The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (16 page)

“And then what?” she asked. “Were you going to take me to the frat formal with my shaved head? Were you going to introduce me to your parents? What were you going to say when they asked what the fuck you were thinking?”

I was offended that this was what she thought of me, that I was too much of a pussy to stand up to my family or my friends.

“I’ll tell them I’m in love with you,” I said.

She scrunched her eyes tight and shook her head. She opened her mouth and shut it again. For a long time I stood there in front of her waiting for her to say something. Finally she just said, “I want you to go.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving until we talk about this.”

She looked so mad then that I was scared. She looked like I’d tried to force myself on her.

“I want you to go,” she said again, louder. And there was nothing I could do then but turn around and leave.

W
HEN
I
TOLD THE THERAPIST
this story I took out the part about CeCe. I told myself I wasn’t that person anymore and that bringing up cheating on my ex-girlfriend just made things complicated. I told the therapist Sophie and I were casually dating, and I wanted more and she didn’t, and even saying that much to another person made me sweaty and uncomfortable. When I was finished the therapist nodded seriously and said he could tell I was a very thoughtful person, and he gave me some sheets to write down how I was feeling, and then our time was up.

On the drive home Lauren asked me how it went, and I said, “Fine,” and then I tried to think of something else to tell her. It was true that I hadn’t told her how I was feeling since the accident, and I didn’t know why—I trusted her opinion more than anyone else’s. I decided I needed to try harder.

“It was good,” I told her. “He says I need to be more open with my feelings.”

She nodded, in that calming way she had, and she said, “You know you can always talk to me.”

And so I told her I’d been feeling at loose ends since the accident, and out of sorts, and maybe it had to do with not working. And she said she totally understood, and it was good that I was going back to work soon, but in the meantime maybe we could try to do more things together, like taking Emma to the park or playing board games. We also decided I would volunteer more at church. I felt relaxed and then we ate dinner and had sex, but it was still hours before I could sleep.

A couple of weeks after my first therapy appointment, I found out Sophie was coming to Chicago. Her movie was opening there, and she was going to answer questions afterward. I’d read all about the movie, and I was already planning how I’d explain to Lauren that I wanted to see it, but I’d never thought I’d actually see Sophie. If I could relearn how to drive, I realized, I could drive to Chicago.

I e-mailed her again:

Dear Sophie
,

I noticed that you’re going to Chicago on tour for your movie. It turns out I will be there for work that day. Do you want to have
some coffee after the screening is over and catch up? It’s such a funny coincidence I figure we should take advantage of it. Let me know if you’re interested
.

Also, sorry if my last e-mail came off as weird at all. I was having a hard time but I’m doing much better now. Although if you would like to discuss anything in the e-mail in person I would be happy to do that too
.

Talk to you in Chicago, I hope,
Daniel

I started slow, with Lauren in the passenger seat next to me putting her hand on my arm at every stop sign, asking if I was okay. At first I wasn’t; my right leg felt unbalanced without the left one, and I kept pushing the gas pedal way too hard so the car lurched forward, scaring Lauren and embarrassing me. But I thought about going to Chicago and I did some breathing exercises my therapist had taught me, and soon I started to feel good, like this was a type of moving I could still do.

The next week I went back to work. My thigh muscles were working better with the prosthesis now, and I’d graduated from a walker to a cane. So hobbling back into my building I just looked like an old man and not an almost dead one. The office staff got me a cake, white with welcome back written on it in red frosting. My desk was just like I’d left it the day of the accident, down to the bag of Mini Oreos that I’d eaten all but one of so I could tell myself I hadn’t finished the whole thing. I realized if I’d died that night the desk would probably have stayed untouched for a few days, like a shrine, and then someone would’ve taken all my stuff and thrown it
away to make room for my replacement. I wondered who my replacement would’ve been, and what he would’ve looked like, and I imagined him replacing me in my whole life, not just work—as Lauren’s husband, Emma’s dad, my parents’ son. I wasn’t sure they’d miss much about me after a while. If I disappeared for a long time and someone else came to take my place, someone who was nice to Lauren and played with Emma and went to work and came home, they’d probably forget about me pretty quickly.

I didn’t get much work done my first day back. A couple of times I realized I’d been staring into space; I hoped nobody noticed. As the week went on I got better at acting normal; I went to therapy and physical therapy; I felt guilty that I had so many people helping me. The therapist asked me if I was scared of driving, but it was the opposite: driving made me calm. I started taking the long way home, the old county road instead of the highway—and then I started turning down roads that didn’t even lead home at all but took me out past cornfields, old farmhouses with rusted trucks in their driveways, a blond-haired kid tossing handfuls of dirt into a drainage ditch.

One of the back roads off the county route ran past a quarry. I’d never seen it before, even though in high school we used to drive around looking for places just like it to get drunk on summer nights. Two nights I drove past it slowly, without stopping, but the third night I got out and looked down. It was so deep I couldn’t put a number on it. The walls were straight up and down on both sides where they had cut the rock out, and at the bottom there was nothing but dark icy water, far, far down.

I could already feel what it would be like to crash through the ice and swim in the water. It would be so cold, so cold that soon I’d lose
the feeling of coldness, and then the feeling in my fingers and toes and leg and arms, and then I’d just lie back; above me I’d see the quarry’s black walls rising, and between them the stars.

I was thinking about the accident again, about the question I couldn’t answer. I knew the other car had come swerving across the road at me. What I couldn’t remember was if I’d cranked the wheel hard and tried to get away, or if I’d kept driving right toward it. I knew I loved my wife and my daughter and I wanted to live, but I also knew that night in the hospital when I was a kid wasn’t some crazy fluke. I knew that ever since I’d blown out my knee, ever since my life was just about going to work and coming home and not about flying around the court and feeling all that power in my arms and legs and heart, some part of me had wanted to die. And I knew if anyone could understand that it would be Sophie.

After a long time a truck came down the road with its brights on, and there I was leaning on my cane next to the quarry like a deformed villain in a crappy movie, and I was so embarrassed that I got right in my car and drove home. Lauren was worried about me; I told her I’d been working late to make up for all the time I’d lost. I could tell she didn’t quite believe me, but she kissed me anyway and we had beef stew with egg noodles, and I read Emma a book about horses, and when I checked my e-mail that night I had a message from Sophie.

Hi Daniel
,

Sorry I didn’t respond to your other messages. Sometimes I’m bad with e-mail. Please come to my show and we can get coffee
afterward and talk. I haven’t talked to anyone about Iowa in a long time
.

Sincerely,
Sophie

I read the last line over a couple of times. Had she not talked about Iowa because she never thought about it or because what we had together there was private and couldn’t be shared with just anybody? I hoped it was the second one. It made me feel better to believe there was something between us that no one else would understand.

That night I didn’t sleep at all. I felt light, like if I wasn’t wearing my heavy fake leg I might shoot up to the ceiling. At about five in the morning, when the sky was just starting to turn gray, I had a scotch to weigh me down a little. I came up with a plan of what to tell Lauren. I already knew about a company outside Chicago that made herbicide. It wasn’t really our area—we dealt mostly in hardware—but maybe it was time to expand. I’d make an appointment with them that morning; I’d tell Lauren right away. It wouldn’t be a lie.

Lauren was nervous when I told her. She didn’t want me driving all that way so soon. She wanted to see what the therapist thought, but he said it was a good idea. He said it was good for me to stretch myself. He asked me if I was doing the journaling exercises he’d given me—I said yes, which was true, except that I hadn’t written anything about Sophie in my journal or about going to the quarry. He said it sounded like I was getting a lot of benefit and I should keep up the good work.

In the two weeks I had to wait, I tried to act normal—I didn’t drive around, I went to bed at a reasonable time. I didn’t e-mail
Sophie. Lauren and I had sex every other day or so, which had become our pattern, and only once Lauren looked at me afterward and said, “Are you okay?”

My heart raced.

“I’m great,” I said. “Why?”

She shrugged then and put her head on my chest. “No reason,” she said. “You just seem a little high-strung these days.”

“Probably because I’m feeling better,” I told her. “I think the therapy is helping.”

She looked up at me, and I thought she was going to ask me another question, but instead she kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’m glad.”

I’
D ONLY BEEN TO
C
HICAGO
a few times before, and I’d forgotten how confusing it was, how so many streets ended all of a sudden or turned into something else. It took me a while to find the theater, and I started to worry that I’d be late, that maybe it would be full and they’d turn me away and I’d have to drive back home the next day without seeing Sophie at all. When I finally got there, my polo shirt—I hadn’t known what to wear and I’d changed clothes three times—was soaked with sweat. The short-haired girl in front sold me a ticket, but there were no seats left—I had to stand up against the wall in the back. It was hard to stand on the fake leg and I had to sort of lean over on my cane, but there was no way I was walking down to the disabled seats in the front where everyone could see.

I realized I’d dressed wrong after all—everyone was wearing tight jeans and T-shirts with pictures of states on them, even the old people. I tried to think about the last time I felt out of place—I
remembered freshman year in college, when I’d gone to the semester’s first meeting of the drama club, just to see what it would be like. I was used to people liking me, trusting me right away, but the president, a skinny guy with hair in his eyes, kept saying things like, “If you’re all
sure
you want to be here,” and then looking right at me. I didn’t go back.

For the first twenty minutes of the movie, I was still nervous. I was scared that my left leg would give out and I kept looking around for things to lean against if that happened. There was nothing; just the backs of people’s seats. The beginning of the movie didn’t have much talking, just a lot of scenes of a little girl in a hospital, getting operations on her hands. The scenes weren’t graphic—no blood, just shiny, cold-looking instruments, gauze being unwrapped, Jell-O on a tray. Everything moved slowly. At one point a clown came to the hospital and gave balloons to the girl and a bunch of other kids, but the scene wasn’t happy or funny—it was dreamy and sad. I was worried there was something about the movie I wasn’t getting. I was worried everyone understood it except for me.

Then the girl got out of the hospital. She stood at the doorway to her bedroom, big and empty-looking with its made-up bed, its stuffed animals lined up along a shelf. And then she was at a bus stop, in a plaid skirt and knee socks—pretty, I thought, like the girls I’d gone to high school with. And then time jumped again, and she was a grown woman, giving a baby a bath in the sink the way Lauren used to do with Emma. You could see her hands clearly and I had a hard time looking at them, the little fingers curved and pointing inward. Then a man came up behind her and lifted the hair off the back of her neck and kissed her, and she smiled a little bit, but instead of shutting her eyes like you would if you were lost in that moment
with your husband and your baby, she kept hers wide open, serious, like she was watching for something. And that was when I knew, even though I didn’t really understand what the movie was about yet, that the woman was so, so lonely, even with people who loved her. And then I forgot everything I was feeling and watched her without thinking, without even knowing I was watching something, until the very end when she went out into the woods and it was so beautiful, like a church, full of light.

Then it was over. The lights came on and people started saying things to each other and again I was self-conscious, worried that everybody else was making smart comments when all I had was a feeling I had a hard time finding words for, a kind of relief. My left leg was almost completely out of juice and I had to lean heavily on my cane to rest it. Then a man came onstage to introduce Sophie, but I didn’t listen to anything he said because my palms were sweating and my heart was racing and I was craning my neck, trying to see her.

She looked the same. She was dressed differently, in a dark gray dress with long sleeves that looked like something from one of Lauren’s fashion magazines, but even the way she walked up onto the stage looked familiar, and I knew her body under the dress would look the same as it did when we were together in her room. I know it sounds stupid but I hadn’t really thought about how I would want her again like I used to. It hadn’t been like that when I looked at the pictures on her website. And I’d felt guilty on the drive over—I had to turn my phone off so I wouldn’t see Lauren’s calls and texts—but not because I was going a see a woman I wanted to sleep with. I’d felt guilty because I was doing something important without talking to Lauren about it and because part of why it was important was that
Lauren wouldn’t understand. Now I felt guilty for all of it. I thought about Sophie’s husband, the musician with the stupid beard, and for the first time I was really jealous of him. I wondered if she really loved him, and I discovered that I hoped she didn’t.