Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“How did you know I was here?” I stammered.

She smiled then, the only time I ever saw her do so in person. She tapped the corner of her eye.

“I have superhuman vision, remember?”

At first I didn’t know what she meant — then I realized she’d read my profile and was making fun of my idea that maybe she could see more than everybody else. I was embarrassed then, even resentful. Now it’s one of my favorite memories. I believe it pained Sophie how poorly other people understood her, how little she could make herself understood, how easy it was to turn her into an angel or a monster. I’m glad to know she also found it funny.

FOR A LONG TIME I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH SOPHIE’S ashes. I didn’t want to have them and I didn’t want anyone else to have them. I didn’t want them to exist, of course, because I wanted her alive, but I also didn’t want her anywhere near me. I was angry at her for dying. I was angry at her for dying while I was still so angry, before I could bring myself to say I was sorry.

Robbie got a third of the ashes and he scattered them over the train tracks in their old hometown. Jacob got a third and he poured them in the lake. But I held on to my third of the ashes all through the filming of Life and Death . I held on to them when it came out and I had to answer questions from reporters about Sophie and our life together and our breakup and her death and what she was like in bed, and I thought I would scratch their eyes out, but then I remembered I had a career and did not. I held on to them when the movie had been out awhile and the requests mostly stopped, and all I got was an e-mail every now and then from a blogger or a film student, like a punch to the back of the head. I held on to them but I kept them out of sight, in a box in another box under a suitcase in my closet.

They were still there when Jacob came for dinner. Robbie and I still can’t be in the same room together — it’s not that we hate each other, it’s just that we actually, physically can’t be in the same room. One of us always forces the other out with his or her sadness and guilt and blame. But Jacob and I are friends. We look a little bit alike, and we think it’s funny. We ease each other’s sorrow; we don’t make it worse.

Jacob came on a night my boyfriend, Christian, was away — he and Christian are friends too, and when we’re all together we talk about music and tell Bigfoot and windigo and giant alligator stories. But that night Christian was traveling for work, testing the water at a construction site in New Hampshire, and when Jacob and I ran out of windigo stories, we started talking about Sophie.

“Somebody asked me why she did it,” he said. “Haven’t gotten that in a while.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Who?”

“Some guy in the opening band the other night. Like he was just curious. What do you say when people ask you that?”

I sipped my tea. Usually Jacob and I drink bourbon, but I’m pregnant now, so I’m learning to like chamomile. Christian and I decided it was the right time; he’s not my husband and he’s not going to be, but we’ll be together as long as we’re good for each other, and he’ll be my child’s father forever, and those are the only kind of promises I want right now.

“I tell them to go fuck themselves,” I said. “Unless it’s someone I have to be nice to. Then I tell them she was depressed.”

“Is that what you think?”

I shrugged. I don’t always want to talk things through as much as Jacob does. I hadn’t wanted to talk about Veronica in the movie. Sophie didn’t know I had anything to do with her leaving. It wasn’t in the instructions. I could’ve left it out and by now maybe I would’ve forgotten it even happened. But I’d already told Jacob, and he said we had to tell the whole story; he said it was our job to make her life make sense. I thought that was too much to ask of anyone, but then I thought maybe if I explained everything in the movie I’d feel less guilty somehow, like I’d discover none of it was my fault. That didn’t happen. I felt the same after the movie as before: I wasn’t sure Veronica would’ve stuck around if I hadn’t messed with her, I wasn’t sure the movie would’ve succeeded if she’d stuck around, and I wasn’t sure that if the movie had succeeded, Sophie would still be alive. But each of those things seemed like enough of a possibility that whenever I thought about Sophie I ended up doing something bad, like drinking a whole bottle of gross gin or breaking all our drinking glasses so the kitchen was covered in shards and the dog cut his foot and I had to tweeze the glass out of his paw pads while he writhed and whined and I thought about cutting my own foot as penance, but I knew that wouldn’t make anything up to anybody.

I did get hate mail after the movie came out — that felt like punishment in a way. I thought I’d lose some roles too. I thought I should lose some; if there was justice in the world, my career would be over. But even if the movie did cost me some jobs, it probably got me more. It made all of us more famous; to some people it made me exciting. One director told me he wanted to work with me because he needed someone dark, a little bit evil.

“I know she wasn’t happy toward the end,” I said to Jacob. “Even before the movie went bad. When I first met her she had this strength about her, like nothing could hurt her. By the time we started making Isabella , it was gone. Maybe depression is one thing to call that, I don’t know. But it’s an easy thing to say and it stops people from asking more questions.”

Jacob didn’t look satisfied.

“Well,” I asked, “why do you think she did it?”

“Maybe she just gave up. She was so terrible at being a normal person and doing normal-person things, and maybe she just wanted to quit trying. That’s what I think most of the time.”

“And the rest?”

“Maybe she thought the movie would only work if she was dead, and she decided it was worth it. That’s what really keeps me up at night — that it was just another, like, artistic choice for her.”

I’d had this thought too, but it didn’t make me crazy like the other ones did — if she killed herself to make the movie happen, at least it wasn’t a judgment on me.

“Maybe it was about the movie,” I said. “I don’t know if that’d be the worst thing.”

“That wouldn’t bother you?” he asked. “If she was willing to leave everybody who loved her, just to get a movie right?”

“There are things that bother me more,” I said.

I got up to make more tea. I wasn’t used to this, not drinking with my friends. I was only four months, but I could already feel my body changing, my hip bones moving apart. I missed bourbon, but I liked the feeling of something new leaving its mark on me.

When I got back, Jacob was staring at the liquor in his glass.

“This is bad…” he said.

“Can’t be worse than me.”

“Do you ever wish you’d never met her? Sometimes I think if she’d never shown up, I would’ve just gotten past the stuff with my mom. Gotten therapy, I don’t know. I’d be this calm person. Instead I’ve got all this shit rattling around in my head. It’s good for the music, but sometimes I just wish I could sleep at night.”

I hadn’t thought about it, what my life would be like without Sophie. She felt inescapable, like something you’re born with. But of course I’d lived twenty years without knowing her. If she hadn’t come to hear my story, I probably would’ve tried to tell a few more — the time my sisters and I found my stepdad passed out so hard at the kitchen table that we put a plastic princess crown on him and he didn’t move, so we put a pink scarf with sequins around his shoulders, and a rhinestone necklace around his neck, and a daisy from the yard behind each of his ears, and then my mom came home from work and we thought she’d yell at us, but instead she laughed silently with her hand over her mouth, and then she took a lipstick out of her bag and started putting it on his face, but then finally he woke up and felt the crown and the necklace and the scarf and looked beaten down and ashamed, but Mom and me and all my sisters laughed so hard we had to hold on to each other to keep from falling on the floor. And the time I got scarlet fever and I was so sick I saw trolls stepping from cloud to cloud on the ceiling above my bed, and one night my mom thought I would die, so she told me I had always been her favorite, and I held on to that for years, and it made me want to stay with my family and take care of them, and then one day I asked my mom if she had really meant it, and she said yes, I was her favorite because I was like her, and that made me want to leave and never come back. But then eventually I would’ve run out of stories — everybody wants to hear about West Virginia, but everybody already knows what it’s like to be broke in Brooklyn and twenty, twenty-five, twenty-eight. I know I would’ve gotten by — if nothing else I know how to get what I need — but I never would’ve thought I could be an actress. If Sophie hadn’t wanted me to be in a movie, I’d never have thought anybody would. I’d have some kind of job and some kind of life, but I know I wouldn’t love it as much as the one I have now.