He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o’clock, but Smoky didn’t trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime passed: Sophie, still awake.
She went away—Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dim—and then came back again.
“You still up?” she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.
“It’s awful,” she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. “Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind’s asleep but your body’s awake—and won’t give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another…”
“Just barely waking you up every time…”
“Yes, so your head can’t—can’t dive down, sort of, and really sleep, but it won’t give up either and wake up, and just keeps repeating the same dream, or the beginnings of one, and not getting anywhere…”
“Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get up…”
“Yes, yes! And you feel like you’ve been lying there for hours, struggling, and not sleeping at all. Isn’t that awful?”
“Awful.” He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. “Cocoa,” he said. “Warm milk. With a little brandy. And say your prayers.” He’d given her all this advice before.
She knelt by his chair, covering her hare feet with the nightgown, and rested her head on his thigh. “I thought,” she said, “when I sort of snapped out of it, you know, the tossing and turning? I thought: she must be cold.”
“She?” he said. And then: “Oh.”
“Isn’t that dumb? If she’s alive, she’s not cold, probably; and if she’s—well, not alive…”
“Mm.” There was, there was Lilac, of course: he had been thinking with such self-satisfaction of how well he knew his daughters, and how well they liked him, his son Auberon the only grain of grit in his oyster: but there was his other daughter, his life was odder than it often appeared to him, Lilac was a dimension of mystery and grief he sometimes forgot. Sophie never forgot.
“You know what’s funny?” Sophie said. “Years ago, I used to think of her growing up. I knew she got older. I could feel it. I knew just what she looked like, how she’d look as she got older. But then it stopped. She got to be about… nine, or ten, I guess; and then I couldn’t imagine her getting any older.”
Smoky answered nothing, only stroked Sophie’s head softly.
“She’d be twenty-two now. Think of that.”
He thought of it. He had (twenty-two years ago) sworn before his wife that her sister’s child would be his, all the responsibility his. Her disappearance hadn’t altered that, but it had left him with no duties. He couldn’t imagine how to search for the real Lilac lost, when he had at length been told that she was lost, and Sophie had hid her awful ordeal with the false Lilac from him, and from all of them. He still didn’t know how it had ended: Sophie was gone for a day, and when she returned there was no more Lilac, false or true; she took to her bed, a cloud was lifted from the house, and a sadness entered it. That’s all. He was not to ask.
So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie’s hair, and not try to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.
Well, if it came to that, though, his other three daughters were as great a mystery to him, really, as his fourth, only not a mystery it grieved him to contemplate. Queens of air and darkness, how had he come to engender them? And his wife: only he had so long ceased (since his honeymoon, since his wedding day) to question her that she was now no more a mystery (and no less) than clouds and stones and roses. If it came to that, the only one he could begin to understand (and criticize, and intrude on, and study) was his only son.
“Why do you suppose that is?” Sophie asked.
“Why what is?”
“That I can’t imagine her getting any older.”
“Well, hm,” Smoky said. “I don’t really know.”
She sighed, and Smoky stroked her head, running his fingers through her curls, sorting them out. They would never exactly go gray; though the gold faded from them, they still seemed like golden curls. Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower—for one thing she was no maiden—but it did seem that her youth couldn’t be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looked sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful. “Maybe you need another Interest,” he said.
“I don’t need another Interest,” she said. “I need to sleep.”
It had been Smoky who, when Sophie had discovered with surprise and disgust how many hours there are in the day when it isn’t half-filled with sleep, had said that most people fill those hours with Interests of some kind, and had suggested Sophie take some up. Out of desperation she’d done so; the cards, of course, first, and when she wasn’t working with them she gardened, and paid visits, canned, read books by the dozen, made repairs around the house, always resenting that these Interests should be forced on her in the absence of her lost (why? why lost?) sweet sleep. She turned her head restlessly on Smoky’s thigh as though it were her unquiet pillow. Then she looked up at him. “Will you sleep with me?” she said. “I mean sleep.”