Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Sophie didn’t react. She just kept talking.

“That was okay. I figured you’d understand when you got older. But then you did, and there were still so many things I wanted to tell you that I couldn’t say.”

I rolled my eyes. Reese was home; she came to the kitchen window of our apartment and looked down at the car. I gave her an In a minute wave. My patience was low.

“Like what?” I asked Sophie. “What are these super-important thoughts that you can’t possibly express to mere mortals?”

Sophie shut her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. She looked tired, but she still didn’t look mad.

“Somebody told me once that if you could read a dog’s thoughts, a lot of them would probably be smells. For a long time, I thought maybe if you could see my thoughts, they’d be like my movies, but I don’t think that anymore.”

“So what do you think, Sophie? What is your problem? I’ve known you my entire life, and I still don’t understand what it is.”

I heard the tears in my voice before I realized my eyes were wet. Just that year I’d started to feel like I’d built a good life. Reese and I had started talking about having kids, and even though I was scared, I thought being a father was something I could do. And then Sophie came back to remind me that I’d failed at being close to the person in my life I was supposed to be closest to, the one I’d loved first and most.

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “I didn’t come here to fight with you,” she said. “I came to tell you I love you and I trust you. That’s all.”

“I love you, too,” I said. “But what do you mean, you trust me?”

“I trust you to do right by me.”

“Of course I’ll do right by you,” I said. “Just tell me what you need.”

“I will,” she said. “Right now can we make dinner?”

Soon after we got inside, the rain started. It lashed the windows and fell in an unbroken sheet from the awning above the door. Reese set up a pot under the leak in the closet, and Sophie and I started dinner. I remember thinking she seemed better — warmer and more alert. She agreed to eat spicy beans and rice for dinner instead of asking for oatmeal. She looked out the window and said, “It’s so beautiful,” and it was — the soaked bright grass, the dark pin oak, the streaming sky.

When it got dark, Reese and I watched TV while Sophie wrote in her journal. When I asked what she was working on, she said it was a new thing she was trying out.

“A documentary, kind of,” was all she would say.

“It’s good that you’re working on something new,” I told her, and instead of shrugging she nodded.

“I think it’s going to be good,” she said.

Reese and I got ready for bed. As she left the bathroom, she kissed me and squeezed both my arms, something she did that always made me feel at home and safe. Sophie saw; for a second we’d forgotten she was there. Reese went into our bedroom, but Sophie kept looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“You’re happy,” she said.

I couldn’t tell if it was a question. “I am,” I said.

She smiled, the first time I’d seen her smile since she came to see me.

“I’m glad I couldn’t screw you up,” she said.

I smiled too. She lowered her head, and I put my hands around it and squeezed like I used to do. I imagined her mind as a thick forest where animals darted, hunted, hid. She put her hands on my hands for a second, pressed, took them away.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night,” I told her, and I went to bed feeling calm.

Our bedroom ceiling was flush with the roof, and the rain rang loud as cymbals above our heads all night. In the morning the sky was clear and Sophie was gone. I’m embarrassed now at where I looked for her. In the park, under the dripping trees, water gushing up around my shoes with every step. In the parking lot of the old church. In the cemetery, where one evening recently I’d seen a falcon take apart a mourning dove, its feathers falling like snow. In all these places I called out for her, and I double-checked all the vantage points with the most scenic views, as if she’d gone sightseeing. And when I went home to regroup, I still thought she might be there with canned peaches, or pudding cups, something she’d wanted in the early morning and just run out to get. I was less worried than mad she hadn’t told me where she was going, and when the officer came to the door, at first I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“That can’t be,” I said. “She’s staying with us.”

And the poor policeman, who must’ve drawn the short straw to have to tell me in the first place, had to explain again.

That morning around three o’clock — later I’d thank a God I no longer believed in that she’d done it then, and not while I’d been looking for her in the park like an idiot — my sister had checked in to the La Quinta Inn across the river. She’d written a note to the housekeeping staff, which she posted on the bathroom door. It read, “Danger. Do not enter. Please call 911 immediately.” Then she’d run a bath and slit her wrists all the way up to the elbows.

For the first two days I was consumed with rage. All I could think about was how careful she’d been with the feelings of people she didn’t even know, how she’d tried to make sure the women who cleaned the room wouldn’t see her body. And still she hadn’t worried about how the people who loved her would feel when we found out we weren’t enough to keep her in the world. She hadn’t thought that someone would have to identify her, and that person would be me, and I would look down at her body like a carved bone, thin and small as when we were kids together, and I’d have to think about all the things I could’ve done over the course of my whole life to keep my sister from wanting to destroy herself. For those two days I couldn’t cry or talk to Reese when she tried to comfort me. I could only bite my nails down to blood and drink coffee and whiskey and whiskey and coffee until I vomited in the sink.

On the third day, abruptly, I was sad. That day was beautiful, Iowa in the midst of its green summer, the sun in the oak leaves and the cicadas singing and everything full and lush and living. I thought of how if we’d had a day like this instead of the storm, Sophie might not have killed herself. If the rain hadn’t made such a racket in the house, I might’ve heard her getting up from the couch where she lay pretending to sleep and sneaking out the door into the night. And I could’ve caught her by the shoulder and asked her where she was going, and after a couple of unconvincing lies — she was never a very good liar — I would’ve gotten it out of her. And then I could have taken her to the hospital and found her a real doctor and the right drugs, and maybe she would’ve gotten better not just from what was hurting her the last few weeks but from whatever was wrong her whole strange life. She might’ve finally been healed.

On the fourth day, I started arguing with her out loud.

“You had a fine life,” I yelled at her ghost in our house. “Nothing was wrong.”

The ghost was silent, frustrating as when she was alive.

Then I started going through her things. I wanted something that would answer for her. I unpacked her clothes from the little suitcase where she’d been storing them and laid them out all over the house. Her boys’ button-down shirts, her one nice cashmere sweater, a few of those floral dresses, threadbare now, still ugly. Which of these was drag? They all smelled like her — dark and musky, like something that slips through the woods, unseen. She’d brought so little else with her — a toothbrush, a blunt-handled hairbrush I’d never seen her use. A tube of bright red lipstick that made me so sad I had to throw it out. A key card from a Holiday Inn.