The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (11 page)

She took two more perfect strokes. Then she felt the water where my hands had been, and jerked, and spluttered, and came up snarling. She moved so fast I could barely see her. She was scratching me on the side of the face, punching me in the gut with her pointy fists. She was clawing me all over, and I couldn’t catch her hands. She was shockingly strong. She was yelling, “You promised! You promised!”

Finally I found her arms in the water and pinned them against her sides. We were both standing on the bottom. Her face was covered with water and tears, and her eyes were wild. What did I have in my hands?

“I’m sorry.” I said. “I’m sorry.”

And she broke free and mashed her mouth against mine.

S
OMETIME LATER
, when it was dark outside and we were lying in the narrow bed closest to the lake, she asked me how my mom had died. It wasn’t the first time a girl had asked me that in bed. It was the kind of question they liked to whisper when they wanted to feel closer to me, like after we had sex or when we were going on a day trip together for the first time. They always asked really slowly, telling me it was okay if I didn’t want to answer, like part of the point of the question was showing how sensitive they were being about asking it.

Tessa hadn’t asked—I’d just told her the first day we met, and the
way she nodded and looked right at me the whole time, like nothing I could say would be too much for her, made me fall in love right then. That was one reason I didn’t usually tell the whole story anymore.

“Congestive heart failure caused by metastatic brain cancer,” I’d say, which was what the coroner had written on the death certificate I’d snuck a look at once when my dad was sleeping. Then, if they still pressed, I’d say it was a long time ago (true) and my mom and I hadn’t been close (not true), just to stop them from forcing me into a closeness I never asked for. But Sophie just asked the question flatly, and her hand was on the weird hip flab I always tried to hide by leaving my shirts untucked, and I felt like here was someone with no agenda, who wasn’t trying to get anything out of me, and I wanted to give her everything I had.

It was in the other house, I told her, the one across the lake where we used to stay in the summer. It was August; I was thirteen. I’d gotten my growth spurt and turned from a fat kid into a doughy taller kid, and I (wrongly) thought this was just the beginning of me getting good-looking. I wanted summer to be over because there was a girl at school, Denise, who I’d never talked to but who I was sure was going to be impressed that I’d learned to play jazz on the piano. Jenna was nine. She liked a TV show about little animals who battled one another, and since we didn’t have TV at the lake, she had entered withdrawal and started recapping previous episodes in way too much detail. That night at dinner she was describing one where an evil cat-dragon character is introduced for the first time. She’d been going on for several minutes, and I’d been trying to imagine what Denise’s breasts looked like under the pink tank tops she always wore, when I heard Mom say, “Jesus Christ, can you shut up for even a second?”

We all stared at her. My sister’s eyes filled with tears.

“Lizzie,” my dad said, his nickname for Mom. He sounded more confused than mad. My mom jumped up to put her arms around my sister, tell her she was just tired and not to pay any attention, but before she did, I saw something on her face, this flash of pure anger.

For months after that, everything seemed normal. We went back to school, Denise had no interest in my piano-playing ability, Mom started teaching German to Jenna in the evenings. They were closer than ever—they’d whisper together on the couch or tell each other German jokes across the dinner table. I still thought about that night in August all the time, and then I thought about it less.

Then one night my parents had a big fight. This wasn’t that unusual—they yelled at each other sometimes, especially about money. What scared me was the way my dad looked at my mom the morning after, like he was scanning her surface for cracks. Much later I learned they’d fought because Mom’s officemate had called my dad. Her name was Eileen, and she’d worked with my mom for ten years. She told Dad that Mom had started snapping at her, calling her an idiot and a bitch. She said Mom accused her of stealing from her office, when she didn’t even have a key. She wanted to know if Mom was okay, if something was going on at home.

When Dad told her what Eileen had said, Mom accused Eileen of lying, and even suggested that Dad and Eileen might be having an affair. After a long time, he managed to calm her down, and she admitted that she hadn’t been feeling like herself lately and she might be getting depressed. He convinced her to see a therapist, and so Mom started going to appointments every Thursday night and coming home with a weird new way of talking to us, every sentence starting with “I.”

But she didn’t get better—she got worse. At first it was just every now and then—she’d say, “This fucking TV” (she never cursed), or she’d ground Jenna for dropping a bowl of beans. She’d always been such a patient driver that we’d whine at her for not passing people on the highway; now she started yelling at other drivers and cutting them off. She stopped giving Jenna her German lessons because she needed alone time to recharge her nerves. Then she started accusing us of things. She said I was trying to make her cut herself by leaving a knife out on the counter, my sister was talking about her to her friends from school, my dad thought she was ugly.

One night she and I were alone in the house. I was practicing piano. It was one of the few things Mom really couldn’t do, and she’d always loved that I could. She called me a genius and a prodigy. I knew that wasn’t true, but I knew I was better than the other kids in my piano class, who got nervous at recitals and choked on the hard parts, turning red and banging one wrong key after another. I liked the hard parts best; the more I had to concentrate, the lighter and freer I felt. That night I was working on one of my own pieces—I’d just started composing, and I could tell that I wasn’t good yet, but that I would be—when I heard her come down the stairs. Already the sound of her footsteps made the back of my neck tense up.

When she came into the living room she was calm enough. She’d started doing exercises where she took a deep breath to keep her from saying something angry, and I saw her chest expand before she opened her mouth.

“Can you please do that more quietly?”

She said it really slowly, which was another thing she’d learned. I didn’t argue; I kept hoping that if I did everything right, she’d go back to the way she was before.

“Sure, Mom,” I said, and I shut the living room door and started playing as quietly as I possibly could. After a few minutes I got into the flow of it again. Sometimes when I play the piano, I have no thoughts in my head and no memories. I think it’s like being an animal, just moving toward the scent of food without knowing how or why, without even the concept of knowing. That day I was deep in that feeling, and I forgot about my mom—the second time she came down the stairs, I didn’t hear her.

“What did I just say?” she yelled.

She caught me off guard and I forgot to be polite. I said the first thing that came into my head:

“I
am
being quiet.”

“You’re even louder than you were before. I’m trying to write a report up there, and I’m typing the same word over and over because I’m so distracted by your noise.”

Now I was angry. I thought of my friend Evan and how I’d always felt sorry for him because his parents yelled at him in front of me and called him a little jerk and a liar. Now my mom was worse, because Evan actually was a liar and his mom and dad were just mean and loud about it, but I hadn’t even done anything wrong. I never had friends over to our house anymore, because I was worried they’d see that my mom had turned crazy and that I was scared of her.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” I asked her. My voice was louder than I wanted. “I’m not doing anything to you.”

Her face was turning a bad color, like meat. She was no one I recognized.

“You’re trying to drive me crazy,” she yelled.

I could feel myself starting to tear up, and that made me even madder.

“You don’t need any fucking help with that,” I yelled at her. “You’re going crazy on your own.”

For a second I felt a big weight lifted off me—I’d said the worst thing I could think of, and now I didn’t have to keep anything inside anymore. Then Mom hit me in the face.

By the time Dad and Jenna came home, my cheek was only a little red and Mom was downstairs holding an ice pack and drinking tea. Part of me hoped Dad wouldn’t believe me, so maybe I could convince myself that Mom had slammed her hand in the car door or even that I’d hurt her, grabbed her little fingers and bent them back, something that recently I’d fantasized about doing. Instead he just nodded, and then he put his arms around me and hugged me for a long time. The next day he took Mom to the doctor, and three days later they found the tumor in her brain.

S
OPHIE LISTENED
to all this silently. She didn’t make any of the little noises people usually make when they listen to you, and a couple times I thought she was asleep, but every time I looked over at her, she was paying perfect attention, lying there wide-eyed in the dark. When I stopped—I was out of breath, I realized, and my heart was kicking in my chest—she asked, “Why did you start playing the guitar?”

I was annoyed with her; I was trying to tell her something important, and now she was asking me the kind of question people ask at bad parties when they’re just casting around for something to say to each other.

“What does that matter?” I asked her.

She didn’t look offended, and she didn’t look sorry. She stared at me with those big eyes. “I’m curious,” she said.

Something about the way she didn’t even register my anger made it fall away.

“I wanted to impress people,” I said. “Nobody sleeps with you because you’re good at the piano.”

She nodded. “But you don’t like it as much.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but it was true. “With the guitar I’m always thinking about how it sounds and whether people will like it. I’m self-conscious. But when I play the piano, it’s like I’m lifted out of myself. Sometimes it’s like I don’t even exist.”

Her eyes were confusing me. Usually girls didn’t look at me all that closely. I’d be talking, and I could tell they weren’t really listening to me; they were just thinking about where I fit into their lives. I’d see it playing across their eyeballs—“A musician, but a good guy, seems like he’d be a good dad”—and around then I’d usually take off. So I liked having Sophie’s full attention. I wanted her to tell me I was okay, that everything I was telling her was normal and good and right.

“Don’t you ever feel that way?” I asked. “Like you’re sick of all your thoughts and feelings and you just don’t want to deal with them anymore?”

“No,” Sophie said, “but it’s interesting.”

Her voice was cold, but when I laid my fingers across her wrist, her skin was hot, her heart pounding. I could feel the sore spots in my back where she’d clawed at me. Another thing girls didn’t usually do was touch me like they really wanted me; a lot of times my body felt like something they were going through to get to something else. Sophie had gone after my flesh like it was food. I put my arm around her waist.

“Why do you make movies?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She was quiet a long time, and again I thought she was asleep, and then I might have fallen asleep myself. Then I heard her say, “I think I’m like one of those crabs, where it builds itself out of parts of other animals.”

She might have said “its shell,” but in any case it didn’t make a lot of sense, and I was worried I’d drifted off and missed something important.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Forget it,” she said.

“No, please, I’m curious. What do you mean about the crab?”

“Seriously,” she said, “forget it. I just say stuff sometimes. You were in the middle of your story.”

And I wanted to keep telling her, so I did.

When we knew what was wrong with Mom, we all got busy. Dad scheduled her chemotherapy treatments and called her friends and family, I took over dishes and vacuuming, my sister made “Get Well” drawings and put them all over the house. My dad learned about how cancer treatments worked and explained them to me, with diagrams. I remember feeling almost excited, like we had a mission now.

At first the treatments shrank the tumor, and for the next year we had Mom back. We had a normal Christmas, except that all our presents were way too extravagant. I got an electric keyboard, and Mom got a bicycle. It was a stupidly optimistic gift, but she rode it once, around the block, while my sister and I watched nervously like we were the parents. Mom went to my sister’s dance recital and the high school talent show, where my band, A Gooseless City, played a
song I’d written about a man who worked in a coal mine, and she clapped and cheered even though we were awful. She started teaching my sister German again.

Once that year my mom took me to the aquarium. I don’t remember where my dad and sister were, but I know it was just the two of us. I felt embarrassed and too old to go look at fish with my mom, but the aquarium had a giant octopus on loan then, and Mom really wanted to see it, and that year I never said no to her. We looked at a bunch of tropical fish first, and a pancake turtle, and a moray eel that looked like an evil log, and then there was the octopus. It was in a dark room and lit from above, and it moved like no living thing I’d ever seen. Its arms and its weird pale underbelly were against the glass, and it was straining and sucking and writhing; when the arms moved apart I could see its pointed monster head. It was the size of a three-year-old child, and it seemed awful to me that something could be so big and have no bones, that something could be so far from human and obviously want something as badly as it wanted to get out of the tank. I heard a black sound in my head. I wanted to go home, but my mom put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed—she was touching all of us a lot then, stroking our cheeks, ruffling our hair. When I turned to her, she had on the funny tight smile she got when she was trying not to cry.