Electric City: A Novel (27 page)

One morning in late March, with a burst of momentum, she decided to volunteer some hours every week at Ellis Hospital in a candy striper uniform. Perhaps this minor introduction to life inside the world of medicine would restore her, or at least allow an alternate version of herself to begin again.

She delivered food trays and took them away, offering rehearsed comments on her way in and out of the patients’ rooms, giving herself the illusion that she was needed. The new routines brought a degree of ballast: stainless steel carts and bright fluorescent lights; the way someone was always sitting at the nurse’s station, no matter the time of day or night.

“You’re such a steady girl,” Susan Yates said to her one Monday afternoon. She was the head nurse in the Department of Internal Medicine and the one who organized Sophie’s schedule. Around fifty years old, without a wedding ring or any other jewelry, dark-blond hair pinned neatly away from her face, Susan was the kind of shapeless person whom Sophie could never picture wearing anything besides that blue-white uniform. Her existence outside the hospital was unimaginable, and she never asked Sophie anything about her life, her family, or her schooling. She had no idea that Henry had died. That Sophie was in a state of barely manageable grief.

Somewhere she was dimly aware that her fascination with all things medical was rescuing her from a debilitating depression. An instinctive curiosity stayed alive even when the rest of her was hibernating, gone so far underground there seemed no sign of reemergence.

Little by little, Sophie felt the earth tipping toward the sun. Maybe it was the vividness of forsythia that brought her back. Maybe it was the scent of lilacs.

M
ARTIN COULDN’T DECIDE
which was less forgivable: having been there helpless on the lake, or the wish to have been blameless somewhere else. In the middle of long January nights, he was tormented by a fraction of relief that Henry was dead. All those times he had tolerated the choice Sophie made, and all the ways he’d deliberately made his own choice not to be anyone’s competition.

A few times just before dawn, waking from yet another nightmare of paralysis—whispered voices calling
Help Me, Help Me
—Martin visited the shale-strewn cliff edge overlooking the Mohawk, pushed by the longing to find refuge in a place high above the frozen water.

Frozen almost frozen
.

He had missed the signs.

Even by the end of February, separate in their grief, Martin found that he and Sophie still didn’t have the heart to be near one another. After nearly two months of distance, he made attempts to reconnect them, inviting Sophie to meet for hot chocolate or to take a walk through the scattering of naked birch and oak and maple behind the high
school. But their once-companionable silence felt strained now, full of thick absence.

Sitting side by side at the diner’s counter, they ordered by pointing at the menu; they exchanged no more than a few words before leaving their ceramic mugs of cocoa half-finished and then parting wordlessly on the sidewalk out front. The walk in the woods was another abandoned effort: both kept slowing their steps as though tranquilized, and Martin kept wishing that he was alone under the trees instead of listening to Sophie’s labored breath nearby.

Even Bear lacked the power to distract or sustain him. School was never a place Martin cared about in the best of times. Standing for the pledge was beyond excruciating. When all of March went by without seeing even the back of each other’s heads in homeroom, he was sure that Sophie realized something was up.

“I did,” he said, when Sophie called to ask if he had dropped out.

“What will you do?” she asked.

Martin shrugged, tossing his hair around, though Sophie couldn’t see him.

“I’ve got a full-time job downtown,” he said. “At the plant.”
The Company, of course. Where else.

“Did you already start?” she asked.

“Got my first crappy paycheck yesterday,” he said. He guessed she could feel the acceptance in his voice, just alongside the resignation.

“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. “I didn’t realize you wanted to give up on graduating.”

“Konnorónhkwa.” He spoke too quietly for her to hear.
I show you that I care
.

“What was that?”

He waited, deciding. “You’re the one with big plans,” he said, instead of the other things. Time was curving itself between them, sending them in separate directions.

“I mean it,” he said. “Someone’s got to get out of here alive.”

G
RADUATION
D
AY
, J
UNE
17, was heavy with humidity and the threat of rain. As she tried her best to smile, posing for the same photo over and over again, Sophie doubted this was the best moment of their lives. Miriam had managed to persuade David to attend the ceremony even though it was held on a Saturday and required him to ride in a car, violating the Sabbath. Sophie appreciated the significance of his gesture, and stood in time for her name to be announced among the students graduating with highest honors; she hoped this made her father feel that his exception was worth the trouble.

In truth, the communal air of celebration seemed not quite to reach the surface of her skin, remote as the syllables of a foreign language or the view from a passing car through a sealed window. Every time she saw one of her classmates with a boyfriend’s arm around her waist, a flash of pain streaked through her solar plexus. Fingering the gold chain that rested on her collarbone, Sophie touched the empty place where a charm might have dangled.

Turning down invitations to two graduation parties, Sophie kept thinking of Martin, punching his time card in and out; their high school was some distant country he no longer lived in. She had reached the point
at which he was the only person she wanted to see, but every time she called, his phone rang into empty space. It occurred to her that he was working night shifts and sleeping during the days, avoiding her, avoiding anyone. But then he called Sophie’s house three days after graduation and asked her to meet him at the place across the street from Henry’s house. The Steinmetz property.

“Now?” Her heart thrummed so hard she was sure he could hear it through the phone.

Martin cleared his throat. “Eleven tonight.”

Sophie hesitated only for a moment, then said, “I’ll be there.” All day she kept seeing the fox’s flaring red tail like some sort of beacon, pointing to a memory from when Henry was alive. She felt as much as heard the cicadas at sunset, and when the first fireflies winked on, she imagined she could hear their invisible wings. The evening air vibrated.

Finally, when it was time to meet Martin, she left the house quietly, carrying her sandals in one hand and a sweatshirt in the other. She passed the dining room table where her father had all of his belated income tax piles spreading like a map of the year. Her parents were in bed watching the news, and she let them think she’d gone to bed too, getting onto her bicycle so she could ride toward Martin in the damp night. It was still hot at 11
PM
, and all of her senses were alert to the ripeness of the earth. She pedaled fast and felt wisps of her hair lifting away from her neck; her bike tires hummed on the warm pavement.

Hardly any porch lights were on. In nearly every house she passed, a window leaked flickering blue light from a television set. The same blue light was filling rooms all over town, all over America. Overhead, the moon glowed in a blurry sphere, reminding her of the Company logo. She studied its face while she rode, and what came to her was
the idea that the moon looked bewildered. For a moment, she prayed that Henry’s death might float quietly behind them, with Iroquois Lake almost restored to its innocence.

Sophie’s elongated shadow appeared before she did, an animated sketch of arms and legs on the sidewalk. Then Martin struck a match and took a deep drag of the tightly rolled joint he’d brought along.

“Want some?” he said, holding it toward Sophie.

She blushed into the darkness, feeling like a little girl afraid of a dangerous game. “No thanks,” she said.

Martin shrugged. “Helps me think,” he said.

She joined him cross-legged on the sidewalk, leaning against a rocky wall at the edge of Henry’s family’s undulating lawn, their backs to the hill that led up to his house. There was an especially dense pool of darkness at the center of the Steinmetz property, as if the space once occupied by the house had swallowed the night sky. She couldn’t help searching for movement at the base of the pine trees, beckoning to the fox with an unspoken request.

The cicadas had suddenly gone to sleep, along with the rest of the neighborhood. It seemed Martin and Sophie were the only ones still up, the moon a distant spotlight for their small stage. He had something to tell her but she had no idea what it would be.

“I’ve been drafted,” he said, and the last word was a gunshot, a cracking sound splitting the silence.

“
No,
” Sophie whispered.

Martin inhaled again, held his breath, and then released a blue-gray plume of smoke into the night air.
It’s true
, the smoke said.

Sophie looked over at Martin’s bare feet, the bottom edge of his jeans frayed with white threads touching his brown skin. She thought his toes were the most elegant shapes she’d never noticed before, and she studied them for a long moment, seeing how the second and third toes were the same length.

“I’ll come back eventually,” Martin said, and at first Sophie didn’t understand what he was talking about, thought he meant he would serve a tour of duty and come home on leave. But then her head cleared.

“You mean Canada?” she whispered, and Martin released another ghost of smoke.

“Where else?” he said. The effort in his voice had become audible, one flat note in a symphony.

Sophie wasn’t surprised by his choice not to become a soldier, a choice to stay alive and also not to kill. But draft dodging meant it was possible he could never come back to America, or else risk being thrown into jail. That very day, Muhammad Ali had been convicted of evading the draft and sentenced to five years in prison. He was one of the more famous ones, amidst a rising tide of refusal. But a crime was a crime.

To lose Henry under the ice and then say goodbye to Martin too: Sophie didn’t see how she would be able to continue. A pair of losses bigger than any container she could hope to hold them in, her head, her heart.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, not looking at him. “I don’t believe in eventually.”