Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“I have another idea,” I said. “Let me hold you by the waist. Then you can feel what it’s like, but I’m there if you need me.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” she asked.

“I have never once drowned someone,” I told her.

Then I saw she was serious.

“I promise,” I said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Okay,” she said. “You hold on to me first. Then I’ll let go.”

I held her at the waist. She was hard there, muscly. I thought of a mink, something quick and stealthy, a hunter.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Ready.”

I felt her lift one foot, then the other. Then she leaned back, kicked her legs, and dropped her weight into my hands. She thrashed at first, and looked up at me for a second like what had I gotten her into, but then she found her balance and let me and the water hold her.

“That’s great,” I said. “Now you’re floating.”

She looked up at the white sky. She was scared but smiling.

“Now try kicking a little bit,” I told her.

She churned the water with her legs. Her feet were nothing like I’d imagined. They were long and pale and pretty with tiny toenails like a kid’s.

“My mom told me you can tell if someone’s healthy by their toenails,” I said. “If they’re too dull, you’re not getting enough protein.”

She ignored me and kept kicking.

“Now your arms,” I said.

“Do what with them?”

What did you do with your arms? I tried to think of words to describe it, but all I came up with was “swim.” Then I remembered the first snow some November when we were little, my sister rushing out in her footy pajamas and red mittens and flopping right down in it.

“You ever make snow angels?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course I did.”

“So do that,” I said. “Do that with your arms.”

And she did, like she was born doing it, her shoulders moving smooth and easy.

“You’re doing great,” I said, and she looked at me with total wonder.

“Am I?”

“You are. Now let’s try it on your stomach.”

She looked scared.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I’ve got you. It’ll be the same, just flipped over.”

She nodded, and I loosened my grip on her just enough that she could roll her body over. She did a quick flip, and her shirt rode up, and I saw a slice of pale skin right above her ass. She kept her head out of the water, turned it toward me and asked, “What now?”

“The same thing,” I said. “Just kick and do the snow angel. Do it until it feels natural.”

On her stomach she was clumsier — her legs went fast and her arms went slow. I heard her breath come quick and shallow. I was about to say we should take a break and try it again later when I felt her start to click into a rhythm. Her body had learned something. Her legs synced up with her arms, and her snow-angel strokes got deeper, stronger, more like real swimming.

“You’re doing it,” I said, and she didn’t answer, she was so deep in the movement. I could see her thighs and shoulders working. I wanted to see her take off, shoot across the lake. I let her go.

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.

SOMETIME 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.”