What Happened to Sophie Wilder (17 page)

The only book she packed was the King James Bible from the shelf near her desk. She'd bought it at the college
store on the day she returned to campus from Christmas at Beth's. She'd never read the Bible before in any version. It was a strange thing to recognize about herself. Countless things she'd read alluded to it, and she had some sense of understanding these allusions. But she didn't know the book.

Because she understood the Book of Job to be the most “literary” of them, she'd begun there. She was amazed by Satan's challenge to God, that he test Job with misfortune:
Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face
. But more amazing still had been God's acceptance of the challenge:
All that he hath is in thy power
. By the time she got to Job's lament—
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept
—she was weeping in her room.

If she'd not read those words in her dorm room that day, the experience at Beth's church might have become an odd memory, rather than the thing that changed her life. As she sat weeping, she thought of the child she'd lost. She knew she would have ended the pregnancy in any case, but as it was she'd never had the choice. There had been two days of terrible cramps, at the end of which she'd gone to the infirmary. That had been a month before fall break, a month before Tom sat down at the table beside her. She had not taken time since then to measure the loss. I should have lain still and been quiet, she thought. I should have slept.

The Bible was the last thing she packed before leaving the apartment, leaving her old life forever. She would return, but it would never again be home. Their lease would be up in the fall. She and Tom would each find a place to stay. She didn't know what would come then. She knew only what came now, which was Bill Crane.

 

At the hospital, he stood with only slight help from a cane, looking much as he had when they had first met in that same place weeks before. His appearance struck Sophie in the way of a resurrection. Having seen him unconscious in bed, tubes running into his nose and arms, she'd vaguely imagined caring for a mute, unmoving object. But he was still very much alive. Not that he looked good. He was even thinner than he'd been. His shirt hung loose from his body like a kind of smock. His belt cinched his black pants, which looked like an empty trash bag pulled tight at the top. On a street corner or a bench in Union Square, he would easily have been taken for a vagrant.

“Your father's a little disoriented now,” the doctor said. He pulled Sophie out of Crane's hearing range, but close enough for him to look on helplessly as they conferred. “He was actually quite lucid earlier today. That will be in and out, I imagine. As the malignancy spreads, there's likely to be slippage as far as cognition goes. Try to keep talking with him, keep him engaged, even when he isn't saying much or doesn't seem to be picking things up.”

He continued in this way, telling Sophie what to expect, making no effort to sound encouraging. They would send someone from hospice care to the apartment the next day, to bring supplies and to show her what else was required.

“Is your husband a strong man?”

She nearly laughed.

“In his way,” she said.

“He may need to do some heavy lifting. Once your father is immobile, you'll want to keep moving him to avoid bedsores.”

“I think we're strong enough for that.”

“The biggest challenge from here will be managing the pain.”

Isn't it always, Sophie thought.

“This is fairly heavy-duty stuff I'm giving you,” the doctor said as he handed Sophie two prescription sheets. “One is for pain and the other is to help him sleep. Read all the directions and administer them carefully.”

“And these will make it better?”

“Not entirely. So long as he's alive, he's going to be suffering.”

 

Two orderlies put Crane in a wheelchair, though he was moving well enough with the cane. It was hard to tell if he'd understood the arrangements being made, if he expected her to leave after dropping him off as she had the last time. She couldn't be sure he even connected her to the woman who had taken him home before.
Keep him engaged
, Sophie thought, pushing him out to the street. How did you engage a man as you took him home to die?

“They said you're my daughter,” Crane announced.

“It was less complicated that way,” Sophie said.

“You're not my daughter.”

“I know.”

They didn't talk much after that until they got inside his building, where she looked up the stairs and understood the enormity of what she'd taken on. At the hospital the talk of washing and changing, bedpans and sponge baths, had not seemed real. But the steps in front of them now were the great challenge of her life.

“I can manage this,” he said as he rose from the chair.

So he did, gripping the railing with one hand and his cane with the other. She walked a few steps behind, dragging the wheelchair while pressing a useless, encouraging shoulder to the small of his back. If he lost his balance, she knew, he'd take them both down.

She unfolded the wheelchair as he unlocked the door, but he ignored it and made for the couch.

“I'm going to fill these prescriptions and do some shopping,” she said. “Is there anything in particular you want?”

He looked at her blankly, as if to say, What could I possibly want?

“By way of food, I mean.”

The doctor had given her the name of a protein drink and suggested she stock up, adding that he could eat small amounts of solid food if he had the appetite for it. Nuts were particularly good. But he was beyond the doctor's care; she would give him whatever he wanted.

“I'm not really hungry,” he told her. “I've been having stomach troubles.”

If he was making a joke, he gave no sign of it.

“So I've heard.”

 

On her way back into the building, she passed Lucia Ortiz's door, and she considered knocking to let Lucia know that she had done the thing she should have done long before: come to care for her father. She walked by, comforted just to know that the woman was there. When she arrived upstairs, Crane seemed more present, as though some part of him that had been earlier asleep had come awake in her absence.

Sophie heated a bowl of soup that she hoped they could share. She poured a can of the protein drink into a glass she found in the sink and filled a small bowl with unsalted cashews. She returned to the other room, where she sat down beside him on the couch. When she handed him the glass, he examined it like an insult before placing it on the table in front of them.

“How do you feel?” Sophie asked.

“About the same.”

They sat in silence while she ate the soup and thought about how hard it all would be. When she had finished, she set the bowl down beside the full glass. She wanted to tell him what she knew, what she had learned about his life since the last time she was in this apartment. She looked at him, trying to determine how the knowledge had changed him in her eyes.

“I can read to you, if you'd like. It might pass the time.”

He set his head down on the arm of the couch and closed his eyes, as though to say that her presence was a matter of indifference but that he wouldn't stop her from doing as she wished. She reached in her bag for the Bible.

She hadn't thought about what passages she might read to him. She wanted something from the New Testament, ideally from the Gospels, a message of redemption rather than damnation. She picked more or less at random from John and started to read.

“‘Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus,'” Sophie read. “‘When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again. His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again? Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.'”

“Why are you reading me this?”

He'd been sitting so quietly that she'd doubted he was listening, or even awake. She'd nearly forgotten he was there. Now she saw how brutal it was to read such a passage to a dying man.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I wasn't thinking.”

But this wasn't what had upset him.

“Don't start in with the Ivan Ilyich shit,” he said. “There aren't going to be any Communion wafers or death-bed conversions.”

“It wasn't anything like that.”

“I'd bet I know that book a lot better than you do,” Crane said. “And he's a fascist.”

She thought he'd lost his sense again, had started slipping back away from her.

“King James?”

“God. The first totalitarian. Has to control everything. Reads your mail. Bugs your phone. Watches while you take a shit. I don't see what's to admire. And death camps. Auschwitz is a beach vacation compared to the circles of hell. You get sent there for the same reason, incidentally: for not being a Christian.”

The shock she felt came not from his resistance, but from the idea that she'd thought it could be otherwise. After her conversion, Sophie had expected to have such conversations routinely with skeptical friends. But no one seemed interested in questioning her faith. Perhaps they didn't care. Or else they found belief so foreign as to be beyond discussion. For a time she'd undertaken a self-interrogation, seeing that no one else would do it for her. But now that it mattered, now that she was faced with one whom she wished to convince, her answers escaped her.

“You're oversimplifying,” she said, aware how inadequate her response was. “He isn't spying in some prurient way. He's not trying to catch anyone at anything. And He doesn't control everything. He could, but He gives us free will.”

“Free will,” he almost roared, before slumping back into the couch. “You're free to do what you choose. And if
you don't choose to worship me, I'll send you to the flames. I'd think better of it if He just made us do whatever He wanted, instead of leaving us to guess and burning us for guessing wrong.”

The arguments weren't new to her. She'd read them before, even made them occasionally to herself. The case for a malevolent God was more compelling, if anything, than the case for no God at all. But it also seemed, once you'd accepted His existence as fact, difficult to question His nature.

“I don't fault you for being angry,” Sophie said.

“Well that's a great relief,” Crane told her. “I would hate to have that on my conscience.”

“Of course I can't imagine what you've been through.”

“You're right about that,” he said. “So don't even try. I don't know what Tom told you, what you think you know about my life, but you don't know shit, so I don't want to hear about it.”

For lack of anything else to do, she brought her empty bowl into the kitchen. When she returned to the couch, a dying man had replaced the enraged beast.

“Have some,” she said, raising the glass of sludgy liquid.

“I don't want it.”

She sat back down next to him.

“If you don't have anything, you're just going to waste away.”

“That was the idea,” he said. “I don't know why that woman from downstairs came checking up on me. She never took any interest before.”

“I asked her to.”

Crane looked at Sophie with a kind of begrudging respect, as at an adversary who had proven worthy of his best effort.

“You're the reason I'm still alive, then.”

“I guess I am.”

“It's nice to know who to blame.”

She decided then that his anger was her best opportunity. Indifference would have been far more difficult to overturn.

“I only wanted to help you.”

“You got me home, at least. So I'm back where I started, and you can go back to wherever you belong.”

They hadn't told him, then.

“I'm staying,” she said.

“For how long?”

Until you die, said the silence between them.

“For good.”

“And Tom won't mind?”

“He's not really in a position to object.”

“How's that?”

She had hoped not to talk about it, though of course that was impossible.

“He left.”

“Also for good?”

“I don't know,” she said reflexively. Then she considered the question and added, “I suppose so. It's not really the kind of relationship where we just come and go. And Tom doesn't make decisions lightly. I don't imagine he'd leave if it weren't for good.”

He gave her a look somewhere between vindication and sympathy, urging her to elaborate, as though they were in league, the two whom Tom had abandoned. But she wanted no part of that storyline, having already lost interest in the predictable facts of her failed marriage.

“You should take these pills,” she said. “One is for the pain, the other will help you sleep. But you can't take them on an empty stomach. You need to have some of that drink.”

Crane took two sips and turned to her, needful. The desire to loosen pain's grip on him trumped even his willfulness, even his cruelty. It was a terrible thing to see. Better that he should rage.