Losing the Light

by Andrea Dunlop

  “No one, Mom.” I took the phone carefully from its cradle and swiftly hung it up. I unplugged it. Sophie tried several more times over the next few days and I managed to intercept nearly every call, screening the calls and deleting the messages as soon as I heard her plaintive voice on our ancient answering machine.

  Then one day she called while I was at work and spoke to my mother.

  “Brooke, honey.” My mom was sitting at the kitchen table when I came in from work. I’d only worked an afternoon shift and the sun was still high and blazing.

  “Hi, Mom.” I came over and deposited a kiss on her cheek.

  “Sophie called for you,” she said, her voice serious.

  I froze for a moment before shrugging and turning my attention to searching through the pantry for a snack. “What did she say?”

  “That she’s coming home in a few days. Not much else, but she sounded very upset. She wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

  I felt a tiny wave of gratitude that Sophie had chosen not to emote all over my mother and tell her the whole sordid story. I wanted to protect my mother from it, I wanted her to believe that my experience in France had been only good.

  “Brookie”—I turned and faced my mom, stopped short by the seldom-used nickname—“I know you two had a falling-out of some kind. I gathered. You don’t need to tell me all of the gory details, but I think you should reach out to her. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can be sorted out. I wish I’d treasured my girlfriends when I was your age. It’s important.” She shook her head.

  “Okay, Mom.” I put my arms around her. “I’ll call her next week when she’s home.”

  The guilt from my letter was starting to eat at me, my mom’s directive notwithstanding. The letter had felt right—even righteous—in the moment. But I’d never before said such cruel words to anyone, and now, knowing she’d read them made me feel nauseated.

  On the day I had decided I would call Sophie, I woke with lifted spirits, with new hope that somehow things could work out. Maybe it was easier for me to imagine accepting her back into my life knowing she was humbled by having failed her exams and by having been tossed aside by our friends. I was still angry, still hurt and humiliated, yes, but now she was too. Could we find our way back to each other now?

  After working the morning shift that day, I was home by early afternoon. I’d ignored Peter’s suggestive glances and declined his invitation to go out that night. “I can’t,” I’d told him, “a friend of mine just got back to town and I’m seeing her.” I hadn’t told him about Sophie or much of anything about France. We didn’t do much talking.

  When I got home from work, my mom was in the other room ironing clothes. “Hi, sweetheart,” she called down the hallway.

  “Hi, Mom!” She put her iron down and came to join me in the kitchen, where I was making a sandwich for myself. “You want one?” I asked, smiling.

  “No thanks, I had some of the lasagna from last night.” She then said cautiously, “You seem cheerful today,” as though afraid I might suddenly decide I wasn’t.

  I shrugged and grinned at her. I put my sandwich on a plate and sat down at the table across from her.

  “Just looking forward to school?”

  “I guess. Better than the five a.m. shift at Starbucks.”

  She looked at me expectantly.

  “I’m about to call Sophie,” I said quietly, relenting.

  My mom’s face lit up and she came over to kiss me on the forehead. “Good, I’m proud of you, sweetie. You never really lose by forgiving someone. All my love to Sophie, then. I’m going to finish up my laundry and leave you here to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles.”

  I rolled my eyes at her playfully.

  The phone rang several times on the other end before an unfamiliar male voice finally answered. For a moment, I wondered if I had dialed the wrong number.

  “Is Sophie there?” I asked tentatively.

  There was a strange and pregnant pause. “Who’s calling?”

  “Brooke Thompson.”

  “Are you a friend of Sophie’s?”

  “Yes. Sorry, who am I speaking with?”

  “This is her uncle Bernard. . . . This isn’t really a good time.”

  “Oh,” I said, confused. “So, um, should I call back later? Do you know if she’ll be around?”

  He made a small, pained sound, then was silent.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked after a moment, my voice echoing in my ears, small and plaintive. I was suddenly finding it harder to breathe, as though the air in the room were thinning.

  “Hold on a moment.” I could hear him putting his hand over the receiver and speaking to someone in the room. “Okay, Rebecca, okay,” he said, his voice sounding far away. Rebecca was Sophie’s mom. “Are you there?” he said to me.

  “Yes.”

  “So, look, I really hate to be the one to tell you all of this, but Rebecca and Frank really aren’t in shape to talk to anyone right now.”

  What he said after that is blurred in my memory as though I’d suddenly half lost consciousness when he said the words. And such strange words: Sophie has passed away. It sounded peaceful when he put it that way, as though she had slipped away in her sleep like some octogenarian who had come serenely and half willingly to her end. I realized once he’d said it that I’d known from the moment he’d answered the phone; that I could hear it even in the voice of a stranger.

  Sophie had not been on the flight from Paris. Her parents had tried to reach her but could not. They got ahold of the landlord—which made sense, as I assumed they’d been paying her rent. He’d opened her apartment and discovered all of Sophie’s belongings, her passport and phone, and a note for her parents. The police told them a tourist couple had reported that they’d seen a girl who matched Sophie’s description throw herself from the bridge in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont the day before. Her uncle didn’t go into much detail about the note except to say that she had apologized but not explained why. I had many more questions but he had no answers.

  The next thing I remember was hanging up and slumping to the floor, where my mother found me screaming.

  For the first semester of my senior year, it was all anyone could talk about. There was a vigil and a memorial, and for a time I seemed to warrant a strange, morbid celebrity. Girls from the volleyball team whom I didn’t even remember ever having met before wanted to discuss Sophie for hours on end. She’s still the most interesting thing about me as far as this school is concerned, I thought, and then felt guilty for letting it bother me.

  For my part, I didn’t want to speak to anyone about her. Rather, the only person I wanted to talk to about her was a world away and I had no way of contacting him. I purposely hadn’t even kept his number, either out of spite or to keep myself from calling him in a weak moment, I wasn’t sure which.

  I saw a grief counselor, with whom I shared a great deal about my feelings and virtually nothing at all about the actual circumstances or my guilt. I knew she’d only tell me it was misplaced, and I wasn’t interested in having it alleviated. It was keeping me company. It turned out no one had talked much to Sophie while she was in France. So it seemed that she and I shared many secrets, and I hoarded them all—despite the prodding from her friends, who wanted to know what could have made her do it. What I kept private felt sacred, and that was what I needed; that was all I had left.

  Much harder to face were Sophie’s parents, whom I drove up to see about a week after I got the news. They had me over for a strained and painful dinner at which her mother repeatedly burst into tears and I awkwardly tried to comfort her. When she wasn’t sobbing, I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was searching for something, in my eyes, in my words, some clue or perhaps just some hint of her daughter. And every once in a while I would say something or do something that she would tell me reminded her of Sophie—unsurprising, I supposed, since we’d spent so much time together—and this would appear to both light her up and break her all at once
. I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  I went through the next year on autopilot. I kept my head down and studied hard and was relieved when graduation finally came. After college I spent a summer with my mom—though not at Starbucks. Instead, I got a job copyediting the Web text for Chino’s local paper. In the fall I moved to New York and have been here ever since.

  For years I dreamed of Sophie at least once every couple of nights. To this day I still do—though somewhat less often as other things have come along to crowd my brain. My dreams of her always seem to be brief, and in them she is always happy. Mostly we’re just sitting somewhere together or walking along in our park; sometimes we’re on a pier watching the boats. There is always the sensation that she can’t stay long, that she’s going to have to leave soon. Sometimes I already know she’s gone and I tell her I miss her; she smiles and says she knows just before disappearing. But every so often I dream she’s not yet gone, that there is still a chance to change things, and I am back on the doorstep watching her walk away, just waiting and waiting for her to turn around.

  I AGREE TO see Alex the Thursday night following the party. We meet at a little café south of Union Square, convenient both to his hotel and to the train back to Grand Central. The place has a bit of a faux-French vibe to it, and the irony of this isn’t lost on me. If I’m honest with myself, it’s a relief to get out of my new house for a few hours—with all its shiny, unused appliances and unpacked boxes. It seems as if it will take a lifetime to settle in; this alone could make me never want to move again.

  As I walk down from Union Square to the café, I try to answer the question I’ve been asking myself ever since I made this dubious appointment: What do I really want from Alex? To have him say, I remember you. I knew you when you were young and hungry for a life you would never have. I see that you are grown and not that girl any longer, but I remember her. I am your link to her, the only one now that the other is gone. I wouldn’t, couldn’t forget you if I tried. I know what happened and it wasn’t your fault.

  I consciously try not to primp for him. I tell myself that this is not in any way a date but simply something I have to do. I can’t explain my reasons for needing to see him. It’s only coincidence that we ran into each other, and I’m long past the point in my life where I try to impose meaning where there isn’t any. But I am looking for something from him, and what that is, I’ll only know when I see it.

  I’ve been thinking about Sophie and about my younger self almost constantly since I ran into Alex. These two girls seem frozen together forever in time—the memory of Sophie and the piece of me that would always be there with her. What would she think of me now? I gave up writing shortly after school, and without much of a fight I settled into the kind of job that my twenty-year-old self never wanted. Even worse, I ended up being pretty happy with it.

  Though rationally I know that Sophie is gone and has been gone for a long time, because she was so far away when she died, some part of me can’t be reasoned with, thinks she might still be in Paris waiting for me to join her. Perhaps this is why people want to see a body at funerals, so that their heart can catch up to what their brain knows to be true.

  What would Sophie have become if she’d lived? I wonder if someone like her was ever meant to be forty, to age, to find coarse, gray hairs stubbornly going in the opposite direction of the rest the way I do now. I can’t imagine she’d have settled for anything less than everything she’d wanted. I fear she might have been disappointed by me, that I’d become so boring. I couldn’t shake the brutal suspicion that she’d have left me behind one way or another, and maybe this hurts more than anything else. We’re not supposed to be selfish about other people’s deaths but we are. We’re left behind, after all, it’s the dead who couldn’t care less.

  Is it more painful for me to think that Alex doesn’t remember me or that he doesn’t remember us? I don’t know. Perhaps I just need to know that I’m not in love with him anymore. Young loves just get into your bloodstream that way, their image looming so large in your memory that no real person who comes after ever compares. The other night had felt like a hallucination, so much so that I remain unconvinced that he will actually be there when I walk in the door to Café Deville. It’s not only Alex that threatens to pull me under now but the whole of the path not taken that he evokes. What if seeing him tonight breaks my heart all over again?

  I’m a few minutes late but I try not to rush. At least he’ll hopefully already be here. There’s something appealing about the idea of making him wait for me after all of these years.

  I push the door of the café open and it’s warm inside. I unwind the heavy scarf I’m wearing, peel off my winter coat, and hang it over my elbow. Scanning the near-empty bar, I see Alex sitting at one of the small bar tables on the other side. He’s seen me already and is watching me remove my outer layers. He smiles and raises his hand.

  I walk over to him. “Sorry I’m a little late.”

  He takes my folded coat from me and puts it on the seat beside him. “It’s okay. I’m happy to see you. I was worried that you might not come,” he says, though his face tells me he was not actually worried at all.

  My stomach is churning and I realize—a little horrifyingly—that I have no idea how to begin a conversation like this; the waiter comes over and gives me a temporary reprieve by asking me for my drink order. I stick with my usual and order red wine.

  “So, have you been enjoying your time in New York?” I ask. It’s not helping my cause that all I want to do is stare at him outright, to catalog the tiny changes that I can only now see, up close, in the geography of his handsome face. He has aged beautifully; the tiny lines only make his expressions more dramatic, more intense.

  “I have. I always love to come to New York. I lived here for a time.”

  “I looked at some of your work online after I saw you the other night,” I say as evenly as possible. “You’re very talented.”

  “Do you think so?” He shrugs and looks out into the middle distance for a moment. “To tell you the truth, it feels like it’s been many years since I’ve connected with my work in any real way. I still take many pictures, of course, and I am grateful that people are still interested, but I’m not sure why they are. It makes me immediately suspicious of people who say they are fans.”

  “Including me?” I smile, conscious that I am flirting, conscious of how easy it feels to do so.

  “Not you. I can sense that you have taste. And I am certain that you prefer my old work to my new work. True?”

  I laugh and nod. “I hope you don’t mind me saying it.”

  He smiles. “Well, it must make you nostalgic, no?”

  Only now do I notice that his eyes have darkened, and it makes me inexplicably nervous. I wanted to be holding all the cards, and until this moment I thought I had been.

  “You could say that,” I finally reply when the pause becomes unbearable.

  “But then, it can be distressing when an image from our past comes upon us unexpectedly.”

  He gives me a sly smile that feels like a challenge. He softly rattles the ice in his glass.

  I release a breath I feel I’ve been holding for years. “I thought you didn’t recognize me the other night.”

  “I didn’t, not at first. But when you said you were leaving, I saw you again, staring at that picture. It was the oldest one they chose. At first I thought you just had good taste, but then I realized.”

  “But you came over to talk to me before that.” I feel as if I’ve been caught in a lie. I want to run.

  “I was intrigued. You looked so out of place.”

  I’m mortified by this. Had I thought he’d just found me irresistible? I look down at the table, my cheeks burning.

  “It’s not a criticism, just an observation.” Without warning he reaches over the table and takes my hand. “Would you really want to blend in with those people?”

  Contemptuous of the beautiful people as ever, I think, no m
atter how much he belongs to them. But, no, I realize, no. I have stopped wanting to be anyone other than myself. Progress of a kind.

  Alex is still holding on to my hand.

  “I still have that photo,” I say quietly, “the one you took of me in the garden.” Not only do I still have it, I know its precise location: in a small box of important miscellany that includes my passport and my grandmother’s wedding ring. It wouldn’t appear to anyone else like a memento of another man, though that’s precisely what it is.

  “Ah, yes,” he says in a way that tells me that he hasn’t any idea what photo I mean. “My work used to mean so much more to me.” He takes a sip of his whiskey and looks thoughtfully into his glass for a moment. “Perhaps I will get through this phase. I know I’m ridiculous to complain. It just used to seem so different. I keep waiting for the feeling I had when I was young to return. But then perhaps no one would even notice.”

  “I bet that isn’t true. I bet you have more fans who are real believers than you think you do.”

  “I don’t remember you being such an optimist. But then, I suppose people change.”

  “It’s easy to be optimistic about other people’s lives.” This is mostly true. In recent years I’ve felt a cautious optimism about my own life, adding up its parts—good job, fiancé who loves me, Mom still healthy—and deciding I was pretty lucky.

  “And you, Brooke, whatever came of your painting?” He leans forward across the table.

  I wince. “That was my friend.” I’m unable to say her name. “I wanted to be a writer back then.”

  “Ah, that’s right. Forgive me, it was such a long time ago.”

  Yet that photograph of Sophie still hangs at his parties, one of his best. And I still have the photograph he took of me, secreted away after all this time.

  “So? Your writing, how is it going?”

  I shrug. Suddenly I can’t admit that I’ve walked away from it entirely. “You know how it is,” I say vaguely. “I work away at it when I can.”