Chapter Four

The Secret Sister
Chapter Four
Sophie
June 1984

In February, before everything came apart and disappeared as fast as it had begun, they walked hand in hand in the deep silence of a snowstorm. He’d appeared at her door at almost midnight with a red runny nose and his hands stuffed deep inside his coat pockets. He stamped his feet before crossing the threshold of her front door and backing up to the old, iron woodstove she had packed full of logs just minutes before.
“It’s really coming down out there. You want to go walk?” He’d said, but she already held her coat in her hands, ready to slip it on. Of course she would go. She always did.
Outside in the grey-purple night, flakes, fat and nearly round, settled in her hair and on her shoulders, crowding the sky above them as they walked under the amber streetlamps, imprinting the fresh, virgin snow with their boots. They crossed the street and into the desert, letting the lights of town fade out behind them so that the sky lit their way by itself, glowing from somewhere or something (the moon? the sun? stars?) reflecting off the clouds.
“Isn’t it strange when the world gets all violet-y grey like this?” She asked Loren.
“You’re strange, but you know that. I’ve said nothing original here,” he replied with a soft smile. The cold bit at her bare face, but hearing Loren’s breath next to her, his shuffling feet, the scratching of his soft blonde-red beard against his nylon coat neck, warmed her even with him at his usual respectful distance.
“No you haven’t. Not at all.”
He bumped her with his shoulder, nudging her sideways then gave her (or maybe himself) space again. The world felt padded, insulated as if containing absolutely no hard edges or sharp angles. Even their voices could go nowhere, give no echo, and instead practically stopped where they began.
Maybe that’s why they kept mostly silent, slowing up after a while until they practically meandered along, Sophie kicking the sagebrush she came to, knocking them naked, wondering how long it would take for them to be covered in white again. The Reno news forecast called for at least three inches here, more than they had seen in years, really. And just like what happens whenever they are in for a good overnight snow, the town hunkered down quiet. Not one car could be seen. Sophie imagined most of the town streets, with the exception of Main Street possibly, were completely blanketed and undisturbed. Like she and Loren were the only two people here to make any sort of mark. The only two people left.
She didn’t know what had made him take her hand then, what made him bridge that distance he always seem so determined to hold, as they fell to a stop there in the middle of the desert, maybe a mile or so out of town, right in front of the barbwire fence they had walked alongside the entire time that kept them out of the base’s land.
But there it was, long fingered and cold, cupped around her own.
She looked down at it then up at him and underneath his beard he smiled and furrowed his brow as if to say, “I shouldn’t do this. But I have to.”
* * *
But now it was June, and the world a very different place. Sophie had been holed up in her bedroom since sunrise, thinking, curled into the window seat wrapped up in an old thin blanket, looking down and out at the world around her. She had been anticipating this morning, this day, with a mix of dread and relief for months now. She’d thought long and hard about what she might feel, what she might say to herself to get through all this mess. But really all she felt was this strange sort of benign numbness. And so she sat thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
June 2nd. Since he’d told her about the significance of this date the previous August, back when their conversations were casual and information was given with barely a thought to any sort of pain it would contribute to in the future, she hadn’t even thought much of what would come to pass because at that time she was in no way in love with Loren the way she was now. But since that February snowstorm when he took her hand out in the middle of the desert, and she realized that she meant nearly as much to him as he did to her, June 2nd had been a fixture on her mind for nearly every minute since.
The sky shone bright and blue and the dry earth had already started to warm from the cool night before. She wondered if nice weather would be expected in Wyoming as well. 8am here. 10am there. Only 6 more hours until Loren would be a husband.
* * *
Sophie could come up with ten or so distinct days (or nights) in her life that she thought defined her, gave her presence, and made her a human being solid and alive on this earth. Other people probably had more moments to shape them, Sophie imagined, but ten by the age of twenty-six was enough for her. Plus, it was encouraging to note that three of these days (or nights) had occurred in each of the past three years. It meant her life was speeding up, meaning more, and things were happening now that were not happening before, and good or bad, the fact that more moments, more events had come into existence meant she was getting to have them in the first place. And that was good because it meant she was not sitting as still as she had been and hoped it meant she would not sit as still as she thought she always would. It helped her to anticipate movement.
The first and most obvious experience to shape the rest of her life would be today, Loren’s wedding. She didn’t know how just yet, but the fact it would alter her forever was just plain inevitable. This day, June second, was an ending, the stopping of a period of time that began the day she met him when he literally tripped over her while sprawled out on the lawn of the elementary school… otherwise known as the second day to shape her life in the past three years.
Both moments Loren. Both moments to do with him.
But the third most important day came long before he ever did and had absolutely nothing to do with him, and for this she was thankful. She’d hate everything in the past few years to be just about him. She never wanted to be the sort of woman whose life could not move forward without a man as a catalyst. Instead, the day her mother asked her in the dead of winter three years before if she wanted the pink house for her own filled the spot.
“What do you mean, want it?” Sophie had asked as her mother sat down on the recliner chair and covered herself with the green and brown zig-zag patterned afghan Sophie had just folded neatly over the back of the couch. Wind howled against the front of her small duplex, slamming the screen door against its frame, the cold seeping in underneath the closed wood door void of its weather stripping. Warm currents of heated air pushed against the draft to no avail and the living room kept a chill even with a bright open window bringing in light. Stupidly sunny but freezing at the same time… Nevada at its best. What Sophie wouldn’t give for a sky grey and dark, and heavy clouds hanging low in the valley. Something anyway, besides a bright blue world and the deceptive appearance of warmth to tease Sophie into the hope it was such. She guessed that was how things just had to be around here.
“I mean want it. Do you want it? I want to sign it over to you.”
Sophie wandered her living room, picking up her knick-knacks from their proper places, dusting the area where they had been, and setting them right back where they belonged, turning them just so.
“Why?” She finally asked even though she knew what was coming.
“I just can’t be in this town another minute.”
Of course she couldn’t.
Sophie’s mother told people all the time the things she could not tolerate. And she could not tolerate this town. Her mantra muttered almost daily, like a prayer, was that she had to leave. Run away. Get out of the town where she had always been and barely left. Move on. See other things. Be in another place all together so she didn’t have to be here. Nothing good ever came with being here.
But her mother never left. She was eternally the boy who cried wolf. Every minute her mother couldn’t stand to be in this place would turn into an hour, a day, a year, a decade and here would be her mother still, static and unmoving as just about everyone else. Here. Still wishing she were somewhere different. And Sophie just got sick of hearing the word escape her mother’s lips and attach to anyone who would listen, this wishing for movement completely absent of the motivation to move.
“Sure. Why not? I’ll take it,” Sophie adjusted her lace curtains to open halfway and let the afternoon sun light up a strip of living room carpet the color of wet rust. Particles swirled in the sudden disturbance of air then settled, glittering in the light like fairy dust. Sophie realized she’d have to wash them again and reached up to pull them off their white metal rods. Nevada, its dirt and its tendency to weigh down and coat every potentially pretty thing with heavy grit always got Sophie thinking how much work there was in keeping things the way they could be.
“It’s a darling little house,” Sophie continued. “And it would be free. Can’t beat that.”
She rolled up the curtains around her arms like a window shade, shot a quick smile to her mother and she didn’t give it another thought. Not that day, not the next week, not the next month. Not until the day after a storm brought in a dusting of snow and bitter cold temperatures did Sophie’s mother show her just how serious she was about the idea of leaving. She met Sophie at her duplex after work to take her down to the courthouse to sign the papers so she could have the house free and clear.
“You’re getting the house one way or the other, sooner or later. Take your pick,” her mother said once Sophie realized what was going on. Janice Vallstead had the papers set out in a neat, orderly row on the counter at the recorder’s office, her notary stamp set out next to her like a salad fork. The empty courthouse, ready to close up for the evening, echoed with an occasional footstep and closing door and the night darkened the windows behind Janice’s head.
“Couldn’t you have told me this earlier, Mom? You couldn’t have said something to me earlier about this? You just drag me down here?” Sophie looked at Janice and Janice turned away, pretending to ignore the conversation. Sophie could see clear as day what would happen as soon as Janice left the building, drove home, went to her weight watchers meeting or choir club at her church or whatever. She’d have a story to tell: Sophie and Nadia Welsh had been in and argued about a matter they should have discussed in private. She’d make sure to use exaggerated gestures and widen her eyes at all the proper places and the other women would eat it up. Because that is what people did in this town, Sophie knew that, just like probably every other small town in existence. They told stories about their outsiders.
“I told you about this months ago,” her mother insisted. “That day at your house. You said you would take it. I’ve made plans.”
Sophie tingled with realization but said nothing.
“Now you two can settle the differences tonight, Nadia. I have these papers all worked up. If you need to come back in the morning or another time, there is no problem with doing that. No need to rush.” Janice sounded the way a mouse would if it could talk. Squeaky and pitched, but tiny. She was also part of the “haircut club,” an unofficial grouping of women Sophie had noticed perpetually had the exact same haircut. She’d discovered this phenomenon years ago as a kid and as time progressed, the style of the haircut changed, but was always, always repeated among these twelve or so women.
Lately, they had come up with a style that was about shoulder length, permed in the back so that it took on the shape of a wavy triangle and feathered in front, lapping over the ears. Janice’s hair on this particular afternoon was a stunning example, lit up like a halo around her head. This haircut told everyone in the most subtle of ways to stand back. She was a chosen one. She mattered.
“I’ll just tell you one thing,” her mom hissed, clutching Sophie’s elbow in her hand. “If I don’t get out of here, it won’t be long before you’re finding me dead in the bathtub. And I swear to the powers that be, Sophie, it won’t be long. That “later” I speak of will come a lot sooner than you think.”
Sophie took the pen and swiftly signed her name. “I take it. I give up.”
Janice smiled, pleased. Sophie walked out the courthouse doors and started on the way home, walking halfway there before her mother pulled up next to her in her old pickup truck.
“Get in, you little shit. Quit pouting.”
“You can’t say that kind of stuff to me, mom. I know what you’re doing.”
“Once again, your father wins out, doesn’t he? He gets to be the martyr.”
“I’m walking home.”
“Just get in.” Her mother reached across the seat and pushed open the door.
“He didn’t kill himself, mom. And obviously you’ve won. You get to be the martyr.” Her mother sighed. An old argument played out again and again in almost the exact fashion every time. Sophie slid into the seat. “You knew I couldn’t make a scene. Why do you always do that?”
“Because you let me.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Sophie had the deed in hand a few weeks later that the situation felt real enough to finally ask her mother. “But where are you going?”
They had finished breakfast and together smoked cigarettes at the dining room table. Sophie would never normally smoke inside anyone’s house, but her mother never smoked outside her own. Since they barely talked to each other without a cigarette in hand, if Sophie wanted to have a conversation she figured this was a good enough compromise. The table underneath their elbows wobbled from a loose table leg so even the slightest movement shook the contents cluttered on top. But it was otherwise sturdy, dark solid oak and Sophie couldn’t remember the house without it as an ever present fixture.
“Winnemucca? Elko? I don’t know. I won’t know until I get there.” They sat centered below a small ornate chandelier type light, Sophie didn’t know what to call it, with crystals (or plastic rectangles that resembled crystals at least) that had dulled with dust and cobwebs, and gold plating that had long since chipped away, leaving the underbelly of dull grey metal exposed for anyone to notice. A built-in hutch took up the entire face of the north wall, filled full of old porcelain dolls her mother had collected throughout the years and placed haphazardly inside with little regard to presentation. Instead, close to what Sophie figured were fifty dolls dressed in costumes ranging from a 20’s flapper to a pioneer girl, a teeny-bopper girl in a poodle skirt to a Scarlett O’Hara replica. Their bodies mashed together, legs and arms entwined, peering out the glass doors as if claustrophobic and gasping, fighting for a view of the world.
For a woman so anxious to leave her place in life for so long, her mother certainly didn’t try to keep her possessions at a minimum. Not only was her hutch seconds away from breaking open and spilling forth all its contents, but so was every closet, every cupboard, and every one of the four bedrooms in the house, including the storage areas tucked into parallel walls in the loft upstairs. A dumping ground for bad memories, the garage had filled with clothes and tools and God knows what else. Sophie hadn’t been out there in years because of the way she felt overwhelmed and panicked inside it due to the sheer disorganization. That garage had been a mess since Sophie remembered it existing in the first place, if she wanted to really think about it. The place was her mother’s catch-all, somewhere to throw something away when she didn’t want to see it anymore, but couldn’t quite muster the courage to get rid of.
Her mother stood up, left the kitchen and returned with her own familiar coffee cup in hand. The base’s logo on the front had long since faded out from being rubbed raw by her hands perpetually cradling its middle and old coffee rings stained the inside ceramic like layers of sediment.
“You want to do this? You really have to do all this?” Sophie held the deed at arm’s length as if it could reach out and snap her dead in the face. Because Sophie wasn’t sure if she wanted it. She wasn’t sure at all.
Her mother looked at her dead in the eye, something she rarely did if she could help it. Her mother looked a lot of people in the eye, but not Sophie. Not really. Sophie rarely looked her in the eye either. They were both long used to looking away from each other while talking. “You don’t understand, Sophie, what it means to need something more. More than this.”
* * *
Sophie was twenty-two before she realized she had hated every second she had spent in the pink house since her father left all those years before. Because when he lived there the house lived too. Its walls breathed in and out with a pulsating undercurrent of something like consciousness hiding somewhere deep within them. Back then, people wandered through the house like a perpetual stream of life, stopping sometimes to sit on the old plaid couch and drink a beer, their feet propped up on the coffee table in front of them. Sophie would sit between these friends of her father, and he would sit in his leather recliner chair and everyone talked about things like mountains, the base, and the world outside of town that Sophie liked to imagine she’d get out into someday.
When people visited, her father liked to show off his rocks. He’d let the ones that could catch the light do so as it filtered in through the windows in the late afternoons. He’d hold each one delicately between his fingertips, turning them just right to allow for their best presentation. When her father brought out his rocks, the room took on a magic that would brighten the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and even the garage. The entire place enlivened so much Sophie could swear she felt the air actually warm around her as if the house had exhaled. These days, these moments, with the house taking breaths like a living thing, her father presenting his rocks and sharing his knowledge of how they came to be, and people crowding the living room with their bodies, beer and laughter, were what Sophie looked back on as the absolute best of her life.
But then they were gone. Just like that. Her father left and with him went all the luster and living Sophie had witnessed for years. What took his place was something like a shadow, an overcast of sorts so subtle it took Sophie a long time to even realize it existed. The house fell so deathly still and silent, as if somehow giving up without her father there to invigorate and inspire it into continuing. Instead it sat, a corpse, a skeleton, with ghost people stumbling through its bones.
To find somewhere that breathed and bent for the people who lived within it became Sophie’s single solitary goal. She craved a place to have company the same way her father had company. Somewhere for people to come and have a beer and talk about parts of the world Sophie knew nothing about. The pink house had its moment and that moment was long past.
So she made a move one Saturday in the heat of the desert summer. She took a walk down to Patchett’s, a small convenience store nestled in the middle of an R.V. park smack dab in the middle of town, to pick up a local paper and a six pack of Coors, a last minute selection and the same brand her father liked to drink. She thought it a cross between a good omen and a sense of fate that the newspaper bin sat directly next to the refrigerator full of that particular brand of beer. She’d never even bought beer before that day, and still felt she was doing something illegal when she set it on the countertop and waited for the old man who always worked there to ring it up. She masked disappointment when he didn’t card her and instead pulled a twenty from her wallet, smoothed flat with her fingers and set it down for him to pick up.
The summer sun had slipped behind the mountains by the time she walked out the store’s clanging doors and the shadows cast cooled the hot asphalt streets enough for her to wander down the main highway cutting through town without immediately sweating. She made her way to the park across town where she lay on her stomach in the grass away from the few families scattered around the community pool waiting for it to open for the evening swim. She read the classifieds while sipping her cans of beer and found a classified ad for what was to become the first place she ever lived in alone.
And it took on that life. Especially at first. She could put everything in its proper place, the place she had designed for it, and it was good and right and she held high hopes for what was to come even though all her stuff combined barely filled her house enough to look even the slightest bit homey. No matter. To her, what unfolded to her every time she walked in was a dwelling magic with potential.
As the months carried on the way months tend to do, she tried to remedy the sparseness by buying a dark grey couch used from the local paper. It helped a bit by occupying a corner of the room. She draped her favorite afghan over its back and considered getting a cat who might be inclined to sleep there, but never did make it down to the pound and commit to it.
Her next purchase came in the form of a small kitchen table she ordered from the furniture store on 5th street. It sat where a big kitchen table belonged and so it looked dwarfed by the room, almost like it was trying hard to be something it wasn’t. And it disappointed Sophie that it wasn’t quite right and that it didn’t quite fit. So she pretended not to notice it in hopes that eventually she would begin not to realize it at all. But no luck. The disproportionate nature of the whole matter grated on her nerves so much she swore someday to replace it before she went crazy.
Her walls sat bare and stark white and the windows covered with lavender lace curtains she’d bought at the Sprouse Reitz. She didn’t know why she bothered with them since they didn’t match anything else in the house and were almost always dirty. She’d just liked the color, she guessed, and bought them without much forethought, and she’d have to pay the price for it every weekend when she’d take them down to wash the dirt smell off them. But was done was done. And she’d committed to these lavender curtains and would keep them until they fell apart. And that was the way it was to be.
* * *
And now she had the deed to a house she wasn’t so sure she wanted, and most definitely not sure what she would do with it once she had it. How would she ever even begin to fill up her mother’s house with its four bedrooms, loft, dining room, living room, large kitchen and two bathrooms with possessions that couldn’t even fill a tiny duplex? Did Sophie even want this house in the first place with all its hard memories, dark corners and heaviness? But this day, the day the deed sat square in her hand like a dangerous animal placated into a sense of calm, became a very important one to her because she didn’t have a real choice in the matter. The house was hers.
That morning the house became Sophie’s alone, her mother stood, rubbed a cigarette hard into an ashtray and walked the coffee cup to the sink, leaving Sophie alone in the dining room to digest the hard facts. This house. Hers. She looked out the windows lined up in the wall neat and square, their trim probably once painted a nice white but now it had yellowed and peeled from years of neglect and exposure to cigarette smoke. Scratched and clouded from wind and sand, the window panes let outside light through in the foggiest fashion, leaving nothing to see in a sharp or contrasting way. Nothing but blurriness came in from the outside. She’d never have money to replace those windows.
The yard outside also seemed dull and ignored with its dirt floor and dry, brittle fence built tall enough to nearly obscure the entire view from the downstairs to the world around it. She’d have to till the dry soil, plant grass and hope for the best. And those trees. All those trees. Impossible. All she had wanted to do was start fresh and here she was again right back where she started and a sense of helplessness clung to her like the smell of smoke embedded into every corner and crevice of this house. No one had cared about this house for a long time. Could she even begin? With all this hate in her heart she had for it?
It was very easy to recall all those years of bland nothing punctuated by fierce pain and fleeting hope and happiness. Those memories held fast. The fights between her mother and father, the emptiness left once her father moved onto Lydia, the knocks on her window at night that she didn’t want to come… but hoped would come. Sophie thought maybe it was best to leave the past in the past and not return. It was hard enough just to visit.
But at the same time there was a sense of hope that she wanted to try on, the idea of something different she wanted to entertain. So she just went ahead and let herself, just this once. She closed her eyes to picture the house as her own and this day became one of the most important ones she lived. The daydreams gave her a home for herself. A place to be Sophie. And she’d make it hers. And that was that.
She’d paint the dining room a soft peach so that light could filter in through those windows and enliven and brighten the place so she could sit there in the morning and read. She’d wallpaper the kitchen in some sort of pink pattern maybe, or paint it a pretty robin egg blue. She’d take the loft upstairs as her bedroom so she could feel in place on top of the trees and have a place to escape to and hide within. The two windows on the opposite sides of the loft had window seats, and those couldn’t be wasted. For as long as she remembered she’d wanted her bedroom in the loft and now she could have her chance. Her mother had a small cramped bathroom built up there a few years back out of a dressing closet and the original drawers were still there, built into the wall. Sophie could put her fresh towels and other toiletries in them tucked away out of sight.
If the house were Sophie’s, she planned on it being a different place than it had been while she was growing up. It would be neat and quiet and just the way she needed it, not full of her father yelling, her mother crying, the clutter everywhere making her crazy, and the men. She would change history, change the course, shift perspective. If it was ever to be done, it would be done now. Headfirst.
Because it wasn’t necessarily just the painting and lack of clutter that made her hopeful, it was the change in environment and the difference of the details. It was an opportunity for the past to be irrevocably erased and molded into new form, so the present could happen on a different landscape. This wouldn’t be the same house and she wouldn’t be the same girl. The changes she’d be more than determined to make would alter the world and that world around her would, in turn, alter her. She’d evolve to who she’d always wanted to be. A fresh coat of paint on her past might just be enough.
When Sophie walked through the kitchen a little bit later, getting herself ready to leave, she looked down into the sink and saw her mother’s cup half full of cold black coffee. Two days later that same cup of coffee still sat in the sink now surrounded by a variety of other mismatched dirty dishes. But her mother was gone, taking nothing but her old tired suitcase and a few things that must have been important enough to bring along, leaving Sophie with a house full of everything else.
* * *
Sophie wasn’t sure if she could even say the trees in the side yard were planted per se, or if seeds were randomly thrown out just to see if they would take root or not. Elm and oak trees dominated the yard, competing with one another for space to extend their branches. As Sophie grew so did the trees and now they covered the yard in an interwoven mess of leaves so thick that she could barely see down between them from her bedroom window. She took Loren there once just a week or so ago, as soon as the weather warmed enough, to make love to him underneath the dome of dark green silhouetted by bright silver moonlight. With him on top of her, between her, and inside her, she felt completely covered and confined. It was the only time she’d enjoyed the trees and their canopy of outstretched tangled arms.
Otherwise, like today, they just seemed messy and out of sorts and just plain difficult to look at. Sitting there in her window the day of Loren’s wedding to his pretty Nicole, Sophie thought she might take the day to prune them into submission, get them neat and natural and not nearly as overwhelming as they had become.
Or not. Probably not. Most likely not.
The first year she lived in the house after her mother left, she was sure that any second her mother would return as if away on a long trip to see family or a vacation somewhere exotic. She even went as far to think her mother might have been planning all along some way to get Sophie back into the house to stay with her since she never really wanted Sophie to venture out alone in the first place. Maybe her mother thought a month away would be enough time for Sophie to get moved in and settled before driving back into town in her dodge pickup and return to her life like nothing had ever happened.
But her mother didn’t come back. Not a month later. Not two months later And as her mother stayed gone, Sophie got happier… at least in a general sense. Her mother had always been her only friend in town, her only confidante and her only company. She loved her mother and didn’t want to seem ungrateful of her attention, but there were times, many times, where she just couldn’t stand her.
The first few months her mother was gone were punctuated by her hastily written letters postmarked from Elko. She gave quick updates mainly with not much else but reflections on the very basics of her life given the kind of sparse detail she gave in real life conversation. The first letter arrived once Sophie gave up on the idea that her mother was right around the corner waiting to come back. She had taken a job as a waitress at a truck stop she never bothered to name. She said she liked the people she met and the money was decent enough for her to rent a small mobile home and still have a little left over to play the nickel slots on Friday night which was just the exact same thing she did living here.
After that first letter, Sophie wondered why she’d bothered to move when her life barely changed, but she couldn’t really judge, could she? She was living in the same house she’d lived in since she was born and was pretty much doing the same thing she always had except for a tiny blip in the screen when she’d lived in that tiny duplex for a time. Her life had barely changed either since she returned to the pink house she’d grown up in. Except she didn’t have her mother wandering around hating everything and everyone. That was one thing certainly different.
* * *
When Sophie couldn’t sleep, and there were many nights she couldn’t sleep, she’d wander up and down the streets, looking in at people’s houses. If lights were on and curtains open, she’d take a look at what hung on their walls, what played on the television if she could see it, and took notice of the color of their kitchen. Sometimes dogs ran up and down behind chain link fences, barking at her until she shushed them. And the ones she knew best she would pet.
Walking at night calmed her, put her in a place of thought that she couldn’t get to normally when people were around to see her move. It was easy to feel omnipresent, out alone, watching people’s stories unfold around her. In a town stretching one square mile from end to end, she had long since memorized who lived where and what houses sat on which streets. Shifting amongst the lives of the people who were so quick to ignore her here made it easier for her to look them in the eye and think, “you think I’ve done wrong? I’ve seen what you do.”
Take Denise Dupree, her girlhood neighbor, for example. On one of her late night walks, Sophie found Denise crumpled up on her front lawn sobbing into a baby blanket, rocking back and forth and sort of uttering this guttural howl wearing nothing but a flimsy nightgown. Sophie had no idea what had happened, but could guess easy enough. Denise had no children, had no reason for a baby blanket, and looked longingly at pictures of her friends’ children in the smoke shack on breaks.
Stuff happened like that sometimes to show Sophie people lived their lives suffering all one and the same.
A few months later, Sophie decided to walk out into the desert one awhile near the town’s border under the water tower where she saw Denise’s car parked in the shadows. She crept up carefully, not meaning to spy exactly, but just to see. Denise was nowhere in sight, but Jason Johnson, who was not her husband, was. Head back, eyes closed, obviously in the middle of a blow job. Sophie knew that was what was happening because she’d seen Jason in that state so many times before herself. So when Denise was nasty to her at work that next week, Sophie just pictured her with her head in Jason’s lap, taking in someone who was not the man she had promised her life to. Knowing this little indiscretion about Denise was enough to calm her when Denise said the things she always had to say. Because despite any pain she had herself, Denise could be wicked mean to others in general and to Sophie in particular.
These walks held beauty as well. She met Loren this way one night late the previous summer when the asteroid showers lit up the August sky in a series of fast, whizzing, shooting stars. She’d ended up on the front lawn of the elementary school, arms and legs spread as if making a snow angel. He’d nearly tripped over her while looking up at the sky. She’d been concentrating so hard on other things she’d never even heard him coming.
* * *
When Sophie moved out of her duplex and back into her mother’s house, she was so eager to do so that she managed to move her couch on her own. She loaded it up so one end hung out of the back of the small pickup truck she’d borrowed from her old man neighbor then drove slowly up to the top of town. She dragged it out and up the porch steps made of railroad ties and to the front door. She found it a place for it in front of the wood stove that provided the only source of heat for the entire house and covered it with the same afghan she’d had since she was a little kid. The rest of the furniture her mother left still sat in the spots long ago relegated to them, leaving the living room crowded and Sophie rather unsure of what to do next.
And here was where Sophie got stuck. Even though she had a house full of stuff she could use, she didn’t use anything that wasn’t hers. She used her own dishes and cleared out a cabinet just for them in the kitchen. She slept in her own bed in the small downstairs bedroom her father had used to store his rocks in because the loft was so full of her mother’s things she could barely get up there. Alone in a house that was supposed to be hers, nothing felt like hers. It was like she was house sitting, essentially, except the owner was kind enough to let her bring in her own furniture and other household items for the meanwhile. So after about four months, after the summer warmed the desert and Sophie got sick enough of looking at the house the way it had always been, she decided to start making the changes she’d imagined making that day her mother presented her with the deed in the first place.
The dining room table and the piles of newspaper that sat on top of it came first. She dragged the table outside and broke table legs loose. She took an axe and split the top apart and set what remained behind the garage, arranging it in a neat little pile, thinking she might use it next winter for firewood, even though it was nice oak. She just hoped her mother would never see it in this condition. She didn’t want to seem disrespectful. She put her own small dining set in its place underneath the aged chandelier type light she’d always liked. And there in the small dining room with the crowded built in hutch and yellowed walls and windows, her dining set looked much better than that old wood table ever did. Plus it fit better than it ever had at her old place. This made Sophie hopeful for things to come.
And from there Sophie continued. She hunted for boxes outside Ned’s liquor store’s back doors so she could pack up the dolls and such that crowded the hutch doors. She shined the glass until it was gleaming. She basked in the emptiness the room took on as she cleared out her mother’s things and made room for her own. She only had a few trinkets and collectables worth displaying in the hutch, but it didn’t matter. The room was already making sense, already had become her dining room and not her mother’s.
She swept and scrubbed the old linoleum floor after that, polished the windows the best she could and finally when she had done all she could do, she walked down to the hardware store on main street and picked out the shade of peach that she thought best matched her daydreams of what she envisioned her dining room to be. The next Saturday, over the blustery and cloudy morning, afternoon, and evening, she painted the dining room just the way she wanted it and the following morning she got up especially early just so she could see the sun filter into the space and fill it with light.
In the early morning sun, the shade of peach she had hoped so much for, the shade she envisioned would help fill the room with peace and tranquility appeared orange. Sophie tried to mask her disappointment, reassuring herself that even though it wasn’t perfect, it was still better than what had been. But she found herself wandering back to the dining room multiple times that day, attempting to stumble on the room in the proper light, hoping that somehow the paint would appear right and perfect in her eyes. But it didn’t. Only once dark outside did it take on the tone Sophie wanted it to. So she cried herself sick, pulling her hair and punching the tops of her thighs hard with her fists. Finally, once settled, she sat down at the dining room table and resigned herself to going down to the hardware store and trying again once she had the rest of the house in order.
“You can fix it later,” she told herself as she smoothed her hair and looked about the room as if someone were watching her. “You can always fix it later.”
And so the dining room remained its orange-y peach color while she worked to make the house around it her own by taking one room at a time. She emptied the kitchen cupboards and packed her mother’s dishes away in the garage. She threw away all of the food, the spices, and everything that remained in the fridge that she hadn’t bought. She scrubbed the butcher block countertops and cleaned the windows and their sills the best she could, digging dirt and dried up insects out of every crevice. She painted the walls a robin egg blue and liked the result well enough. Better than she did the dining room.
She sanded down and painted the old cabinets, ripped up the linoleum floor and replaced it with tile she laid herself. She did everything herself, except when Katie and Sam helped her, and it took her several months just to finish the kitchen, but once she did she felt proud and accomplished and never wanted to leave the room. She’d even find herself sitting on the counter reading before bed some nights, not wanting to wander through any other part of the house.
And so she continued. She concentrated on selling most of her mother’s furniture; some dressers, a couple of extra beds, the two sofas and the recliner chair that crowded the living room. She eventually got the house empty enough to move her own things where she wanted them to be and began to feel at least a little bit settled. It wasn’t until well into the second year she lived there that she painted the living room a soft yellow. She bought matching curtains made of a delicate print of daisies and ivy that twined together as if linking arms to cover the three main windows. She liked the way her living room ended up feeling cheerful and sunny like the outside was coming in.
She was more adventurous in the loft, her bedroom, painting it a rather dark plum, which she wasn’t sure she liked anymore than the dining room, because her room felt like a closed up womb whenever she went in it. But she found a white bedspread in the Sears catalog, white sheets and pillowcases, and it lightened up the room enough that she didn’t feel the need to do anything more to it.
The beginning of the third year, right after she met Loren, she ripped out the carpet herself with a little help from Sam and Katie. She refinished the hardwood floors, shining them into a dark mahogany. The absence of carpet left the house echoing and empty-sounding and she liked it that way.
And this time out of all the time she’d been alive she was the happiest, calm and warm in the place she’d made for herself. A place linked to but separate from her past. The place she needed to be if she was going to be anywhere.
* * *
The day of Loren’s wedding, Sophie showered; the first shower she’d taken since he left her this final last time. She closed the door and lit a couple candles she kept by the sink and shut off the lights lined up over the vanity. She let the water run so hot she could barely see because of the thick steam. And that was good and fine. It was hard to look at her body when his hands on just been on it three days before, running his fingertips over her skin, both of them memorizing the image, the sensation, because they knew it would be the last time something like this could ever happen between them. Their moments together had already gone on too long, been too much. They both had long since been drained from the output of energy it took to keep this going for the past few months. When his hands at last left the curve of her hips, when his lips separated from hers for the final time, she sighed a great sigh, the relief overwhelming. He did the same.
After the shower she dressed. Baggy Levi jeans rolled to her calves, a loose white tee shirt and huarache sandals. She pulled up her red hair into a sloppy ponytail, bumpy and still dripping wet. And she didn’t care. She paced the house, checking the windows for smudges, the bookcases for dust, the sink for dishes. Nothing much really to keep her focused and occupied so she wandered the rooms of her house instead, feeling out the world in this new sad space of hers. The story had ended. The path stalled. A dead end. Nothing more to this one except the credits running down the screen.
She could barely stand the thought of her bed still smelling of him, still smelling of his beard and his body from being tangled up in her sheets sweaty and clutching. She’d purposely avoided washing her bedding as a sort of way to keep him there just a little while longer. But it became too much now that she was clean and warm from the shower, her body completely absent of him. Because now he would become just like the others; someone she’d have to ignore and block out from her memory forever. And that was the worst because the memories having to do with him were the best of her life.
“You have to forget me now,” he said as they lay in this bed the final time, limbs entwined, skin sticking together in the most intimate of places. “Don’t you?”
She paused then pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingertips, each one, before she answered. “As soon as you walk out of here, I will have already forgotten your name.”
He stayed quiet a long time, so long Sophie didn’t figure he’d answer. But he did. “The last thing I am going to do is believe that.” But he knew better than to doubt that she didn’t mean exactly what she had said. He understood most everything about her now because he’d taken the time to. And he’d have to be a fool not to know just how determined she was to do just that. She would forget him.
Because this was the only way to deal with the crushing sadness she’d have to feel when she’d run into him and his pretty Nicole. Pretend it wasn’t there just as she had done since she was fourteen with all the countless other men and boys she’d taken. Just like the others, she’d learn to be able to look through him like she would a stranger. Put him in her past like she had put everything else.
She stripped her sheets from her bed, dragged them downstairs then stuffed them in the washer. Started a cycle with the hottest water possible. But she smelled them first. Inhaled them, smothered herself with them. Sobbed. Then she went numb all over and there was nothing left to do but stand there as the machine started to shake and rumble, washing Loren away.
* * *
What was next?
When she closed her eyes that June 2nd, freshly showered and wondering what she could do with the rest of her life now that everything had changed and gone the path she knew it would, she imagined Loren in a freshly pressed suit waiting at the end of an aisle at a church somewhere in Wyoming looking on at his bride, a fresh-faced tiny blonde thing with a veil to cover her face and a lace gown that trailed twelve feet behind her. She carried a large, cascading bouquet of lilies and baby’s breath and walked in time with the organ playing in the background. All eyes on pretty Nicole. Loren watching her come to meet him there at the end of the aisle, seeing his entire life meld and fix itself in his line of vision. This would be his life. His life with Nicole, making love and making babies, teaching students and living life. There it was all there right in front of him. And Sophie let herself entertain the notion that somewhere deep down inside he thought of her, the woman he claimed to love but never felt an obligation to. The woman he claimed to love above all others. And yet here was the choice he made instead. She let herself entertain that thought for a good long while, at least until the afternoon when she decided it would be best to organize the garage so that in time she could clean it bare. The last thing she’d do for this house on this very, very important day.