“I don’t know,” Sophie said. Her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to live in a coed dorm, who worried when she took a cab from school to the airport, was nodding vehemently.
“You can stay with me and my girlfriend. I’ll tease you and pull your hair, or whatever a big brother’s supposed to do. We’ll figure it out. You’ll like Fiona, she’s nice. All this was actually her idea, me getting in touch with you guys.”
“Oh,” Sophie’s mother said softly, as if punched.
“Not that I hadn’t thought about it myself,” he added.
· · ·
Sophie went back to school and in October, on Columbus Day weekend, she took the train to New York. She’d been there once before, with her roommate, who was from Long Island. They stayed in the suburbs and, during their one day in Manhattan, went to FAO Schwarz. This time she took a taxi from Penn Station to the Upper West Side, where her brother — saying it, inside her mind, still gave her an intense but not entirely unpleasant shiver — lived.
They’d arranged this on the phone. “I’ll still be at work when you get here,” Philip had told her. “But Fiona will let you in and entertain you until dinner.”
“Okay,” Sophie said.
“We’ll show you a good time, don’t worry,” he said. “And we can call your mom on the phone while you’re here, so she knows you’re all right.”
Sophie wondered why he said your mom. But of course he had his own mom, who lived in Philadelphia and was also a banker. His father was an orthodontist.
The building’s doorman asked Sophie’s name, made a call, then carried her backpack to the elevator and pressed the button, as if the task would be too much for her. Upstairs, Fiona was waiting with the door open, smiling. She looked like a movie star, with straight, glossy brown hair and manicured fingernails. Grabbing the backpack, she threw her arm around Sophie’s shoulder and gently pushed her into the apartment, all the while offering drinks, food, a shower.
“We’ll make up the couch for you later,” she said. “I’m sorry there isn’t a spare room, but this is New York. We all live like sardines. We’re going to move soon, I swear, but looking for a place is such a nightmare. Have a seat. It’s so great to meet you. God, you look just like him, don’t you? Didn’t that freak you out?”
It was the first time anyone had mentioned the weirdness of the situation to her. Everybody else, her parents, her new brother, seemed intent on making it seem ordinary, which it manifestly wasn’t. At this onslaught of honesty Sophie felt grateful, even close to tears.
“It’s incredibly strange,” she said.
“Must be,” Fiona said. “But also good, right? I mean, here you have somebody else who’s part of your family. Somebody else to care for you.”
Sophie hadn’t considered it that way at all. “I guess I’m still getting used to it,” she said.
At eight, she and Fiona went out to a French restaurant. Her brother arrived twenty minutes late, trailing a briefcase and apologies, then insisted on ordering for her.
“Have you had oysters?” he asked. “What about snails? Have you had steak tartare, ever, in your life? I bet you didn’t have snails growing up in California.”
She hadn’t, and didn’t want them now, but felt it would be rude to refuse. She thought he was testing her. She didn’t realize that he felt he had something to prove, that his entire life — what he’d been given, what he’d become — was under scrutiny. Fiona sat back and didn’t talk much, just smiled at both of them. Philip ordered the snails and a bottle of Bordeaux and Fiona pushed her glass over to Sophie, letting her drink most of it. Philip kept asking her questions. What was their house like, what kind of after-school activities did she do, what did she think of her high school, what did she get on her SATs? It felt like a job interview.
“You must be smart, you got into a good college,” he said. “What are you going to do after you graduate? If you moved to New York, I could help you. I have some connections. The world’s about connections, you know. That’s something I didn’t realize in college, but it’s totally true.”
“I was thinking maybe grad school?” Sophie said. She didn’t want to let go of the life she’d only just discovered. It was the first time she’d ever felt like an adult, and she couldn’t imagine that there would be other places she might feel that way, other ways she could grow up.
Philip laughed. “Everybody here’s either dropping out of grad school or just about to go back. You’ll fit in perfectly.”
He ordered dessert for the table but didn’t have any himself. Sophie and Fiona shared it, their spoons digging into the meringue. Close enough to smell Fiona’s perfume, she noticed the diamond engagement ring on her left hand.
The next day, Fiona offered her a menu of activities: the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Met. “We don’t have to do anything big and touristy,” Sophie said. “Just walking around is good.”
Philip nodded, and Fiona smiled. “That’s such a smart thing to say. It’s so true that you see more of a city that way.” Sophie felt that she’d done well. “Let’s go to Chinatown and then we can have some pasta in Little Italy, maybe walk around SoHo. How does that sound?”
“Perfect,” Sophie said.
They took a cab downtown. The streets in Chinatown were mobbed. While holding hands with Philip, Fiona pointed things out to Sophie: Chanel knockoff purses, an art-supply store, the ducks hanging in shop windows. Next they moved over to Little Italy, where they had lunch. All the talk was about what it was like to live in New York, the various difficulties and advantages, the rents, the stresses. It was an urban version of her parents’ friends sitting around talking about their houses and yards. Having this revelation made Sophie feel wise. She thought that this was maturity, the ability to see through people. Only later did she find out that anyone could see through people, and the hard thing was not to try.
After lunch Fiona said she was tired, so they went back to the apartment. Before taking a nap, she suggested that Sophie and Philip call California.
It was one in the afternoon there, and Sophie’s mother was outside gardening. “Are you having a good time?” she asked, sounding a little breathless.
“Of course,” Sophie said, knowing that this was what she wanted to hear, yet unable to bring herself to rave or brim over with stories.
“Put him on?” her mother said.
Sophie handed the phone to her brother, who stood with the receiver pressed to his ear, smiling politely. Was he good-looking? Sophie couldn’t say. His face was long, like hers; his nose had a bump in it. If without knowing anything she’d passed him on the street, would she have noticed him, or somehow felt a connection?
“Soph,” he said, still smiling, but now holding out the phone.
When she put it to her ear she could hear her mother crying. “Are you okay?”
“I’m great,” her mother said, the worst liar ever. “I’m just so happy.”
In the background she could hear her father’s voice but not the specific words. Whatever they were, she knew he was trying to comfort her. In the future, after he retired, this tendency would grow even stronger. He’d start cooking for her, three meals a day, even after she got sick, and he’d shadow her from room to room, just as Sophie’s mother had once done to her. Her mother, irritable from pain, would complain about this to Sophie while he was in the kitchen straining broth into homemade soup. Once she died, of liver cancer, Sophie expected him to fade into the shadows himself, to lose his purpose, or to move into her own home. By then she was living with her second husband, sharing custody of Sara with Lars and of Mark’s son, Henry, with his ex-wife, a rotating parade of children and schedules that had to be carefully regulated and updated on wall calendars lest total chaos ensue. But her father seemed happy in his own routine, walking two miles every day and scrupulously following the news. Not until then did she realize he was the most self-sufficient person she’d ever known, and that her mother, the doter, the worrier, the maker of phone calls, had been the most in need of care.