What Happened to Sophie Wilder (22 page)

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.

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 state, 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.”

I pulled slowly out of the driveway, signaling my turn though there was no other car in sight. I followed the curve of the road, concentrating on keeping the wheel steady. The feel of the car came back to me as I guided it through the turn. When the road straightened for a stretch, I put on the radio and rolled the window down. I stuck my arm out in the wind as I picked up speed.

We'd passed through town on our way from the station, so it should have been easy to find my way back. But I missed a turn somewhere. After a few miles the road
became unfamiliar. I was sure that Main Street was somewhere to my right, so I took the next turn in that direction. But the road twisted, sending me in the same direction I'd already been going, away from both town and the Manse. It ran one way, so I could only go on wherever it was taking me. There was no one around at that hour to ask for directions. There weren't even houses on the side of the road, only fields where horses paced and ate. The road turned uphill, tracing a series of cutbacks that I followed helplessly. As that helplessness settled, I spotted a little wooden sign near a dirt path that split off from the road: The Abbey of Regina Laudis.

I'd known the place existed, that it was a few miles from the Manse. Sophie had mentioned it to me, long before her conversion, as a local curiosity. But stumbling on it now meant something. I don't know what I expected to find at the end of that dirt path, but I came upon a half-filled parking lot. Beside it stood a building in the straight-lined style of postwar suburban churches, similar to the one my grandparents had attended each Sunday on Long Island, the one to which I'd gone for my father's funeral. I followed a small group of people inside. Everyone who entered found a pew and knelt in silence. Reflexively, I did the same.

For twelve years, I had knelt that way each morning in the St. Albert's chapel. Sometime around fifth grade, I'd stopped trying to pray during those minutes of silence before our daily chapel talk began. Instead I thought about the day ahead of me, or the homework I hadn't done the night before. Once this became unbearable, I would give up those thoughts and just turn words around in my head until we stood to sing from our thick red hymnals. Sometimes a sentence would click—not the meaning of it
exactly, but its shape—and I would try desperately to hold on to it until I got to class, where I could write it down. On the page it usually sat lifeless, making me wonder what had excited me about it. The words retained their power perhaps a dozen times over a span of years, and the resulting satisfaction lasted through the day. I'd forgotten this fact until that morning: my first real efforts at writing had happened while I was on my knees.

A bell rang and a line of nuns entered from the sacristy. An ornate metal fence, reaching nearly to the ceiling, separated them from the congregation as they surrounded the altar. No doubt the barrier had some theological justification, perhaps as protection from us sinners outside, but it seemed that the wall might as easily serve to keep them in as to keep us out. It hinted that these women weren't contained quite of their own volition, that the sight of us among them might drive the weaker-willed to escape.

There were about thirty nuns, some old and infirm, most in late middle age. The occasional woman even as young as my mother surprised me. But the last to enter was no older than I was. The hushed church seemed to fall into a deeper silence with her appearance, though most of the congregation must have been used to the sight. The shock didn't come entirely from her youth, but also from her beauty. She would have been beautiful in any setting, but in this place her beauty seemed like a beatitude granted to the rest of us. What could have led her to this place?

Some prejudice on my part, or failure of imagination, gave a sinister turn to every answer I considered. No one retreated so completely from the world unless there was something unbearable about it. There had been abuse by a father or a boyfriend. There had been an assault, an unwanted pregnancy, some kind of scandal for which she
was now making amends. I knew this last notion was antiquated—not just the idea of the religious life as sanctuary, but the idea of sanctuary itself, of escape from the shame of the past. The past could now simply be forgotten. It was no longer possible to disgrace oneself. If any of the women in front of me had come to the abbey to redeem a wayward youth, it would have been one of the stooped nonagenarians, children of the Depression, old enough to have lived in a world where certain mistakes were irrevocable.

The women took up places beside the altar and started to sing. To chant, I should say. I remembered a time in college when Gregorian chant had been common background music for dorm room study. It was soothing, even inspiring, but it was also popular as an ironic statement on our artificial surroundings. We sat in medieval turrets, in monastic solitude, reading some gloss on Derrida. What I witnessed at the abbey that morning was entirely different. It was happening right in front of me, emanating not from weak computer speakers but from the other side of that metal divide. There wasn't a hint of irony to it, no sense of an outdated habit being cultivated or an endangered art preserved. They sang as though it was simply the best way they knew of being in the world. And the people around me listened as though listening was their own best way.

When the chant was done, two priests performed a mass in Latin while the nuns looked on like the rest of us. The strangeness of ritual performed in a dead tongue was beautiful in its way, but none of it so moving as the chant had been. Briefly, everything had become still; the voice in my head had quieted. If I were capable of faith, I thought, I would have felt it then. After that, I returned to observing it all with respectful curiosity. When Communion was offered, I went up to take it. The last time I'd done so had
been at my father's funeral, surrounded by family members unaware that I hadn't been raised in the Church. I knew as I walked to the altar that I wasn't properly qualified, but I went up anyway, hoping to recover the feeling I'd had when the chanting started. Nothing came of it. I received the little cardboard quarter in my hands, brought it to my mouth, and let it dissolve into mush on my tongue.

It was after 9:00 AM. when mass ended. Sophie would be awake, perhaps upset about my disappearance with her car, and my breakfast plan would be spoiled. Still, I wandered the grounds for a few minutes instead of going straight back to the parking lot. I was on the edge of some insight, and I couldn't take myself away. I pictured that beautiful young girl in her habit. If I could capture the sight of her, convey it to Sophie when I got home, she would understand. It would make a great story, she'd say.

So it would. As I wandered, I thought of writing something about that girl, about her motives for coming there. Certainly, it would be different from the empty scenes of literary parties and ironic conversation in my first book. I wanted to spend time in this place, to find out what life was like for her now, not just the small public portion at mass, but the private moments that together made her days.

Of course, I saw none of that. The women were cloistered away from eyes like mine. That was part of the point. What I saw instead was a kind of farm: two barns and beyond them the residential spaces. The women had filed out the back of the church after mass, and there was no sign of them now. One small building was open to the public, and I followed some of the other churchgoers into it.

It disappointed me to find a gift shop there, though I can't say why. Up front was a shelf of literature about the order, and I took a pamphlet to bring home with me. Beside
the shelf sat a stack of mounted prints showing scenes from the abbey.

“Those are all painted by the sisters themselves,” the woman behind the register said when she saw me looking through them.

I took a painting of the church from the pile and brought it to the register.

“Are you in the order?” I asked the woman.

“I just work for them.”

“What is it like here? For them, I mean.”

“The sisters are Benedictine,” the woman said. “That means they follow the rule of Benedict:
ora et labora
. Prayer and work. The work depends on each woman's skills and her interests and her experience before coming here. It's mostly contemplative, you know. Lots of prayers and study. And they stay inside the enclosure.”

“Do you think they're happy here?”

I don't know what made me ask her this, but she accepted the question as natural.

“Did you hear them this morning?” she asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“Well, I imagine you'd have to be happy to make such joyful noise.”

“I suppose you're right.”

“Will that be all?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“You don't want any cheese?”

She pointed to a dozen large wheels of cheese sitting behind the register.

“The sisters make them. They're sort of famous for it.”

“Are they good?”

“Absolutely. And they make bread to go with it.”

She handed me one of the wheels, letting me feel its
weight, its gratifying solidity. I liked the idea that these women, sequestered for ascetic contemplation, produced this round thing that found its purpose in the world they'd left behind. I remembered the meal I'd planned. I wouldn't be returning empty-handed. Perhaps the goal that had kept me at the abbey had been breakfast after all, not revelation.