What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  “Me neither.”

  “It just happened, though. The disappearance of the stars, I mean. Not in our lifetime, maybe, but within a few generations. We don’t think that much about it, but we’re historically unprecedented. Standing out there, I imagined that the whole world was lit up like a city, so that no one ever saw the stars. It’s going to happen eventually. What will people make of us then, and all our talk about the heavens? Songs about constellations. Stargazing poetry.”

  I felt obliged to play along.

  “‘How countlessly they congregate,’” I said. “‘O’er our tumultuous snow.’”

  “‘His heart was darker than the starless night,’” Sophie said. “What will that mean once every night is starless? They’ll think we all suffered some mass delusion.”

  “Or else they’ll know we saw something they can’t see anymore.”

  “Even worse.”

  Predictably, Max and I had used the blackout as an occasion for a party. We’d gone to Gerhard’s roof and looked out at the darkened city. But I didn’t remember anyone looking up at the stars or thinking anything about them.

  “Maybe they won’t be bothered by it,” I said. “They’ll get the convenience of cities, the survival of mankind. That will be worth the disappearance.”

  “How will they know it was worth it, if they’ve never seen the stars? How could they measure their loss beneath an empty sky?”

  I didn’t know how to answer this.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After you stepped back inside and forgot about the stars.”

  “I went downtown to save Crane’s soul.”

  It started to rain before we arrived at Sophie’s building. Not a clear-skied summer rain, but heavy from charcoal clouds. The wind picked up, knocking over a trash can on the corner, spilling paper and coffee cups into the gutter. I hailed a cab and we took it back to Gerhard’s. We were both soaking wet, and Sophie’s hair, longer than I had ever seen it, was pressed against her face.

  “I should go home,” she said. “I’ve imposed on you and Max long enough.”

  We both knew that her presence was the opposite of an imposition.

  “Some visitors stay for months,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not that sort.”

  “You haven’t finished your story,” I said.

  “I’ve told you enough.”

  The cab pulled up outside Gerhard’s, and I paid the driver. Sophie pulled me close and pressed her wet face to mine. I didn’t understand what was happening. I stepped from the cab and waited for her to follow me out. Then the door closed, and she was gone. I hadn’t heard her say anything to the driver, and I didn’t know where he was taking her. I was too surprised to do anything but stand in the rain, watching her go.

  Inside, Max sat watching his movie. It might have been his second time through since we’d left, or his third.

  “Beware the pathetic fallacy,” he said, when he saw me dripping in the doorway. “Attend to the weather in your heart.”

  I went upstairs without answering, to shower and change. By the time I was done, the rain had passed. I stood for a while at my bedroom window, looking out at the empty sky. Downstairs, the television was off. Max was staring at the blank screen with a fresh drink in his hand.

  “Do you want one?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Where’s Sophie?”

  The question came as a relief. At least it confirmed that she’d been there, that I hadn’t made the whole thing up.

  “She left,” I said.

  “For good?”

  “We ran into Tom and his new girl on the street, but I’m not sure if that’s what made her leave.”

  “I don’t think she was ever planning to stay for more than a few days.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He let out an annoyed hiss of breath, as if sensing a gathering complication.

  “That’s what she said when she called.”

  “She called? I thought you ran into her on the street.”

  “She called me at work a few days before she showed up. She wanted to know if she could come for a visit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “She asked me not to. And anyway I knew you’d drive yourself crazy. I told her we’d be having some people over on Friday, and she could come then if she wanted. I have no idea why she would lie to you about that.”

  “Just out of nowhere, she called you up and said she wanted to visit?”

  “She wanted to come into the city for a few days.”

  “Did she say she wanted to visit, or did she say she wanted to come into the city?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. It was a phone conversation. I didn’t bring out my hermeneutic toolkit.”

  “I’m not looking for an exegesis,” I said. “I just want to know what she told you.”

  “Well, if there isn’t going to be an exegesis, then I don’t see why we need to establish an authoritative text.”

  “Max,” I said. “Help me out here.”

  He set his drink down on the table as though I’d spoiled it.

  “She wanted to stay a few days.”

  “Did she say where she’d been staying until then?”

  “We didn’t really get into anything like that.”

  He seemed to be making things more mysterious than they needed to be.

  “Was something going on between the two of you?”

  “You mean eight years ago? Or this week?”

  “Where did you guys go when you left the party that night she showed up?”

  “Jesus Christ, Charlie. The perpetual-adolescent thing is not without its charm. But we’re not actually still eighteen years old.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “We went outside and took a lap around the park. She wanted to talk, about you. How you were doing, whether you were seeing anyone. How your writing was going. I don’t know why she didn’t ask you this herself.”

  “She asked about my writing?”

  “So she did.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said you were working on a few things. Frankly, I wasn’t sure that having Sophie Wilder take a sudden interest in your life was much good for anyone. Which seems like sound reasoning in retrospect. But I kept my mouth shut. When you got to the party, she kind of flipped out, so we went for a walk. And then we got back inside, and you had gone upstairs. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Sure,” I said, though we both knew that it could not.

  Max stood and headed for the kitchen.

  “Let me get you that drink.”

  In the days that followed I came to wish that Sophie had never returned to my life. Not that I’d been particularly happy, but I had been comfortable enough in my unhappiness. I’d made some peace with it. Now that peace was gone. Her presence in my life—even as a shadow—was a challenge. It had always been a challenge, I realized. A great effort was required to meet that challenge, and I didn’t know that I still had it in me to make that effort.

  This challenge was complicated by the discovery that Sophie had planned her visit. What else had she planned? She might have known that Tom would be in their old neighborhood, dropping off a key or performing some other scheduled task. Countless chance encounters that marked our history might have been matters of Sophie’s design.

  What was she after, then? Why had she designed things this one way instead of any other? Why had she come when she did, and, having come back, why did she leave so abruptly? It would have cost her nothing to come inside, pack up the few things she’d brought, and say a proper good-bye.

  I didn’t know where to begin to find her. We had fallen that far apart. I didn’t have her cell phone number or a recent e-mail address. She’d said she was going home, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. I found a listing for Sophie and Tom in the phone book, but I knew they weren’t living in the apartment.
I called anyway and let it ring. I sent an e-mail to her old New Hampton alumni account, though I rarely checked my own and when I did it was filled with spam. I wrote that it had been great to see her. That I’d love to talk with her again, and she should let me know the next time she was in the neighborhood. I didn’t express any urgency, but she would understand if she ever got the e-mail. After I’d finished, I felt the helplessness that always comes after sending a message to which one desperately wants an immediate reply. There was nothing left to do.

  A few days later I went for a walk, hoping to recapture the habit I’d lost before Sophie’s arrival. Music played from three directions in Washington Square. A three-piece jazz band—drums and a horn and a stand-up bass, all of the players probably students at the university—had attracted a large crowd to the park’s south end. Beneath the arch on the north side a desperate-looking man played a slow version of the Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Better” on an acoustic guitar. In the western part of the park a boom box played, surrounded by the same group that had been dancing the week before. Only the eastern end was open, and I went out that way.

  I didn’t quite mean to repeat the first walk I’d taken with Sophie, but that’s what I did. Everything fell into place when I reached Crane’s block. She’d been leading me there all along. This is where her story ended. And I realized why she’d left when she had: she’d told me everything she could.

  For a long time I stared at his building, as if it might give up its secrets through the force of my will. I’d almost laughed when she told me that she’d gone to save his soul. I couldn’t quite take it seriously. I’d been raised more or less Catholic myself, gone to Catholic school my whole life before arriving at New Hampton, but I don’t think I knew a single person who would have spoken in that way about saving someone’s soul. The religious people I knew talked about their faith apologetically. It was an embarrassment to their own reason and intelligence, but somehow a necessary one. Their justifications often suggested something vaguely therapeutic. They needed a sense of meaning in their lives. They wanted to believe that things happened for a reason. To speak of souls and damnation, to speak of intervening in another life for the sake of salvation, was beyond all this.

  When it had finally become clear that Sophie’s trips to the church off campus were neither rumor nor research, that something had changed for her, I thought of her pregnancy and my failure to help her. Then I thought of her joining us at midnight mass for three Christmases, which so far as I knew were the first three times she’d been to a Catholic church. I couldn’t help relating her new behavior to me. I did so again when I heard that she’d started going to St. Agnes, the same church I’d brought her to then, though it was also the closest one to her apartment. We’d never spoken about any of this during our few conversations over the years. I didn’t ask questions about her religion, since her answers would only mark out the distance between us. Mostly it didn’t seem real to me. I still pictured Sophie as I’d always known her, and I couldn’t imagine that person turning to God at a time of need.

  My own father came from a long line of believers, though he wasn’t much of one himself. For my mother it was all a matter of indifference. She didn’t object to my being baptized and confirmed, but she didn’t pretend for a moment it meant anything to her. And whatever talent I had for faith had died along with my father. But my mother and I had continued going to church a few times a year with family, and I could understand religion as an inheritance, a family tradition.

  I understood it also as an aesthetic choice. I’d spent enough time around churches in my childhood to appreciate the pull of certain ceremonies, the dark medieval appeal of incense in the nose. It seemed a fair response to the chaos of the modern world. That kind of religion was always an option for a certain sensibility. And there was religion as bohemian provocation or performance. Dylan born again. It wouldn’t have been so surprising if Max one day announced that he’d found God, as a kind of affectation, like playing bridge with retirees at the card clubs uptown.

  But when Sophie spoke about saving Crane’s soul, I saw that her faith had nothing to do with sensibility. She believed. Another challenge: I hadn’t thought such a thing was still possible.

  That night I opened a notebook at my desk. It was the old marble kind that we both used to use, and a few pages were already filled with false starts from months before. I ripped those out and threw them away, so that I could start fresh. I found a pencil in the drawer and chewed on it while examining the page. I had gnawed down to the lead when Morgan Bench appeared in the doorway of my room.

  “Hey man,” he said, “have you got any smokes? We’re all out downstairs and no one feels like going to the corner.”

  “There should be some on the dresser,” I told him without looking up from the page.

  “Cool,” he said. He stayed in the doorway. “What are you getting up to in here?”

  “Writing,” I said.

  “Working on the follow-up?”

  “Tough to say.”

  “I hear you.” He had found the cigarettes by then and lit one. “How’s that going?”

  “Not great,” I told him. “It’s kind of tough to concentrate in this environment.”

  “Right on,” said Morgan. “Fucking George Bush, you know?”

  “I was speaking more about the local environment.”

  “Well, all politics is local, right?”

  I watched Morgan turn down the hall and head for the stairs before rising to go after him. “Wait up,” I said. “I’m due for a break.”

  The next morning I came down late and Max was back in front of the screen, watching something in black and white I’d never seen before.

  “A letter came for you,” he said, as though this were a regular occurrence.

  “A letter?”

  “It’s on the table by the door.”

  The envelope had no return address, but the handwriting on the front was unmistakably hers. I opened it and found a single sheet of lined paper.

  Dear Charlie, the letter began. Please excuse the anachronistic method of communication, which isn’t entirely an affectation. I’m staying at the Old Manse, where there’s no internet connection. There is a phone, of course, but this is only half a help, without a number to call.

  The Old Manse was our ironic name, after Hawthorne and Emerson, for the house where Sophie had grown up in Connecticut. It was left to her after her parents died, and I’d been there a few times while we were in school. There had been enough in the estate to pay taxes on the house and keep it inhabitable, but Sophie had often spoken in college of selling it after graduation, so she’d have something to live on while she wrote. I’d assumed it had long ago left her hands. But once she’d published her first book and married a man with a career, it would have made sense to hold on to the place. I should have guessed that Sophie would be staying there, that this is what she would have meant by going home.

  I’m writing this on Tuesday. If you get it in time to make the one thirty train on Friday, I’ll be waiting at the station. Of course I’ll understand if you don’t appear.

  “What day is it today?” I asked Max.

  “You’ve got all the tough questions,” he said before checking his phone. “It’s Friday.”

  “And how about the time?”

  “Just after noon.”

  I barely waited to read the rest of the letter. There wasn’t much to it. She had signed her name in all lowercase: yrs, sophie. Underneath, a few lines down, so that I almost missed it, a postscript:

  At night here, you can always see the stars.

  PART TWO

  The Law Within

  1

  ON THE THIRD day, they told Sophie to pick her father up. She hadn’t been back to the hospital before then. She’d thought she would take the time to prepare, but her preparations had finally amounted to sitting in the apartment, wondering what came next. She had decided to stay downtown with Crane—it made no sense to
bring him to this place, strange to him and no longer home to her—but she’d done no packing before the call came.

  Now she gathered her things as though for a trip. She meant to stay as long as he survived, but she didn’t know how long that would be, if she’d committed herself to days or to months. She packed a week’s worth of clothes, along with toothpaste and shampoo, her makeup kit and an expensive face cream that Tom had bought her for her birthday the year before. She realized the foolishness of packing these last two items, but she knew that if she left them now she would be leaving them for good.

  The only book she packed was the King James Bible from the shelf near her desk. She’d bought it at the college store on the day she returned to campus from Christmas at Beth’s. She’d never read the Bible before in any version. It was a strange thing to recognize about herself. Countless things she’d read alluded to it, and she had some sense of understanding these allusions. But she didn’t know the book.

  Because she understood the Book of Job to be the most “literary” of them, she’d begun there. She was amazed by Satan’s challenge to God, that he test Job with misfortune: Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face. But more amazing still had been God’s acceptance of the challenge: All that he hath is in thy power. By the time she got to Job’s lament—Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept—she was weeping in her room.

  If she’d not read those words in her dorm room that day, the experience at Beth’s church might have become an odd memory, rather than the thing that changed her life. As she sat weeping, she thought of the child she’d lost. She knew she would have ended the pregnancy in any case, but as it was she’d never had the choice. There had been two days of terrible cramps, at the end of which she’d gone to the infirmary. That had been a month before fall break, a month before Tom sat down at the table beside her. She had not taken time since then to measure the loss. I should have lain still and been quiet, she thought. I should have slept.