What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  When the drink was done, Sophie stood dazed with the empty glass in her hand, feeling herself empty beside it. She made another, adding water to it out of an inexplicable sense of propriety. She brought it out to the living room, where she sat on the couch.

  There was a world inside the world, like the secret station beneath City Hall. Behind the visible lay the true nature of things. In that secret world, things were free. Perhaps the body was not a cage that held the soul, but a hand that gripped it like a cane, appearing to guide it, to command it, but all the while dependent upon it, gripping it all the tighter the more that it needed it, finally letting it go.

  But Crane wasn’t asking for his soul to be released. He wasn’t asking her to usher him from one nature into another, from this world to the other. He wanted an end. He wanted no longer to exist. Sophie couldn’t blame him. If she thought such a thing were possible, she might want it, too. But it wasn’t so. Once you had been made to exist, you had no choice but to do so forever. There was no escape for anyone.

  The torment he felt now would be followed only by greater torment. But this would be so either way. She’d given up the thought that he might repent and confess. If he was damned, what difference would it make to him whether his damnation commenced now, or in a week, or in a month? Soon enough he would be outside of time.

  She wasn’t sure how much she’d had to drink, and so she wasn’t sure if she should be taking the pill, but she couldn’t have peace without it. She needed a long, dreamless sleep. She climbed into Crane’s empty bed, the fourth place she’d slept in four nights, feeling she would never find a resting place all her own.

  “How is your father today?” Sarah asked in the morning.

  Sophie couldn’t say, exactly, since she’d only just woken up at the sound of the buzzer. It seemed to her that they ought to establish some intimacy, given the circumstances, given what they shared between them, but she was unable even to begin a conversation with the woman.

  “He’s been struggling,” she answered.

  Entering the apartment, Sarah noticed immediately the glass of scotch sitting on the table, as if such noticing were part of her job. She made no mention of it, only letting her eyes rest long enough that there be no mistake. Sophie wanted to explain that it was there from the night before, but that would mean admitting that she had spent the whole morning asleep, and the judgment would remain unchanged.

  “I’ll go check on him now,” Sarah said. “You must be ready for a break.”

  “Yes,” Sophie said. “It’s been difficult.”

  A day before she would not have admitted such a thing.

  Back at home—for the first time since leaving, she thought of her apartment as home—she could have gone online to find the schedule of a neighborhood church, but Crane had no computer. Just by wandering, she might have found a church with a mass at 11:15 or 11:30. But she’d be left to scramble back before Sarah’s time was over, confirming that she wasn’t a responsible caretaker. In the end, she returned to the Spanish church, although it was empty at that hour.

  She headed straight for the pew in the front where the women had been two mornings earlier. She knelt and crossed herself, letting the silence echo through her for a moment. Then she tried to begin. Never since prayer had come into her life had she felt at such a loss when trying to pray. She didn’t know what to do with the image she now had of this man, following his son through life. Even when she banished this thought, a picture of an old man, shaking in the hospital bed that he’d wanted so badly to avoid, replaced it. The pills would have worn off during the night. She hoped that Sarah had given him more, until she remembered that she still had the painkillers.

  In her pocket, Sophie’s fingers worried over the pills. As long as he was suffering without them, it was impossible to think of anything else. And it was impossible, as long as she was thinking of it, not to want his suffering to end. She prayed for it, though she knew what it meant to pray for such a thing.

  Stepping back out into the light, her eyes balking at the sight of the noon sun, she couldn’t place the source of her tears. They felt like tears of rage, even of defiance. But rage against whom? Defiance of what? She had been defeated, but she couldn’t name the adversary that had won.

  Sarah stood over Crane in the bedroom, wiping his face with a towel, her hand describing a figure eight, down from his forehead to his cheek, across the upper lip to the chin and back around. She continued the motion even as she looked up at Sophie. They stood in silent opposition. Then Sarah looked at her watch.

  “You still have another fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll want some rest.”

  “That’s all right,” Sophie answered. “You can go.”

  Sarah hesitated before setting the sponge down. She looked at Bill, who gave no notice to either of them.

  “I’ll wait in the other room. In case you need anything.”

  Sophie took her place at Bill’s bedside and found him unmoving but awake, his eyes open and darting about in frightening contrast to the stillness of his body.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  She couldn’t tell if he intended the sounds that he made to cohere into words, or to be expressive in some more direct and urgent way. He seemed to be returning to infancy, in the etymological sense: he had exited the stream of language. They continued the exchange they’d started that morning, but he was so much more persuasive now that he’d given up words.

  He was there, above all, to challenge her; he existed as a challenge. It was terrible to think about him as he lay suffering, as though his pain were more real for her than it was for him. For there was nothing of him held apart from the suffering to honor it; he could only live within it. Her purpose was to witness it.

  Sophie walked back outside, where Sarah sat on the couch.

  “I appreciate your dedication,” she said. “But really, you can go now.”

  “All right,” Sarah answered after a moment. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Actually, we won’t need you anymore.” Sophie had not come into the room expecting to tell her this. “I’m going to take care of things from here.”

  “You’re sure? You’ll need a bit of help, at least.”

  It occurred to Sophie for the first time that this woman’s livelihood was at stake. Her interest in his care had a simple purpose: she wanted to keep her job.

  “Quite sure.”

  “I’m not authorized to cancel the arrangement,” Sarah said. “You’re going to have to call the service.”

  “That’s fine.”

  As Sarah gave her a card with the number to call, Sophie felt relieved that she’d been unable to establish any connection with the woman.

  “Thank you,” she said finally. “I do appreciate your help.”

  “Good luck,” Sarah said, making no effort to hide her disapproval.

  Turning from the door, Sophie saw the living room as Sarah must have seen it, the papers on the floor, the half-finished scotch still sitting on the table near the couch. She picked up the glass and took a slow sip. The ice cubes had long ago melted, and the drink wasn’t as strong as it had been the night before. Sophie finished it quickly. She took out her cell phone and made the cancellation call. Having made the decision, she wanted to act on it before she changed her mind.

  “Were you unhappy with our service?” the man on the phone asked her.

  “No, nothing like that,” Sophie said. “In fact, I want to make sure you know how happy we were with Sarah’s work. I just want to take care of things myself.”

  It made no difference to him. He asked because he was compelled to ask. Then he went about the rest of the steps. It was all over very quickly. Whatever was to happen next would happen only between Sophie and Crane. She had sent away the rest of the world.

  She returned to Bill’s bedside, placed two pills on his tongue, and lifted the water to his lips. They were alone now. No one would be coming for them.

&nb
sp; So began the last days.

  Sometimes it seemed that he wasn’t there inside, that she was watching a husk from which he had already escaped. But he had moments, sudden bursts of startling lucidity, when he came back fully into himself. She wondered if these times felt to him like small islands of consciousness surrounded by hours of floating, if he had the sensation of coming up for air, or if those brief moments were all that existed for him, the stretches between them striking him as dreams or not at all.

  He would say something that seemed another piece of nonsense, but which after a moment Sophie realized referred to a conversation they’d had during his last bout of intelligibility. Or else he just named something in front of him, a color or an object, as if remembering that such things had names and greedy to participate in naming. Or as if a word could be a bridge between the speaker and the thing it named, and this was his way of pulling himself across that bridge, back into the world.

  Each time he spoke he let her know that he still wanted it to end, that she had the power to make it so and refused. One of these periods lasted far longer than the others, so that for a time she was given to believe that the decline might have stopped. For the better part of three days, he spent every waking moment calling out for his own death. On the last day she had to go into the other room; she couldn’t listen anymore. That night she slept on the couch, checking him at points but retreating in fear even when she found him quietly asleep.

  He was suffering to save her soul. It was for her own sake, not for his, that she refused to intervene, when she might end his ordeal at any moment. How did it serve him, to make him live? What did his suffering win him? Where was the nobility in prizing her soul at the cost of his suffering?

  She had for a time been much taken with the contrarian argument about Judas Iscariot. Briefly, it went: Jesus needed Judas to betray him in order to save us all. This made him the most selfless, perhaps the greatest, of all the apostles, because he was the one who could never be saved, and still he played the role it was given him to play.

  Sophie did the opposite. When Bill fell back into confusion, she gave him protein drinks, which she knew he would accept in that state. She didn’t want him starving to death. It would be too painful. This was absurd given the circumstances, but every instinct in her pushed toward the preservation of life. Why was this? Shouldn’t he, who thought there was nothing outside this life, prize what was here above everything? Shouldn’t she have been the one eager to shepherd him out of the visible world?

  While he slept, she entered these thoughts into her notebook. She wasn’t trying to tell a story. What mysteries remained about Bill Crane she didn’t want to solve. She wrote now to save herself. She needed these thoughts to leave her head, and putting them on the page was the simplest way of being rid of them. She needed to pass them on, to put the burden on another. She was no longer thinking quite straight. She took two sleeping pills each night, since she woke in a terrible sweat when she took only one, her heart pounding from dreams she couldn’t remember. Even when she took two she woke eventually with the feeling of having had an unsettled sleep.

  One day she realized that a week had passed since she’d last left the apartment. Abstractly considered, she would have liked to leave. But there was no one else to sit vigil over him. She hadn’t imagined he would last so long. After emptying the scotch she found another bottle beneath the sink, hidden among the cleaning supplies like contraband. She was careful not to mix it with the sleeping pills, so she drank only during the day and took the pills at night.

  The day she discovered the second bottle was the day she gave up on prayer. Not for his sake. She would have happily prayed forever against his will, just as she fed him and changed him against his will, kept him alive against his will. But she was no longer capable of it. She would remain incapable for as long as he lived. The best she could hope was that the capability would return upon his passing.

  She held out for two days after that. Then she set him free.

  6

  AFTER THE POLICE and the ambulance had left, I stood in the driveway looking at Sophie’s car, which had survived another generation of Wilders. I guessed it belonged to Tom now, like the Manse itself. He’d probably sell them both, since it was hard to imagine him making use of either. For now, they were still mine to use, and I decided to go for another drive.

  The road into town was so clearly marked that I couldn’t believe I’d missed it a few hours before. I wondered what would have been different if I’d made that turn the first time. I didn’t know when Sophie had taken the pills, when she’d fallen out of bed. It had probably all been decided before I left the house that morning. But perhaps I could have saved her if I had made the trip I’d set out to make and returned an hour earlier.

  In town I bought cleaning supplies and enough food to last another week. I wasn’t sure how long the police expected me to stay, but it would be at least another few days before anyone in New York wondered where I was. Max and I kept different hours, slipping away from time to time without explanation. At one of his parties, someone might ask why I wasn’t around, and Max would shrug. “Am I my cousin’s keeper?” he would say. I spoke with my mother no more than once a week, so a few days without word wasn’t remarkable. I could disappear from my life; no one would really notice I was gone.

  Who would notice Sophie’s disappearance? Our meeting on the sidewalk suggested she hadn’t been speaking much with Tom. The police would call him soon, if they hadn’t already. He would then tell his aunt and others, and they would begin making arrangements. But for now it was possible that I was the only one who knew. If it had happened before she’d appeared on Gerhard’s couch, I don’t know who would have thought to tell me. At best, I might have been included on an e-mail list that received a message from Tom announcing the time of the funeral. Or I’d run into an old classmate on the street who would ask, “Did you hear about Sophie Wilder? Weren’t you two close?”

  But it hadn’t happened that way, because she had come looking for me to say good-bye. All the time I’d spent thinking of her, she’d been thinking of me, too. She’d wanted for us the same life that I wanted, even if she didn’t think it was possible. As I put the food away in the kitchen cupboard, I imagined this life, and somehow I believed it wasn’t too late for us to save each other. I brought a bucket, a mop, and a bottle of soap up into Sophie’s room. I felt oddly unmoved by the sight of the red-brown crescent on the floor, until I started going over it with the mop. I cried as the color faded, but I kept working at it until the stain was gone.

  I changed the sheets on Sophie’s bed, where I spent the rest of the day.

  In the morning, Detective Sutton called my cell phone.

  “Is there any news?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said. “But we’d like to follow up with you. Just run through a few more questions.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m at the house.”

  “Ms. O’Brien’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just moved right in?”

  “I thought you wanted me to stay.”

  “Stay in the area,” he said. “In the country. Stay available. I didn’t mean in the house.”

  “I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I hope it doesn’t cause any problems.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I suppose you’re entitled.”

  “Well, I’m here now.”

  “All right. That’s fine. I’ll be over in about an hour.”

  We sat on the porch, going through things. He asked me how long it had been since I’d seen Sophie before that week. I couldn’t say for sure.

  I told him about the wedding we’d both gone to about a year before. I’d danced drunkenly with Sophie, holding her close. “Are you happy?” I whispered to her. She didn’t answer but stiffened in my arms. We danced until the end of the song. It was followed by something faster, and everyone stormed the dance floor to jump ar
ound in amorphous groups. The crowd absorbed and separated us, and we didn’t speak again for the rest of the night. I kept drinking. Eventually I convinced one of the bridesmaids—a high school friend of the bride’s whom I’d never met before and never did again—to come up to my hotel room for some mild messing around before we both passed out. By the time I woke up, I hardly remembered the incident with Sophie. I hadn’t thought about it since.

  “So you’d say it was about a year?” Sutton asked, smiling slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a bit out of sorts, and I’m not really sure what’s relevant and what isn’t.”

  “Might as well err on the side of inclusion.”

  After that, he asked me all the same questions he’d asked before. He didn’t seem to have any new angle of approach; he just wanted me to repeat everything.

  “Has something happened?” I asked. “Is there something in particular that you’re trying to find out?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Cause of death was definitely an overdose. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m afraid it’s unlikely to be ruled accidental. There were just too many pills in her system. We wanted to do some follow-up, since the timing lends itself to some suspicion.”

  “The timing?”

  “About a month ago Mrs. O’Brien made some substantial changes to her will.”

  I didn’t think people our age even had wills, perhaps because I didn’t have anything to leave behind.

  “Well,” I said, “her husband left her. Maybe it made her rethink certain things.”

  “So she didn’t tell you anything about this?” he asked. He gave a clipped wave at the front door, as though welcoming me.

  I leave it to you.

  “The house?”

  “The house,” he said. “And a small trust to pay for its upkeep. And the car. Everything else—there’s a fair amount still left from her parents’ estate and royalties from a book she wrote—was divided between her husband, a few churches, something called the Manhattan Speech Pathology Center, and a woman named Elizabeth O’Brien. The husband’s mother, I guess?”