What Happened to Sophie Wilder (28 page)

At the grave site her parents were buried side by side, and Sophie was shocked to see how much dirt had been brought from the ground to accommodate them. They had not been large people in life, they had been delicate, and she thought:
It won't take all that much to hold them in the ground; I don't want them so far away
. As the years went by she found herself less and less able to summon the details necessary to keep them present in her life, and she blamed all that dirt. They had been buried too deep.

After the funeral, off the script and asked again to improvise her own life, Sophie no longer felt real to herself. She didn't know what role she ought to play. Even then, her father hadn't left her alone; there was the lawyer, an old family friend named Harvey Green, who had taken charge of everything. He managed the estate still, looked after the Old Manse, which had sat empty all these years.

She wanted very badly to be back there now, to be home. She knew each corner of that odd place as she knew nowhere else in the world. The place knew her as no living thing did. The summer would be over soon; in windswept autumn the Manse was its most beautiful and spirit-haunted. She thought of Rilke's autumn poem:
Whoever has no house now will establish none, whoever lives alone now will live on long alone
.

But there were still arrangements to be made.

 

Tom had called a few times since leaving. When she hadn't picked up, he'd left messages that she hadn't returned. He
wanted just to talk, as though they were old friends in need of catching up. She didn't understand why he should keep calling if he didn't want to come back. What was there to talk about? Then it came to her that he might be trying to determine how much she had discovered in her days with Crane, what she now knew. But she had no plans to tell him this.

He picked up the phone now within a ring, sounding wary.

“Your father died,” she said abruptly. “It happened just a few hours ago.”

“Oh.”

“The man from the funeral home said I should talk with the family about what arrangements would be made.”

“I'm not his family,” Tom said.

“Maybe,” she answered. “But you're mine.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Were you with him?”

“Yes,” she said. “Ever since you left.”

“I'm sorry, Sophie.”

“You don't have to be sorry. I would have come here anyway.”

“I mean that I'm sorry about us.”

“Are you coming back?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I don't think I am.”

“Then don't tell me you're sorry about it.”

She felt no particular urge to make things easy for him. Things weren't easy for her.

“Can you give me the name of the place where they took him?”

“It's all right,” she said. “I know you don't want to be involved. I just thought that I needed to tell you.”

“No,” he said. “I should do it. It's not your job. I should have dealt with it from the beginning.”

She didn't know how she felt about Tom taking charge of things. It seemed too soon to be done with Crane when either way she'd never escape the consequences of what she'd done. She'd live with it for the rest of her life. Perhaps all that had been meant to happen between them had come to pass. He had arrived as a ghost and left as a ghost. No amount of worrying over his physical remains could make any difference now.

“I need to ask something from you,” she said after giving him the number. She hadn't thought, as she was calling, that she had anything to ask. “I want you to take care of the apartment. Our things. Do whatever you want with them. I'm leaving town for a while.”

“Are you going to Connecticut?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In the next few days, I guess.”

“Maybe we can sit down and talk before then.”

“I'm not sure that there's anything to talk about.”

While on the phone, she had wandered into the kitchen. Now that the call was done, she made herself a drink. She brought it back out into the living room and sat down on the couch, sinking into it with exhaustion. There was one thing left, something that had been on her mind several times in the past few days, though she hadn't been able to bring herself to check on it. She collected all the folders and pulled out the ones she had not already read.

She went through them quickly, not stopping until she found the things she was looking for, which she knew would be in there. In the third folder she checked, she came upon a small, one-paragraph announcement, from the
New York Observer
, of the sale of her collection in a two-book deal that included the rights to an as-yet-unwritten novel. The
next clip had appeared months later, when the publicity around the collection started to pick up. Every review, good or bad, every printed interview, was there. There was an advertisement announcing a reading she'd given at a bookstore in Soho. How easily Crane might have fit in among the odd older men who attended such readings. Once he saw that Tom wasn't there—an emergency had kept him at work—he might have walked right up and asked her to sign his copy of the book. She imagined she could find that signed copy on a shelf somewhere in the apartment. She might have been disturbed by all this, but she wasn't. She liked the idea that he had been watching on.

The last clipping in the folder was her own wedding announcement, from her hometown paper in Connecticut. In the accompanying photo, she and Tom stood in front of the Manse. After that clipping, it ended. There were more folders, but she didn't bother looking through them. Since there hadn't been another book, there was no more record of her.

If she didn't leave then, she would be trapped forever there. Nothing kept her another moment, except that she was too tired to move. She looked around while finishing her drink. It was a squalid place, really. Not small by the city's standards, not even dirty since she'd been there. But it had the appearance of having been lived in for years by a man who didn't much care for his own life. The world was filled with such people, and Sophie was at the point of becoming one again.

Charlie's book sat on the table in front of her. If she called him, he would take her in without another thought. He would give up anything else, even after all these years. She didn't know where he was living, or how his life was going, but these things would have been easy enough to
find out. It probably wouldn't take all that much for them to fall back into their old life. It was presumptuous to think as much, but she knew she was right. Just as she knew that she didn't want that old life, any more than she wanted the life she had now. She picked up the book and held it in her hands.

She kept coming back to the cover, to the young man and woman walking away from each other in the snow. It was not an especially haunting image; it should not have affected her in this way, but it did. She slipped off the dust jacket and let it fall to the floor. She looked now at the red board beneath, with only Charlie's name and the book's title pressed into it. There was something beautiful and timeless to her about a hardback without its jacket, a book that could be known in no way except by reading it. The first thing she'd done when she'd held her own book had been to take the jacket off and see how it looked.

When she stood from the couch, she carried the book with her. She brought it into the bedroom and packed it with the rest of her things. She would bring it wherever she was headed next. She saw the pills in the bag. She ought to have thrown them out, but she took them as well. Also in the bag were the other books she had brought from her apartment. The idea she'd had in those first days, about coaxing from Bill some kind of life-changing confession, struck her as laughable now. He had always been in charge. He had known all along what he wanted from her, and he had gotten it. And he had never cared what she would be left to when he went. It may even have been an added pleasure, to bring her into the fire with him.

The sheets on the hospital bed from which he'd been taken were yellow with his sweat, and they still held the foul smell of his last days. She expected to be repulsed by
this, but the bed called out to her, as if it might give her the final rest that it had given him. She climbed in and pulled the sheets up over herself. Despite the smell and the sticky feeling of the dirty sheets against her skin, she made herself stay. It took great effort to keep her thoughts from the pills in her bag. Joining Bill Crane wherever he was would be as easy as that.
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest
.

Having decided what would come next, Sophie moved quickly. The slightest step from this new course would keep her forever from her goal. She took the bag into the living room and put all of the folders into it. Then she walked out of the apartment, leaving the door unlocked behind her. Nothing left there was of any value to anyone.

 

Returning to the world, she had some sense of the picture she created. She hadn't showered or changed in days. She was wearing an old T-shirt and no bra. Her hair, which she'd worn short all her life, was growing out awkwardly. She had probably carried some stench even before climbing into his bed; she certainly did now. Anyone she knew, seeing her in this state, would think that she'd gone mad, finally turned feral as she'd all along promised to do.

On the train uptown, the other passengers moved away from her, and it gave her a kind of satisfaction. She imagined running into Tom. It would have been like him to go to the apartment soon after their talk; when charged with a duty, he took care of it. The prospect of seeing him in their old neighborhood didn't move her one way or another. She felt no embarrassment in her condition; she had reached the proper state of humility. She wished to come across a roach somewhere on the street, so that people could watch her take it up and eat it, like John the Baptist feeding on
his locusts. But neither Tom nor any bugs happened across her path on the short walk from the subway to the garage.

“O'Brien,” she told the parking attendant. “It's the Jaguar in spot 218.”

She rarely took the car out, and the attendant wasn't familiar with her. She expected some hassle, looking as she did. But there was none. The man disappeared down the ramp and in another few minutes drove back up and handed over the keys. Sophie tipped him a few dollars, the last she had on hand.

It had been months since she had last driven, heading to New Jersey for Beth's birthday. She was tempted to go that way, to tell Beth about the decision she'd made. She was curious to know what she'd make of it. But the greatest danger now was losing the trail. She had to keep on. She'd made the trip so many times in her life that it was easy despite her exhaustion, despite the hunger that halfway through brought a spell of dizziness. She drove with the windows open—she could hardly stand her own smell—and the whipping of wind kept her attentive and awake.

Pulling into the driveway, she felt a great sense of relief that the house was still there, as though it might have collapsed in her absence. Harvey saw to things, and there were housekeepers and groundskeepers who kept the place always ready for visitors. She could have gone right in, and it would have welcomed her. And she did think of going inside, if only to shower and change before continuing the next leg of her trip. But she decided to present herself as she was: a mendicant, made filthy by the world. She left her bag in the trunk, with the pill bottles and Charlie's book inside. She was sorry to think that she would never read it now, but there was nothing to be done about that. He would have to find some other audience, some other soul for whom to write.

The walk was five miles, the last of them uphill, and it took her two hours. She stopped occasionally at the side of the road and leaned against a post for rest. At one such stop, a horse that had been grazing wandered over and nosed at her curiously. She had nothing to give the animal, but she offered a friendly pat below its eyes. When she reached the point where the road wound its way up the hill, she thought she might not be able to go on. But she continued. She turned onto the dirt road. Her journey was almost done. She kicked up dust as she walked, and it stuck to her sweaty skin.

It was nearly comical, what had become of her appearance. But it wouldn't matter. She knew this, because she could see what was to come, almost all of it. She was going to present herself to them. They would wash her and change her and give her rest. In the morning she would begin preparations. And when the time came, they would welcome her inside the gates, and she would never leave again. She was going to be forgiven. She would give her life for it.

And a life's work it would have to be: she couldn't know until the very last page if she had been redeemed.

I don't know that I can express what it means to have a publisher as committed as Tin House Books has been. Tony Perez is a wise and sensitive editor. Nanci McCloskey's intelligence and enthusiasm are more than I deserve. Meg Storey's response to my work meant more than she can know. Some years ago Helen Schulman introduced me to the Tin House family, into which Rob Spillman and Elissa Schappell welcomed me; I'm grateful to call them all friends. And I thank Win McCormack for making it all possible.

At times Sarah Burnes believed in
WHTSW
more than I did. She is not just a dogged agent but a brilliant reader and a rare human being. Never did a call go unanswered or an e-mail ignored, even amid difficult times. My appreciation for her and Logan Garrison and everyone at the Gernert Company is as unflagging as their effort on my behalf has been. Sarah also gave this book its title, by the way.