Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

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 CHICAGO 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.

When she started taking questions, I could tell something was different about her after all. She sounded more polite, more grown-up, but also tired and nervous. She’d never been like that when I knew her — I’d always liked how she said what she wanted without worrying about how it came off. She was fidgety, too — she kept scratching her arm through her dress. Someone asked what her favorite recent movie was, and she said Aero-Man , which I thought was funny because I hadn’t pegged her for a superhero fan.

“The way Veronica Dias plays the Parachutist,” she explains. “You’d think she’d be really tough, and she is, but she also looks so sad. Like it’s lonely to be a superhero.”