Something About Sophie

by Mary Kay McComas

  She came across a rock, barely waist high but not one she could jump over. That’s when she realized there was more light in the woods than her car would provide; looked up and saw a giant full moon that was both enemy and benefactor at the moment. With the briefest of inspections, she couldn’t tell if she could go around the rock so she started to climb; topped it without incident—despite the slippage of her sandals—to find it was a short drop off to a steep tilt on the hillside. So steep, she was afraid to continue her ascent upright. She bent at the waist and scrambled like an animal with four legs, head down, feeling her way through brush and over rocks and roots and branches.

  She was sure it wasn’t a good thing to be so loud—the tornado sounds of air coming and going through her lungs; her heartbeats echoing throughout the park, and the noise of her clumsy climbing had to be making her easy to track. Could she risk a breather to catch her breath and quiet her heart enough to check on him? Salty saliva pooled in her mouth and her stomach roiled. She groaned and spit, refused to vomit, and used her arm to wipe spittle off her chin and the unstoppable tears from both cheeks.

  Her vision cleared and promptly went black as she plowed, head down, into something solid.

  Her scream petered to an injured cry that resonated from one end of the woods to the other as she slowly realized her skull was split wide open . . . but she was still alive. She could move, too, though flailing wasn’t meeting the urgency triggering her muscles.

  Her eyes were open, but not seeing. She focused, tipped her head to make out dark beyond darker as her head began to throb. Putting forth a shaky hand she touched the darker—rough, solid . . . a tree! She remembered and understood immediately.

  Forward! Forward! Panic broke back into her mind even as she touched the point of impact on her head—sticky and stinging and rolling into her eyebrows—even as she started to scramble again.

  “Whoa!” A heavy boot landed in the middle of her back. Her belly hit the ground and her legs sprawled.

  “No. Please.”

  He said nothing—couldn’t if his rapid wheezing was any indicator. They were both spent and breathless—though Sophie believed she could go farther given the chance. Not that she saw another one coming any time soon. The surprise hit-and-run wasn’t likely to be unexpected a second time.

  “Please. Don’t do this. Don’t kill me, please. I don’t want to die.” She cried full on, without pride or caution—there simply didn’t seem to be a need for it anymore. She was caught.

  Tears and blood and dirt mingled in her eyes and on her face while his breathing grew slow and quiet again and he was ready to move on.

  “Come on,” he said, his tone more resigned than harsh. He reached down and found her arm—the pressure under his boot pressing the remains of her air from her lungs. She knew a moment of suffocating alarm before he grabbed her upper arm and stepped back, pulling lightly, helping her to her feet. She kept slipping—the pitch of the hillside, the disorientation from the grunge in her eyes making it difficult to see. He was patient with her, steadied her, waited for her to right herself. “Don’t do this again. Come on.”

  She could only assume he knew where he was going. She was aware only that it was downhill, away from her car; away from the parking lot and the road, away from safety.

  She staggered. Often. He’d stop and stabilize her, not unkindly, but didn’t loosen his grip.

  Her breathing was more like raggedy sobs, and in a surreal moment it passed through her mind that she was admirably well hydrated to still have tears wetting her cheeks. And then, and again oddly, she was reminded that both major and minor facial wounds were notorious for bleeding profusely—and she had an instant 3D-HD flashback of the moment she learned that fact in the first first aid class she’d taken in Girl Scouts . . . at the fire station . . . before they ate the brownies that were made by one of the firemen . . . that weren’t even burnt on the bottom like Mommy’s. . . . Daddy.

  “Please,” she repeated, her voice a raspy whisper. “Don’t. Don’t do this.” A despondent thought: “I . . . please . . . Do you have a cell? A cell phone? I only want to call my dad? That’s all, only my dad. To say goodbye? Please? I need to tell him that I love him.” She swiped at a fresh deluge of tears. Her own phone, snug in her back pocket, was a temptation, but also still her last best chance of being rescued. “I’m begging you. Please.”

  Without warning he shoved her to the ground and snapped at her. “Stop that!”

  They were in a ditch or a gully; she sensed enclosure—but perhaps it was simply the anticipation of a grave. She sat up. The moonlight wasn’t enough to make certain.

  “I’m sorry.” But she wasn’t. At all. She smacked the palm of her hand over the blood spout on the top of her head to stem the flow of blood. “If you have to do this, if you’re going to kill me, let me talk to him first.”

  “Shut up and let me think.”

  About the phone call? Lord God, he was human after all. “I won’t mention your name or—or what’s happening. I promise. I just need him to know I love him. It’ll only take a second. I promise.”

  “Forget that. And stop talking! I need to think!”

  About what? The mistake he was making? About letting her go? About how best to do it, to kill her? She held her breath. Disturbing any molecule in the humid night air might sway a lenient thought.

  He paced in short distances. It was an eon before he stopped to look at her and another before she sensed he was staring straight through her. What a weird man, she thought, distracted by his behavior. What was he thinking? What was he seeing in his mind? Why was he so far away? And then . . . how far away was he? Was this a miracle, another chance at escape? Which direction gave her the best odds? Oh! And maybe the old-dirt-in-the-face trick would hold him an extra second or two to—

  “It wasn’t my idea, you know,” he said, out of the blue, his tone petulant and rather juvenile—as if he’d gone back in time. “I told them not to do it. Jeremy and I both did. But once Cliff got something in his head, there was no stopping him. And that fool Maury did everything Cliff told him to do.” He paused, focused more intently on wherever he was in his recollections. “I guess we all did.” He shook his head in what looked like regret, the moonlight bouncing off his glasses. “I knew. The second he took his foot off the gas and I looked up and saw her walking up ahead, I knew what he was going to do. He talked about it all the time. Not right out, not in words exactly. But you could tell by the way he looked at her all the time. He’d say he thought she was pretty but you knew . . . in my gut I knew he meant something else. But I never thought he’d do it. I never thought . . .” He took a deep breath in and exhaled slowly. “That’s it, isn’t it? I never thought. Kids don’t, though, do they? They don’t think.”

  He didn’t seem to want an answer—which was good because she was toying with the idea of making another break for it.

  She lowered her hand from the stinging wound on her scalp, waited, let it drop to her lap when she realized the river was dammed up.

  “Or they think too much,” he went on. “Like in daydreams, so that sometimes the lines between what they think about and what they know they can’t really do get blurred. You know what I mean?”

  “No.” Short responses to keep him talking—the more he blathered the less air he’d have to chase her with.

  “Oh.” Stymied, he paced some more. “I’m just saying that maybe I knew what Cliff was thinking because I thought about it, too. Once in a while. Not like Cliff. I always knew it was wrong; that I’d never do it. I knew even thinking about it was wrong . . . but, hell, I was just a kid.” She caught the expectancy in the air but said nothing. Her reticence was making him anxious and jumpy. He heaved a sigh. “That’s not a good enough excuse, is it? It’s not. I know that. I’ve always known that. That’s why Jeremy left, and why I left. I couldn’t look into their eyes anymore. I kept seeing the way we were that night.”

  There was a long pause. He was asking and ans
wering his own questions—a good sign. And yet while it was perfectly fine with her if he slipped over the edge of sanity, she did need to speculate on how it would affect his reflexes. Faster? Slower?

  She hesitated, her mind jerked backward. We . . . that night . . .

  “You know I don’t think we thought she was even human. I don’t. Not that night. It was like she was too stupid to understand what was happening or maybe we thought she was so simple-minded she wouldn’t remember the next day so it didn’t matter.”

  She tipped her head to one side. What the hell was he talking about? Her skin began to crawl in a whole new way.

  He went on. “And you don’t know about people like her, do you? Not really. You can’t tell what they’re thinking. They say and do whatever passes through what little brain they have and—”

  He stopped short and it looked like he swayed a bit, like he was feeling dizzy. After a moment he looked her way again. “That’s not the point, though. Is it? Her being simple-minded made it easy but nothing could ever make it right.”

  “Simple-minded,” she murmured softly, remembering . . . that while she has developmental disabilities and is known to have wandered off before. . .

  “Yeah. You know. Retarded,” he said, frustrated, filled with shame and hopelessly without honor. He backed away immediately. “Not completely, though. I mean, she could read some, and write, and she could figure most things out if she had enough time. Slow, they’d say.”

  He nodded—seeming to think it a much better word.

  “Yeah. But for the most part no one cared. She was what she was. We all knew about her. She was harmless. Sweet even . . . real friendly, happy all the time. Most of the time she just . . . was, you know? She’d roam around smiling, saying hi to everyone by their full name. Hi, Frank Lanyard. Hello, Maury Weims. Good morning, Leigh Kerski. Sometimes she’d sit herself down in the middle of a group of us and pretend she was part of the conversation. No one minded. Now and again she’d say something—either completely off the wall or so true and smart it made your jaw drop—then she’d get up and wander off.” He gave an unconscious half-laugh. “There was no reason for her to be afraid of any of us. She was like a class pet or a school mascot; she was one of us. We all knew that loud noises scared her and she didn’t like being touched. And for the fuss that followed either one of them two things, it just wasn’t worth messing with her.” But, he recalled, “Unless you were in need of a quick distraction. A pat on her back or taking hold of her arm was better than throwing a live grenade into an angry mob.”

  Sophie sat in silence, feeling dead inside.

  He was lost in recollection. “She liked to walk around. Her old mama kept a real close watch on her, but once in a while she’d give her the slip and off she’d go. You’d see her strolling down Main Street and soon enough here’d come her mother, huffing and puffing to get her. She wasn’t well, though, the mother. She passed early on. After that you’d see her dad or the housekeeper or a babysitter trailing after her.

  “If you came across her alone somewhere and asked her what she was doing, she’d say she was traveling. And as far as I know, her destinations were always some wacky place she’d get into her head like DisneyWorld USA or she was going to Paris for springtime or to Boston to see what happened to the tea or the moon or . . . or some street where a character from a book lived.” He raised his hands in amused wonderment—the gun a loose appendage. “See, she knew stuff but the pieces didn’t always fit tight, you know? She was a couple years younger than us, but I heard that one of her teachers used to have her draw some of these places she traveled to . . . I heard she drew pretty good.”

  It felt like he was awaiting her approval for divulging so much information to her. She wished him in hell.

  He cleared his throat. “Looking back, it’s almost like it was meant to happen.” He flustered quickly. “Not meant to happen—we never meant for it to happen, but like a setup, a trap we fell into.” He paused again. “Well, no. That makes it sound like we had no choice. We had lots of choices. . . .”

  Choices. Everybody makes choices—some good, some bad. Some so easy you don’t even know you’re making ’em; some so hard they rip your heart to pieces. Good people make bad choices. Evil people make choices that hurt innocent people. Innocent people make choices that put them in harm’s way. It’s always the choices we make that whittle the life we live, Lonny had said.

  “I remember hearing the gravel crunching under the tires as he pulled off the road behind her,” Frank was saying. “The tension was already so strong it felt like a fifth person inside the car. We all knew something bad was going to happen—I did, at any rate. I didn’t know what, I swear. But I knew it was going to be wrong because of . . . because of how she was, you know?

  “When he told her it was getting too dark to be walking along on the highway alone, I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe I was all wrong. He wasn’t going to play any tricks on her or tease her or make her cry. She told him she had eyes like a cat and could see in the dark just fine and there was something so . . . I don’t know . . . evil, I guess . . . in his voice when he said, ‘Is that so?’

  “It wasn’t until he asked her where she was traveling to, and she said she was walking to the very top of the mountains to see the snow, that me and Jeremy looked at each other. He knew, too. And when Cliff said he’d seen the snow and offered to give her a ride up the mountain, Jeremy told him to stop, told him to leave her alone. Cliff laughed and called him a candy-ass. Then he got out and opened the back door for her to get in. She did resist, at first, but only because she didn’t want any of us to sit too close to her. Cliff told us to move, to give her plenty of room. We should have gotten out, let her have the whole backseat.” He stopped.

  “No. We should have thrown her over our shoulders and run like hell in the other direction. That’s what we should have done, that’s what I wish we’d done.” He pictured the alternate scenario in his mind. “But we didn’t. We knew how it would be if we didn’t go along. We knew we couldn’t leave him and we knew we couldn’t leave her with him. Trapped. We were trapped.

  “We moved way over and she smiled and got in. ‘Hi, Jeremy Bates. Hi, Frank Lanyard,’ she said.” He used his left hand to wipe her words off his lips. “Cliff got back in and pulled back onto the road and she sat in the backseat yakking about mountains and how the higher they got in the sky, the less air and the more snow they had and how some mountain climbers had to use air tanks like the one someone at her church used, and she went on and—”

  He stopped abruptly, grew thoughtful and paced a few steps back and forth before speaking again.

  “You know, I don’t think I ever heard her talk like that before. Do you think . . . ? Do you think she knew what was coming? Maybe she could sense it, like feel trouble coming. Think she was talking like crazy to keep herself calm or something?”

  She felt no compulsion to answer him. Even she knew what was coming and her upper lip was already curled with repulsion and disgust.

  Had she the wherewithal to examine the furor powering through her body at the moment, she probably wouldn’t have been surprised to note the shocking lack of fear in her system. He was looking smaller and weaker with every word he spoke. Clearly, the girl was autistic to some degree. Clearly, she was a trusting innocent. Clearly, he’d known she was in danger and he’d done nothing to help her.

  She was all fury and anger and rage as she leaned slowly to her left and bent her legs up under her right hip. She wasn’t going to die tonight, not without a good fight and not without tearing part of his face off first.

  “I thought, when Cliff turned into the park here, that he was planning to set her down somewhere and let her stumble through the park all night. You know, because of the cat-vision thing? That wouldn’t have been the worst thing we ever did to someone and I could always come back and get her later . . . or Jeremy could. Hell, it might even be good for her—teach her to stay home at night, not to get into ca
rs, to run screaming from people like Cliff . . . like us.” He shook his head. “She had to have known what we were like back then. She wasn’t that dumb. She saw. She heard. She could have figured it out.”

  “You pig.”

  He looked her way through the faint moonlight but said nothing—acknowledging that there was nothing to say. And while she obviously agreed, she was sorry she’d spoken. He was confessing his sins, distracted from the here and now—the time zone in which her left hand clutched as much thick, rich forest dirt as she could gather while she used her right to search for something big enough and hard enough to split his skull wide open and turn the contents therein to a slimy mush before she spit on them. Conversing in Supergrossout with five- and six-year-old boys was paying off in a most satisfying manner.

  “No. You’re right. What she was thinking didn’t matter. Not to us. We were like animals—all of us. Always looking for someone pathetic to hassle. And as long as I’m telling it all, for you I’ll admit I enjoyed it as much as anyone. I did. I loved that look on their faces when they first noticed us noticing them.” A loud bark of a long lost laugh. “Pure, raw fear.”

  “When they first noticed us, huh? I bet that when you were alone, when you weren’t with all your pals, people looked straight through you.”

  He looked away, wiping at something on his face.

  “And Lonora? How did she look at you?”

  She couldn’t seem to stop engaging him. And she needed to move to expand her search area. She bit the tip of her tongue to remind herself of the danger and remained still, waiting for him to speak again.

  It took a while.

  “She was confused, I guess.” He spoke so softly she almost missed it, straining to hear the rest. “Yeah. Confused. At first. No.” He shook his head. “The whole time. She didn’t understand. The whole time. She just didn’t get it.” He looked at Sophie, but he wasn’t with her anymore. “We stopped in the lot up there. I remember thinking that she was getting off easy. Setting her loose to wander in the dark for a while wasn’t so bad. If she were some kid, one of our regulars, we’d have taken all his clothes, too. So, I laughed with everyone else when Cliff opened her door and waved her out like she was royal or something.