“The bed?”
“Is there a patient here who needs a hospital bed?”
Sophie had imagined some kind of barrier or guardrail being installed for Crane. She hadn’t thought they would bring an entirely new bed. She unlocked the chain and opened the door. Beside the men in the hall were several large boxes and a mattress. She stepped aside as they carried them into the apartment.
“Where do you want this set up?”
“In the bedroom, I suppose.”
She led them there and turned on the lights. Crane didn’t stir.
“Don’t worry about him,” Sophie said. “He’s a heavy sleeper.”
The men went about their work without another word, assembling a full hospital bed with a steel frame on wheels and a handheld electric adjuster like an old two-buttoned remote control. After they set it up, they showed her how to work the thing. Then one of the men looked over to Crane.
“We can move him if you want.”
She considered this. He would feel helpless being handled by these men, but this wasn’t her first concern. She hadn’t bought diapers yet, and she wasn’t sure if he’d made it cleanly through the night.
“Will you give me a moment to wake him?”
They retreated discreetly from the room. At the bedside Sophie met the mild stench of sweat and sleep, but nothing to indicate that he’d shit himself again. She shook him lightly until his eyes opened. He looked frightened and confused, as he had when she’d found him on the floor. In these moments it was impossible not to care for him, no matter how difficult he was when he was truly himself.
“Good morning,” she said, trying to sound soothing.
“What is it?”
He might have been speaking about the world before his eyes.
“We’re going to move you into another bed. It will only take a second. You’ll be safer there, and more comfortable. You’ll be able to sit up or put your legs up. And you won’t fall out again.”
She wasn’t sure he still remembered his fall. She waited for him to respond, though she didn’t need his consent for anything. He had no control over what happened to his body anymore. If she wanted him moved, he would be moved. He seemed to know as much, and he nodded feebly. She called the men back in, expecting them to help him up and walk him to the bed. Instead they put their hands beneath him and lifted, as though carrying another mattress. After setting him on the new bed, they pulled a sheet and blanket over him with an odd tenderness.
“You’ll be very comfortable here,” one of the men said.
When they’d left, Sophie stripped the now-empty bed and made it up with clean sheets from the closet. When she’d finished, she checked on Crane. He was awake but unresponsive, his face frozen in a look of defeat. He was in exactly the position he’d been fighting desperately all this time to escape: dying in a hospital bed. Now that he was settled in this new bed with its thick barriers, she could go about the day without worrying. But the point was precisely to worry over him, so she still spent the morning sitting in his room. Every few minutes she got up and stood at his side. She tried to make him take a drink, which he did only once.
While she watched him she thought about Tom and the fire like the memory of a bad dream. Perhaps she kept herself bound to Crane’s side because she knew those folders were waiting in the other room, and she didn’t want to hear the story they had to tell her.
When the woman from hospice came to relieve her, Sophie went to the pharmacy, where she bought a package of adult diapers and a large, soft sponge made for washing skin rather than dishes. She refilled the prescription for Crane’s pills, though there were plenty left. She did it only for the convenience, she told herself, so that he wouldn’t be left to suffer if they ran out at an awkward time.
Back in the apartment, she saw the woman out, gave Crane a pill, and sat in the living room. Having avoided them all day, she now went to the folders with urgency. She needed to prove what she already knew: that the police had made a mistake, that Crane was responsible. It was amazing how the stories proliferated, and how many of them he had saved. She was now on folder number three. Still she found only more references to “suspicion” falling on “the victim’s son.”
Before then, Tom had been treated as a victim himself, but now he was a relation at best. They never gave his name or provided a picture, but one article mentioned that he’d gone to live with an aunt out of state. These articles would sometimes mention, in a stray paragraph near the end, that Crane’s condition was unchanged or that doctors were guarded but hopeful. Finally, near the end of the pile, came a piece that focused directly on Crane. “UM Professor Hurt in Fire Regains Consciousness.” Below this headline it said that the police would interview Crane within the day. The next page in the folder was the first article that named Crane as a suspect. More precisely, it said that he had “claimed responsibility” for the fire.
Sophie moved quickly through the rest of the clips, which became shorter after that. They outlined the process of his confession, his plea deal with prosecutors, his release from the hospital into the custody of the police. The fourth folder ended with the start of his prison term. She felt no satisfaction from arriving at this inevitable end. The story still hung unresolved.
She went to the kitchen to eat and while she was there she poured a glass of scotch, which she took into the living room. Charlie’s book sat on the coffee table. She picked it up and made a brief effort with it. But it seemed only slighter now. Her mind kept returning to the folders. She couldn’t bear to go back through them, but she couldn’t stop thinking of them, either. She decided to skip ahead, into the future, to see what Crane’s life had been like since his release. Folder eight was filled with more recent newspaper clippings. She was relieved to see that they had nothing to do with the fire.
The first article was from the sports pages of a paper in New Jersey. This perplexed Sophie until she saw that it was about a local baseball game in which junior Thomas O’Brien had pitched a two-hit shutout. Beside the article ran a photo of Tom in his uniform, his bright face looking out from beneath the rounded bill of his baseball cap. Sophie had seen a photo much like this one on Beth’s bureau. She lingered on her husband’s face before moving through the rest of the pages. There were announcements of debate matches and school plays, human-interest pieces about community service done by the local church, all of them from two small papers covering a few towns in southern Jersey.
When she’d finished with the folder, Sophie checked on Crane and found him still asleep. She let herself out and walked downstairs. Lucia Ortiz answered after only one knock on her door.
“Sophie Crane,” she said. “I thought I hear you in the halls.”
“I came to take care of my father.”
“How is he doing?”
“Not so well, I’m afraid.”
“I pray for him every day,” Lucia said. Seeing Sophie’s worried expression, she added, “Is there something I can do to help you?”
“There might be,” Sophie said. “It may sound like a strange request. But you mentioned that you and my father had both been living here for several years. Was he here when you moved to the building?”
“No,” Lucia said. “He come a couple of years after I come.”
“Do you remember when that was, exactly? I’m sorry to bother you with this, but it would be a real help to know. I’m trying to settle some of his business.”
Lucia thought for a moment and then smiled.
“I know exactly, because my son graduated from high school that year. He helped Mr. Crane carry some things upstairs, and then later, in the fall, Mr. Crane helped us move his things out when he go to college.” She counted to herself. “Almost twenty years. Time goes by. My son, he’s a doctor now. Always talking of moving me out of here. Why do I want to move? I like it here.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Sophie. “You must be very proud of him.”
“You let me know if I can help more.”
/> “Just keep praying for him. Keep praying for us all.”
Back upstairs she refilled her glass and took it into the bedroom. Crane’s eyes were closed, but his head shook back and forth as though in denial of something, and he let out a low list of moans. One hand was up near his face, clasping and unclasping but holding only air.
He might have been a beaten animal, knowing nothing of his suffering, only inhabiting it. And she was powerless to stop it. She could have shaken him from sleep, as though it were a bad dream he was suffering, but he would only wake into more pain. She wished to still him with a touch. Part of her wanted simply not to have to watch, not to know that what she saw was real. She knelt at his side, leaning against the bed frame as against a Communion rail, and she prayed for his ordeal to pass.
If Lucia’s memory was correct, Crane had come to New York the year he got out of prison. It was as good a place as any to start a life over, but he would have known that Tom and Beth were just an hour away. She wasn’t sure if the local Jersey papers had been delivered to Manhattan in those days. More likely he’d driven to get them. She imagined him even going to one of those baseball games, following Tom from a safe distance. What else had he done with his life? He would have had some job, of course, perhaps until he got sick, but it couldn’t have been much of a career. All the evidence in the apartment suggested that he’d given the past twenty years to this story.
If he’d been following Tom, he’d been following her for as long as she’d shared her life with Tom. The things that he’d known on the first day they met, about her book and her conversion, were only the beginning. How many times had Crane seen her before the day she came to the hospital? Tom had thought he was gone, but he’d been there, almost close enough to touch, though still invisible.
“Get up, get up,” she heard him say. She looked up, into his open eyes. He had not been so lucid in two days. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “I didn’t ask for it, and I don’t want it. It’s useless.”
She stayed on her knees, looking at him.
“If it’s useless, what difference does it make whether I do it or not?”
“Because I don’t want to have to look at it,” he said. “If you’re going to pray, you can do it outside.”
Still she didn’t rise. Waiting for a store of generosity within her to meet his antagonism, she remembered those clippings and the shadow life he’d led.
“I’m sorry you’re suffering.”
“I’ll be suffering either way. Your prayers don’t do shit about it. They’ll just make you feel better.”
He closed his eyes and turned his head. His hand continued to reach out for nothing. He was well practiced, Sophie thought. He knew just how to use his pain as a weapon against her. But there was no mistaking that the pain was real, or that her prayers had no power over it.
She’d thought little over the years about the efficacy of prayer, though it was a fundamental matter of her faith. She prayed a great deal, but rarely for anything. She made prayers of thanksgiving and penitence and adoration, rather than prayers of petition or intercession. She sometimes prayed for the souls of her parents, but she didn’t pray for God to intervene in the visible world.
No principle kept her from it. She wasn’t among those who thought that God had better things to worry about than missing car keys or late trains. The moment that God stopped worrying about anything on earth, we stopped existing entirely. There was no stock of divine attention to be depleted. Guiding a vacant cab to a rich old woman in the rain on Park Avenue couldn’t distract Him from starvation in some other corner of the world. Such intercessions just didn’t occur to her in the moments when she knelt to speak with God.
But it was impossible to watch Crane struggle without praying for it to stop. So on this day she asked for something. Something not unreasonable, she thought. She might have asked, in that moment, for two decades to be erased, for that house in the woods to be restored and with it the family within. But she wasn’t so ambitious. She prayed only that he not suffer through the days he had left. And then she knelt, watching the unmistakable proof that her prayer had not been answered.
He answers prayers in His own way, Sister Dymphna had told the initiates. The answers might be mysterious to us. You couldn’t ask God to help you make your appointment and expect Him to reconfigure time and space to meet this preference. It would be childish to think that God must not exist, or must not be good, merely because He refused to conform the world to your own will. This had satisfied her at the time, but now it seemed inadequate. What did it mean to say that God answered prayers, if He chose which ones were worth answering? Or if His answer was so oblique that it was no answer at all? Simpler to say that God answered every prayer, but that sometimes the answer was no. That He made the world do as He wished, that if your wishes met His, your prayers were answered.
Why should Bill Crane be the one who put these matters into question for her? What was it about his suffering, above all the suffering the world held, that made it unconscionable to her? Was she objecting, at heart, to bearing witness to it? She had chosen to come to this place. He hadn’t asked her there, and he didn’t want forgiveness. He didn’t even want her to stay. She had chosen to go through his files, to learn things that Tom had kept from her for years. She had chosen to knock on Lucia Ortiz’s door, to confirm a suspicion that might as easily have been left unconfirmed. Not to help anyone, but because she’d wanted to make sense of the story.
She decided to find a church in the area that held mass during the hour after Sarah arrived.
Now she stood, placing a hand awkwardly against the hot, wet skin of his face. He turned back to her and opened his eyes but said nothing. He seemed already to have forgotten their earlier exchange.
“I’ll get you some pills,” she said.
Sophie filled a glass of water in the bathroom and brought it along with the painkillers back to his bed. Using the handheld control, she sat him up. He tried to reach for the pills, but his hands were shaking and wouldn’t obey, so he leaned his head forward and opened his mouth. She placed two of the oblong white pills on his tongue. If they could keep his pain at bay, perhaps those pills were her answered prayer. She lifted the glass to his lips and poured the water down his throat.
Before he’d finished swallowing, Crane set his head back and closed his eyes. Relief couldn’t possibly have come that soon, but the mere anticipation had given him some peace. She pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat watching him. She didn’t need to kneel. He couldn’t know what was passing through her heart, and he couldn’t change it if he did. She watched his body settle, his breathing become less labored. His hands fell back to his side. Without thinking, Sophie reached out for one and held it in her own. If he was conscious of her touch, he made no sign of it.
Did she make any difference at all to him? She suspected not. But she wasn’t sure she needed him to need her there. That might not be the meaning of her work. Was it selfish then, this reaching for his hand, this desire that life be met by life? Was it for his sake or her own that she wanted to save his soul?
His soul. Had she said it out loud, he would have laughed at the word. Or spat on it. What would she tell him, if asked to explain the notion? If one thought of the soul as something that lived in the body like a kind of prisoner, but that wasn’t finally dependent upon it, where was his soul while his body suffered in front of her? Did it suffer also? Or was his body losing its grip on it? Had it escaped? But then, what was in his still-living body, what animated it, such as it was, if not his soul? And where could his soul be found, if not in his body, while his body still lived?
She was interrupted in these thoughts when Crane called out. The sound seemed at first an odd corruption of his own name, as if the word had been caught in his throat and deformed on the way up, or spoken in a foreign tongue. He seemed to be asserting his continued presence in the world. She looked up, still holding his hand in hers, and waited for him to speak
again.
Pills, it might have been. Not Bill. Though even this wasn’t quite it.
“I can give you more in another two hours.”
He shook his head from side to side, slowly but still forcefully. The pained look on his face might have been merely the effect of movement, or it might have been his disgust at her refusal. He spoke the awkward imperative again, and it came to her, in the instant before he repeated himself, what he had actually said, so that the words when they returned emerged not from him but from some place within her.
“Kill me.”
She looked into his face, which had now gone blank, and she thought that he was slipping away again. She hoped so. Then she might pretend she hadn’t heard. The burden might be passed. But there was life in his eyes, which darted from her face to the bottle of painkillers still in her other hand, trying to direct her.
“I won’t,” she told him, trying to sound certain. “Put it out of your head.”
He seemed to do just that. He seemed in fact to absent himself entirely, leaving her alone in the room. He didn’t know what he was saying, she thought. He wasn’t capable of making such a request in this state. But death was what he’d wanted all along. Dying had been the plan that she’d spoiled the first time she entered his life. He’d needed someone to sign a form at the hospital and set him free. He didn’t want to be saved. He wanted to be left to die.
Now he slept, and she stood up. As she pulled her sweating hand free from his, her fingers tingled sharply with a kind of mock pain, as if to remind her what suffering really was. She went into the kitchen with no real purpose except to escape from him. She fixed herself a scotch with two cubes of ice and drank it slowly while she wept over the sink.
What had she meant when she prayed for his ordeal to be over? What could she possibly have been asking for, except that he be taken from the world? And if she could ask for such a thing for him, why could he not ask for it himself? He was asking her to answer her own prayer.
What Happened to Sophie Wilder Page 18