What Happened to Sophie Wilder (5 page)

 

It occurred to her to check on Crane before going to fill his prescriptions, but she wanted to let him sleep. She was there and back before she realized that she hadn't taken a key. She buzzed his apartment twice, knowing that he would sleep through it, before moving on to others. A voice with a heavy Spanish accent came over the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Sophie said. “I'm running an errand for the man on the fourth floor, and I've been locked out.”

The intercom went dead, and a woman emerged from a first-floor apartment and trundled down the hall.

“You're running errands for Mr. Crane?” the woman asked, holding the building's front door open a few unwelcoming inches. She was short and overstuffed, in her fifties perhaps, with black hair and questioning eyes.

“I just stepped out for a moment, but I forgot the key.”

“Mr. Crane doesn't get visitors. We live here both ten years, and he never get a visitor.”

“I'm his daughter,” she said, which seemed near enough to true and likely to carry some force.

“He never mentioned having children. You're his daughter, and you don't visit all these years?”

“I'm sorry,” Sophie said, unsure for what. Then she showed the woman the bag from the pharmacy, pointing to the prescription label. “See here, William Crane, it says.”

Perhaps this suggested something official, for the woman now spoke with deference.“I'm Lucia Ortiz.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Ortiz. I'm Sophie.”

“Mr. Crane is sick? I live with him a very long time. He's a very nice man. He's quiet, but very nice.”

Sophie felt the introduction of this woman into her story as an act of providence—as, in truth, she was inclined to treat all such introductions—and she saw at once how she was meant to make use of it.

“Yes, I'm afraid he's quite sick.” She gestured at the bag of pill bottles, now in Lucia's hands. “Do you think you could bring those to him later, so I don't have to disturb him while he sleeps?”

“That's no problem,” said Lucia Ortiz, obviously relieved not to have to let Sophie into the building.

“Another thing.” Sophie hesitated. “If you have a chance, could you just check in on him once in a while? I'm going to try to see him soon, but it's hard for me. I'll leave a number you can call if anything happens.”

Sophie wrote her name and her cell phone number on a piece of paper she found in her purse. She took out a twenty-dollar bill and awkwardly handed it to Lucia along with the paper.

“No, no,” Lucia told her, returning the bill. She gestured to the cross around Sophie's neck, almost touching it. “God's blessing to you, Sophie Crane. I'll look in on your father.”

 

As Sophie entered her apartment she heard the phone ringing, and she had the unsettling feeling that it was morning again. She was coming back from mass, and she would have to live the entire exhausting day over again. This time she didn't wait to pick up. She wanted to get it all over with.

“Hello?”

“You answered.”

How happy she was to hear her husband's voice, to find it unchanged by what she'd done.

“Are you coming home soon?”

“I wish you would have picked up earlier. I've been calling for hours.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was out. You should have called my cell.”

“It's been turned off all day.”

“I'm sorry,” she said again.

“What have you been up to?” She sensed him trying to calm himself, waiting for her to confirm his fears.

“I went to get your father from the hospital.”

As she said this, it might have been just another chore that they'd both known she had to fulfill, as it would in another family.

“Soph.”

“I had no choice, Tom. The man is old and very sick and alone.”

“It's his own fault he's alone.”

She wanted to tell him how it felt in Crane's apartment, wanted to say that she saw there all the things that he had saved her from. More than that, she wanted him to want to hear about his father.

“Maybe so,” she finally said.

“And if he didn't need something from us, he never would have called.”

“That's probably true.”

In the quiet that followed, certain ideas burst forth that she guarded carefully. He had a parent, as she did not, and it was inhuman of him to forsake this legacy, no matter what the man had done.

“Let's not do this now,” she said. “We can talk when you get home.”

“I'm going to be held up here for a while.”

“Okay. I'll try to wait up. If I can't, I'll make us a big breakfast and we'll talk in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Don't be mad.”

“I'll get over it,” he said.

“I love you,” she told him.

“You too, kid.”

A moment before she would have liked to talk with him forever. Now she hung up the phone in relief.

LONG AFTER WANDERING upstairs that night, I heard the laughter and talk on the floor below. We'd always let those parties run their natural course, and I had learned to sleep amid that murmur, like one who lives near the sea. But on that night I stayed up, listening to the noise downstairs, trying to make out Sophie's voice. I had waited about an hour downstairs before giving up on her return, and I still couldn't sleep without knowing if she'd come back. By my best estimate, it had been a year since I'd seen Sophie, at the wedding of a New Hampton friend. Now that we had been returned to each other, I didn't want her to disappear again. She came in finally to say good night, stepping through a sheet of dusty light in the doorway, as though she knew I'd been waiting for her.

“Sleep,” she said, when I sat up to reach for her. “In the morning, we can talk.”

But the uneasiness didn't pass once she was gone. I realized that I had known all along that she would find a couch or one of the spare beds when the party wound down, that
I would see her in the morning. I had been listening for her not because I doubted her return, but because I wanted to know she wasn't with Max.

 

Max was a sophomore at Yale the year Sophie and I started college. Early in December, he took the train down to visit me. Two of his high school friends went to New Hampton, and the three of them took me out that weekend. It was typical that Max should show me around my own campus. Though he was only a year older, I had always followed his lead.

I hadn't socialized much in the first two months of the semester. Each Friday afternoon I'd ridden New Jersey Transit into Penn Station to spend the weekend with my mother. She insisted it wasn't necessary, but I didn't feel right going out with friends while she stayed at home so soon after my father's death. His illness had been a slow process of subtraction—his hair was taken, his strength, his teeth, his mind—so that it was hard to say exactly what was lost on that day a few weeks before my graduation from St. Albert's when the last of him went. Yet nothing that came before had prepared us for it. It may be that whatever remained of his consciousness was relieved to have it end, but I wanted only for him to still be there, even in all his suffering.

When my father was alive, we'd eaten at the table in the dining room, but now it seemed too big for us. My mother would make dinner on Friday night, and we would sit on stools at the kitchen counter while we ate. Each weekend I arrived with the hope of being a comfort, but once I was with her I found it impossible. I suppose I wanted her to comfort me, though I knew that this too was impossible. She asked about my classes, but there wasn't much to say,
since I wasn't going to most of them, having discovered that I could get away with doing almost no work at New Hampton. I had already decided never to submit to the rituals of job interviews and grad school applications, so grades meant little to me. I only needed to pass so I could take my fiction workshop. I stayed in my room, writing stories or reading the books that Sophie mentioned on our walks back from class, while my textbooks sat untouched.

After we'd exhausted my academic life as a topic of discussion, my mother would ask about my classmates and my social life. It was Friday night and I was eating dinner with my mother an hour away from campus—that was my social life. Sophie was the only person I'd met who mattered to me, and I was somehow unable even to mention her name.

My mother was still working, ostensibly at least, as a real estate agent, but she had stopped picking up listings while taking care of my father, and she was struggling to get back to it. I wanted to learn how she was doing, but I didn't know where to begin such a conversation. “What fills your days?” I might have asked, but who asks such a thing? What answer could she have given that I was prepared to hear? My presence did nothing for her suffering except embarrass it with an audience.

An open bottle of wine sat on the counter between us each night. I generally drank a glass or two while my mother drank the rest. Sometimes I drank more, so that there would be less left for her, but this approach had its own risks. If I took too much from the bottle, she would open another. After dinner, we went to her room, where we climbed into bed together and watched reruns until she fell asleep. She woke when I turned off the TV, so I learned to leave it on, lowering the volume a bit before creeping to the door and dimming
the lights. Then I headed down the hall with a sour taste in my mouth to spend the rest of the weekend as I would have had I been at school—alone in my room. By the time I left, we both felt a bit worse than we had upon my arrival, and I told myself that I would stay on campus from then on. But when Friday came around again, I went back to New York.

This continued until Thanksgiving, which we spent with Max and his parents at their apartment. After that, I stayed three days in my room, working on a short story whose details I have since entirely forgotten.

“You need to have a normal life at school,” my mother said that Sunday before sending me off for my train. “Why don't you stay down there next weekend?”

“I don't mind,” I told her. “I can come back up.”

“Charlie,” she said, her tone soft but insistent. “I don't want you to come back up.”

 

On campus I discovered that my classmates had been working tirelessly. Unlike course work, constructing a social life required sustained attention. You couldn't hang around one Saturday out of three or four and expect to follow along with others who had been doing all the reading and taking all the notes. My roommate, Dean, a friendly but somewhat awkward kid from Cleveland who had not struck me as a social adept, invited me to a party in another freshman's room. When it finished, I followed him to the fraternity houses.

“Do you have any blues?” he asked as we stood in a line outside a Tudor-style mansion filled with drunk kids.

“What's that?”

“Jesus, man,” Dean said. “You can't get in the door without a pass. They rotate the colors. Tonight it's blue.”

“No, I don't have any blues.”

“I'd like to help you out,” he said. “But I've been hustling all week to get three passes, and I told this cute girl from Orgo that I'd get her and her roommate in.”

Dean looked at me as though I had presented him with a serious ethical dilemma.

“No big deal,” I said. “It's just a party.”

So I passed the balance of another night reading alone in my room.

 

This all changed when Max arrived the next weekend. Like Dean, he took me to a room party, but this one was in an upper-class dorm, where we drank beer from a half keg lodged behind two couches in case of an inspection by the campus police. Max reintroduced me to his old friends, two guys I'd known vaguely at St. Albert's. When the crowd started to thin, we sat in a circle getting stoned from a six-inch plastic water pipe.

“Charlie, man,” one of Max's friends said. “I knew you were here, but I never see you. We need to hang out.”

“I've been working a lot lately,” I said. “But I'm starting to go out more. I mean, yeah, we should do something.”

As we walked out to the fraternity houses, I realized that I didn't have any passes, didn't even know what colors would be accepted. But the issue never came up. We walked to the front of a line stretching off the porch onto the manicured lawn and were ushered inside. I had found my way into a few of the houses by then, but none of the more popular ones, which seemed to serve some related but separate population.

We were in the basement, standing near a Ping-Pong table, when I felt the tap on my shoulder. Before I could turn around, Sophie had wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “You're here!” she said,
as if it were a great shock that I should be out with everyone else. Which to me it was, though I wouldn't have expected her to notice it. We'd walked back from class each week for a month, but otherwise we hadn't spoken much. Now I was stoned and she was drunk, and for a moment we stood stupidly regarding each other. I tried not to be disappointed at how well she fit in with the others, how wholly comfortable she looked among them. She seemed to be thinking the same about me. I wanted to explain that it wasn't so. Max introduced himself and his friends, and Sophie introduced the girls who stood beside her. A few minutes of conversation passed, the kind of empty talk such situations demand, at which Max has always excelled. All the while Sophie and I looked at each other as if to say, We aren't really like this, are we?

“What's her story?” Max asked, when we were alone again.