Sophie's Journal — Era 1: The Aftermath (1946–1948) — Entry 1

I am going to write things down because if I don't I will go crazy, and if I do go crazy Aunt Tessa will call my mother, and my mother will come to Albuquerque and be competent and concerned and tell me it is all for the best, and I will have to sit there and listen to her say that with her particular way of saying things that makes you feel as though disagreeing would be both rude and pointless, and I would rather go crazy, honestly, than sit through that conversation one more time.

So I am writing things down instead. In this book, which I bought at Woolworth's for thirty-five cents, and which has a red cover and lined pages and is not remotely adequate for what I need to put in it, but nothing would be.

I have been at Tessa's house for three weeks now. Tessa is kind to me in the way that people are kind when they do not know what has happened but can see that something has, which is to say she feeds me well and does not ask questions and occasionally puts her hand on my shoulder when she walks past my chair, and that is about all I can stand from anyone right now. I enrolled at the University last week, which I had planned to do anyway, which was always the plan, and I sat in a lecture hall full of students who seemed to know what they were doing there and I took notes on something and I don't remember what it was. I am told this will get better. I am not told by anyone in particular. I just assume someone somewhere has said it.

The house is quiet, which is the problem. Not quiet the way Casa Blanca is quiet, where even the silence has something in it — the windmills turning, the screen door, a horse stamping in the corral, Rufina's knife on the cutting board in the kitchen, the sounds so woven into the silence that you hear them as stillness and don't know what you're missing until they're gone. Tessa's house is just quiet. Cars on the street. A dog somewhere. The cottonwood in the courtyard dropping leaves onto the flagstone and every single one of them sounds like footsteps and none of them are.

I don't know what I expected. I think I expected that when I got far enough away from La Conquistadora, the feeling would stop, the way a sound stops when you drive far enough from it. You hear the windmill and then you hear it less and then you don't hear it at all and then it is just the road and the hum of the tires and the country opening up in front of you. I expected that. But the feeling did not stop. It came with me. It is here in Tessa's guest room, where the bed is softer than any bed at Casa Blanca and the sheets smell like lavender and not like sage, and I lie there at night and listen to the cottonwood and I think about things I should not think about and I do not sleep.

I have not called my parents. My mother has called twice. Tessa tells me this with her eyebrows raised just slightly, which is Tessa's way of saying she thinks I should call back. I will. I'm just not ready to hear my mother's voice yet, because I will hear everything in it — the relief, the conviction that she was right, the careful love that never quite lands where I need it to — and I am not able to be polite about that yet, and if I am not polite my mother will know exactly how much damage was done, and I am not willing to give her that information. She does not get to know what this cost.

I rode today. Tessa's neighbor has a bay mare that needs exercise, and I offered because if I don't get on a horse soon I will lose what is left of my mind. The mare is sweet and willing and has no idea what she's doing, which made two of us. We rode up into the foothills above the city, and the aspens were turning, gold and white against the dark green of the pines, and the air had that October bite that you can taste at the back of your throat, and for about twenty minutes I was just riding, just a girl on a horse in the mountains, and I forgot. I forgot everything. And then I came around a bend in the trail and there was a meadow below, with the sun cutting across it low and gold the way it does in the late afternoon, and I could see down into the valley and there was a ranch down there, not a big ranch, just a few corrals and a house with a tin roof catching the light, and something about the way the corrals sat against the land, the way the fence line ran, hit me so hard I had to pull up and just sit there.

I sat there for a long time.

The mare stood patient. She didn't know why we'd stopped. I didn't tell her.

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