Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

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.

SOPHIE 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.