Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“What happened?” I asked.

Sophie gave the biggest shrug I’d ever seen. She threw her shoulders back and her face upward like she thought the sky might open and send her down an answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s not true. I know. I’m hard to be with.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, thinking about how she’d insulted me. She smiled a little bit, then got serious again.

“I don’t mean I’m a bitch. I mean, that’s a problem, too, but less so, most of the time. I just mean I don’t understand other people that well, and sometimes they don’t understand me either. It leads to trouble.”

“I can see how that could cause trouble,” I said, “but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”

“Well,” she said, “I haven’t been alive all that long, but I’ve had enough breakups to know that the common element is me.”

This last part sounded like she’d read it in a self-help book, and I had a mental image of Sophie sitting cross-legged on a bed somewhere, paging through a pink paperback with a pen in her hand, trying to figure out how normal humans had relationships.

“Listen,” I said. “My mom was sick for a lot of her childhood and her teens, and she had a lot of surgeries and a lot of scars. When she got to college, she didn’t really know how to act with people her own age, and she was so sure nobody would ever want to date her that she didn’t know what to do when people did. And so she had a lot of bad boyfriends and boyfriends that hurt her. Then when she was twenty-five, her dad died, and she decided to stop dating and build a house on this lake and live here alone. And my dad was the guy she hired to help build the house. And when the house was done and my dad asked her to marry him, she asked him why he wanted her when he could have someone with nothing wrong with them. My dad didn’t give her a bunch of compliments or anything like that. He just said, ‘No I couldn’t. That person doesn’t exist.’”

I didn’t tell her the rest of their story, how they married and loved each other for twenty years, and then in less than two years she went crazy and died. I didn’t think there’d be any need to tell her, because after we said good-bye the next day, I thought I’d never see her again. She was smiling now, her face still wet. I wanted to touch her, not even to kiss her necessarily but just to feel her skin, which I for some reason thought would be hot and thin and fragile like the skin of a mouse. I took a step toward her, and I could feel the heat coming off her. Then she brought her arm up between us and wiped her eyes with the afghan.

“Why did we come here?” she asked.

The night snapped back into focus. Frogs were singing in the woods; the moon was starting to set.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. It was the kind of question people back in the city would ask me at parties, meaning What is our purpose in this world? But Sophie didn’t seem like the type to get existential.

“I mean, why did you want to shoot here? I can tell you’ve been here before. What happened here?”

Her face was dry now, and she was looking at me hard with her big eyes, sizing me up. I remembered that I barely knew her at all.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” I said, turning away. “I’d better get some sleep.”

“Good night,” she said. And she put her hand on my arm, just for a second, and her skin was just like I’d imagined.

. . .

THE NEXT MORNING the guys were loading up the van. I put the amps and guitars on board, but when I tried to help Sophie’s crew with the lighting equipment, they gave me a look like they didn’t know who I was, so I just stood around in the driveway, staring at the trees and my feet. I was thinking maybe this weekend would be good for me. I was feeling clear and alert. When I got back to the city, maybe I’d be able to write songs again. Then I felt skinny arms wrap around me from behind.

“Let’s not go today,” Sophie said. “Let’s stay.”

At first I thought we wouldn’t be able to do it. When I called, the owner said it was rented to someone else starting Monday, and when I asked if there was any way they could switch, he gave me a lecture about city people and the things we needed to understand. I thought of telling him I’d come here every summer for fifteen years, but I was worried he’d tell me bad news about the house, like the new owners had torn it down and put up a big new ugly house in its place. Instead I just hung up. But when I told Sophie it was a no-go, she called him back, and within fifteen minutes he had changed his mind.

“I just told him we needed it,” she said, blank-faced.

And then we were alone with that whole house around us, just staring at each other. I admit that I thought we’d have sex; it seemed like the next step. But we were just standing together in the empty living room, and I had no idea how to get started. I couldn’t tell if she even expected me to do something — she was looking at me out of those eyes like a cat or a bird of prey. I was embarrassed, and I didn’t know why. Finally I went to the kitchen and got my guitar, which was still right by the door, ready to get loaded into the van.

“Want to hear some music?” I asked her.

She nodded and sat down on the daybed. I sat next to her, close enough for my leg to touch her a little bit but far enough that if she asked if I was hitting on her, I could deny it, maybe. I felt twelve years old. I thought I’d play something romantic, so I started in on “Walking After Midnight.” But once I finished the first verse she stopped me.

“Will you play one of your songs?” she asked.

“I thought you hated my songs.” I tried not to sound like I was pissed off about it, but I’m pretty sure I failed.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did say they weren’t interesting.”

“Oh,” she said. “I just meant the words.”

It was true I’d never been much of a lyricist. I heard the music in my head first, and later I’d kind of match some words up to it and hope it all fit together. My favorite songs of mine, the ones that came closest to the feeling I’d had writing them, were the ones with no words at all. But I wasn’t playing those songs in public much then. People liked a story, I thought; they liked to sing along.

So I launched into “Luella.” Like a lot of the songs I was writing then, it wasn’t really about anything in particular. It had a girl with broken hands who stays inside a lot, and people wearing blue in a white room, and some stuff about sadness. When I finished, she asked me, “Is that about your mom?”

“I guess so,” I said. “A lot of my songs are about her, a little bit.”

“What happened to her hands?”

A lot of things happened to my mom’s hands. When she was born, my grandma thought she was making fists, but the fists wouldn’t open. The doctors X-rayed them and found dozens of tiny bones, all in the wrong places. I’ve seen the X-rays. For some reason my grandparents put them in her baby book, next to the first photos of her, a wide-eyed baby in a knit hat. Over the next fifteen years, she had ten surgeries to make fingers. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and she told me things that only people who have been sick for a long time know, like that there is school in the hospital, even for kids who are going to die. My mom learned long division in the hospital. She read To Kill a Mockingbird and Jane Eyre . She told my sister that she got her first period in a hospital bed, and my sister told me that years later, when we were drunk together for the last time before she got born again and quit drinking and everything else.

And then it was over. She was in the tenth grade, and her hands were as good as they were ever going to be. They turned out to be pretty good. She could write and draw and braid hair; she could count change and wear gloves and use chopsticks. She could even play the trumpet, and she was in the school marching band for a year until she quit, not because the fingering was hard on her new hands but because she was tone-deaf. There were only a few things she couldn’t do, like play cat’s cradle, fasten a necklace, give someone the finger.