What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  “Give me some notes,” she said, “so I know who everyone is.”

  “Oh, it’s just me and Beth.”

  “Beth?”

  “My mother’s sister, Beth O’Brien. She raised me.”

  “Your parents?” Sophie asked.

  “Not around.”

  “Mine either,” she said, suspecting he already knew as much. “Picnic, lightning.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Car crash,” she explained. “Very literary. How about yours?”

  “They died in a fire,” Tom said. Or so Sophie would remember it. Perhaps he said they were “lost” or “taken” or some other construction that was honest in the strictest semantic sense, but he clearly suggested that both his parents had been killed. He’d taken the name O’Brien after coming to live with Beth at the age of eight. Another orphan, Sophie thought. As if absence created vacuums that pulled them to each other. It was, in retrospect, a very intimate conversation for two people who had more or less just met. But this was during a time when life seemed to Sophie a series of such intimacies, her losses extended like a hand to be shaken upon introduction.

  “So it will be the three of us?”

  “Is that all right?”

  “I just hope I’m not intruding.”

  “Not at all. Like I told you, Beth loves visitors.”

  They stopped on the way to eat dinner, and it was late by the time they arrived at the small, two-story Queen Anne Victorian, one in a row of houses in similar style, with a wraparound porch and a tower along its right side that extended above the roof. The porch light was on, and Tom’s aunt opened the door before they had finished pulling into the driveway. She was surprisingly beautiful, with pale skin and reddish blond hair that curled slightly toward her thin face. Only her outfit—a shapeless floral dress that ran to the ground—suggested the spinster aunt Sophie had been imagining for the last hour of their drive. When Tom introduced them, Beth took Sophie into a light but real embrace.

  Tom and Beth led her to a small guest room on the first floor, where Sophie unpacked the few things she’d thrown together after lunch. She was anxious about spending the next week with strangers, and she didn’t really understand their eagerness to take her in. There were shelves along one wall, and out of nervous habit she examined the books, one thing that could always give some comfort. She recognized few of the titles, most to do with religion, a topic about which Sophie knew almost nothing. The Belief of Catholics, The Seven Storey Mountain, Guide to Aquinas.

  “How do you and Tom know each other?” Beth asked Sophie as Tom brought his things to his room.

  She resisted the urge to say that they didn’t.

  “We take a philosophy course together,” she answered instead.

  “That’s funny,” Beth said. “I didn’t know the subject interested Tom.”

  During the short tour of the house that followed, Beth caught Sophie looking at a framed photograph sitting on a side table, a picture of a smiling young woman—it might have been Beth herself—with an infant on her hip.

  “That’s my sister,” Beth said. “Tom’s mom. She died when Tom was young.”

  In the photograph, the woman stood alone with her child.

  That night at Beth’s house, Sophie waited for Tom to come down to her room. Driving her there and introducing her to what amounted to his family was more of an effort than most would make, and it seemed to entitle him to such a visit. If he comes, she thought, I’ll do whatever he wants. As it was, he didn’t come.

  The next day Tom took Sophie into town, and they walked together along Main Street. Every few blocks a former teacher or the parent of an old classmate or a friend of Beth’s stopped them on the street. Each one gave Tom a hug and asked how college was treating him.

  “You must be almost done by now?”

  “I graduate this spring,” Tom said.

  “And what’s next?”

  “I’m going to law school at Columbia.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t do so hot at that college,” joked Tom’s high school baseball coach. Then he told Sophie what a star Tom had been on his team, their best pitcher, throwing a one-hit shutout in the county playoffs that people still talked about.

  Was life really like this for anyone?

  Sophie found herself happy for the first time in months, most of all because none of it had anything to do with her. This town was a place she couldn’t have imagined for herself, that had existed all this time without her knowing about it. She was happy most of all because the world that welcomed her now gave no sign that it had been waiting for her, or that it would notice when she was gone.

  Each night she prepared for him, as she prepared each day for an arm to find its way clumsily around her, or a hand to brush against her back. By the fourth night her surprise had turned to genuine disappointment. On the fifth night she went to him herself. He welcomed her, but anxiously, seeming only barely pleased. It took two more such nights before he settled himself, at which point she understood that all that week he had been terrified of her, terrified of his need for a girl he hardly knew. By then it was time to go back to campus. When she and Tom returned two months later to spend Christmas with Beth, they were a couple, and Sophie still believed Tom’s father was dead.

  She had never been inside St. Vincent’s Hospital, though she’d walked by it many times. At the reception desk she asked for William Crane and was sent to an upper floor, where she asked again for him.

  “I’m his daughter-in-law,” she explained to a nurse behind the counter. “I’m here to pick him up.”

  The nurse’s laugh seemed almost flirtatious.

  “He’s quite a handful,” she said. “Tried to slip out on us twice. We nearly had to put him in restraints.”

  Sophie sat for a few minutes, until she felt a presence standing over her. When she looked up she found not the man she’d been expecting, some decaying echo of her husband, but a woman not much older than herself.

  “Mrs. Crane?” the woman asked.

  “Sophie,” she said.

  “I’m Dr. Phillips. I wondered, while I have you here, if we might talk.”

  Sophie expected to be taken into an office somewhere, but the doctor led her into an empty hospital room. It had been years since Sophie had been in one. The absence of patients gave it an eerie air, as if she and the doctor were conversing among the dead.

  “Your father-in-law is quite upset that we’ve kept him here, I know. But really there wasn’t any other way.”

  “I understand.”

  “How much do you know about his condition?”

  “Not much,” Sophie said. “To be honest, we’ve never met.”

  Dr. Phillips seemed relieved that she wasn’t actually confronting a grieving loved one.

  “It’s quite serious.”

  “Is he dying?”

  “Yes.” Then she clarified. “There are still some things we can try, of course. We went in for an endoscopy, to take a look at some growths in his stomach. We found a substantial presence in some nearby lymph nodes. Possibly also his liver. We’re going to know more after we get the results of his biopsy back, but it’s not a great prognosis we’re looking at. I think our most promising course is going to be a complete gastrectomy. That is, we’ll take out his stomach. While we’re in there, we can also take out those lymph nodes and some surrounding tissue.”

  She paused like a teacher measuring classroom comprehension.

  “I’m sorry to be telling you all this in this way. We don’t have a lot of choice. I’ve explained things to Mr. Crane, but he isn’t in great shape, and I’m not sure how much he’s taking in. I understand that he and your husband aren’t close, but you’re the only contacts he’s given us.”

  “What exactly are you looking for us to do?”

  “Well, there are ways to make all of this easier for him. Mr. Crane doesn’t take very good care of himself. For starters, he doesn’t seem to be taking his medicine. I’m going to w
rite some scrips for you, and I want you to make sure he gets them filled.”

  “I can do that,” Sophie said. “But I can’t promise much else. My husband and his father don’t get along.”

  The doctor was already handing over the prescriptions.

  “Just do what you can. Ultimately, of course, he’s responsible for his own well-being.”

  A duty had been discharged then, another imposed, and there was a subtle shift in balance between the two women as they walked out into the hall and back to the reception area.

  “Here’s my card,” Dr. Phillips said by way of parting. “If you have any questions, you can call.”

  After she left, Sophie filled out the forms and waited for Crane’s arrival.

  Later, Sophie imagined that he had first appeared like a ghost, his pale green hospital gown emanating from him in waves. She imagined him floating toward her, bringing with him an obligation—as every spirit does—as though the demand he would eventually make was present in that instant, carried palpably within him.

  But he was already dressed to leave, in a loose black T-shirt and black jeans, an outfit Sophie recognized as the uniform of a particular kind of older man who haunted lower Manhattan. He still wore his hospital slippers, shuffling to her, and if he resembled anything otherworldly, it was a creature from some medieval portrait of perdition, his pale face animated only by fear. The look made his obvious resemblance to Tom—square jaw; proud nose; thin, tight mouth—all the more troubling. His hair was white where it grew in patchy stubble on his cheeks and chin; it was gray and slight on top of his head, where it had been combed back in an effort to make him presentable. The nurse who walked beside him pointed him toward Sophie. Perhaps she knew, as the doctor seemed already to have known, that no real relationship existed between them.

  “Mr. Crane,” Sophie said, reaching out a hand to him.

  He only nodded, and she dropped her hand back to her side. Neither spoke again until they were in the elevator.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I couldn’t stay any longer.”

  His voice suggested little in the way of gratitude. But she didn’t want gratitude. Better that he understand her arrival as an act of duty. This was how she wanted to understand it herself. She wanted to believe that she was behaving against her own will, if only so she could say as much to Tom. Yet letting the man spend one night in the hospital would not have weighed so heavily on her. She had come for herself. She had come to meet Tom’s father.

  “You can leave me here,” he told her out on the street.

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I signed a form in there,” she said, as though the form had anything to do with it. “I’m going to take you home and get your prescriptions filled. If you don’t like it, I can bring you back upstairs.”

  She struggled to strike the right tone. She felt more sympathy than she’d expected she would, more than she wanted to feel, and overbearing authority from her would only make his situation more pathetic. But she didn’t mean to budge, and she needed him to know it.

  “I live on Fourth and C,” he said. “The pharmacist is right up the block.”

  She helped him into a cab, and they rode in silence. There was everything still to say.

  He untucked his shirt, reaching under it to bother at something in his gut. Some kind of surgical scar, she guessed. She thought, So this is the man. Tom hadn’t wanted her to know Crane, would have been happy enough if she’d never learned that he existed, and it was difficult to shake the idea that an act of kindness toward one was a betrayal of the other. Or that Tom would think of it that way, which amounted to much the same thing. But everything she had seen thus far that day confirmed the secret image of Tom’s father she’d kept these years, the image of a sad man who had made mistakes he didn’t know how to redress, a man against whom hearts had been hardened. Such a man was owed kindness from those in the position to offer it.

  They had his name on file at the drugstore, and the pharmacist told Sophie that the prescriptions would be ready in an hour and a half. They walked another block, and she followed him up the stairs to a three-room railroad apartment, the sort that many of her college friends had occupied in their first years out of school. There were papers everywhere, loose pages and newspaper clippings, some of them very old, by the looks of it. Most were collected into manila folders, as if to suggest organization, a gesture that only made the mess seem more desperate.

  “Why don’t you lie down,” she told him, “and I’ll pick up your drugs in a bit.”

  He nodded silently, still working through his shirt at whatever bothered him underneath. Then he disappeared into the bedroom, leaving her alone amid his ruins.

  She had at least an hour, which she might have spent outside, in a diner or a café. Instead she created some space for herself on the couch by pushing one of the folders to the floor. For a moment, as she looked over the papers and general disarray, she thought: This could be me. This could be my life. She felt unaccountably exhausted.

  When she stood she felt queasy, unstable on her feet. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water and found the sink overfull with dirty dishes, the cupboard empty. She washed and filled one glass. But before taking a sip she started cleaning the others.

  Her own father, an investment advisor prey to wild shifts in mood, had never seemed happier than in the act of physical labor, raking leaves or chopping wood in their yard in Connecticut. He’d tried to instill this in her, often inviting her to join him in his work. Now, when she spent a day sweeping and vacuuming, she thought of him. Or didn’t think of him, exactly, for the fact of not thinking accounted for a good deal of the pleasure those days provided. But her unthinking self, her brute body at work, felt close to her father then, and she liked the work for this reason.

  She didn’t care much for washing dishes, though. It kept you fixed in one place and didn’t have the feel of true labor. On the rare occasions when Tom was home in time for dinner, Sophie made him clean up afterward. But now the warm water comforted her hands. The one dishtowel was dirtier than most of the dishes, but there was soap and a dish rack, and she had enough to make do. Once she’d finished, she took her glass into the living room. There too, she tidied up. When she handled Crane’s folders, the urge was great to look through them. But Sophie resisted, sensing where that would lead, the entanglement that such interest would bring. She straightened them into piles neat enough to suggest at least the possibility of order. She thought she might buy cleaning supplies while at the drugstore, so she could do a proper job when she got back.

  It occurred to her to check on Crane before going to fill his prescriptions, but she wanted to let him sleep. She was there and back before she realized that she hadn’t taken a key. She buzzed his apartment twice, knowing that he would sleep through it, before moving on to others. A voice with a heavy Spanish accent came over the intercom.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I’m running an errand for the man on the fourth floor, and I’ve been locked out.”

  The intercom went dead, and a woman emerged from a first-floor apartment and trundled down the hall.

  “You’re running errands for Mr. Crane?” the woman asked, holding the building’s front door open a few unwelcoming inches. She was short and overstuffed, in her fifties perhaps, with black hair and questioning eyes.

  “I just stepped out for a moment, but I forgot the key.”

  “Mr. Crane doesn’t get visitors. We live here both ten years, and he never get a visitor.”

  “I’m his daughter,” she said, which seemed near enough to true and likely to carry some force.

  “He never mentioned having children. You’re his daughter, and you don’t visit all these years?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie said, unsure for what. Then she showed the woman the bag from the pharmacy, pointing to the prescription label. “See here, William Crane, it says
.”

  Perhaps this suggested something official, for the woman now spoke with deference.“I’m Lucia Ortiz.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Ortiz. I’m Sophie.”

  “Mr. Crane is sick? I live with him a very long time. He’s a very nice man. He’s quiet, but very nice.”

  Sophie felt the introduction of this woman into her story as an act of providence—as, in truth, she was inclined to treat all such introductions—and she saw at once how she was meant to make use of it.

  “Yes, I’m afraid he’s quite sick.” She gestured at the bag of pill bottles, now in Lucia’s hands. “Do you think you could bring those to him later, so I don’t have to disturb him while he sleeps?”

  “That’s no problem,” said Lucia Ortiz, obviously relieved not to have to let Sophie into the building.

  “Another thing.” Sophie hesitated. “If you have a chance, could you just check in on him once in a while? I’m going to try to see him soon, but it’s hard for me. I’ll leave a number you can call if anything happens.”

  Sophie wrote her name and her cell phone number on a piece of paper she found in her purse. She took out a twenty-dollar bill and awkwardly handed it to Lucia along with the paper.

  “No, no,” Lucia told her, returning the bill. She gestured to the cross around Sophie’s neck, almost touching it. “God’s blessing to you, Sophie Crane. I’ll look in on your father.”

  As Sophie entered her apartment she heard the phone ringing, and she had the unsettling feeling that it was morning again. She was coming back from mass, and she would have to live the entire exhausting day over again. This time she didn’t wait to pick up. She wanted to get it all over with.

  “Hello?”