You think this is a story about coincidence and/or injustice and/or fate, about the extraordinarily wrong actions of ordinary people. But you’re wrong. This is about the moment when one of them realizes he has killed the wrong person, and the two of them, these lovers, very nearly run to each other and embrace. They almost kiss over the dead body of the woman who is not her. It’s about the moment in which hope leaps in his heart. The moment in which she vows never to let him go again.
The Only Child
It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the depressing, blustery winters, the intricate one-ways and roundabouts, and felt she’d outgrown California and its sunny, childlike weather. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only child, and her mother had always clung to her. She tiptoed into her room at night to watch her sleep. As a child Sophie hadn’t noticed, but now that she was older she usually wasn’t asleep yet when her mother came in, and she’d look up from her book and say, “What are you looking at?”
Which only made her mother smile affectionately and back out of the room. By late June Sophie couldn’t take it anymore; she went over to her friend Beena’s house and they called up Trevor, their high-school drug connection, and got a dime bag and some Ecstasy, and suddenly it was four in the morning and Sophie drove home at breakneck speed only to find her parents still up, waiting.
“You guys,” she said, “you’re driving me crazy.”
Her mother was crying.
“It’s not that bad,” Sophie said. “I was just out late. At school I do this all the time. I mean, not all the time. But you know what I mean.”
“We have to tell you something,” her father said. “We should’ve told you a long time ago.” He was a serious man, her father, prone to ominous pronouncements about issues he had no ability to affect. “This real-estate bubble will burst very soon,” he’d say while barbecuing chicken. Or: “Gas prices will go up much farther before they ever go down.”
So Sophie wasn’t that concerned when she sat down to hear what they had to say. She hadn’t steeled herself for any news in particular, and this, in addition to the drugs, was probably why, in the future, she could never remember the exact words in which her parents told her that she was not, after all, an only child.
She had an older brother who’d been given up for adoption, and for all these years they’d never known where he was.
“We were very young,” her mother said. “We weren’t married yet. You didn’t know my parents, Sophie, but they were very strict. We had the baby, then gave him up. Eventually we got married and had you, and that was wonderful. But I’ve thought about him every day since he was born. I was so happy when we got his letter today, saying he wanted to meet us.”
At this point she had to stop talking, because she was crying so hard. She could hardly breathe. Sophie crossed the room and sat down next to her mother, who melted against her shoulder. On the opposite side, Sophie’s father held her hand.
The brother she’d never known existed, Philip, lived in New York City and was an investment banker. His adoptive parents had given him a good life, with good schools and love. He didn’t want anything from her parents, only to meet them. Her mother wrote back that they’d love to see him and told him about Sophie. Two weeks later the phone rang. Philip was going to be in L.A. on business the following week. He wanted to meet, but not at the house. Her mother said they’d all be there.
That morning her mother put on and discarded every item of clothing in her closet. Sophie was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and it was her father, who ordinarily never noticed her appearance, who asked her to change into something a little nicer. “This occasion,” he said, “is something we’ll remember forever. Not many days are like that, pumpkin.”
So she put on a dress. She still hadn’t decided how she felt about anything. She’d never thought about having a brother. She’d always wanted a sister, someone to confide in and whisper with at night after the lights were out. Someone mischievous and fun, down-to-earth, not dreamy like her mother — though now she understood what her mother had been dreaming about.
They waited at a Taco Bell on the freeway, holding medium-sized Cokes. The three of them always ordered mediums, never smalls or larges. They were a family that took the middle road. The door opened and a man in a suit came in and stood there looking around. Her mother gasped. Sophie felt a strong wind shake her arms and spine, a buffeting force. Red hair and green eyes, freckles, a square face and a round nose, a flush on his cheeks and a wrinkle that ran straight across his forehead. All this time there had been someone in the world who looked exactly like her.
Philip came toward them, unsmiling, and sat down. “This is awkward,” he said. “Hello.”
“I know,” her mother said, then bit her lower lip.
Sophie leaned forward. “Would you like something? We have drinks, I could get you something.”
He looked at her — she saw it register on his face, how much they looked alike — and smiled stiffly. “Sure,” he said. “Root beer, a large? Thanks.”
Sophie felt stung. She hated root beer. Of course she understood this didn’t mean anything, but she thought it meant everything. The situation made everything symbolic, made everything, even root beer, carry too much weight.
When she got back to the table her parents and Philip were talking about the weather. They didn’t seem able to move any deeper into the conversation, to say the things they wanted to say. She sat there feeling annoyed with all of them and the spindly artifice of small talk. She didn’t realize that there were some things that couldn’t be said, that these were the most important things, and that everyone except her knew it. After she married her first husband, Lars, ten years later, she would tell him constantly, effusively, how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. And Lars would hold her hand and nod, his silences driving her crazy, so crazy after a while that she went off and slept with his best friend and business partner, Joe, who was short and squat and called her “Cookie” in bed, and the act wasn’t even finished before she started hating both him and herself. Afterward she came home and found Lars sitting in the living room with a drink. She could either tell him or not tell him. She still loved him. Instead of telling him she stopped taking her birth control pills and got pregnant, and that’s how they had Sara. During her pregnancy Lars broke off his partnership with Joe even though it left them at a terrible financial disadvantage, and Sophie was so angry at this — about to have a child, they needed to be stable, plus there were house and car payments to think about — and hormonal that she cried and raged and threatened to leave him. And Lars said quietly, “But I have to. Don’t you see?”
She understood then he’d known about her and Joe all along, that he was trying for a fresh start. And she was grateful, and wanted it to work so badly; but it didn’t.
This was later. At the time, at Taco Bell, she had no idea how small talk was protecting them from the scabrous weight of the past. All she knew was that her mother asked Philip for the story of his life, and he told it, and then her parents talked about their business, Sophie’s college in Boston, their house, even the perennials they were trying to grow in the garden. It was a conversation people might have on an airplane.
As they were leaving, Philip turned to her. “You and I live so close to each other,” he said. “You should come visit me in the fall, when you go back to school.”