What Happened to Sophie Wilder (14 page)

For a moment it seemed that was all he would say, though he'd only repeated the few facts she already knew. But he was working on the proper expression of something that had been inchoate within him for years.

“He did it.”

Sophie wanted to say something to acknowledge the enormity of the thing she'd forced out of him, but there was nothing to say. She wrapped her arm around his unyielding body.

“Maybe it was an accident,” Tom said, as if the distinction hardly mattered. “He was drunk and stoned at the time. He might have fallen asleep with a joint or something. There was a trial. Not for arson, for negligent homicide. He was sentenced to two years. That's when I came to live with Beth. I waited for him to get out, so that I could have my father back again. I was ten or eleven by then. I remember it well. But when he was released, he just disappeared. We never heard a thing.”

“I'm so sorry, Tom. It must have been awful.”

“After a while I got over it. I just stopped waiting. Beth gave me all the affection or attention or whatever that a kid needs. I didn't feel some great loss. It was just how I grew up.”

As if this desperate invocation of a happy childhood had required an objective correlative, they came then to the great brass sculpture of Alice on a toadstool, lording over the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. It was one of their favorite places in the park, and Tom walked ahead
now, not away from her so much as toward the statue. He wasn't trying to be difficult, Sophie thought. He didn't want the story to mean anything, and so he refused to give it shape. She kept her pace and didn't catch up to him until they were both at the sculpture. Tom sat slumped like a weary child on one of the toadstools, his posture seeming to say that this was not what he'd skipped work to do.

“I'm sure he felt guilty. I'm sure that time was hard for him. But I needed my father back. I needed him to be strong enough to come back. Instead he made me feel like both my parents had died. So that's the way I decided to treat it. If he's dying now, it has nothing to do with me.”

Sophie sat down beside him and took his hand.

“I shouldn't have made you talk about it.”

She wasn't sure how he would feel about having finally told the thing, or how she felt about hearing it. But he let her hand surround his, and he looked almost tenderly at her. He was finished with the topic now, and he led them out of the park.

Over lunch at a diner on Madison, Tom seemed unburdened. He told stories about his bumbling summer associates, and the topic reanimated him. This was the Tom that Sophie loved best, funny in his largehearted way, but it was strange to see how quickly he got over this thing he'd avoided talking about for years. He spoke now as though everything between them had been settled. She decided not to tell him about her trip downtown, treating the omission as a kindness rather than a deception.

 

At her desk that afternoon, after seeing Tom off to work, Sophie thought of Bill Crane. She was glad the story was out, but she wasn't sure what to make of it. Could the man she'd met really have set that fire on purpose? Had he
killed his own wife? An accident seemed more likely. And an accident, even a negligent one, made Crane an entirely tragic figure in her eyes.

Sophie tried to imagine how he would have felt getting out of prison, struggling to start a new life. She thought she understood why he might undertake that struggle alone. Perhaps he knew that Tom was better off with Beth. Perhaps it was a kind of selflessness, however misguided, that kept him away all those years. Sophie remembered what Crane had told her, about hating God, and she imagined that she understood now the origins of this hatred. As she imagined all this, she started to write.

 

“Hello?”

“Sophie Crane?”

It was like something out of a dream, hearing her name mixed with his.

“Lucia,” she said.

“Miss Crane,” said Lucia Ortiz. “I'm calling about your father.”

“Is everything all right?”

“He didn't come down from his apartment the last few days, so I went up to check on him, and he didn't answer the door. The landlord and I went in to look for him. He's very sick. Maybe he hasn't moved for a long time. The ambulance just came for him.”

“Where are they taking him?”

“To St. Vincent's.”

“I'm on my way now.”

In the three weeks since Tom had told her the story, she had continued to think of Crane, and to write, but she hadn't been back to see him. She had promised herself she would go if he called, but she'd known that he wouldn't
call. Now her behavior felt disgraceful. She had cared more for the story than for the man.

She found the doctor's card in her purse. She called with little hope of getting through, but the woman answered on the second ring.

“I'm sorry to hear all this,” Dr. Phillips said in her professional voice after Sophie had explained everything.

“It's fine that you're sorry,” Sophie answered, surprising herself with her anger. “But what are we supposed to do?”

“Your father-in-law is not my patient anymore.” The woman spoke as if to a troublesome child. “I suppose he hasn't told you that. After I went over the results of the last surgery, I recommended the gastrectomy, but Mr. Crane refused. I suggested some alternative treatments, and he refused those as well.”

“So that's it?”

“Well, I also recommended hospice care. If he's not interested in a more aggressive approach, this is the only alternative, especially since he has no family to care for him.” She let this remark linger. “But he refused this, too. He said he wanted to be left to die at home.”

“And you're going to let that happen?”

“He's a grown man. As far as I can tell he still has full mental capacity. If he doesn't want care, I can't force myself on him.”

Sophie hung up without saying good-bye. She pulled her things together and went for the second time to free Bill Crane.

 

Behind a curtain in the emergency room, he looked better than she'd expected. He was thin, but not disastrously so, and peacefully asleep. An ER doctor approached, and the nurse who had brought Sophie to the bedside retreated.

“Are you a relative of Mr. Crane's?”

“I'm his daughter.”

“The good news is that he was just malnourished,” he said, leading her away from Crane's bed as they talked. “He's getting some fluids now, and I expect he'll have some strength back before too long.”

“That's wonderful.”

“I understand that your father has elected to stop treatment for his cancer.”

“Yes,” she said. “To be honest, I just found this out myself. We're not really…”

But it had not been a question.

“These end-of-life issues are very difficult, Miss Crane. I don't blame him for making the decision. But the man hasn't eaten in two days. The kind of pain he's been in is entirely unnecessary. I'd recommend you get him into hospice after he's discharged.”

“He doesn't want to go to hospice.”

“I don't doubt that,” the doctor said. “But if his family—if you—are going to leave him to starve in his apartment, then there aren't a lot of good options. Some palliative measures need to be taken. He can't be on his own at this point. And we can't keep him here if he doesn't want to be treated.”

“My husband and I will take care of him.”

“You're sure? It's going to be demanding.”

“We're happy to do it. We didn't know how serious his condition was.”

“All right. We'll move him upstairs in a few hours, but he should be up and about within a day or two. You can take him home then. We can have a hospital bed delivered. Insurance should cover that. And I can write some prescriptions for his pain. The most important thing is to make it as easy as possible.”

He took Sophie's number and left her to wander back to where Crane lay sleeping. She sat down in the chair beside his bed. The pale green hospital gown had fallen from his shoulders, leaving his bony chest uncovered, and she saw the burn for the first time. It might have been two days old, instead of two decades. She reached to pull the gown over it, and it seemed fresh and warm to the touch. She felt the throb of blood, the struggle to live.

She could muster no outrage, even on Tom's behalf, only sadness as she thought of all that had been taken from him. He was her character now, and she looked upon him as God looks upon all the benighted. She imagined him writing letters to his son, letters never opened, pulled from between two bills in the mail pile and discarded by Beth before Tom ever saw them. She didn't know why she imagined this, since Beth was far too honest for such a thing. There had been no letters. But now there would be letters, for now it was up to her. She moved her hand from his burnt chest to his thin fingers, took them in her own, and cried. Anyone walking by would have thought them the dying father and grieving daughter she'd claimed them to be.

If Tom refused to take Bill in, she would stay downtown with him. But it wouldn't come to that. In the end, she was certain of Tom's goodness. She relied on it. Once he understood how helpless his father was, he would want to do this.

“Do you think he'll wake up soon?” Sophie asked a passing nurse.

“They're giving him something right now,” the nurse said, glancing at his chart. She gestured to one of the two IV drips running into his arms. “He's going to be out for the rest of the day by the looks of it.”

She might have left him there, taking the afternoon to make plans for bringing him home. But he had been entrusted to her. She bowed her head and prayed that he was not beyond saving.

 

His hand was still in hers when the darkness came, like a message announced. A full minute passed before the light returned with a loud hum and a commotion on the other side of the curtain that separated them from the world. Sophie stepped outside, where a nurse was calling the waiting room to attention.

“There's been an outage,” she said. “The hospital is running on an emergency generator, and patient services shouldn't be affected. First of all, I need everyone to stay calm. In order to avoid confusion, we're asking that visitors say their good-byes and slowly make their way out to the street.”

Sophie had no good-byes to say, so she left immediately. Outside in the early summer evening, with the sun still shining, it was difficult to tell that the power was gone until she saw the blank traffic lights and the pedestrians out in the street, directing cars while cabs on Seventh Avenue honked their horns.

She remembered blackouts from her childhood. They usually came after falling trees took down wires, and so coincided with violent storms. They were exciting, pitting her family against the elements without the usual advantage of technology. There was the romance of inhabiting a distant, candlelit time, summoning the natural resources of humanity. Their house was an old colonial in which every board squeaked, and on those evenings it seemed especially haunted by the past.

But now there had been no storm, and this wasn't supposed to happen in New York. Her parents had lived in the city during the blackout of the late seventies, before
she was born. They had described it as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Then again, their lifetimes had passed.

“Do you think?” a woman standing near Sophie asked, hinting at another attack on the still-raw city.

“No,” the man beside her said. “Just an act of God.”

When Sophie called Tom, a message told her that all circuits were busy. She thought of that morning two years earlier, struggling desperately for some contact with him. She tried again and received the same message. Then she headed uptown.

The lights were out in the storefronts along the avenue, and what shops had still been open were now closing. Everyone had left work, and the sidewalks were full. Some people seemed scared, but most already understood that nothing serious had happened. Two boys had climbed a streetlight on the corner, and they were perched together on it precariously, watching the chaos just below. People were already constructing the stories they would tell about the night of the big blackout. They started singing and celebrating, as if to live up to tomorrow's legend.

Sophie practiced the speech she would make to Tom that night. She wouldn't say anything about saving his father's soul. She would just say that they had an obligation. Tom understood well the language of oughts. She might add that caring for the man would be a way of proving that his father had no hold over him, that he had control over what kind of person he was.

The walk from the hospital took two hours, and night fell before she arrived home. Then came the walk up twenty-eight flights. Candles had been set down on every landing, bathing the stairwell in uneven light. Sophie thought again of the blackouts at home, remembering the bad storms, when days might pass before the lights went
back on. She remembered how quickly it all became tiresome. You wanted to watch TV, to use appliances, to open the fridge. You wanted the ghosts to go away.

She opened the door and found Tom. He'd bought candles, which she hadn't thought to do, and set them along the kitchen counter and around the living room. Most remained unlit.

“I thought you'd be here,” he said, when she walked in. Sophie tried to determine, in the flickering light, if there was a look of relief on his face.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

Indeed, she was sorry. She was happy to see her husband, and she stepped over to him, putting her arms around his neck while he remained unmoving.