What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  When she’d cleaned up the floor and dressed him, Crane agreed to get back into bed. He was stronger now, or perhaps just more willing to help. They got him up from the floor without trouble and moved him to the center of the mattress. Sophie set pillows along his sides to keep him from rolling. She gave him a sleeping pill and retreated to a chair at the other end of the room, where she sat listening to him breathe.

  Crane was still asleep, and Sophie still sitting, when the buzzer sounded. A round, severe-looking woman stood on the landing with what looked like a large gym bag slung over her shoulder. She had dark black hair pulled into a ponytail.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said. “The hospice sent me.”

  Sophie introduced herself, offering a hand that the woman didn’t take.

  “Where’s your father?” Sarah asked.

  “He’s sleeping. He had a rough night.”

  “Has the doctor prescribed something for that?”

  “Yes, but he fell out of bed.”

  The woman nodded. Her interest in the problem seemed mostly academic.

  “We’ll send over something that you can set up to keep that from happening again.”

  “That would be a relief,” Sophie said.

  Sarah took a seat on the couch and emptied her bag while she explained the services the hospice would provide. Insurance would pay for someone to come to the apartment for an hour each day.

  “If you need more time than that,” she said, “you can bring him in to us. He’ll get all the attention he needs.”

  “He wants to stay at home.”

  “Is it just you taking care of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s going to be quite a challenge, I’d imagine.” There was no reproach, merely a statement of professional opinion. When Sophie didn’t respond she went on. “I’ll look in on him now. You’re welcome to step out for a bit if you have errands to run. I can stay a little longer, this once, since I’m sure you’ve got some catching up to do.”

  Earlier that morning, this hour would not have felt so precious, but now Sophie knew that she could no longer leave Crane alone. She would have to make the most of her time outside. If she hurried, she could get uptown and back without making Sarah wait too long. If her job would consist mainly in sitting up while Crane slept, she would need more books, though she no longer had any illusions about reading them to him.

  She didn’t have to worry about running into Tom at the apartment, since he’d already abandoned it for whatever fashionable corner of Brooklyn or the West Village the girl had made her home for the summer. The doorman greeted Sophie as warmly as always. She wondered if he knew that Tom had moved out.

  Letting herself into the apartment, Sophie felt as though she’d been away a long time. On the shelf near her desk, she found another book by Thomas Merton, The Waters of Siloe, about life at Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where he had lived and written. Sophie had always felt envious, when reading it, that Merton’s conversion had brought him to silence and solitude. At the time it had seemed natural that her own had chased her into the sacrament of marriage, into sharing her life with another. It seemed now that it had never needed to be that way.

  A few miles from her parents’ house in Connecticut was an abbey of Benedictine nuns. She had driven by it many times while growing up and after her conversion she had made a few visits there. It was the most peaceful place she’d ever been. It had not occurred to her until it was too late that she might choose that kind of peace. She didn’t know how the women there lived, but she imagined it wasn’t so different from Merton’s Trappist existence. Perhaps that’s what she had been called to all along, without knowing it: contemplation. Would she have the courage for it, if it came to that? She couldn’t afford to be wrong another time. She couldn’t keep going from life to life.

  It took an active effort to stop pursuing this line of thought. She needed to get herself back to Crane. She put a few other books in her bag and looked around to see what else she should take along. Her notebook still sat where Tom had set it down on the night he left. If she took it now, it wouldn’t be to work on the grant whose deadline was just a week away. She would be using it to write about Crane.

  Before leaving, she called the director of the speech clinic. She got the woman’s voice mail, and so it was painless enough to explain that her father was very ill—dying, in fact, she didn’t hesitate to say—which would prevent her from finishing the proposal in time. Of course, she would not bill the clinic for the hours she had already put in, and she would be back as soon as possible to find another appropriate funding source for them. She hung up and gave a last look around before leaving. There was nothing else she needed there.

  The lobby mailbox was full, as if Sophie had been gone for weeks instead of just overnight. A single large envelope took up most of the space, the rest being a normal day’s worth of junk. The envelope was addressed to her, from Peters and Ryan, the agency where Greg worked. It was oppressive even to think of him. She considered throwing the package out, but she slipped it instead into her bag.

  “I put a pad underneath him on the bed, in case there’s another accident,” Sarah said by way of greeting when Sophie returned. She gave no indication of how she knew about the first accident. “You’ll want to buy some diapers, though.”

  Sophie thanked her and walked her to the door.

  “They’ll send someone else over tomorrow,” Sarah continued as Sophie let her out. “My day off. But I’ll see you again in a few days.”

  Alone again, Sophie returned to the bedroom, where Crane was still asleep. It was early afternoon, and she was exhausted. If he slept all day, he would be up through the night, and she would stay up with him. She thought she should try to sleep while she could. Instead she brought her bag to the chair in the corner and took out Greg’s package. There was a book inside, with a handwritten note paper-clipped to it: Here’s the novel I mentioned on the phone. Maybe consider working on something in this vein? Of course it’s up to you. The old man idea could still work.

  The book’s cover had a photograph of a young man and woman walking away from each other on a snow-covered street. Between them was the title, In the City of My Birth. At the bottom of the picture, along the sidewalk’s edge, was the author’s name: Charles R. Blakeman.

  Charlie had sent an advance copy to Sophie months earlier, and she’d started reading it several times, but she couldn’t get out of the first chapter. It told the story of a boy like Charlie, living with a boy like Max, going to literary parties, taking drugs, sleeping with pretty young publicists. It was all so sad to Sophie, and she couldn’t tell if Charlie had meant it to be.

  He was writing about a world she didn’t share with him, but this shouldn’t have been enough to put her off. Was it that part of her had wanted, after all, to live in that world with him? Did she wish that she’d spent the years since parting with Charlie in some other way? He had meant so much to her once, and they had both had such promise. Perhaps the sadness came from knowing that this book—her own slim book already forgotten—was all this promise had amounted to. For it seemed to her that there would be no follow-ups.

  She could have married him if she’d wanted, though it probably wouldn’t have turned out any better than the marriage she’d had. Tom had led her to the Church, and no matter how things ended between them, she didn’t wish that she’d been led otherwise. But if she didn’t regret the life she’d given up, why did she find it so hard just to read Charlie’s book?

  Something strong had kept her from it, something she couldn’t understand. She wanted better for him, wanted better for both of them. After a while she couldn’t even look at the plain black and white cover of the advance copy. It shamed her. One day she threw it out impulsively, and she’d been trying to forget about it ever since. She knew she should have called to congratulate him when the book came out. But that would have meant admitting that she hadn’t read it, for he would certainly ask her w
hat she’d thought, and she couldn’t lie to Charlie, at least not about that. So she’d done nothing at all.

  There had been a time when she thought of Charlie, like her writing, as something precious she needed to give up as proof of her faith. It didn’t make sense, she knew, but the feeling was unmistakable. Looking at the book’s cover, she remembered how it had seemed to them that their lives were intertwined irrevocably no matter what else happened, like the paths of two characters in a novel. She still felt this way, the difference being that she knew now who the author of her story was. But why send her this book? Why send her back to Charlie, or Charlie back to her?

  “What is it?”

  Across the room Bill Crane sat upright in bed, looking at her. She’d nearly forgotten that he was there. With one hand she waved the book vaguely at him while wiping her tears with the other.

  “Just something I’m reading.”

  “You’re not reading, you’re just looking at the cover and crying.”

  His voice no longer had a full range of tones to it; everything came out uncertainly, so she couldn’t tell if he meant to be cruel.

  “I used to know the author.”

  “An old flame?” he asked in the same flat voice.

  “Something like that,” she said. Despite herself she added, “I was in love with him.”

  “Did Tom know?”

  “This was all before Tom.”

  “I see,” he said. “My son was the consolation prize.”

  “No, it wasn’t that.” She decided that if she was going to tell him anything, she shouldn’t spare herself. “I fucked his cousin.”

  “The temptations of the flesh.”

  “It was the only thing I could think to do that he would never forgive.”

  She cried more openly now, unembarrassed in front of this man whom she had washed and changed like an infant that morning.

  “Still hung up on him, though, after all these years?”

  “I was thinking of something else,” she said. “I got pregnant.”

  She had never told this to anyone who didn’t have a stake in the story, never told it just for the telling.

  “You have a kid?”

  “I lost it.”

  “Let me guess: that’s when you found God.”

  “Just about.”

  “You’re more predictable than I thought.”

  He seemed to know that the worst thing he could do was reduce her faith to a banality.

  “I don’t know how much the two had to do with each other.”

  “So the little guy’s in limbo now? Is that how it works?”

  It was an effort not to rise to his provocations, even though she recognized them for what they were and he sat helpless in bed.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not how it works. Unbaptized infants are entrusted to the mercy of God.” How many times had she said these words to herself? “But God has not revealed to the Church their ultimate fate.”

  “In plain English, then, you don’t know if your child is in hell?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you worship a God that might have put it there?”

  “Where do you think your child is?” she asked, knowing as she said it that she was making a terrible mistake.

  “Where do I think Tom is?”

  “Not Tom,” she said. “The other one.”

  His eyes opened wide and he took a sharp breath. Then he went into a kind of fit, letting out a wheezing sound. She was killing him. But as she approached she saw that he was laughing.

  “We have something in common, then” he said. “We both left children in the flames.”

  “You really are a monster.”

  “Of course I am. You must have known that long before we met.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference that I’m taking care of you?”

  “Sure it does,” he said. “I hate you for it.”

  She stopped halfway between chair and bed.

  “I’m only trying to keep you from suffering. I could have left you there on the floor in your own shit. Would that have been better?”

  “The suffering would all be over now if you hadn’t sent that woman to check on me.”

  This was undeniably so. But what could she do about it now? Let him starve to death? Let him spend his last days in pain?

  “You’re not going to chase me away,” she said. “Nothing you say, no matter how awful, is going to make me leave you here to rot.”

  But chase her away he did, at least as far as the living room, to which she retreated after giving him a pill. She couldn’t believe that he’d joked about his dead child, even to punish her. His callousness made her think that he’d set the fire on purpose, that Tom’s very worst ideas about the man were true, though she couldn’t say why. There was a long way between making a joke about such a thing and actually doing it.

  She’d brought Charlie’s book out of the room with her, but she set it down and fished under the couch for the folder. She flipped through the clippings she’d already read, and then through several more that merely recapped the same information. Then she reached the first to mention a suspicion of arson. It said only that police were investigating the conditions under which the fire began. It also made brief mention of Crane’s condition, still critical, but it drew no connection between him and the unsettled question. By this time, the story had moved to the farther reaches of the paper, but the next story was back on the front page, with a headline that ran across three columns:

  “In Deadly Blaze, Police Suspicion Lands on Victims’ Child.”

  The article began, “Police are investigating the possibility that a house fire that killed a pregnant Columbia woman and left her husband, a Missouri professor, in critical condition was started by the couple’s eight-year-old son.”

  Sophie read no further. She shut the folder violently, as if to thrust the very idea out of her head. She wanted no part of this new knowledge. It was a false lead, she knew. Crane had started the fire. The fact that the police hadn’t realized it right away meant nothing. But this new possibility, once planted, was difficult to dislodge. It explained why Tom had never wanted to talk about his father, why he’d placed the topic permanently off limits. If he had done it, it would have been an accident, a horrible thing to have lived with all this time.

  If she could have returned to the wondering ignorance in which Tom had tried to keep her, she would. She got up from the couch, wishing she could walk away from all these possibilities. Back in the bedroom, Bill was asleep. She shut the light and sat down in the corner. When she’d left the room a few minutes before, she’d been exhausted. Now she was entirely awake. She reached out for her bag on the floor. It was too dark to read, but even turning pages might calm her. She didn’t go to the bag expecting to hear that click, like loose change, but that is what she found. She heard it again as her hand hit upon the plastic bottle.

  These sleeping pills were prescribed for everyday insomnia, not just for terminal patients. She could have gotten her own just by asking. There was no harm in taking one, if only to keep to Crane’s schedule. Otherwise, she might never sleep.

  4

  WALKING DOWNSTAIRS THE next morning, I worried that the creaking of the narrow wooden steps might wake Sophie. After each one I stopped while the floorboards settled, and I felt the house beneath my feet. I ducked into the dining room. A single speeding car came and went outside. The sound of it lingered well after it was gone. Everything went still, and I went still with it.

  I put on a pot of coffee in the kitchen and thought about Sophie’s invitation to stay. I was sure that her offer was serious, but that also meant she was serious about leaving. I tried to imagine a future at the Manse, but I couldn’t imagine one without her. I decided to make breakfast, as if this domestic act might help her imagine our life together and make her want to stay. The refrigerator held only a stick of butter, a withered head of lettuce, and an old pint of milk. The freezer was in a similar st
ate, with a single empty ice-cube tray and an uninviting mound of plastic-wrapped meat. If I was going to take care of Sophie, I would have to start by shopping.

  Outside, the sun sat low between two hills in the distance, still sharing the sky with a pale half-moon. The clock on the Jaguar’s dashboard read 6:02 AM. In New York I could sleep until noon and still be tired, but that morning I felt refreshed, as though the perpetual fatigue of the city was a kind of spiritual exhaustion from which I was beginning to recover. Whatever I needed to make breakfast could be picked up on a short trip to town, and I’d have the food waiting when Sophie woke up. While we sat eating on the porch, I would explain the solution that was only then coming to me. She could be married to Tom forever, and I wouldn’t interfere with that, but we would be together. Despite what had happened the night before, we didn’t need to sleep together. But we needed to share our lives. I would get her to admit that much over breakfast.

  Strictly speaking, I knew how to drive—I was licensed to do it after taking driver’s ed at St. Albert’s—but I’d never owned a car. The last time I’d driven had been in that Jaguar, with Sophie in the passenger seat. She’d let me take the wheel on a trip to the multiplex near school. I’d nearly crashed along the way. After the movie she took the keys and drove us back to campus. “If we’re going to get killed,” she’d said, “I’m the one who’s going to do it.”