Something About Sophie (28 page)

Knowing that her reluctance to approach the family before leaving was mostly selfish, Sophie sought out Billy first.

No words were necessary. They simply embraced. And where he had once appeared from the darkness, held her and imparted his courage and strength to her, she now passed an equal portion of hers to him.

He felt it and squeezed her tight before releasing her. “I hear you're leaving today.”

“Yeah. This afternoon. Daddy wants to drive over to the university and look around a bit. Show me the ol' alma mater. We'll leave for home sometime tomorrow.”

“You're leaving?” This came from Ava, who was accepting Tom Shepard's condolences a few feet away. “So soon? Now? But we've hardly talked and I want to. Not, you know, about . . . all this but . . . like before.”

Sophie grinned and grabbed her up. “Like friends. Yes.” She held her a few more seconds, then pulled away to look at her—dark glasses notwithstanding. “I have a grandfather here, you know. I plan to see a lot of him, so I'll be back. Soon. I'll call.”

They were hugging again, in empathy and farewell, when the last three McCarrens approached, having already spoken to everyone else. Drew, hanging back, made the introductions to his father, Joseph, and his sister, Pam.

Pam was stiff and formal due to the stress of the moment, her natural manner, or a prejudice toward Sophie—it was a mystery. She thanked her for coming and wished her a quick recovery and a safe trip home before excusing herself to follow her younger siblings back to the car.

Dr. Joseph McCarren had removed his sunglasses and slipped them into his jacket pocket before holding his hand out to Sophie. When she took it, he covered it with his other one and with an expression so forlorn that it pulled at her heart, he said, “I cannot tell you how I regret what has happened.”

She was acutely aware of his many losses—his friend, partner, and wife, the sanctity of his marriage, his faith in what he believed to be true and real in his life.

Her nod was more agreement than acceptance. “I regret it as well. Please accept my deepest condolences.”

He seemed to sense her understanding. His expression softened and he said simply, “Thank you.”

After a polite inquiry about her health he, too, wished her a safe trip back to Ohio.

And there she was, alone with Drew.

The air was humid, cloying, sticking to her. It was clogging her nose and throat—she was suffocating and she couldn't tell if Drew could see she was dying because she couldn't make herself look at him.

“Sophie—”

“My condolences,” she blurted. “I deeply regret my part in your mother's death, but you have to know it was unintentional and that I never wanted to cause her, you, or the rest of your family any pain.” Her brief glance at his face was his only chance to see the truth in her eyes. It was time to walk away. “Take care of yourself.”

“Sophie.”

She stopped and turned back slowly, tamping down her scattered emotions. She hadn't practiced saying anything else and wasn't sure she could trust herself.

“What?” He waited so long to speak, she looked at him and spoke again, sharply. “What?”

“I just wanted to say, again, how sorry I am.”

It was in her to scream. She wanted to shake him so hard his head would rattle, kick him in the shins and then hold him so gently, so tenderly and for so long that he'd eventually come to realize that she was a part of him and that they shared a love that was special and true and not to be ignored. But she hadn't practiced that either.

“Me too, Drew.” She stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “Bye.”

Seeing that Mike and her father were in Jesse's car, she chose to climb into Lonny's truck and closed the door. She felt low as a worm in a gopher's basement.

Lonny studied her. “I'm old. Chock-f-o-wisdom and sage advice, you know.”

Her lips bowed but couldn't hold a smile. “I know.”

“Never had anyone to use it on till now,” he said casually. “They say all the very best of them guru types don't go round spoutin' off their clever, deep-thought answers to just anyone—they play it close to the vest and wait to be asked.”

The silence inside the truck grew so loud, it started to pop and crack before it came to her that he was waiting to be asked. She slipped him a sidelong glance, chuckled involuntarily, and then let her frustration fly, growling, deep and angry, in her throat. “Oh! He makes me
so
mad.”

Lonny's nod was somber and scholarly as he started up the truck. “I can see that.”

“All he can say is ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry',” she said, lowering her voice to illustrate how dull Drew sounded. “He won't talk to me. He won't tell me what he's feeling. And it's right there on his face. I can see how he's feeling but he won't . . . talk to me. Not that I want him to actually talk about it—like
speak—
I know lots of people can't. But he could at least let me be there with him, for him. He's in so much pain, Grandpa. I want to help but . . . well, he's sorry!” She crossed her arms over her chest in a huff. “He won't tell me if he thinks what happened to his mother is my fault or if he feels like he has to take responsibility for his mother's actions. No explanations. Nothing. He just says there's too much between us—and that he's sorry.

“Well, I'll make him sorry. I'll make him rue the day he met me because if he thinks I'm walking away to make this easy on him, he is quite mistaken. I may be just a kindergarten teacher, but I know stuff. And one thing I know for sure is that you don't give up on love.”

His gaze left the road briefly to meet hers. He nodded his veteran insightfulness on the subject like one of the magi and she continued.

“I'll go home. For now. I'll give him a little space and a little time to think . . . and to grieve . . . but I'm not just going to disappear. I'm not going to let him forget. I'll come back—to visit you and Jesse and Billy and Ava.” She spread her arms at the obvious. “I'm going to be here. A lot. And if he thinks he's sorry now—ha!—he doesn't know sorry yet.
I'll
make him sorry. I'm flint. And I'll make sure—”

“You're what now?”

“Never mind.” Her cheeks heated and she lost most of the wind in her sails. “I'm just . . . really frustrated. And really sad.”

“Course you are. I'm disappointed myself. I always figured that one to be a real smart fella, being a doctor and all.”

“Well, he is smart. Just not about this.” She sighed, feeling better, calmer for having let off some steam. “He'll figure it out. On his own, the hard way, but he'll figure it out.” She paused and then cringed. “Ah, jeez. I said rue, didn't I? Can you believe he made me say rue?”

Lonny looked at her, pressed his lips together, and shook his head gravely. “No, indeed, I cannot.”

D
ay 18.
That was her thought between the outer fringe of her REM sleep and the vague awareness of the shuffling in the hall outside her bedroom door. She identified it as
Dad
with her eyes still closed and groggily reminded herself that while she'd given up her own apartment when her mother became ill, and stayed for a handful of reasons after she died, it was time to move out again. He was a
noisyearlyriser
—and she dreamt next of dinosaurs.

The clanking and the clipping and the inconsistent bird noises swelling into her room through the open window beside her bed had her scowling before her eyelids parted on the too-bright sunlight lasering in on the rug, dragging with it the too-sweet reek of fresh-cut grass, diesel oil, and corn chips that had, not so long ago, been the very essence of a long, lazy, lovely summertime to her. Lately, not so much. Lately, not much pleased her at all—and being a poopyhead was not her natural state of being. It felt heavy and hollow at once. She'd been trying to be her usual happy self, but privately, she was feeling pretty poopy.

After a brief muddle through her mind during which she concluded that it was still
Day 18
since she'd left Clearfield, she turned her back to the window, beat her pillow with her fist, and went back to sleep.

Tried.

He's talking to someone,
she groaned mentally. It was like having a fly in the room. Buzzing and stopping, then buzzing again. She flopped onto her back and stared at the ancient four-sided patch-crack in the ceiling—a parallelogram that looked like a square from one side of the room and a rhombus from the other. If her dad was talking to someone down in the kitchen, he hadn't gone to work—which meant it was the third weekend she'd had to endure since she last saw Drew. Every week seemed like a year.

Her uncle Fred often dropped in early Saturday morning for coffee—before his errands in town, to get his motor started, he'd say. Her dad made really strong coffee so Fred always said either that it grew hair on his chest or it got his motor—

Except yesterday was Thursday. Day 17. Is it a holiday weekend? No. Something's wrong.

She was out of bed—her frizzy topknot in serious bed-headed disarray—and her wonderfully worn Buckeye T-shirt and shorty sport shorts were still bed-warm by the time she reached the top step and stopped short.

She knew the voice. It made everything inside her go liquid, like melting ice, as she listened.

“ . . . I thought if we ever found her, we'd find her dead.” Drew went silent for several seconds. “That's the first time I've said it out loud. Sounds even worse than it does in my head—and thinking it was . . .” She lowered her head and took two or three steps down to hear better. “We'd barely spotted the light in the woods when we heard the shot. I thought it then. By the time we got there, Billy was crying over a body and I thought it then, too.” His voice lowered with emotion. “When I realized it was my mother and that she was dead, I was—well, shocked doesn't exactly cover it. I was horrified . . . and confused and . . . and for just a second I was . . . no, it was more than a second . . .”

When he was not forthcoming with a word, her dad offered, “Grateful? Relieved?”

“Grateful.” He tried it on like a new shirt. “I was grateful. Not grateful that my mother was dead, of course, but grateful that it wasn't Sophie. And there's a hair's difference between that and being grateful Sophie wasn't dead, too. You see? And it seemed wrong—in my head—like I'd chosen between them. But that's how I felt, and then I felt guilty.”

Part of Sophie wished she could watch his face during the long pauses in his account, though she knew the emotion in his frank expression would be crushing to see. She went two steps lower, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of him without interrupting—suspecting it wouldn't be any easier on him to tell her these things than it was to tell a relative stranger—who happened to be her father . . . who happened to make his living being easy to talk to and listening with care.

“When I heard Jesse calling her name and seeming to expect her to answer . . . well, I don't know. Somewhere in there—between seeing my mother and what Lanyard did to Sophie and hearing what Mother did and almost losing Sophie and not being there for either of them—I wasn't sure I wanted to, or even could, keep feeling the way I did about her. It was . . . too much. It felt out of control.
I
felt out of control.”

Out of control. His feelings for her made him feel out of control. Believing he had no feelings for her made
her
feel out of control.
Oh, surely there was a happy medium here somewhere,
she thought, her chest tight with optimism.

The next step moaned slightly, briefly, but not enough to disturb them.

“It took me too long to understand that I felt differently about them because I love them differently, in different ways . . . for different reasons. And to remember that emotions don't parade by, one at a time, so you can pick and choose. They come all at once in massive proportions. And you can't always tell them apart or decide to feel one more than another. You just feel them all, all at once. I've seen it. A million times. I just couldn't see it in me.” He paused. Sophie could all but see him collecting himself, though the stress in his voice remained. “Of course, by the time I did, it was too late. I'd pushed her away.

“So I came to tell her . . . I want Sophie to know that as enormous and scary and almost unbearable as it can be to love her sometimes, living without her is worse.” His voice lowered as he said, “I hurt her. I know that. I came to say I'm sorry.”

As the silence in the kitchen grew, Sophie waited, anticipating the soft throat-clearing that always signaled what her father seemed to deem his turn to talk.

It came and he spoke calmly. “I agree with you. And it doesn't seem to me that anything you've told me is unnatural. Extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary emotions, which in turn produce extraordinary reactions. I think, in fact, it would have been extraordinary and quite unnatural if you hadn't felt overwhelmed and out of control. I also believe that it'll be considerably easier to acquire Sophie's forgiveness than it's been to forgive yourself—but one is not more important than the other.”

There was an abrupt change in her father's manner.

“Now, first, I feel I should tell you that while it is unexpectedly gratifying—and sentimentally satisfying—it isn't necessary for you to explain yourself or to inform me of your intentions toward Sophie . . . even if she is living in my home. However, that said, if you can relieve this blue funk she's been in lately and get her to stop scribbling your name on the grocery lists, you have my blessing and I will be forever in your debt. Tuesday evening I spent thirty minutes after work looking for ‘Drew laundry detergent' before I realized what she'd done.”