What Happened to Sophie Wilder Read Online Free

When no response came, she added, “You can call back later if you’d like. He usually gets in around midnight.”
    This was not an exaggeration, but an outer estimate. Tom hadn’t come home before nine in weeks, and he was often still at the office when Sophie went to sleep.
    â€œCan you give me his number at work?”
    She didn’t mean to leave the man in suspense, but she took a moment deciding what to do, what Tom would want her to do. He filled the silence apologetically.
    â€œThis is his father.”
    Something about the voice wasn’t right. He’s drunk, she thought. I can’t let him call Tom in this condition. As if in answer to her suspicion, he continued slowly, sounding out his words, letting each stand a moment on its own.
    â€œIt’s an emergency.”
    Sophie gave him the number, but only because Tom would want to handle it himself, would want her to have as little as possible to do with the man, and because this
seemed the quickest way to get him off the phone. After he’d hung up, she sat at her desk, receiver in hand, until the phone started to make that obnoxious sound it made when left off the hook, a plea for attention from the world of objects. She had waited years for a chance to speak to him, and now the chance had passed. Tom would do his best to make sure there wasn’t another.
    The notebook sat dead on her desk, and she left it there. She opened the sliding door and stepped out into the sticky heat of their small concrete terrace. From twenty-eight stories up she looked at New York, to which the late-morning humidity seemed applied like a wrapping of gauze. The sky above was cloudless, empty but curiously pale.
    Over the years, she had given many hours of thought to Tom’s father, wondering how it would feel if she still had a parent alive in the world, always present, and she never spoke to him. She and Tom had a long understanding that she would not ask about him, and she’d abided by it. Tom gave no sign that the man’s continued existence interested him at all, but Sophie couldn’t really believe this was true. For her own part, her father-in-law was among the most persistent puzzles in her life. She marveled now at the fact that she’d spoken with him only a moment before, even more at the idea that she had hurried him off the phone when she’d finally had a chance to speak with him. She regretted this rush in the uneasy way that she occasionally regretted doing something that she nonetheless felt had been right. Still, she wasn’t sure what she would have asked him, had she felt free to ask anything.
    Sophie worked a cigarette from the soft pack in her front pocket and lit it with a match. Since she’d started again, she used only matches, because each pack was always her last, a fifty-cent lighter always an unsound
investment. A year into this relapse, she could still become light-headed and pleasantly queasy after smoking just one. When she eventually finished it, flicked it over the rail, and leaned to watch it disappear, she felt a gratifying vertigo. The butt twisted elegantly, leaving a light trail of ash in its wake. Then it seemed to catch on a bit of air and slow in its fall, and she imagined herself in its place. She swung her head back, as if to shake off the thought.
    Inside, the phone was ringing again. This time she answered without hesitation, knowing that it would be Tom. Once more the brief pause, the husbanding of strength.
    â€œSophie?”
    How strange to hear her name in his voice. Five minutes earlier she couldn’t have said with certainty that he knew she existed.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œThis is your father. Your father-in-law. Bill Crane. Tom’s father.”
    The more he spoke, the more convinced she became that something was wrong with him.
    â€œI know who you are.”
    â€œWe haven’t met,” he said, as though she might doubt it. “I feel bad about that.