I want to remember the song, she said. I feel like I should. You were with her for 7 years. He said, you remember a lot. You don’t have to remember everything. Nobody does. She ate in silence for a moment. Then, “What do you remember about her? That you haven’t told me?” He thought about it. Clare at 22, in the first month he’d known her, sitting on the hood of his truck, telling him she was going to be something someday, and not sounding like a boast, sounding like a promise to herself.
Clare, the way she’d argued with full investment, no halfway positions, every debate total war. Clare laughing at something stupid. the particular way she’d covered her mouth first and then given in, surrendering to it. She had very strong opinions about things that didn’t matter, he said. Like, she would debate you about the correct way to load a dishwasher for 20 minutes and be completely serious about it. Sophie’s mouth twitched.
She once made our neighbor redo his bookshelf because the books were alphabetical by first name instead of last name, she said. Ethan laughed. Yeah, that sounds right. She said first name alphabetical was for people who didn’t understand how libraries worked. She definitely would have said that they finished dinner with the shared warmth of two people who have found a piece of the same person in each other and the evening moved into the comfortable quiet of a weekn night and Sophie helped clear the table without being asked which she’d started doing
sometime in February without announcement and Ethan washed the dishes and it was ordinary and functional and exactly right. Victoria came back on a Sunday afternoon in the third week of March. She came back with her rolling bag and her laptop cases and a very specific tiredness that came from weeks of intensive professional negotiation, the kind of tired that lived behind the eyes rather than in the body.
She also came back with tucked under one arm a large flat package wrapped in brown paper. Sophie was in the orchard when the car came down the drive. She’d taken to spending part of her weekend afternoons out there with her drawing pad, rotating through different spots and different light conditions in the methodical way of someone building a body of work.
Ethan had seen her on his way in from the equipment shed and had clocked her in the same absent, affectionate way you clocked the location of people you’re responsible for. He came out onto the porch when he heard the car. Victoria got out looking tired and pulled her bag from the trunk. He took the bag from her, which she allowed without comment, and they walked up the porch steps, and she stopped in the doorway and looked into the house.
The kitchen table with Sophie’s homework spread on it, the jacket on the hook by the door, the general evidence of a household in use, and something in her face loosened very slightly the way a held breath releases. “How was it?” he said. “Terrible and then fine,” she said. We restructured the contract approach.
Found two smaller partners instead of one large one. It’ll work. She set the brown paper package against the wall. Where’s Sophie? Orchard east side. She changed out of her travel clothes and went out to the orchard, and Ethan watched from the porch as she found Sophie in the rose. And Sophie looked up from her drawing pad, and there was a moment between them, brief, not dramatic, the moment of two people who have been apart registering the return, the particular recalibration of space, and then Sophie scooted sideways on the old blanket she’d started keeping
in the orchard for sitting on, and Victoria sat down beside her and looked at the drawing. That was all. No big reunion, no performance, just the returning and the making room, which was its own thing, particular. insufficient. At dinner that evening, Victoria gave Sophie the brown paper package. “What is it?” Sophie said. “Open it.
” Sophie peeled the paper carefully. She was a careful unwrapper. Always had been, taking the paper off with an attention that suggested she thought the wrapping itself might be useful later. Inside was a framed print, one of Sophie’s own drawings, reproduced at large scale and mounted in a clean wood frame. the drawing of the orchard in morning light, the one she’d given Victoria to take to the hotel, but enlarged, framed, given back. Sophie stared at it.
“The hotel?” she said. “I had it done before I came back,” Victoria said. “I looked at it every day I was there. It helped me think.” A pause. “It’s yours. I thought you should have it properly.” Sophie looked at the drawing. Her drawing of the light through the orchard trees, the thing she’d said was the hardest thing to get right, reproduced at a size where you could see every deliberate line.
“Did I get the light right?” she said. “I looked at your orchard every morning for 3 weeks,” Victoria said. “You got it right.” Sophie set the frame on the table and looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked up at Victoria. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said. It was simple and direct in the way Sophie’s important statements always were with no decoration, no apology for the sincerity of it. Victoria looked at her.
Me too, she said. Ethan sat at the table eating his dinner and watching the two of them and not saying anything because sometimes the right thing was to let a moment be what it was without adding to it. April brought the hearing and the hearing brought its own particular anxiety. It was different from the first one.
The first hearing had been about proving something, about constructing an argument and presenting evidence and hoping the judge saw what you needed her to see. This one was about demonstrating what already existed, which should have been easier and in some ways was harder because what existed was real and therefore vulnerable in a way that a legal argument was not.
Gerald Park prepared them on a Thursday evening, going through what to expect, the questions Judge Alderman or the guardian adidum might ask, the documentation he’d submitted. Sophie was not in the room for this. She was upstairs theoretically doing homework, actually drawing, but her presence was in everything they discussed.
