And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “There’s nothing for you to do here tonight,” Peggy said after introducing herself. “You ought to go home.”

  “We can’t leave her here,” Sophia answered.

  “Well, you can’t take her with you,” Peggy said, smiling.

  “What if she wakes up?” Darius asked.

  Peggy put her hand on top of his. It was mottled like a piece of expensive Italian paper. “I’ve worked on this floor for thirteen years,” she said. “Patients in your daughter’s state don’t wake up overnight. It takes weeks, maybe even months. You need to conserve your strength for the days ahead. You can sleep on the floor. I’ve seen others do it, but I’m giving you the best advice I know.” Sophia searched the nurse’s face for some hidden meaning in her comments but couldn’t find anything.

  “She’s right,” Sophia said, “let’s go home.”

  Darius opened his mouth to argue but then stopped himself. “You’ll call if there’s a change. Any change. Good or bad?”

  “Of course,” the nurse answered.

  Outside, in the parking lot, the night had turned cold and clear. Sophia’s car had long since been towed. To make room in the backseat of her father’s Volvo, Miranda had to push aside an assortment of books, papers, a sweater, a squash racket, several empty takeout coffee containers, and a twenty-pound bag of topsoil Darius had bought at the organic market and never gotten around to unloading. The dirt made the car smell loamy, like a garden after a long rain or, Sophia couldn’t help thinking, a grave.

  When they pulled into the driveway of their house, Sophia was startled by its darkness. Some member of the family was normally home by now or had left a light on, but today the family had left in the fullness of the sun and returned in pitch black. It was like the first time she returned to a winter on the East Coast after living in California. My God, she’d thought, looking at the bare trees and brown grass, how could she not have noticed the death all around her? In the kitchen, a mug half filled with coffee sat in the sink. Sophia stared at it, stricken by the curdled star of milk in its center. Was it Helen’s? She thought of the relatives of those who died in the World Trade Center, how they’d combed hair out of brushes or submitted old toothbrushes in Ziploc bags for DNA samples.

  “Look at that.” Darius’s voice knocked the thought out of her head. The number 30 blinked on the answering machine. He pressed the play button.

  “Do we have to do this now?” Sophia asked.

  Miranda leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded, head down.

  “I’m not tired.” Darius sat down with a pen and pad of paper.

  Sophia poured herself a glass of scotch and sat across from him. Usually, she drank wine but she felt the need for something stronger, more corrosive. She could tell from the happy, careless tone of the first messages that they had called pre-accident. Darius meticulously wrote each one down. Sophia sighed.

  “She’s going to want them when she wakes up,” Darius answered.

  After the fourth message, the calls changed. First, there was the sound of whimpering followed by the quivery voice of a girl asking if somebody was there. Was Helen okay? Could anything be done? Would they call and let her know how Helen was doing?

  Sophia picked up her scotch and left the room. Miranda was about to follow when Jason’s confident baritone filled the room.

  “Miranda?” He sounded older and embarrassingly robust on the machine. Darius glanced at Miranda, who stood, riveted, red-faced, still pointed toward the door. “It’s Jason. You just left an hour ago, but…” Miranda winced, mortified by the carnal suggestiveness of his voice. He might just as well be saying, “Thanks for the shag,” or “Nice tits,” or something equally awful when overheard by her father. But he wasn’t that kind of person. Would she ever learn to stop underestimating him? “What I mean is, I’m glad we met and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Okay. Bye.”

  Darius forced a smile. “I didn’t even ask about today. How was it?”

  “Fine,” Miranda mumbled. “Good night.”

  In the bedroom, Sophia lay down on the bed, fully clothed, balancing the scotch on the hollow between her breasts. Every few minutes, she would raise her head to take a sip. She hadn’t eaten since lunch but instead of making her drunk, the scotch seemed to make her more sober, able to feel and see things more acutely. Even the every day sounds of the house seemed louder than usual: the soft swish of the passing minutes on the clock, the far-off rumble of the boiler in the basement, the sound of water running—had Miranda flushed a toilet? And beyond that, the delicate roar of the vast city as people pursued their lives—eating, drinking, fucking, fighting, running over one another. She thought of the morning a few weeks earlier when she had been wakened by the sound of water rushing through the pipes. When she went to investigate, she found Helen’s room empty. Sophia had gone back to bed, troubled by her discovery. It was possible that Helen had woken early and wanted a shower, but Sophia doubted it. More likely, she had snuck out for the night and come home early. Sophia wondered if she should confront her. Her own parents had been so smothering, she wanted to give her children space and air to grow, the way plants do better when they’re not crowded in the garden bed. Over breakfast that morning, Sophia had looked Helen right in the eye and asked, “Tired?” But Helen only shrugged. “A little,” she’d answered. If Sophia could, she’d do it differently. She’d keep them home, away from danger. Away from men on motorcycles.

  When Darius finally came to their bedroom, the scotch was almost gone. He smiled vaguely in her direction but their eyes did not meet. Was he taking more time than usual in the bathroom or was the elongation of time the work of the liquor? Normally, she relished having the bed to herself, but on this night, she could not bear to be alone. She went into the bathroom. Her husband was staring at himself in the mirror.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered.

  She put her arm around his shoulders and they walked to bed together, awkwardly, like two drunks supporting each other. She crouched in front of him to take his shoes off.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She sat back on her heels, embarrassed. Had he thought she was making an overture to sex?

  “We should talk to each other,” Sophia said.

  He didn’t answer. She tried again.

  “For me, the worst is not knowing. If she was dead, at least I would know how to feel. Right now, I feel torn between hoping and grieving.”

  “You can’t give up hope,” Darius answered, “it’s only just happened.” He sounded angry.

  “I know. I just want to be prepared.”

  “Why?” The word came out harshly, as if he were accusing her of something terrible. For the first time that day, she felt her throat constrict with the threat of tears. How typical, she thought, castigating herself, crying at the minor wound instead of the big one.

  “We’re going to have to be kind to one another,” she said. “We’re all we’ve got.”

  Darius turned away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

  Sophia turned off the light, glad for the cover of darkness. A few minutes later, her husband’s snoring filled the room while she lay next to him, rigid and sleepless, her mind veering toward the accident and the questions she had not asked aloud. Why had the young man hit the car? Was it an accident or had he done it on purpose? How drunk was he? Had it hurt? Had she understood what was happening? Did she have a last thought? A last word? Sophia got up and moved down the hallway, guided by touch, toward Helen’s room.

  It always surprised her how girlish her daughters kept their rooms. More than once, she’d offered to change the pink tulip wallpaper Helen had picked out when she was eight years old, but always her daughter said no, she liked the way it looked. As a teenager, Sophia had banished the stuffed animals of childhood as soon as she was old enough to wear a bra, but she had been in a hurry to grow up. For all their sophistication, her girls seemed happy to linger in the ca
refree oblivion of youth. Sophia chose to take it as a compliment. She and Darius had worked hard to protect them from so much of life’s unpleasant realities. Even when they fought their worst fights as a couple, the ones over money or Sophia’s disappointment in her career, they’d been careful to do it out of earshot, in the basement or the bedroom with the door closed. The girls had been lucky, she guessed, to be children during years of peace and prosperity. Sophia remembered long lines for gas and effigies of Americans burning in foreign cities when she was little. Watching the nightly news with her parents, she had felt hated by young men with black hair and eyes, who kept their women covered in black, like furniture in mourning. On 9/11, the family had watched in fascinated horror as events unfolded across the country, but after the initial dread passed, the girls seemed largely unaffected by it. Sophia had even worried her girls might be made boring by the ease of their lives. How quaint that worry seemed now.

  She lay on Helen’s bed and turned her nose into the pillow, looking for her daughter’s scent. Mothers, she had once read, can locate their children in a nursery through smell alone. When the girls were babies, she would have recognized the okra smell of breast milk and baby soap, but when she tried to conjure Helen now, she drew a blank. All her pillow smelled of was the green-apple shampoo she had bought at the health food store. Turning on her side, Sophia slid a hand under the pillow and hit something hard. She pulled a book out from the pillow and immediately recognized the illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra she had given Darius as a birthday present ten years earlier. It had been a half-joking, half-serious present, given at a moment in their relationship when the demands of parenting had seemed to drain the sex out of their relationship. He’d been pleased when he opened the package but the book had been a disappointment. The positions had names reminiscent of kitschy cocktails—Tiger in the Grass or Lotus on the Branch—and required either enormous flexibility or a two-foot-long penis. They had tried to re-create a few of the positions after the girls had gone to sleep but they’d ended up in the position they both preferred. Him on top. Her on bottom. Boring but effective.

  Sophia opened a page and studied the drawings. The brown fish eyes, long nose, and sensual lips of the man in the drawings looked like somebody she had met recently. But who? Suddenly it hit her. He looked like Dr. Marjani, Helen’s doctor.

  The next morning, Sophia lay awake on Helen’s bed when the doorbell rang. She held her breath. Was that how hospitals broke the news of a death? In person? Like the military? Of course not, she told herself, willing her pulse to return to normal. It could be anybody coming to the door at seven a.m.

  Darius opened the door. Helen’s best friend, Siri Bonavant, and her father were standing on the front stoop. He flashed back to a moment ten years earlier when he had gone to the Bonavants’ house after Sophia discovered an expensive jade-and-diamond bracelet in Helen’s sock drawer. When confronted, Helen admitted that Siri had given it to her. The Bonavants were overjoyed to see the bracelet—a family heirloom on the mother’s side—and the girls had not been allowed to see each other for three months. Both sets of parents secretly blamed the other girl’s influence for their child’s misbehavior and hoped the friendship would die, but adversity had only seemed to strengthen the girls’ bond.

  Despite their history, Darius could not remember the man’s first name.

  “George Bonavant,” the man held out his hand. “Good to see you. We can’t tell you how sorry we are about Helen.”

  Siri let out a muffled sob. George Bonavant put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. It was meant to be comforting but something about the angle of his hand suggested reproach.

  “Thank you,” Darius answered. “I’d invite you in but this isn’t the best time.”

  “Hi, George.” Darius turned to find Sophia standing behind him. Her hair looked like someone had taken an egg beater to it, and she was wearing yesterday’s clothes. If he had seen her on the street, he’d have thought, Crazy woman. Was that what separated the sane from the insane, he wondered, a night’s sleep in your clothes?

  “Siri has something to tell you.”

  Darius remembered that George Bonavant was a lawyer for the airline industry. He knew this because Siri had given Helen a ticket to go to Hawaii with her family the year before. All the McMartins had to do was pay for half her room and meals. Sophia had initially been against the idea. “She should work for the privilege,” she’d said. But in the end, she’d relented.

  Everyone waited for Siri to start, but each time she opened her mouth, she started to sob. George Bonavant frowned and began to speak. “Siri was there the night Helen met the young man on the motorcycle,” he said. “Apparently, the two have been seeing each other for a few weeks.”

  Darius and Sophia glanced at each other. This was the second time they had heard the news, thus rendering it officially the truth. Sophia tried not to dwell on Helen’s duplicity. There would be plenty of time in the coming days to ponder every aspect of the lies Helen must have been telling them all these weeks. Nights she was supposedly studying with Siri or Magda. Afternoons she was allegedly at the mall. How had she managed to look them in the eye day after day? And, more important, why? Had they prevented any of her schoolgirl crushes in the past? Even that idiotic stoner, Roy Beaudell, with the bad writer for a father. No parent could have wished such a child for a first love but they had not forbidden it. Children need to make their own mistakes. They knew that.

  “Apparently, the boy was—” George stopped, unable or unwilling to complete the thought.

  “A loser. Totally beneath her,” Siri said. The prospect of watching her father further botch the narrative of her friend’s relationship stirred the girl sufficiently to words.

  “Beneath her?” Sophia repeated. For one unpleasant moment she imagined her daughter beneath Bobby Goralnick in a carnal embrace. Of course that wasn’t what Siri Bonavant meant. She meant that Helen’s boyfriend was from a different class. It surprised Sophia to hear the words coming from Siri; she imagined those old class distinctions had died among the new generation.

  “He played in a band but it broke up. Then he painted houses. I guess he was handsome but Helen knew you two wouldn’t approve. Also, she said he drank too much. Yesterday was the day she planned to break up with him. She wanted to start her senior year fresh.”

  Sophia was learning every thing she yearned to know about her child, but in the wrong way, as if she were reading her diary.

  “Do we know where his family is?”

  Siri shook her head. “Somewhere in the South. I don’t think he was in touch with them. When Helen asked, he told her they were dead or they may as well be dead. Something like that.”

  Sophia recognized Bobby Goralnick from Siri’s description. When she was Helen’s age, her Bobby Goralnick had worked in the kitchen at her parents’ restaurant. His name was Yanni, he was several years older than Sophia, smoked cigarettes he rolled himself, and was in the habit of grabbing Sophia’s breasts when nobody was looking. She knew she ought to tell someone but instead she found excuses to go to the kitchen when business was slow. Yanni had a Polish wife with a china-doll face who picked him up and dropped him off for work in a gold Buick with Florida plates. If he’d had a motorcycle, she would have gotten on it and gone anywhere he wanted to take her.

  “Thank you, Siri, for coming and talking to us.” Darius was impatient to get to the hospital.

  “She asked me for a ride. I told her no, she should break up with him over the phone. I didn’t want her to see him again.” Her voice broke. Sophia knew she was asking for absolution, a sign saying they did not blame her for what happened. She knew she ought to say something to comfort her but something held her back. What if Siri had given Helen a ride? Sophia allowed herself a small puff of pride over her daughter’s principles—Helen was right, you can’t break a heart over the phone. Even Yanni had given her a gold locket the day before he stopped showing up for work. “Garbage,” Sophia’s father
had sniffed when he realized he was without a short-order cook for the lunch hour. She still had the locket.

  “It’s not your fault,” Sophia said. But clearly it was! Why couldn’t she have driven her? What was so important that it couldn’t have waited?

  Siri nodded, grateful. “How is she?”

  “Not good,” Sophia answered.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Darius said, glaring at Sophia. “Not yet.”

  10

  harry lacked the talent for sloth. Even as a child, he had dreaded the open-ended aimlessness of the weekend, time set aside for the ritual of church, family, meals on the good china. Things other people did. When he once mentioned it to his mother, she had immediately insisted they dress up the next Sunday morning and go to the fried chicken buffet on Route 80.

  “Really?” Harry had asked.

  “You bet,” she’d answered.

  On Sunday, he’d gotten dressed in his best clothes and waited until ten o’clock before trying to wake her.

  “Oh, honey,” she’d moaned. Harry was familiar with the yeasty smell of alcohol on her breath, like bananas gone black. “Can I take a rain check? I think I have food poisoning.” Harry had not minded her canceling nearly as much as he minded the lie. Food poisoning? Had she forgotten how often he had called her employers pleading the same so-called illness when the hangovers were too debilitating?

  Later, during the soap years, when the money had seemed endless and a loose, easy kind of friendship had sprung up between him and a few of the other actors on the show, Harry had tried to fill his weekends with golf. He liked the idea of an activity that took up the whole day. When, somewhere around the fifth hole, one of the other actors would inevitably turn to another, inhale deeply, and say, “This is the life!” Harry would join in, but deep inside he could never escape the make-work feeling of it, as if he were digging a hole, filling it back in, and digging again.