The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (12 page)

“I know you know this already,” she said, “but I have to tell you anyway. When I get—” She paused. “When I get mean, when I say nasty things to you or your sister or your dad, I want you to know it’s the cancer talking and not me.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. All my scariest thoughts were rushing into that dark room, and I wanted to go back out into the light where we could laugh and get a soda.

“I know you know. But I just want to tell you, because even though I hope it never happens again, I think it might. And I want you to be ready and know that your real mom would never say those things, not ever.”

I nodded and we hugged, and then we went to the food court, where she bought me starfish-shaped chicken nuggets, which I was definitely too old for but which I ate with barbecue dipping sauce. Mom laughed and chatted like she was glad she’d reassured me and like she’d reassured herself, but all the time I kept thinking that if she knew that the meanness came out when she was sick, and if she knew that it would again, then it had to be somehow part of her.

It was late spring when she started getting worse again. It was more unpredictable this time. She’d be talking about our dog getting into the trash, and then her voice would drop an octave and she’d say he should be put to sleep, and then she’d laugh and say she was only kidding, why was I looking at her like that? She started hiding things from us—small, worthless things like the dog’s leash or the salt and pepper—and when we confronted her, she’d say she was just rearranging. At first the doctors said her scans were clear, and I thought maybe we were being paranoid, maybe she was cured now and we were the ones who were crazy. Then they did another scan and found the cancer back after all, crawling through her brain. The doctors offered her an experimental treatment, a new chemo drug they said could extend her life by as much as a year. She said she’d take it, but that night she asked to talk to my dad alone. Jenna and I left the hospital room, but instead of following my sister down to the cafeteria I stood outside and listened.

“I can’t be in the hospital anymore,” she said.

“I know it’s hard,” my dad said. “But it’s like you used to say when you were a kid—‘That’s where they make you better.’”

Mom laughed then, and the way she laughed made me afraid. I thought of leaving, but I didn’t move.

“Listen,” she said, “when you’re a sick kid, everyone has a certain way they want you to act. They want you to be all sweet and positive, so they don’t get too fucking depressed about the fact that you’ve had fifteen operations and you’re only eight years old. And you learn to give people what they want, because it’s just easier. But I’m an adult now, and I’m going to die, and I’m done giving people what they want.”

I did follow Jenna to the cafeteria then. And when she asked me what was wrong, I told her to shut up, which I never did, and when Dad came down to get us, he explained the meaning of “palliative care.”

It turned out that what Mom wanted was to go back to the lake. The doctors okayed it—she was weak but she wasn’t on chemo anymore, and they said we should do what made her happy. Mom wouldn’t let me help her pack—she said she hated how I was always sticking my nose in her business. But when we got to the lake, she seemed calm, even happy. We sat with her on the dock, and when she saw a loon, she jumped up and pointed and made sure we saw, just like she’d done when Jenna and I were little. She offered to help Dad cook, and she did it without fighting, washing the lettuce and slicing the hard, unsalted bread from the bakery in town, smiling at us over dinner in a way she hadn’t in months. She ate, too—the bread and salad and even meat. We went on a short walk down the road one morning, and she took her scarf off, and I saw white-blond hair
growing from her scalp, like a baby’s. I let myself think maybe she would get better after all.

On the warmest day that summer, Jenna and I wanted to go to the little beach by the general store—I wanted to look at the girls, and maybe Jenna wanted to look at boys, too. She was eleven by that time and so quiet I had no idea what went on in her head. We tried to get Mom to go with us, but she said she was tired.

“You should take them,” she told my dad. “Get some exercise. I’m going to stay here and read.”

So he took us, and I watched an older girl with long beautiful legs and angry red pimples swim lap after lap, butterfly style. Then my sister and my dad and I raced to the marker buoy, and I won, and then we all went to the store and got chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl soft-serve ice cream, and Jenna got it on her swimsuit and waded back into the water to wash it out. I remember all this very clearly, because when we got back to the house, my mom was gone.

It took the police and the dogs three days to find her. She wasn’t in the lake, although they did drag part of it. She was in the woods, north of the house, just over a mile from the road. She had cleared the leaves away from a space under a beech tree and lain down there with her head pillowed on her hands. The coroner said she’d been dead just over a day.

After the funeral, after that first hard year when we didn’t have to go to school if we didn’t want to and we ate cereal for dinner most nights of the week and all slept in the living room because we couldn’t fall asleep alone, my dad started to feel better. He still teared up when he talked about her, and on her birthday and their anniversary and the day she was diagnosed and the day she died, but he
started disciplining us again and playing Frisbee with the dog instead of taking him on short sad walks around the block, and he shaved the beard he’d grown because he was too miserable to look at his own face. My sister started having friends over again and going to the mall and buying the ugly clothes girls her age wore to try to look older. I was the only one who didn’t start to get happier once the first bad grief was over, because all I could think about was that when my mom knew her life was ending, what she wanted was to get away from us.

When I was done telling Sophie all this, the sun was coming up. I could hear chickadees and white-throated sparrows waking up outside. Sophie lifted herself onto her elbow and turned her face toward me.

“Can we go there?” she asked.

This was so far from what I’d been expecting that I didn’t even understand. “Go where?”

“Where your mom died.”

After the police found my mom, my dad had her cremated. Then we took her ashes back home and had the funeral. In between were two days where we stayed in the lake house without her. Dad didn’t let us out of his sight then—he didn’t say it, but I knew he was worried he’d lose us, too. So I spent those days walking from room to room, not seeing anything or saying anything, just trying to stay ahead of the panic that caught up with me whenever I stopped. I definitely never thought of going to the place where she died—I didn’t even really think about it as a place. When I thought about her death, I thought about where I’d been when the officer knocked—sitting on the wicker couch by the front door, trying to practice my guitar, trying to think of ways it could all still be okay.

“I don’t know where it is,” I said.

“Haven’t you ever tried to find it?”

She sounded disappointed in me, and it made me defensive, even though I didn’t know what I was defending myself against.

“How would I find it?” I asked. “It’s not like it’s marked or anything. It’s just forest.”

“But you know how far it was from the house. You know it was a beech tree. At least you could probably find the general area.”

I don’t know what I’d wanted her to say; because she listened so closely and didn’t try to offer the kind of comfort that never comforted me, I thought maybe she’d give me something that would change the story somehow, make it easier to think about. Instead she was just grilling me.

“Why would I do that?” I asked her.

Sophie rolled onto her back, pointed her wide eyes at the ceiling.

“I just thought you might want to see what she saw.”

I could have gone looking for the place where my mom died; maybe other people would have. But I was afraid to, and not just because it would bring back the memory of that last day before they found her, the phone not ringing, dread hanging in the house like smoke. The truth was I was scared she saw something in me. She was mean to everybody when she was dying, but she was especially mean to her family, the people she knew best. I was scared that she saw us for what we were and that what we were was crappy, pathetic, worthy of hating. As long as I didn’t think too much about her last days, this was just a possibility I could mostly ignore. But if I really understood what she’d felt at the end of her life, I was worried I’d be sure of it.

At the same time, I wanted to hold Sophie’s interest. I felt like I
was performing for her—I didn’t know whether it was a good performance or a bad one, but I didn’t want to stop. And I didn’t like the way Sophie was looking at me, like she’d given me a challenge I was failing to rise to.

Sometimes I think about what would’ve happened if I’d said no to her—if things would’ve moved slower, if we would’ve been more like a normal couple who date for a while and fight and make up and only get married when they know what they’re getting into. Or if she would’ve just left the next morning and found somebody else. But I didn’t say no.

“We can go,” I said. “I don’t mind a walk in the woods.”

W
E SLEPT AND ATE
, and by the time we got going, it was late afternoon. We drove through town, past the chicken-wing place and the general store with the old wolf-dog sleeping under the steps. As we slung around the cove to the northern side of the lake, I could feel my shoulder muscles creeping up the back of my neck. I was worried the new owners had razed the house to the ground; I was worried it would look exactly the same, like I could walk right in and Mom would be there making potato salad. Neither of these things turned out to be true. The house was still standing, it was the same in all major aspects, and it had clearly been taken over by strangers. They had replaced the broken shutters with bright red ones; they had set up a picnic table in the back. They had gotten rid of the old motor-boat my dad had let rust by the kitchen steps and planted some kind of purple flower in its place. Their lights were on; we could see a gray-haired lady in the kitchen, someone’s mom who’d been allowed to grow old. I turned and made straight for the woods.

Sophie saw the signs first.

“Who’s Wolford?” she asked.

PROPERTY OF WOLFORD
, the signs said, one on each of three pine trees.
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This was always state land.”

“No one will mind if we just take a look,” she said, and then she did something she hadn’t done before, which was to reach out and take my hand. We walked like that into the forest. I had forgotten how strong it smelled. The lake was all cold and clean and sharp, a smell that made you feel cleaned out inside. But the forest smelled like rot and moisture and secret growing. Clusters of yellow mushrooms sprouted from the undergrowth; shelves of fungus stuck out from the trees. The light turned deep green. My sister and I had always been scared of the forest. Our uncle had told us the story of a creature there, something that watched you from the trees, and even though we didn’t believe him, we did. There was only the narrowest path to follow, and then there was no path. I held Sophie’s hand tightly, and she held mine.

We walked for a long time, much longer than I thought a mile could take, and all the way the oaks and pines and firs crowded in on us. Beeches, too—any tree could’ve been the one my mom chose, the place that felt right or that was just the farthest she could reach. I hoped it was the former, that she was looking for something specific and not just desperate to get away. But what would she have been looking for? What my dad and my sister never understood was the lesson of her death: We didn’t know her at all.

We walked and walked, and the forest closed in, and I was scared and ashamed to be scared; it made me sad to think of Mom giving herself up to a place that felt so alien. And then the trees opened out
in front of us, not much but just enough to make a small space where you could sit, or lie down.

“Do you think this is it?” Sophie asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s about the right distance, but there’s no way to know for sure.”

A little light fell into the clearing, brightening the leaves at our feet. A chickadee sang. Somewhere behind us a dog was barking. I felt disappointment slam into me. I’d let myself expect something out of this—some kind of revelation, good or bad—and now I realized how stupid I’d been to imagine I’d get anything like that. I was angry at Sophie for making me think it was possible.

“Let’s just go,” I said. “We shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “This could be it.”

The dog barked again, closer now. Sophie and I looked at each other; I was thinking of the signs we’d seen, and how much the police there hated summer people, and how if we got caught we’d probably spend the night in jail. Sophie took my hand again without a word, and we started to run. The clearing closed at our backs and the trees rushed in again; we trampled wet ferns. The dog was loud behind us; we pushed deeper. Finally we found a place where the brush was thick and wild and the roots of a cedar made a hiding place against the ground. We crouched there. The smell of the forest was strong, and the air was colder than before. I listened to Sophie’s breathing; her skin was hot. For a long time, I had no thoughts in my head. When they came back, finally, I thought of how unalone I was, with her chapped hand still wrapped around mine.

We heard the dog bark, softer and farther away. I knew this was not where my mother had lain down—no clearing, no beech. But still I tried to picture her there, the way she was at the end of her life,
slow and old from the drugs and pain but also pretty like a baby, with pink cheeks and that soft hair. I tried to picture what would make the mom who sang us “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and let us take turns warming her hands between two of ours crawl out into the woods to die alone. I tried to see what this place would offer. The dark trees and the blackberry thorns and the cold dirt gave me not a single clue.