What Happened to Sophie Wilder (24 page)

She went to the kitchen to eat and while she was there she poured a glass of scotch, which she took into the living room. Charlie's book sat on the coffee table. She picked it up and made a brief effort with it. But it seemed only slighter now. Her mind kept returning to the folders. She couldn't bear to go back through them, but she couldn't stop thinking of them, either. She decided to skip ahead, into the future, to see what Crane's life had been like since his release. Folder eight was filled with more recent newspaper clippings. She was relieved to see that they had nothing to do with the fire.

The first article was from the sports pages of a paper in New Jersey. This perplexed Sophie until she saw that it was about a local baseball game in which junior Thomas O'Brien had pitched a two-hit shutout. Beside the article ran a photo of Tom in his uniform, his bright face looking out from beneath the rounded bill of his baseball cap. Sophie had seen a photo much like this one on Beth's bureau. She lingered on her husband's face before moving through the rest of the pages. There were announcements of debate matches and school plays, human-interest pieces about community service done by the local church, all of them from two small papers covering a few towns in southern Jersey.

When she'd finished with the folder, Sophie checked on Crane and found him still asleep. She let herself out and walked downstairs. Lucia Ortiz answered after only one knock on her door.

“Sophie Crane,” she said. “I thought I hear you in the halls.”

“I came to take care of my father.”

“How is he doing?”

“Not so well, I'm afraid.”

“I pray for him every day,” Lucia said. Seeing Sophie's worried expression, she added, “Is there something I can do to help you?”

“There might be,” Sophie said. “It may sound like a strange request. But you mentioned that you and my father had both been living here for several years. Was he here when you moved to the building?”

“No,” Lucia said. “He come a couple of years after I come.”

“Do you remember when that was, exactly? I'm sorry to bother you with this, but it would be a real help to know. I'm trying to settle some of his business.”

Lucia thought for a moment and then smiled.

“I know exactly, because my son graduated from high school that year. He helped Mr. Crane carry some things upstairs, and then later, in the fall, Mr. Crane helped us move his things out when he go to college.” She counted to herself. “Almost twenty years. Time goes by. My son, he's a doctor now. Always talking of moving me out of here. Why do I want to move? I like it here.”

“That's wonderful,” said Sophie. “You must be very proud of him.”

“You let me know if I can help more.”

“Just keep praying for him. Keep praying for us all.”

 

Back upstairs she refilled her glass and took it into the bedroom. Crane's eyes were closed, but his head shook back and forth as though in denial of something, and he let out a low list of moans. One hand was up near his face, clasping and unclasping but holding only air.

He might have been a beaten animal, knowing nothing of his suffering, only inhabiting it. And she was powerless
to stop it. She could have shaken him from sleep, as though it were a bad dream he was suffering, but he would only wake into more pain. She wished to still him with a touch. Part of her wanted simply not to have to watch, not to know that what she saw was real. She knelt at his side, leaning against the bed frame as against a Communion rail, and she prayed for his ordeal to pass.

If Lucia's memory was correct, Crane had come to New York the year he got out of prison. It was as good a place as any to start a life over, but he would have known that Tom and Beth were just an hour away. She wasn't sure if the local Jersey papers had been delivered to Manhattan in those days. More likely he'd driven to get them. She imagined him even going to one of those baseball games, following Tom from a safe distance. What else had he done with his life? He would have had some job, of course, perhaps until he got sick, but it couldn't have been much of a career. All the evidence in the apartment suggested that he'd given the past twenty years to this story.

If he'd been following Tom, he'd been following her for as long as she'd shared her life with Tom. The things that he'd known on the first day they met, about her book and her conversion, were only the beginning. How many times had Crane seen her before the day she came to the hospital? Tom had thought he was gone, but he'd been there, almost close enough to touch, though still invisible.

“Get up, get up,” she heard him say. She looked up, into his open eyes. He had not been so lucid in two days. “I know what you're doing,” he said. “I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it. It's useless.”

She stayed on her knees, looking at him.

“If it's useless, what difference does it make whether I do it or not?”

“Because I don't want to have to look at it,” he said. “If you're going to pray, you can do it outside.”

Still she didn't rise. Waiting for a store of generosity within her to meet his antagonism, she remembered those clippings and the shadow life he'd led.

“I'm sorry you're suffering.”

“I'll be suffering either way. Your prayers don't do shit about it. They'll just make you feel better.”

He closed his eyes and turned his head. His hand continued to reach out for nothing. He was well practiced, Sophie thought. He knew just how to use his pain as a weapon against her. But there was no mistaking that the pain was real, or that her prayers had no power over it.

She'd thought little over the years about the efficacy of prayer, though it was a fundamental matter of her faith. She prayed a great deal, but rarely
for
anything. She made prayers of thanksgiving and penitence and adoration, rather than prayers of petition or intercession. She sometimes prayed for the souls of her parents, but she didn't pray for God to intervene in the visible world.

No principle kept her from it. She wasn't among those who thought that God had better things to worry about than missing car keys or late trains. The moment that God stopped worrying about anything on earth, we stopped existing entirely. There was no stock of divine attention to be depleted. Guiding a vacant cab to a rich old woman in the rain on Park Avenue couldn't distract Him from starvation in some other corner of the world. Such intercessions just didn't occur to her in the moments when she knelt to speak with God.

But it was impossible to watch Crane struggle without praying for it to stop. So on this day she asked for something. Something not unreasonable, she thought. She might
have asked, in that moment, for two decades to be erased, for that house in the woods to be restored and with it the family within. But she wasn't so ambitious. She prayed only that he not suffer through the days he had left. And then she knelt, watching the unmistakable proof that her prayer had not been answered.

He answers prayers in His own way, Sister Dymphna had told the initiates. The answers might be mysterious to us. You couldn't ask God to help you make your appointment and expect Him to reconfigure time and space to meet this preference. It would be childish to think that God must not exist, or must not be good, merely because He refused to conform the world to your own will. This had satisfied her at the time, but now it seemed inadequate. What did it mean to say that God answered prayers, if He chose which ones were worth answering? Or if His answer was so oblique that it was no answer at all? Simpler to say that God answered every prayer, but that sometimes the answer was no. That He made the world do as He wished, that if your wishes met His, your prayers were answered.

Why should Bill Crane be the one who put these matters into question for her? What was it about his suffering, above all the suffering the world held, that made it unconscionable to her? Was she objecting, at heart, to bearing witness to it? She had chosen to come to this place. He hadn't asked her there, and he didn't want forgiveness. He didn't even want her to stay. She had chosen to go through his files, to learn things that Tom had kept from her for years. She had chosen to knock on Lucia Ortiz's door, to confirm a suspicion that might as easily have been left unconfirmed. Not to help anyone, but because she'd wanted to make sense of the story.

She decided to find a church in the area that held mass during the hour after Sarah arrived.

Now she stood, placing a hand awkwardly against the hot, wet skin of his face. He turned back to her and opened his eyes but said nothing. He seemed already to have forgotten their earlier exchange.

“I'll get you some pills,” she said.

Sophie filled a glass of water in the bathroom and brought it along with the painkillers back to his bed. Using the handheld control, she sat him up. He tried to reach for the pills, but his hands were shaking and wouldn't obey, so he leaned his head forward and opened his mouth. She placed two of the oblong white pills on his tongue. If they could keep his pain at bay, perhaps those pills were her answered prayer. She lifted the glass to his lips and poured the water down his throat.

Before he'd finished swallowing, Crane set his head back and closed his eyes. Relief couldn't possibly have come that soon, but the mere anticipation had given him some peace. She pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat watching him. She didn't need to kneel. He couldn't know what was passing through her heart, and he couldn't change it if he did. She watched his body settle, his breathing become less labored. His hands fell back to his side. Without thinking, Sophie reached out for one and held it in her own. If he was conscious of her touch, he made no sign of it.

Did she make any difference at all to him? She suspected not. But she wasn't sure she needed him to need her there. That might not be the meaning of her work. Was it selfish then, this reaching for his hand, this desire that life be met by life? Was it for his sake or her own that she wanted to save his soul?

His soul. Had she said it out loud, he would have laughed at the word. Or spat on it. What would she tell him, if asked to explain the notion? If one thought of the soul as something that lived in the body like a kind of prisoner, but that wasn't finally dependent upon it, where was his soul while his body suffered in front of her? Did it suffer also? Or was his body losing its grip on it? Had it escaped? But then, what
was
in his still-living body, what animated it, such as it was, if not his soul? And where could his soul be found, if not in his body, while his body still lived?

She was interrupted in these thoughts when Crane called out. The sound seemed at first an odd corruption of his own name, as if the word had been caught in his throat and deformed on the way up, or spoken in a foreign tongue. He seemed to be asserting his continued presence in the world. She looked up, still holding his hand in hers, and waited for him to speak again.

Pills, it might have been. Not Bill. Though even this wasn't quite it.

“I can give you more in another two hours.”

He shook his head from side to side, slowly but still forcefully. The pained look on his face might have been merely the effect of movement, or it might have been his disgust at her refusal. He spoke the awkward imperative again, and it came to her, in the instant before he repeated himself, what he had actually said, so that the words when they returned emerged not from him but from some place within her.

“Kill me.”

She looked into his face, which had now gone blank, and she thought that he was slipping away again. She hoped so. Then she might pretend she hadn't heard. The burden might be passed. But there was life in his eyes,
which darted from her face to the bottle of painkillers still in her other hand, trying to direct her.

“I won't,” she told him, trying to sound certain. “Put it out of your head.”

He seemed to do just that. He seemed in fact to absent himself entirely, leaving her alone in the room. He didn't know what he was saying, she thought. He wasn't capable of making such a request in this state. But death was what he'd wanted all along. Dying had been the plan that she'd spoiled the first time she entered his life. He'd needed someone to sign a form at the hospital and set him free. He didn't want to be saved. He wanted to be left to die.

Now he slept, and she stood up. As she pulled her sweating hand free from his, her fingers tingled sharply with a kind of mock pain, as if to remind her what suffering really was. She went into the kitchen with no real purpose except to escape from him. She fixed herself a scotch with two cubes of ice and drank it slowly while she wept over the sink.

What had she meant when she prayed for his ordeal to be over? What could she possibly have been asking for, except that he be taken from the world? And if she could ask for such a thing for him, why could he not ask for it himself? He was asking her to answer her own prayer.

When the drink was done, Sophie stood dazed with the empty glass in her hand, feeling herself empty beside it. She made another, adding water to it out of an inexplicable sense of propriety. She brought it out to the living room, where she sat on the couch.

There was a world inside the world, like the secret station beneath City Hall. Behind the visible lay the true nature of things. In that secret world, things were free. Perhaps the body was not a cage that held the soul, but a hand that gripped it like a cane, appearing to guide it, to
command it, but all the while dependent upon it, gripping it all the tighter the more that it needed it, finally letting it go.

But Crane wasn't asking for his soul to be released. He wasn't asking her to usher him from one nature into another, from this world to the other. He wanted an end. He wanted no longer to exist. Sophie couldn't blame him. If she thought such a thing were possible, she might want it, too. But it wasn't so. Once you had been made to exist, you had no choice but to do so forever. There was no escape for anyone.