didn’t really matter. The rest was up to Lucius Doyle.

  We waited while he pulled three plastic baggies out of his pocket. Each had powder of a different color—yellow, white, and blue. Just as Sofie had described.

  “Hold out your hands, palms up.”

  Sofie did.

  “You’re sure you remember how to do this?” I asked.

  “Please.” His voice was cold and hard. “Don’t talk any more.”

  I was sitting close to Sofie, our shoulders touching. I could feel her leg warm against mine. She gave me a little nudge. It felt like a smile, but her face was solemn.

  Lucius Doyle was speaking softly in words I couldn’t understand. I stared at him as he worked his magic, opening one bag at a time, sprinkling the powders over Sofie’s soft, small hands, and making a mess on the table and the platter.

  I stared at him the whole time, as Sofie had on that terrible day when he first enslaved her. I remember that his face was square and compact, except for the jaw, which was starting to droop. I looked at his skin. It had a sheen to it—maybe oil, maybe sweat. His lashes were pale and stubby. There was a mole on his cheek, right beside his mouth. The nose had a sort of ball on the end, like what happens when you squeeze the tip of a balloon. It was pinker than the rest of his skin.

  He didn’t look like an artist, a person capable of painting something as beautiful as my platter. Nor, for that matter, did he look like a man who would teach himself Latin so he could read forbidden books. He looked like a merchant, a seller of cloth. Maybe a cobbler who made boots.

  The last powder now, just a pinch of the blue. I couldn’t distract my mind any longer. I leaned against Sofie a little harder, feeling the warmth of her real-person body, saying good-bye.

  And then, where she had been, there was nothing. It was what I’d expected, but when it happened it shocked me. My heart lurched inside my chest and I felt a cold wave of sorrow sliding over me. But I was determined not to cry in front of Lucius Doyle, who was brushing the powder off his hands and mopping it up with paper napkins, as though what he’d just done was nothing.

  I picked up the platter and stared at the picture for a couple of beats. It was still just a landscape with geese, a pond, some trees, and a distant windmill. Sofie wasn’t there. She’d gone home. I stuffed the platter and wads of wrapping into the canvas bag. Then I slid out of the booth.

  “You know, I could call the police right now,” I said. “I could tell them about the kidnapping. That’s what my mother wanted to do. They’d probably put you in prison, where you could grow old behind bars. But I said no, because then I’d have to see you again, and hear you tell lies in court, and I didn’t think I could stand that.”

  The look he gave me was cold yet strangely lacking in expression. He didn’t even bother to thank me.

  Barrett and Leonard were waiting outside the restaurant, just far enough from the window that Lucius Doyle wouldn’t see them. Now they wrapped me in their arms, like I was an accident victim, and ferried me away toward home. I can only imagine how we looked. Neither of them said a word till we had turned the corner.

  “Was it okay?” Barrett asked. “Is it done?”

  “Yes.” I started trembling, just thinking about it, and they were all over me again.

  We shuffled along like that for a while. Then I kind of shrugged them off.

  “I’m okay now,” I said, handing Leonard the bag and taking Barrett’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I knew I wasn’t okay, not yet. I’d dream of that moment—when Sofie’s warm touch turned to empty air—for years, maybe for the rest of my life. Then I’d wake and remind myself it was good, it was what Sofie wanted.

  But the thing was—it had been so real.

  After a while, Leonard hung back and left Barrett and me to walk by ourselves. That was nice. It helped. And it gave me a chance to ask a question that had been troubling me for a while.

  “Do you think she’ll actually remember us? Because if she really went back to be the person she was before she met that monster on the road—wouldn’t she be the same innocent girl who let him trick her into posing?”

  Barrett let go of my hand and hooked his arm in mine instead. That brought us closer. I felt his warmth where Sofie’s had been. How he’d known that’s what I needed, I can’t imagine, except that he’s really smart and a wonderful friend.

  “If it was that simple, then Lucius Doyle couldn’t be sitting in a New York pizza parlor four hundred years in the future. He’d be back in Holland smoking his pipe and preying on innocent girls. I think time has its own shape; it’s not a river that runs only one way, but more like a circle or some other complicated shape. I think Sofie is back there right now with her three-hundred-plus years of wisdom, her whole life ahead of her, and lots of big plans. And you know what?”

  “Wha
t?” I said, or I sort of said it, because I was letting it all hang out by then, heaving big sobs and wiping my face with my free hand.

  “She’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. That little Dutch village won’t know what hit it—but I promise it will never be the same.”

  Postscript

  THREE YEARS LATER

  I WAS IN MY ROOM doing homework when the phone rang. Mom was still at Sloan, Hart. She had an office there by then, and only one book to edit, with lots of help from Jackson Sloan.

  I got up and went to the living room, thinking it was probably Mom saying they were going out to dinner, and would I mind ordering in?

  But it wasn’t Mom, it was Jen.

  “Hi!” she said, with this semicrazed enthusiasm that put me on alert. Clearly she had something big to say.

  “Hi back. You sound weird.”

  “I am! I can hardly contain myself!”

  “Well then don’t!”

  “I have to! At least until tomorrow!”

  We really did speak in exclamation points. It was that kind of conversation.

  “Okay—so what happens tomorrow?”

  “You and your mom ditch whatever you have planned—”

  “Like my algebra test?”

  “Yes! To hell with algebra! Tomorrow at ten is as long as I can wait. You and your mom. At Christie’s. At ten!”

  “Is Leonard there? Do you need an intervention?”

  “Nope! I’m just ducky!”

  And she hung up the phone.

  Seconds later it rang again.

  “What?” I said.

  “Barrett too!”

  Click.

  We were up at Rockefeller Plaza well before ten. Mom had her cup of iced coffee. I had my backpack so I could go straight to school after my “doctor’s appointment.” Barrett had on a jacket and tie. He said he had a feeling it was called for.

  Jen hopped out of a cab and ushered us inside. She looked pretty much the way she’d sounded on the phone. And she was moving us along so fast we couldn’t ask what was going on. We just trotted along behind her.