The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (15 page)

The writer asked if she was talking about movies or love.

“It’s hard for me to talk about love,” she said. “I think movies are the way I do that.”

I remembered when I’d told Sophie I loved her. We’d just had sex and we were lying in her bed looking at each other. She looked like a fighter naked—she was so skinny, but her arms and her belly and thighs were hard with muscle. She was using her hands to measure my chest. Her hands were little and red and chapped, and I wanted to hold them in mine and let them heal, but she slid them out and kept measuring.

“Your chest is wider than three of my hands,” she said.

“You have three hands?” I asked, but she was serious.

“Does it feel weird?” she asked me.

“Does what?”

“Does it feel weird to be so big?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but now that I looked back, I could remember how things changed when I was thirteen, fourteen, when I grew. Not just girls liking me or my dad’s friends joking about how I could beat them up now. I remembered feeling different. I used to
swing my arms around when I was by myself just to feel how heavy they’d gotten. When I ran I felt the new length in my legs. I felt dangerous. I didn’t know how to say any of this so I just said, “I guess it did at first, a little. Now it feels normal.”

“Stand up,” she said then.

I was confused. I thought maybe there was a bug in the bed.

“Why?”

“I just want to see you.”

I reached for my clothes.

“No,” she said. “Like this.”

And so I stood naked in front of her. It had been years since I’d felt embarrassed taking my clothes off in front of a girl—I was always looking at them, thinking about what we were going to do. But I was embarrassed then—I could feel my face getting red and my chest too. I was worried about how I looked to her, my hairy legs, my balls. Then she said, “Stand up straight. You’re beautiful. Stand up straight.”

At first I was offended. “Beautiful” made me think of a male model or something, the kind of person my dad wouldn’t respect. But then there was nothing about Sophie my dad would like; none of my family or my friends would have anything to say to her. It made me feel special that I had something nobody else knew about. She wanted me in a way nobody else would understand. And even though she never used the word, I thought she loved me. I pulled my shoulders back, and I didn’t feel stupid anymore. I felt like I was doing something great, even though I wasn’t doing anything at all.

When I got into bed with her again, I was tingling all over. I put my arms around her and felt her back against my stomach, and I
whispered that I loved her. She didn’t say anything, so I said it again, louder. The room got so quiet I could hear the crows calling in the parking lot and the trucks on the highway. Then she turned around to face me.

“My grandma died when I was eleven,” she said. “And my brother, he cried and cried. I didn’t cry at all. Afterward my brother asked me, didn’t I love her? And I said of course I loved her, I thought about her all the time. And he said, then why wasn’t I sad?

“And I didn’t have an answer for him. It was like if someone asked you how did you know blue is blue. And ever since then I’ve been scared, I guess, when people talk about how they feel. I never know if we mean the same thing.”

Now I think she was being honest, which is more than I ever did for any of the girls I was with before her. I told CeCe I loved her every day, even while I was sleeping with Sophie. It came easy to me, telling girls I loved them, but I never thought about what it meant. I’m still not sure.

After I finished the article I looked up Annie the schoolteacher on Facebook. She was blond and had kind of crooked teeth and she looked really happy and normal. Her account was public and so I could see all the messages on her wall saying it was too soon and they knew she was watching from heaven. I didn’t read them all; I just scrolled through them to the messages she’d gotten when she was alive, like,
“Had so much fun w you and TJ and Sara loves her new Barbie so much!”
Or,
“Was so great to talk, never forget you are the smartest and bestest friend.”
Just from looking at the normal silly things her friends and family said to her, I could tell she was a kind person with a nice life. After I read all her Facebook messages and read them again, I wrote Sophie for the third time.

Dear Sophie
,

I don’t know if you’re getting these e-mails. You might have someone who reads your e-mail for you and tells you which ones are important. If you do I’m not sure that person would think this is a very important e-mail. But if you are reading this, I want to tell you another thing about my life, which is that I was in a car accident this year. I am doing a lot better now and will probably go back to work soon, but the accident has made me think about my life in some ways. It’s hard to explain but I guess what I’m asking is, remember when we were first talking and you asked me to prove I was interesting? I guess I’m wondering what you thought and what kind of person you ended up thinking I was. Would you say I was a good person? I know it’s a weird question, and it’s been a long time, but if you could take a minute to think about it, that would mean a lot to me
.

Talk soon,
Daniel

Lauren signed me up for an appointment with a therapist. She said she was worried about me, staying up so late and spending so much time on the Internet. She showed me a pamphlet the nurse had given to her when I was discharged, explaining that people who had been in accidents might get depression or posttraumatic stress. She had a whole stack of pamphlets I’d never seen before, which made me feel like a kid, like the adults were talking about me after I went to bed.

I wasn’t stressed. I didn’t have a leg anymore, and that made me
feel like a freak, but it didn’t make me
nervous
. I wasn’t sure if I was depressed. I played and replayed the accident over and over again in my head—the headlights, the woman lying in all that brightness, the man screaming. The pamphlet on posttraumatic stress said therapy could stop people from reliving the traumatic event, but I didn’t want to stop. I knew it was important. But I agreed to go because Lauren wanted me to—I wanted her to be happy and not worry.

The therapist was a nice man with a beard and a round face. His office had a houseplant and some paintings of beaches and sailboats. He was burning one of those scented candles. I felt big and clumsy like I was going to break something.

First he asked me questions about myself and my family, and then he asked me a lot of questions I answered no to. Did I have nightmares? Did I have intrusive thoughts about the accident? Was I afraid it would happen again? Did I have panic attacks? Did I have thoughts about hurting myself or someone else?

Then he asked me how I felt about the accident. I didn’t know how to answer because I was still trying to figure out how I should feel.

“Okay, I guess,” I said.

He nodded. I thought he would be a good game-show host, because his face would never give away whether you were on the right track or not. Then he put his notepad down and leaned toward me.

“You know,” he said, “I see a lot of men in my practice, and one thing we really have trouble with is expressing our feelings. We tend to feel like we have to be strong and keep everything inside, because that’s how we were raised—that’s how our dads were. But it’s not the only way to be.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I nodded anyway. I didn’t want him to think I was stupid.

“The truth is, there are lots of different ways to be strong. We can be strong in the old way, the never-talking-about-our-feelings way, and that has certain advantages. In the short term, it might be easier. Or we can recognize that another way to be strong is asking for help when we need it and letting people in a little, even if it’s scary. More often than not, if we can learn to do that, we feel even better about ourselves and more able to take care of the people who need us than we did when we were trying to be strong and silent. Does that make sense?”

I was thinking about my dad. I wouldn’t call him strong and silent—he laughed a lot, and sometimes he yelled, but he certainly didn’t talk much about his feelings. I thought if he were sitting on the therapist’s couch, he’d probably say he wasn’t keeping anything inside. He’d say if he was ever feeling something important, he’d be sure to let somebody know. And really, I didn’t think he’d been hiding a lot of complicated stuff all those years we were growing up, when he’d come home whistling from his job at the Grain Board, eat his dinner, have a beer, and go to bed. He always said we were a lot alike, he and I, and mostly I agreed with him.

“I guess,” I said.

I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he smiled anyway. He would’ve been good at poker too.

“Look,” he said. “Let’s try a little exercise. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it again.”

“Okay,” I said.

I was expecting inkblots or word association or something, like on TV, but instead he just told me, “Try to describe, in as much detail as you can, a time when you felt helpless.”

I thought he was trying to get me to talk about the accident or the
hospital, but “helpless” wasn’t the right word for what I’d felt. When I was at the hospital I had so much help—help eating and help falling asleep and help going to the bathroom—so much help all the time that I barely had to feel anything at all. And now I didn’t feel helpless when I sat in front of the computer at four a.m., clicking and clicking like the next website would have answers written on it. Maybe it was because I’d been thinking about Sophie so much lately, but when I thought about helpless, I thought about the last time I saw her.

It was December, the end of the first semester of our junior year. I’d been seeing Sophie for a month while I was still dating CeCe, and Sophie never asked about it or acted like she even cared. I cared, though. Before when I cheated on CeCe I could forget about it quickly—if she ever called me on it I would’ve actually had trouble remembering. But Sophie was under my skin—I could smell her room on me even after I showered, and I could tell CeCe was suspicious. She’d never asked so many questions about where I was or asked me so often if I loved her. She was worried in a way she’d never been before, when I stayed out late or said I had to practice so I could go off and be with another girl. I felt guilty every time I looked at her, and also confused. She and I made sense together—she was fun, she was pretty, my parents liked her. Before the Sophie thing, she’d been jealous enough to show she cared but chill enough to let me do what I wanted. But I couldn’t get back to feeling about her the way I did before I met Sophie, the way my heart used to race when I looked at her or touched the back of her neck.

Finally I decided I wanted Sophie to be my real girlfriend. Once I made the decision I knew it was right. I practically ran across town to her apartment so I could tell her. I knew something was wrong as soon as I got there, because she was cleaning. She had a giant trash
bag on the floor and she’d cleaned off the desk and half the bed already.

“I’ve never seen you clean before,” I said.

“I’m moving out,” she said. “I got a job.”

My stomach fell. “What kind of job?”

“It’s a fellowship in New York. For young directors. They give you some money and train you to make better movies.”

“What about your classes?” I asked. “Are you going to skip next semester?”

It wasn’t what I wanted to say but it was the easiest question I could come up with.

“I guess I’ll apply for leave or something,” she said. She didn’t seem to have thought about it.

“For how long?” I asked. “When are you coming back?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Well, you have to come back in the fall, right? So you can re-enroll?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so. Probably.”

That was when I knew I was going to lose her. When she was in New York making movies, why would she come back here where people made fun of her and guys shaved her head? I was sad and pissed off, and I let myself get mean.

“You’re going to get eaten alive there, you know,” I said. “What’s the biggest city you’ve been to? Des Moines?”

“I’ve never been to Des Moines,” she said.

“See? You’ve never been anywhere and you think you can just go to New York and everything will be fine?”

She looked confused and—the first time I’d ever seen it—hurt.

“Why are you talking to me like this?” she asked.

I felt bad that I’d hurt her, but I was still mad.

“I just want you to think through this before you rush into it. You can’t just move across the country without thinking about how it’s going to affect you.” I couldn’t stop myself from adding, “Or me.”

“You have a girlfriend,” she said.

I’d always liked her plain way of talking, like everything was simple and obvious. Now it made me feel like an idiot.

“So this is it?” I asked her. “I’m never going to see you again?”

She looked really upset then, and I couldn’t tell if she was sad to be going or if I was just bothering her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We might see each other. How do I know?”

I couldn’t stop. “And you’re not going to miss me at all?”

She sat in the clean space on the bed, wrapped her arms around her knees. “Why are you asking me this stuff? I thought you liked how things were.”

“Well, maybe I wanted more,” I said. “Did you ever think about that?”

She looked up at me then, and now her face was different. She looked like I’d suggested she jump off the roof.

“What did you want?” she asked. “Did you want me to be your girlfriend?”

Her voice wasn’t nice, but I wasn’t giving up.

“Yes,” I said. “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

I thought she might change her mind then, that once I’d made the offer she’d decide to stay. Part of me thought she might be leaving because of me, because she was in love with me and I wasn’t giving her what she wanted. I knew I was the only one who’d used the word “love,” but I also knew she’d stalked me for three months, and I
didn’t believe she could be done with me so fast. I thought a lot of myself then; nowadays it’s hard to remember why.