15. Sophie
15
Sophie
Sophie could hear her family getting ready for the day. The kids were arguing over who got to sit in the front seat on the drive to school, while Todd was having a conversation on the phone – something business-related that Sophie tuned out. None of them opened the bedroom door to disturb her. Maybe Todd had had a word with the kids to let their mum sleep in on her non-working day. And maybe he could tell she wasn’t sleeping that much these days. She’d been staying up, watching bad TV late into the night and crawling into bed beside him long after he had fallen asleep. Before their fight she would have snuggled into Todd in bed, letting her head rest in the crook of his neck, breathing in his scent, but these days she remained firmly on her side of the bed, arms folded across her chest, staring at the ceiling, willing sleep to overtake her.
‘You shouldn’t even be sitting in the front seat! You’re only eight!’ Tilly’s voice rang out, followed by a swift ‘Sh!’ from Todd. ‘Mum’s sleeping!’ It warmed her a little to know that he cared about her sleep, despite their fight and the silent treatment they had been giving each other ever since.
Rani’s words came back to her. Don’t wait till it’s too late and the damage is done.
But she was unable to broach that divide. She wanted Todd to make the first move, or at least say something conciliatory, but neither of them seemed willing to back down. She wondered for a moment whether she could try. She was on the verge of getting up to speak to the kids, and maybe even Todd, when she heard the front door shut.
Instead of getting up, she turned over onto her back and let the silence fill her. She appreciated the quiet, but in another way it was a reminder that without her family in it, this place was just a house. It did not contain the warmth and love that made it a home; the home she had worked so hard to be different from the house she had grown up in.
Thoughts flooded in of the last time she had stayed at her parents’ place, before she and Todd were married. She closed her eyes and immediately Todd’s face entered her mind. He was smiling at her, that white-toothed smile that had her swooning from the first moment she saw him.
She flung her eyes open. She refused to let herself become sentimental. She turned to her phone to fill the emptiness with external noise, mindless scrolling of meaningless content that would distract her from answering the bigger questions in her life. This and late-night TV meant she didn’t need to figure out what she was doing with her marriage and indeed the rest of her life.
As soon as she picked up her phone she saw a text from Rani.
How are you feeling today? she asked. The question made Sophie smile. Rani had been there for her, unlike her actual best friend Meena, who for some reason had been ignoring her calls for days, leaving Sophie hurt and confused.
I’m okay , Sophie texted back to Rani. How much could she burden a woman who already had so much on her plate?
The last time she’d seen Rani was the evening after her fight with Todd. That night she also met Dan. Sophie was expecting a domineering, big guy to turn up. Instead she was met with a mild-mannered, slender man with a receding hairline and silver-rimmed glasses. Dan was so courteous and soft-spoken that it completely jarred with the description Rani had painted of him. Goes to show , Sophie thought , that there are always two sides to every story . Perhaps Dan wasn’t the sort of person Rani made him out to be, which in many ways made her question what sort of relationship Meena had with Owen. Sophie hadn’t spent much time with Owen; maybe he wasn’t as bad as all that. And maybe, if she really thought about it, neither was Todd.
This time the thought of Todd and the state of her marriage made tears spring to her eyes. Reflexively, she opened an app on her phone and started scrolling to stop the emotions overwhelming her. If she let herself, hours could pass by and she’d lose herself in a constant stream of content. Perhaps this was how humans coped these days – in a mindless gush of other people’s lives so they wouldn’t have to focus on their own.
The phone buzzed with another text, Todd this time. I’ve taken the kids to school so you can sleep in.
It was kind of him, she admitted, that he had let her know. And not for the first time she wished she could stop being angry with him. She closed her eyes again and pictured him. A carousel of different images of Todd came to mind. He was on his knees, a ring in his hands; he was solemn and red-eyed at Gramps’s funeral; he was nervous and excited on his first trip to America. She thought of him fidgeting with his tie as he was about to head to his first official overseas business meeting. ‘Relax’, she’d told him, grabbing his hands and bringing them down to his sides before fixing his tie. ‘You got this.’
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t hide his nerves. ‘Reckon they know I have no idea what I’m doing?’ he asked her.
‘No, I think they know they have the best man for the job,’ she said.
If he hadn’t been so nervous, she would’ve joked about how the first time she laid eyes on him he’d said he would never go to the US. But she knew it wasn’t the right time.
When they’d first landed in Australia, Todd’s family had been as welcoming as he’d said, despite the fact they were arriving at a time when the family was going through some difficulties due to his grandfather’s illness. She tried as much as possible to give them privacy, opting to stay in her room so they could have family time. But then Todd asked her if the reason she was in her room all the time was because she didn’t like his relatives. That was far from the truth. They were warm and, yes, a bit too into hugs for her liking, but it was something she figured she could get used to. They had welcomed her into their fold with open arms and never made her feel like she shouldn’t be there. But still, for her, getting used to that sort of openness took time. She came from a family that were fussy about rules and etiquette, where strangers weren’t hugged but greeted politely with a pursed smile. Sometimes she had to admit when it came to Todd’s family that the lax attitude to timeliness, the lack of boundaries, their openness with their tears, was all a bit overwhelming. But she took it in her stride. And Todd reassured her any chance he got.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he would say. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’ Even his mother told her how grateful she was for Sophie’s presence. ‘You’ve made an unbearable situation bearable,’ she once said.
After Gramps passed away and it quickly became obvious that they couldn’t continue to live in the same house as Todd’s parents forever, as nice as they were, they made the move to Sydney, getting a small studio flat in a suburb near the beach. The flat had damp problems and if they didn’t air it enough it smelled of mould, but the location was perfect. They would wake up early and go for walks by the water, often stripping down to their underwear to take a quick dip. And then when Todd started working, they would make it a ritual to go for evening dips, even when the weather turned cold and the water was freezing. She looked forward to those dips all day, especially as she didn’t have the right visa to be able to work yet, and mostly hung around at home or went to the ocean, spending hours just staring at the waves crashing on to the shore.
When the opportunity came for him to go to the States, she jumped at the chance to go with him. By then she had become sick of being the stay-at-home girlfriend. She had never been a domestic goddess and she wasn’t going to start now.
The plan was that she would accompany him to San Francisco and after he was done with his business dealings, they would fly to the east coast and she would introduce him to her parents. She was nervous about it, but if they were going to proceed with their relationship, he had to know the sort of family she came from. But things didn’t turn out as expected.
In San Francisco, she hadn’t realised that accompanying him on a business trip would mean that he’d be out working all day. Todd had found his confidence and took to his role like a duck to water, but on the downside the hours he worked on the trip were long. Rather than coming back to the hotel, he would often text her to say he had to have dinner at work or take clients out. It reminded her of the sort of work ethic they had in America. While in Australia they prioritised a work–life balance, in the US it was all about your job. How quickly she had forgotten the hours she too used to put in to work. How it had consumed every aspect of her life.
After a few days mooching around the hotel room with some visits to a few shops and eateries she’d read about, plus tourist sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island, the loneliness was starting to get to her. All around her there seemed to be families and friends and, oddly, mothers with babies, who she had started noticing more and more, even though she was sure they must’ve always been around.
A strange feeling started to grip at her throat; a sensation which she realised could best be described as homesickness. She wanted to be in the company of people who knew her, who had known her for a long time, and she wanted to be somewhere familiar. In New York she knew the city like the back of her hand. She knew the bodegas to go to, the coffee shops that served the most drinkable coffee and the places with the best bagels. She wanted to see her friends who she shared inside jokes with and who knew her drink order and, yes, she even wanted to see her parents. Her mother wasn’t a great cook, but she did make an amazing apple pie and Sophie was sure that her return home would be occasion enough for her mother to bake one.
Without telling Todd, Sophie changed her flights, flying to New York before him. He would join her a week later on the flight they had originally booked. Todd seemed fine with the idea when she told him, which reassured Sophie. Todd trusted her implicitly and recognised she was an independent woman who didn’t need his permission before doing things.
Her father gave her a stiff, quick hug when he met her at the airport and it took every fibre of her being to stop herself from holding on to him for many moments. At home, her mother was waiting for her. She had been to the hairdresser, it seemed, her hair neatly blow-dried into a bob, and she wore a cashmere jumper and woollen trousers with a perfect crease down the middle. They both seemed so formal in her presence she wanted to shout at them to loosen up! But she had forgotten, it seemed, what sort of people they were. How formality ran in their veins, how they knew no different, even in the presence of their only child.
Being home brought back unexpected memories. There was a distinct lack of pictures on the walls, which hadn’t bothered her before. Perhaps it was because of the time she had spent in Todd’s parents’ place, the corridors cluttered with family photos that showed the children’s progression from babies to adults. At her own parents’ home there were a couple of photographs in frames on the mantel in the living room. One was of her giving a toothless smile in what must have been her kindergarten photo. And the other was of the three of them as a family when she was a teenager. By then her smile had faded and she had learnt to shape her mouth into a thin line like her parents. She spent a long time looking at the two photos. Then she avoided glancing at them whenever she entered the room because of the feelings they brought up.
The house too was, for some reason, bigger than she remembered it, compared to the small studio flat she now shared with Todd. The hallway with wood panelling seemed to go on forever, leading into rooms her parents no longer used and kept permanently locked. Her bedroom had not been preserved but emptied of its possessions. Not even a trace of the tape she had repeatedly used was left, erasing the marks from the many posters of teenage crushes that had once adorned her walls. The room had been painted egg white and now held a simple desk with an office chair and a small two-seater sofa. It almost felt like a waiting room in a sad-looking doctor’s surgery. When she asked her parents what they used the room for they shrugged. It seemed like the room was unused. Her mother, noticing that Sophie had been hurt by the fact her old bedroom had been cleared away, said, ‘Well, you moved to the other side of the world. We didn’t expect you to ever return.’
‘It is only a visit, isn’t it?’ her father enquired. ‘You haven’t fallen out with that Australian man already, have you?’
And Sophie shook her head.
She tried to gather all her friends at a bar in the city, hoping that their warmth would somehow make her feel better, but most were too busy to meet. In the end only a couple of them said they could turn up – friends she had known since high school.
She was disappointed, but she also recognised she hadn’t been particularly close to anyone. There was no one she thought of as a BFF. Her college friends had scattered across the country. Some of her ex-colleagues who she used to grab drinks and dinner with after work were still around, but it seemed none of them cared enough about her to come out, especially on a rainy, cold evening. After all these years, only two girls she went to high school with made the effort to see her.
At the drinks, the three swapped stories and Sophie bought a round of cocktails. And then her friends looked at their phones and said in unison they had to leave. Sophie was caught off guard. They had barely been there for an hour.
As the women grabbed their coats, one of them turned and said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that to Carly. It was a shitty thing to do. She deserved a friend better than you.’ They left without saying goodbye. It was, Sophie realised, the only reason they had even turned up, to deliver that verbal slap in the face. She was sure afterwards there would be prolonged discussions about the drinks and the look of shock she was sure she wore when they had said that to her.
For a moment Sophie was stunned, her mind a jumble. She flagged down the bartender and ordered another drink, letting the words sink in. Truth be told, she thought, they could have said a lot worse. They could have called her a bitch and maybe even thrown a drink in her face. Yes, she had ditched her friend. But if Carly had been a real friend, she would have understood why she had done it, Sophie rationalised. After all, how often did one come across The One? Once in a lifetime, if you were lucky.
She toyed for a moment with calling Carly, about maybe checking in on her and apologising. Maybe she could tell her about Todd. About how all she wanted to do was spend every single moment with him. But it was too late. It would feel insincere to call after what had just happened and the more she lingered on the thought, the less she felt the need to say sorry. This detachment, Sophie realised, was perhaps the truest reflection of her feelings. It laid bare the truth of her priorities, and perhaps was the real sign of how much she cared about Todd, because it showed the growing chasm between her and the life she led in New York.
Sophie downed her drink and made her way back to her parents’ house, a place that made her sadder with every passing day. As she lay in the guest bedroom, she thought about what she wanted for herself. And only one thing came to mind.
A few days later she drove to JFK to meet Todd, even though he said he would grab a cab. She had seen him only a week ago but still she felt butterflies as she waited for him in the Arrivals hall. When he walked through the gates she abandoned all decorum and ran towards him at full pelt. He dropped his bags and swept her off her feet. She wrapped her legs around him and gave him a long, deep kiss, ignoring the stares from strangers.
‘Whoa! Now that’s what I call a hello,’ he said, putting her down.
Later that evening, after they had endured an excruciating dinner with her parents where her mother had once again failed to make apple pie – the apple pie Sophie had looked forward to – and instead served an overcooked roast beef followed by ice cream, Sophie and Todd headed to the guest bedroom.
Her father had said they could make up a bed in another room but Sophie had given him a look that said, ‘Get real’. She couldn’t wait to get Todd away from them and alone with her. The anticipation exploded as soon as they were alone, and she managed to pull a button off his shirt in her haste. She undid his belt and tugged at his pants. He pulled them off in one swift move and they crashed onto the bed. She had barely taken off her panties before he was inside her. As he thrust into her an errant thought floated by – this was the first time she was fucking in her parents’ house. She’d never done it, despite having plenty of opportunities. It had seeped into her that it just wasn’t the done thing. And, anyway, she couldn’t imagine anything less sexy than doing it there – sex at their place would be a total downer. As she found out, it was the opposite. The oppressive, unemotional, silent atmosphere that throttled her from the moment she entered the front door was being destroyed with every scream she unleashed as the man she loved moved inside of her. She came with a powerful gush, unleashing in many ways all the broken parts of her. This, she wanted to scream, was where she left the past behind.
‘You wet the bed!’ Todd exclaimed afterwards. ‘I haven’t seen that happen before.’
‘Can you not allude to the previous times you’ve slept with other women right now?’ she said, still feeling a little woozy from possibly the most powerful orgasm she’d ever had. She didn’t want to tell him she had never gushed before. That tonight had been a first in many ways.
‘Oh my god, that’s not what I meant. It’s just that I can’t believe I did that!’
She opened her eyes and saw him looking back at her with pure delight. She pulled him towards her and gave him a kiss.
‘I’m ready to go home,’ she said. ‘Like tomorrow.’
‘Are you sure? I’m happy to hang around here for a bit.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not.’
He looked at her with concern but didn’t ask her why.
‘Also,’ she said. ‘I want to have kids.’
‘What?’ Even as he asked the question his face broke out into a smile. ‘I mean, I guess I thought we would eventually, just not right now.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean right now. Like right this very moment. But soon. Maybe next year.’
‘Next year? Wow, were you planning to include me in this baby-making?’
‘I think you’re going to have to play a very vital part in it all.’
They both wore goofy smiles as they spoke.
‘Wow, I mean. I guess I should ask you to marry me at some point then?’ His face flushed even redder than before.
‘I mean, if you’re a traditionalist about it then yes, maybe you should.’
‘I’m not that much of a traditionalist,’ he said, a cheeky smile on his face. He rolled over till he was on top of her. ‘But I can’t imagine anything that would make me happier than to call you my wife.’
The words ‘my wife’ filled her with an unexpected warmth. She had never been hung up on getting married or having kids, she might even have considered it patriarchal. But the man who now was looking down at her with the biggest smile had completely changed her mind about everything. He had uprooted all her plans about what she wanted in life and where she saw herself headed. He had planted just the one thought instead, that all she wanted to do was spend a life with him by her side.
‘Please don’t tell me this is going to be our proposal.’
‘What? No, I had other plans ...’ And as soon as he said that he rolled off of her.
‘You had plans? Oh, pray tell, what were they?’ she said, still joking.
‘Just let me have this one thing, will you?’ he said, serious now.
‘You’re not kidding? You were actually planning to propose?’
‘Ugh,’ he buried his head in his pillow. ‘Yes! But now the surprise is ruined.’
‘It’s not, I promise,’ she said, grabbing his shoulder and turning him around till he was facing her. They both stared at each other with gleaming eyes. Life was happening, pivotal moments were taking place, they both understood the significance of it. This was why neither of them wanted the moment to pass. But moments, no matter the significance, did pass, and when you looked back on them they seemed like a blur.
As she found out in the days to come. He had already asked her father for her hand in marriage before he even met him in person. He knew how etiquette and tradition mattered to her parents. And even though she wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t asked for her father’s hand in marriage, a concept that seemed antiquated, a part of her liked that he did. It showed he had paid attention when she spoke about her family. And when he said he couldn’t find any flights that were leaving the next day back to Sydney, he was actually lying, because he had already arranged for a proposal. She knew something was up when he said he had to go meet a client in the city. And then when he called her, asking her to meet him in Central Park, her heart couldn’t stop racing.
She found him standing in the middle of the Cop Cot – a rustic, wooden gazebo covered in vines. He was surrounded by candles and rose petals and as soon as she saw him she had such a visceral response there was nothing to do but burst out crying. She remembered little after that except for him kneeling and her nodding yes and a smattering of applause from the strangers nearby who had witnessed the moment.
‘You never have to go through life alone,’ he told her. He said other things too, but that was the one that stood out the most. All of her life she had convinced herself that she didn’t need anyone. The only one she could rely on was herself. But when Todd told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and she unequivocally believed him, a feeling of relief rushed through her veins. That was the feeling that stayed with her for the years to come, and one that she had forgotten in the heat of their argument.
Sophie sat up in bed. The silence since Todd and the kids had left home for school and work still hung heavy in the air. She willed herself to get up, deciding she was no longer going to spend hours wallowing in the past. She was going to shower, get dressed and head out.
As she left home, her head felt clearer than it had in days. She would surprise Todd at his office in the city and they could get lunch at a restaurant somewhere. Being in public meant they could control their emotions and not say things they would later regret. Even though she was not ready to accept all the blame for their fight, she was willing to concede that perhaps she had overstepped the mark and didn’t mean the hurtful things she had said.
But when she arrived at Todd’s office, he wasn’t there. The receptionist called his executive assistant, who said Todd had left work early, saying something about picking up the kids and taking them to the farm. Sophie immediately pulled out her phone and called him.
‘We’re going to surprise Granny and Grandpa!’ Bodhi shouted excitedly on the speaker phone.
‘Todd, is there a way for you to pull over so we can chat in private?’ Sophie asked, trying to keep her voice even.
‘Not right now,’ Todd replied. ‘We’re on the highway.’
Sophie felt her heart racing. Was he kidnapping her children? Was this the point where she had to contact lawyers or maybe even the police?
As if hearing her thoughts, Todd tried to allay her fears. ‘We’re just going for the weekend, Soph. No need to get worried. We’ll be back on Sunday, I promise.’
He was speaking to her in a much nicer way than he had in days. Was he coming around?
‘Dad said we could go horse riding,’ Tilly said, trying to sound casual, but Sophie could tell she was excited at the prospect.
‘Oh yeah?’ was all Sophie could muster.
‘We looked up their website. All the horses have their own webpage,’ Tilly was saying, when Bodhi interrupted. ‘I’ve already decided I want to ride Brodie because his name sounds like mine and because they said he likes young kids. Though I’m not that young anymore, am I, Mum?’
‘You’re not, I suppose. You’re a big boy.’
‘Yeah well, I’m going to go on Gloria because they said she’s suitable for someone who has some experience with riding,’ Tilly said.
‘I’ve ridden horses before too,’ Bodhi said.
‘Yeah, the ponies at birthday parties don’t count,’ Tilly replied.
They sounded so happy, Sophie couldn’t say anything. She knew whatever would come out of her mouth would dampen their fun.
‘Hey Soph, just take some time for yourself this weekend. We’ll see you on Sunday, okay?’ Todd said. He sounded calm and like himself, which made Sophie feel warm inside.
But he hadn’t told her his plans or even asked her if she wanted to come along; he had just taken the kids and driven off. Probably not a good sign for the state of their marriage. Feelings of hurt and anger started to surge inside her. Before she could say anything damaging she said goodbye and hung up. Minutes later, she was hunched over and crying in the middle of the street. No one walking past stopped to check if she was okay. But perhaps that was what happened in big cities; people carried their traumas and their sadnesses like hidden packages and sometimes those packages leaked in front of everyone and you all had to pretend you didn’t notice something was wrong.
When she had calmed down a little, she started walking towards the water, coming to a halt in front of a grand hotel that stood near the shore of the famous harbour. And without thinking twice she walked in and went to the reception and asked for a room. She couldn’t bear the thought of going home and finding the house empty and devoid of her children, their laughter and their warm bodies and their smells, which, when she inhaled them filled her with endorphins that gave her the energy to face anything life decided to throw at her. Without them there, the house they called a home was a shell. A place with no feeling. She had no need for it.