She hesitated, looked down at the book she still held. I could see her struggle with the decision, and then she attempted a smile. “Wine would be welcome, Will. It’s been a tough day.”
I was able to breathe again. I expected her to follow me to the kitchen, but she went into the living room, as if she were a guest in the house, for Christ’s sake, and I swung back to irritation. I grabbed a bottle of Cab from the rack and chose two goblets from a shelf. They were hand blown, part of a collection begun when we’d started dating. Whenever we took a weekend away, we’d buy two matching wine goblets as souvenirs instead of the usual tourist crap, a tradition we continued after we married. I can still recall where each pair came from. Block Island. Provincetown. San Francisco. The East Village. The anniversary trip to Florence. The squat-stemmed glasses in my hands came from a craft show in Quebec City, goblets that once represented the future we were building, a future as it turned out that was as fragile as crystal.
When I returned to the living room, she was sitting in one of the Morris chairs, lost in thought, staring intently into the far distance. Again, as I had in the foyer, I studied my wife. She had changed, and it was more than the haircut. I searched for the words. Seriously self-contained. No laughter shining in her eyes, though that had been gone for some months. I tried to see in her something of the woman I’d married, the girl who laughed with ease of a child, who wore not only her heart on her sleeve but her mind and soul as well, nothing concealed, the person I’d tried to comfort through the long fall and winter just past when we were fellow survivors clinging to the lifeboat of each other. I remembered that day last November when I had come down from the studio in the midafternoon to find her in the kitchen sobbing. She’d been dressed in a blue sweater the shade of cornflowers that fell softly to her hips and a charcoal skirt, black boots, an outfit she’d chosen for lunch with Jan and Alicia, an outing I had encouraged and taken as a sign that she was on steadier ground. “What’s wrong?” I’d asked. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Between shuddering sobs, she’d related the story, how in the middle of lunch, she had broken down and fled to the restroom of the restaurant until she could regain control. Later, on the way back to the table, she’d overheard Alicia saying, “I don’t know what to do with Sophie. She’s a mess. She’s just a mess.” I had held her, let her cry, her tears wet on my shirt. “I’m not a mess,” she kept repeating. “I’m not. Can’t they understand that I’m grieving?”
“Alicia is an ass,” I’d said. It was Alicia, I remembered, who early on had told me grief was like having a house burn down. It took a long time before you realized what you had lost. For an instant I feared I might strike her. “I know exactly what I have lost,” I managed before I walked away. I recalled, too, the day in mid-December, the first day Sophie had said she was not going back to school. She’d notified the superintendent that she was quitting. “You quit?” I’d had absolutely no idea she was even thinking of this. Her counselor had encouraged her to return to work, had told her the routine of work might be helpful, and although I admit I had had some reservations, I’d supported her decision. After all, she loved her job as choral director at the school. She loved the kids. How many times had she said it was the kids who made the job worthwhile? The rest of it—administration, rules, regulations—were joy robbers.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she’d told me.
“It’s okay,” I’d said. I’d assumed she no longer had the energy to fight the battles her job entailed: convincing the school committee that the majority of choral music was sacred but that this didn’t mean she was trying to bring religion into the school, battling the athletic department for a share of the students’ free time after classes.
“It’s not okay.”
I’d tried to embrace her, as I had after that lunch with Alicia, but this time she’d escaped my arms. I’d struggled to think of what to say, to find some way to go on, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She walked up the stairs to Lucy’s room and crawled into Lucy’s bed. “It still smells of her,” she whispered to me when I went to find her, and her words struck me hard. Lucy’s smell. The fruity mix of apple-scented shampoo and the deodorant that smelled faintly of baby powder and beneath this the singular indefinable scent that was our daughter.
Sophie stayed there that night. And the next. And for weeks after, long after the last traces of our daughter clung to the bed linens. I’d tended to her, bringing her soups and bowls of milk and toast, as if she were an invalid, one suffering a terrible and terminal illness. I was helpless in the face of this collapse.
During those weeks, her sister, Amy, drove down from Maine for several weekends, dismayed and worried about Sophie’s condition and as helpless as I had been in the face of it. I fielded calls. She didn’t want to speak to anyone, not her friends or her parents, who phoned from Arizona, or her therapist, who called regularly, or Amy, who, after she returned to Maine, called each night.
“Please,” I’d begged as the weeks passed. “Please. At least come downstairs.”
“I can’t,” she’d say. “I can’t do any of it, Will. Surviving is the most I can manage right now.” I saw then, as some part of me had known all along, that our journey through these days was a solitary one. Separate lifeboats.
It was someone from school who pulled her from—if not grief, at least from the bed. Joan Laurant showed up at the door one Saturday morning early in March and asked to see Sophie. “She’s not available,” I’d told her. “She’s still in bed.”
Joan was the high school PE teacher, and according to Sophie she never really fit in with the rest of the faculty. “It isn’t because she’s a lesbian,” Sophie said. “It’s that she’s incapable of putting up with the bullshit the job requires. If they didn’t want to risk a lawsuit, she probably would have been fired.”
Now she stood in our foyer, a fit and attractive woman, brusque nearly to the point of rudeness. Before I could stop her, she’d brushed aside my concerns and charged up the stairs like a train without brakes. As if guided by radar, she’d gone directly to Lucy’s room, where Sophie lay, duvet pulled nearly over her head. Joan took one look at the lump that was my wife and said, “Come on. Let’s go. We’re going out.”
Sophie stared over the edge of the blanket, listless and wan.
“Get up, kiddo. We’re going to go fight.”
“What?”
“Fight. You know. Punch. Jab. Hit. Box. Fight.”