“His aunt.”
“And you didn’t know about this?”
“She didn’t tell me. I mean, not really. She told me I could stay for a while, that she wasn’t going to be using the house. But there was never any talk about wills or anything like that.”
This seemed to satisfy him.
“Of course, on a certain level it makes plenty of sense,” Sutton said. “If she knew she was going to do this and didn’t want these old family assets to go to her estranged husband. But it’s a bit odd that it would be just these two items. There’s an investment portfolio, which the lawyers tell us is worth more than the house and the car combined, and a lot of that goes to him. So it’s not just about wanting to keep things from the guy.”
“Her parents are here,” I said.
“They’re here?”
“Their ghosts.” I knew this wasn’t the time for such propositions, so I tried to explain what I meant in rational terms. “The house and the car were the last things she shared with her parents. She would want them to go to someone who would hold on to them, make use of them.”
“All right. Do you have anything else to add?”
“I still don’t think she did it on purpose.”
“Because of her religion?”
“She wouldn’t send herself to hell.”
He seemed to consider this now not as an officer of the law, but as a man speaking with a confused boy.
“Unless she was going there either way.”
He’d made himself uncomfortable with this speculation, and he stood up from the chair. He paced the length of the porch before returning to me.
“Did the two of you have a fight or anything? Is there something that might have happened between you the other night to precipitate something like this?”
It would have been easy enough for them to tell that we’d slept together just a few hours before she died.
“No,” I said. “Whatever happened had nothing to do with me.”
This was true. It had never had anything to do with me.
“Well, I think that’s it for now. We’re probably going to close everything up on this pretty soon, but we may want to speak with you again. You don’t have to stay, just answer your phone.”
“All right,” I said. “And what about the house?”
“That’s not really my area. The lawyer executing the will should be in touch with you soon. These things take some time to sort out, but assuming the husband doesn’t plan to contest it, you’ll be able to start making arrangements before too long. Beyond that, I can’t really say.”
I walked him to his car and watched him leave. Once he was gone, I stood in the driveway, wondering what to do now. The wind had picked up, and it rattled the screen door before passing into the house, over the floorboards, the stairs.
It was a short way from town to the main southern route. Within a few minutes I was on the road to New York. I hadn’t done much highway driving before, and I would have been terrified if I’d cared enough to be. Instead, I felt the same anger toward the car that Sophie had described to me. It wasn’t a gift she had left me, but a burden. What was I expected to do with it? It would have been very easy to give up control of the car, to take my hands from the wheel, freeing it to drift toward the median, destroying itself and me with it—destroying the whole story, really, since I alone remained to tell it. What kept me from it was not any great desire to persist, but the feeling that Sophie had a plan.
I parked a few blocks from Washington Square and walked to Gerhard’s house. It felt as though I’d been gone for a very long time. I imagined a scene out of a dream or fable: the house occupied by strangers who would treat me as an interloper and tell me that they’d been living there for years, since those two strange cousins disappeared all that time ago. Instead, I saw Max coming down the stairs with his suitcase in his hand.
“Groucho Marx–grade timing,” he said when he saw me standing near the door. “Where the fuck have you been?”
So then he had noticed that I was gone.
“Something terrible has happened,” I told him.
“No shit,” he said. “Daddy’s home.”
Max pointed to the couch, where Gerhard sat slumped over, his head in his hands. It had been months since I’d seen him.
“Welcome back,” I called to him.
He didn’t respond.
“Spoiled children,” he said, to no one in particular. “A bunch of spoiled children.”
Then he walked out of the room, into the kitchen, and in his absence I saw the aquarium. One of the glass panels was shattered, and the water and the fish were gone. A piece of the wrought-iron frame that should have been holding the missing panel was bent back into the tank. The damage was not the result of casual work; someone had committed real violence against the thing.
Max had set his suitcase down and was heading back up the stairs.
“Come on, Charlie,” he said. “I need you to give me a hand.”
“What the fuck happened?” I asked him on the second floor.
“Tough to say for sure,” Max answered. “I had a few chums over last night. Nothing too involved. But there was an altercation. Funny thing for this crowd, as I don’t need to tell you. Not really men of action. The best lack all conviction, and so on. But Rick Tanner threw Jeff into the fish tank.”
“Jesus.”
“It didn’t seem that bad at the time.”
“They fucking totaled it.”
“I’m not going to argue that the optics are good, hindsight-wise. I’m saying how it seemed to us at the time. You’re going to have to trust me on that, since you weren’t here. Which, we could have used you around. Anyway, I had every intention of cleaning things up in the morning. But it seems that the water leaked out of the tank overnight.”
“Leaked? They smashed the thing open.”
“Which certainly explains the leak. The problem is that the fish don’t do well without water. Not an insurmountable problem. That is, the water problem certainly proved insurmountable for the fish. I mean more that the fish problem need not have been insurmountable for us. Except that Gerhard arrived this morning from some gutturally-articulated metropolis in the Benelux.”
He was enjoying it all, in his way. Not that he would have wished it to happen, but he was glad he could at least get a good performance out of it.
“Max,” I said.
“I know, I know.” He waved me back to silence. “A little improbable in its timing, the return of Gottlieb. All I can say is that’s how it happened. When you write it into the follow-up, you’ll be free to make adjustments for the sake of plausibility.”
“Max,” I said again, and this time he fell quiet. “I can’t have this conversation right now.”
“That’s for sure,” Max answered. “He wants us out effective immediately. He said those fish were the most important thing in his life. I told him that if this was true, he ought to have visited them more often. Which went about how you’d expect. So: the world is all before us. Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow. I’m headed up to the pater familias tonight. There’s room for you, of course, though I guess you’ll want to see your mom.”
As he said that, I very much did.
“Sophie’s dead,” I told him.
A strange thing happened, then. Max’s mask collapsed, and the hidden thing that lay beneath it was laid bare. The last time I’d seen this had been when my father died, and it was awful to watch. So much of Max’s act depended on his commitment to it, on the understanding that nothing would ever truly penetrate. However much this exasperated, it also comforted. Once Max broke down, there could be no question that the loss was real.
“What happened?”
“They’re not really sure,” I said. “She died in her sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” said Max. “I know how important she was to you.”
“We hadn’t been close in years.”
“So much the worse.”
&
nbsp; Nearly everything in the house belonged to Gerhard. I had only clothes and books to pack. I took as many as one bag would fit and left the rest behind. I said I’d come back once Gerhard had calmed down, but I suspected already that I would never return. I might have explained that I hadn’t been there when the accident happened, that I would have saved the fish somehow if I could have. But who can really say what I would have done differently if I’d been there?
Downstairs, Gerhard stood crying in front of the aquarium. The sight of him, this man who had been so generous to us in his absence, set free all the despair I’d been feeling. We had been given something beautiful, asked only to watch over it. We’d been careless, and now it was all in ruin.
“Tomorrow, I’ll start looking for a place,” Max said as we walked out. “I’m sure we could find something nearly as big if we looked in Brooklyn.”
“I’m leaving town for a while,” I answered.
“Right on,” he answered after a moment. “Morgan might be moving out of the loft on West Broadway, so the guys will be looking for someone to take his room. That should work out pretty well.”
“Sounds good.”
We were walking along the south end of the park.
“Do you want a ride uptown?” I asked.
“You going to treat me to a cab?”
“I’ve got Sophie’s Jaguar.”
“Jesus, Charlie. You stole her car?”
“She left it to me.”
We drove in silence to my uncle’s building on the Upper West Side. I double-parked and got out to help unload Max’s bags.
“I might not see you for a while,” I said.
“Getting away will be good for you,” he said. “You can get back to work.”
“I think I might.”
“Do you know where you’re headed?”
“I have some ideas.”
“Charlie,” he told me. “I’m sorry I ruined things between the two of you.”
“It was all a long time ago.”
“I know. And I’ve been sorry about it for a long time.” He surprised me then by pulling me into a hug. “I love you, Charlie.”
“I love you, too,” I said. We stood in each other’s arms while the doorman brought Max’s bags into the lobby.
Driving through Central Park to my mother’s apartment, I remembered weekends growing up, when Max and I and our fathers would play two-on-two basketball. Max was always a little bit bigger, a little stronger, and since our dads were both indifferent players, he and my uncle would win game after game. I would start to get frustrated, then, and Max would ease off defending me in the post, or take a quick, lazy shot that he knew was out of his range. This would only infuriate me more, because I wanted to beat him at his best. At some point, as we grew up, Max came to suppress this natural protectiveness toward me, knowing how I hated it.
It had been a long time since I’d come uptown to see my mother. I tried to do it once a month, but it didn’t work out that way. I had plenty of time in those days, so there was really no excuse. I took for granted that she would be home, though I didn’t know much about how she spent her days. I let myself into the apartment and heard the television in her room. She was lying in bed with a glass of wine, watching one of those forensic police procedurals in which some washed-up movie star spends an hour looking at semen under a microscope.
“Hey, Chazzie,” she said when she saw me in the doorway. “What a nice surprise.”
She didn’t seem especially pleased.
“Hi, Mom. Sorry to sneak up on you.”
I tried to say more as she got up from bed and came over to me, but the words wouldn’t come.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Sophie’s gone,” I said.
“She’s gone? I didn’t know she was back.”
“I mean she’s dead.”
My mother reached out to run her hands through my hair, a familiar gesture from my childhood. She’d done this often in the days when my father was dying, and I remembered how inadequate it had seemed to me then, as if anything in her power would have been sufficient to the time. She withdrew her hands and looked at me, wobbly and damp-eyed.
“When did it happen?”
“A couple of days ago.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She seemed to want me to release her from feeling too much about this girl she half remembered, who’d come to stay with us a few times years ago.
“It happened in her sleep.”
“Why don’t I make us a pot of coffee?”
We walked together into the hallway, and she saw the bag I’d brought uptown.
“Have you come to stay for a while?”
“No,” I said. “I’m leaving town, and I wanted to say good-bye.”
Once we were settled around the kitchen table, coffee mugs in hand, she asked, “How are you doing with this?”
“I’m lonely,” I said.
“Me, too,” my mother said.
I don’t know why this struck me as it did. It was natural that a widow whose only child never visited should feel that way. I should have known all along that there had been someone whose suffering I could have done something about.
“I should come by more often.”
“It’s hard for you up here,” she said. “And you have your life to live.”
“I could stay for a little while. I don’t really have to leave town right away.”
“It wouldn’t make much difference.”
She was right. I was too late. We sat there together in the sad recognition that the time when we might have been a comfort to each other had passed, that we had both failed a long time ago.
“I never understood why things didn’t work out between the two of you,” she said. “I always liked Sophie.”
“So did I.”
We stayed up talking through most of the night, not about Sophie but about my dad. We told stories from my childhood, stories we’d both carried with us without ever thinking to express them to one another. My mother told me stories from before then, ones I’d never heard, that perhaps only she had known.
“He had an old cardigan,” she said. “And he used to tuck you into it and sit for hours, reading while you slept.”
The understanding that we couldn’t fix each other’s problems, that we were no longer expected to try, brought us closer than we’d been in years. At the end of the night, I walked her back to her room. I left her there and spent a last night in my childhood bed.
Traffic kept me in the city longer than I wanted the next morning. Still uncertain behind the wheel, I watched all the signs carefully and drove with the perpetual sense that I’d missed a turn somewhere. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d been on the road too long. But the exit came eventually, and I drove through town to the house. It didn’t belong to me yet, I knew. Perhaps it never would, if Tom chose to create difficulties. But in the meantime, I knew that no one would keep me from staying there.
I stood in the driveway with my hand on the car’s hood, feeling the living warmth beneath it. In front of me, the house sat waiting. Instead of going inside, I walked around back, beyond the pool to the work shed. The padlock on the door was open. It might have been that way for years, or Sophie might have left it unlocked in one of her last acts. There was a small wooden desk inside, and on it sat two marble notebooks, the kind we’d both used at school. There was also a lamp on the desk, and a chair beside it. Beneath the chair sat a pile of the same notebooks and a second pile of perhaps a half dozen manila folders, each with a number on it. There were also a few books, none of them familiar to me. Otherwise, the room was bare. The morning sun floated through the small oval window, illuminating the dust I’d unsettled with my arrival. I took a seat in the little room that Sophie and her father had built with their four hands.
Once it was too late to save anyone, even myself, I started to write.
7
CRANE ACCEPTED THE pills two at a time. His face showe
d no recognition that Sophie was granting his wish. If he felt anything, it may have been resentment that his wish remained hers to grant or not. He let out a string of short burps as he swallowed the pills but gave no other sign of their effect. She wasn’t sure how many it would take, so she fed them to him until he stopped opening his mouth for more. Then she set the bottle down and waited.
His breathing gave way to short, desperate pleas for air. Between each one he remained completely still. Each breath seemed, in the moment that followed, to have been his last. The time separating his gasps grew longer. Every time she felt that the spirit had left, it fought to announce itself again. She already knew that she’d made a terrible mistake—had known it even as she’d done the thing—but there was no way now of undoing it.
Then it was over.
Sophie saw no difference between this new stillness and the stillnesses that had preceded it, so she waited a long time before she was certain that another breath wouldn’t come. She had never watched a person die before. There had been two of them in the room, and now she was alone. Strange how it had come to pass: not a violent rending of life from the body, but a slow unbinding of spirit and matter.
For years after her parents’ deaths, Sophie had dreamed of violent ends. She saw the accident as it happened. She was inside the car with them. She didn’t think of it as imagining but as watching; she saw it, she thought, just as it had been. Her father had had a drink or two, no more, and the warmth of those drinks had put him in mind to take a hand from the wheel and place it on his wife’s knee. He wasn’t speeding, or not irresponsibly so. Then something happened to make him lose grip of the car, to make the car lose grip of the road, and they were spinning wildly toward two thick elms.
In some dreams it was her very presence in the car that did it. Her father caught sight of her watching, and he turned his attention from the road to question her. She came to him as an angel of death. She was in the car because of what had to happen next. He took his other hand from the wheel to fulfill what her presence made necessary. She stayed with them as the car skidded off the road, as it flipped over, even to the moment when it struck the first tree. But then she was expelled. There was a line she couldn’t will herself across. She’d never seen their death.
What Happened to Sophie Wilder Page 20