What Happened to Sophie Wilder (18 page)

After he took the pills, he rose by his own power from the couch. Sophie followed him to the bedroom, where he pulled off his shirt. She flinched at the sight of his pale and ruined body. The burn was larger than she'd first suspected, occupying all of one shoulder and arm and most of his chest. It was red and hashed and swollen and looked almost like something that had been draped over him, something that he might take off as a last preparation for bed. It extended down to his gut, where it touched with the fresh scar across his belly—the mangled meeting place that Crane had been reaching into his shirt to work over on the day they met. He sat still on the bed, seeming to present himself to her, as if to say:
This is what the world sets upon us
. But his face showed no intent. He hardly knew she was there.

She was no help to him, and she didn't want to watch him undress, but having followed him into the room she wasn't sure how to leave. Finally, he was down to his boxer shorts, and he pulled his legs up onto the bed. His clothes lay in a heap on the floor, like a body cast off by the spirit, and she left them there. She turned off the light and let him sleep.

In the kitchen she looked through the odds and ends she'd bought a few hours earlier—a few more cans of soup, two boxes of spaghetti, two jars of tomato sauce. She considered trying one of the protein drinks, if only to know what she was asking of Crane when she made him force down a few sips before handing over his pills. And then she spotted the bottle of scotch sitting in a dusty corner of the kitchen counter.

She'd taken her last drink the night before she found out she was pregnant. Only after the miscarriage had this
struck her as odd, suggesting that some part of her had considered keeping the baby. By that time, she was glad she'd stopped; she didn't want anything to blame herself for. She might have started again, but she didn't. For a long time alcohol didn't appeal to her. Later, when she sometimes wanted a drink, inertia kept her from it. She was known around campus by then as both a religious convert and a reformed drinker, and so these facts were naturally linked in the minds of others, though she'd stopped drinking months before the first stirrings of her faith and the two things had nothing to do with each other. She'd never declared to herself or anyone else that she meant to quit; she'd just stopped, in a moment of choice.

All of which left her free to start again. Why she wanted a drink just then, as opposed to any other time, she couldn't say. But why should she keep herself from it, if she did? She poured a glass. The ice cube trays in the freezer were predictably empty, but she added some water from the sink. She took her first sip while still standing in the kitchen. She coughed and added more water to the glass, which she took back to the living room.

“It's not my Irish,” she said out loud. “But it's something.”

On the coffee table in front of the couch sat Crane's pack of cigarettes. She lit one to complete the picture and took a single drag before leaving it to burn in the ashtray. She picked up the Bible from the table and began leafing through it.

 

At the time she'd bought it, she'd known in an academic way that it was a Protestant Bible, but she hadn't thought much about this until speaking with Father Edmundson, the pastor of the church in New Hampton.

She didn't know why she hadn't gone to the chapel on campus. It wasn't embarrassment that kept her away. Plenty
of students went to mass in town, and she was aware that some spoke about her attendance. She supposed she had not wanted to be treated by the school's chaplain as some late adolescent going through a religious phase. She was sure that it was more than that.

After a few weeks, she'd introduced herself to Father Edmundson and tried to describe what had happened to her.

“Do you read the Bible?” he'd asked during their second or third conversation.

She'd told him about the copy she'd bought.

“If you're going to think about this, you might try the Revised Standard version.”

She'd gone out and bought the recommended translation, and often studied it. But she still returned to that King James translation. It felt truer to her in its beauty, closer to God's real voice, though sometimes she worried that this preference suggested her faith was more literary than spiritual.

A few weeks later, Father Edmundson recommended that she buy a copy of the Catechism.

“I don't tell everyone to do that,” he said. “But it seems like it might have some impact on you.”

“How can we speak about God?” one section was titled. “Since our knowledge of God is limited,” it read, “our language about him is equally so.” The section went on to speak about language's limits, its inability to capture God in His “infinite simplicity.” Reading those two words, she felt again the stirring she'd felt on Christmas day. She realized that all the words she was reading about God had value as approximations only because she had stood in direct, ineffable contact with that infinite simplicity.

Father Edmundson made no effort to pressure her in her studies. If anything he treated her fervor with doubt. But when she continued attending mass and speaking to
him about what she was learning, he enrolled her in the church's Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults program. It was springtime then, and he said that if all went well she might be baptized the following Easter.

That night she told Tom about her decision. He was the first to know, really, since talking to the priest didn't precisely count as talking to a person. Tom had seemed happy enough when she'd started attending mass with him, but he found it curious that she went alone on the weeks when he was too busy with schoolwork. Now he looked baffled.

“You don't have to do it,” he said.

She both did and did not have to, it seemed to her. Either way his response was unexpected.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don't have to do it for me.”

“Of course I wouldn't do it for you.”

“Oh,” he said. “I'd thought you might.”

She would come in the years that followed to cultivate an image of driving her parents' old Jaguar to ask Beth to be her sponsor. She would remember the smile on Beth's face, the joy shared between them in that moment. But she'd willfully set aside from those memories the fact that she'd originally meant to ask Tom. She'd set aside the night spent crying, thinking of that response that had stopped her short.
You don't have to do it
. His real meaning had eventually become clear: Tom didn't want her to be more like him and Beth, to ground herself in the soil of his life. He wanted instead to join her in unrootedness.

Another forgotten disappointment returned to her now as she sat on Crane's couch: Tom didn't understand why they couldn't keep sleeping together.

“It's a sin,” she'd said, still trying the word on her tongue.

“But it was all right before?”

“I wasn't Catholic before.”

“But I was.”

“That wasn't my concern.”

“So you're saying that what we were doing was wrong, and you just didn't know any better?”

She hadn't been sure she was saying that.

“I'm not sure I'm saying that.”

It hurt him that she could even consider it this way. It hurt her, too, in fact. She didn't know how to relate to the person she had been, a person who seemed still to exist and to follow her at times, asserting some claim. It wasn't as easy for her as it seemed to be for the converts she'd read about. She couldn't toss off her old life so easily. At the same time, the laws of the Church, set down by men descended in a direct line from the apostles, seemed the closest access one could have to the infinite simplicity. It was the only path she had thus far been shown.

Tom had been ready to leave for a time. And why not? They hadn't been seeing each other all that long; there was no reason their lives should already be decided, no reason that Sophie's new faith should bring them together rather than divide them. Sophie had known all along that Tom had no great religious feelings himself, that it mattered to him only because it mattered to Beth. But her conversion was bound up in her mind with meeting Tom, and the change in her life seemed fundamentally to include him.

In the end, he hadn't left. But his patience had limits, and their early marriage was related to the line she'd drawn. Like a character from an old novel, he had proposed in order to get the thing he wanted, to possess her entirely. It hadn't bothered Sophie to know this. They would have married eventually. What difference did it make if they did
it sooner than their friends, who would spend their twenties living together, doing everything but taking a vow?

So she had told herself then. But it all struck her differently now that Tom was gone. Now that he'd told her: I never really got the chance to live on my own. As if she had forced him to make this choice. You were the one who couldn't wait, she would have said, if he were there to hear it.

Sophie set the Bible back on the table and looked down. On the floor, partially hidden beneath the couch, was one of the manila folders that had been everywhere on her first visit, the ones she had tried to neaten up but that always appeared again spread out on the floor and the couch. She reached for it, intending only to set it somewhere, to straighten the place out a bit. But she no longer owed anyone her discretion, and once it was in her hand it was impossible not to open it.

Inside was a thick stack of yellowed newspaper clippings. They seemed to be mostly from the early nineties, and they didn't mean much to Sophie. When she closed the folder, she saw the number seven written on the front of it. The rest of the folders, lodged under the table and the couch, had numbers on them, too. It took her a few minutes of searching to find number one. It also contained newspaper clips, from a paper called the
Columbia Daily Tribune
. On the top of the pile was a small item, a few paragraphs taking up less than one column, beneath the headline “Columbia Woman Dies in Fire Near Fort Leon-ardwood.” Beneath the headline it read: “Son, UM Professor Husband, Survive.” The paper was dated August 13, 1983. The source of the fire, the article said, was unknown, but no mention was made of any suspicions about the cause. It was reported that William Crane, a professor at Missouri, was in critical condition, struggling for his life.
It appeared that his injuries were sustained while searching in the burning house for his son. The police were calling the man a hero.

Who would start a fire and then run inside to save someone from it? She had seen the scars, so at least that part of the story was likely true. Why hadn't Tom mentioned that his father had saved him? Why would he not let even that act be counted in the ledger on Crane's behalf?

For it did count. That Crane had kept these clippings so close at hand for twenty years counted for something also, though she couldn't say for what. Each time she put the folders away, they had reappeared. She imagined Crane spending his days going over these clippings, thinking about what had happened. It was a terrible thing to envision. She set the page aside and looked at the one that followed it in the pile. “Police Investigating Fort Leonard-wood Fire,” the headline said. The words below she read several times before they meant anything to her: “Autopsy Reveals Victim Pregnant.”

The information settled slowly, and much had to shift in accommodating it. The words that Crane had spoken outside the hospital came to her:
You're not my daughter
. Had there been a daughter, she would have been much younger than Sophie, just twenty now, perhaps a junior in college. Tom would have been old enough at the time to be told that he would have a sister. It just depended on how far along the pregnancy was at the time of the fire.

Every sheet in this pile, and in the other folders throughout the room, held the threat of such awful revelations. Bill Crane's whole story was in the apartment, waiting to be read. He had even put it in numbered order. And the story began just where one might have thought it had ended. The
idea terrified and captivated Sophie. She closed the folder and slid it out of sight.

The cigarette, burned most of the way down, had gone out in the ashtray. She lit another and smoked it while finishing her drink. Then she stood without thinking to refill her glass. How much is lost, she thought. As she finished her next drink, she thought about the night ahead. The couch was large enough to fit her spread out between its arms. She could have looked for a blanket or a pillow somewhere in Crane's room, but she couldn't bear to go back in. If she got cold, she would take more clothes from her bag. She turned out the lights and lay down in the darkness of this new life.

I LEFT FOR the Manse without knowing how long I'd been invited to stay. Sophie could have asked me to come away forever, to abandon Gerhard's house and everything in it, and I would have done so without a thought. But I didn't want to arrive packed for a week if she expected me for an afternoon. So I threw a single change of clothes and two books into a small duffel bag. I also packed the few things she'd left behind when she'd sped off in the cab.

Sophie waited at the station in the driver's seat of her parents' old Jaguar. I'd forgotten about this car, which she'd had on campus when we were at school. It must have been at least twenty-five years old. I spotted it before leaving the train, but I waited a moment on the platform, pretending confusion while I calmed myself. She flashed the brights to let me know she was there.

“It still runs,” I said by way of greeting.

“When all else collapses.”

We'd been eighteen, driving from New Hampton to New York, when Sophie told me that car was keeping her
parents alive. She'd meant it seriously. Throughout most of her childhood it was the family's only car. But a few months before the crash her father had bought a new one, which he'd been driving that night. Because it was so new, it was easily forgotten. Afterward, Sophie would see the Jag in the driveway and think:
They can't be dead; the car is right here
. She would go outside in the middle of the night and run her hands over the body, feeling its solidity. No dents, no scratches. They're asleep upstairs, she would tell herself. I've had a bad dream.