“You don’t have to start anywhere,” I said miserably. “I know this is going to take time. And I’m staying because I want to give you that. It’s just…it’s hard not knowing.”
“I know.” Sophie put her hand over mine. “And I want to tell you how it happened, you know? The right way. In order, I mean. First this, then this, then that.” She raked her fingers over the top of her bandanna. “I just want to make sure I get it all, okay? There’s so much, Jules. Every time I think I’m ready to start telling you something, I think of something else that I forgot, and then I get so worried about not telling you everything that I just shut down completely.”
For a moment, just for a moment, I tried to imagine what it was that Sophie was going to eventually get around to telling me. Maybe if I were in her shoes, I’d need her to go a little easier on me.
“How about this?” I suggested. “How about if and when a thought comes to you—any thought, it doesn’t have to be in order or from the beginning or whatever—and you feel like talking about it, you just say it. Right then. No matter how weird it sounds or how out of place it might seem. Is that something you think you could do?”
All the air seemed to go out of Sophie, as if someone had pulled a cork out of the top of her head. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay. That might work.”
A few minutes of silence passed. Sophie sipped her coffee, but she didn’t eat any more of her breakfast. I finished my pancakes and eggs and pushed my mug forward when Miriam came back around.
“She was beautiful,” Sophie said after Miriam had left again. I looked up, startled. “She looked a lot like you when she was a baby. Except instead of brown hair, she had this big, thick tuft of black hair. It was like a mohawk or something. It ran the length of her head, from her forehead all the way to the back of her neck, and just stuck straight up. It was the weirdest, cutest thing I’d ever seen. And she had huge eyes. Wide, wide blue eyes, just like yours. Dad used to call them ocean eyes.”
“My eyes are green,” I pointed out.
“They didn’t used to be,” Sophie answered. “When you were a baby, they were blue. They changed to green later.”
I sat back, slightly amazed by this tiny fact.
“I loved that head of hair of hers,” Sophie continued. “I was only four, you know? Little kids get a kick of out of stupid stuff like that. And I was just fascinated with it. I was always trying to brush it, or clip on those little plastic barrettes when she was sleeping.” She shrugged. “It never really worked, though. Maggie had a hard time during her first year. She cried constantly. It was this weird little cry—really soft and sad, almost like she was whimpering. It would’ve been all right, I guess, if it didn’t go on and on and on. It drove me crazy.”
Sophie began to trace the rim of her coffee cup with the pad of her middle finger.
“Dad was really good with her then. I don’t know how he stood all the noise, but he did. He’d stay up all night with her sometimes, just rocking her and singing to her until she fell asleep. He had a terrible voice, but he’d sing to her for hours. ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby.’ ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ Even when she got older, Maggie could never go to sleep unless Dad sang to her first.”
I barely breathed as Sophie continued to talk, afraid that if I did, I might miss a single spoken—or unspoken—word.
“Mom and Dad thought all the crying was because she had colic. You know that thing that some babies get where they’re just born fussy? They had all these tests done on her, and took her to different doctors, and nobody could find anything, until finally, when she was about six months, I guess, one of the doctors said that he was pretty sure she had asthma. He gave Mom and Dad this tiny little face mask, which they would put over Maggie’s face every night. Her medicine, which was being pushed out by an inhaler connected to the mask, would mist over her nose and mouth, so that she could breathe it in. They did that twice a day, every day, until…”
Sophie’s face darkened. She rolled her bottom lip over her teeth, and then pulled her package of cigarettes out of her pocket.
“You’re not allowed to smoke in here,” I said gently.
“I know.” She withdrew a cigarette and held it between her fingers.
“Anyway, even with the treatment, Maggie still cried. I didn’t understand that it was because she couldn’t breathe right, you know? That she couldn’t catch her breath. All I could see was this new little person who wouldn’t let me touch her hair, who hogged all of Mom and Dad’s time and left me out in the cold.” Sophie ducked her head, scratched the side of her chin, and then winced. “Once, when it seemed like the crying would never stop, I ran into her room and shook the sides of her crib and screamed at her to shut up.” She glanced up at me quickly, trying to gauge my reaction. “And that wasn’t all of it. I told her that I hated her and that I wished she’d never been born.”