Sophie's Journal — Era 1: The Aftermath (1946–1948) — Entry 2

Thanksgiving at Casa Blanca. I came because not coming would have required an explanation I do not have the energy to construct, and because my father asked me in that voice he uses when he is trying very hard not to beg, and I cannot say no to that voice and never could.

The ranch looks the same, which should not surprise me and does. I don't know what I expected. For it to be different somehow, marked by what happened here. But the portal is still the portal. The trumpet vines are bare now, just the grey bones of them twisting up the posts, and the flagstone is cold underfoot in the mornings, and Rufina has taken over the kitchen with the kind of grim authority she brings to every holiday meal, which is to say that anyone who enters is either put to work immediately or banished without appeal.

My parents are being very careful with me. My father watches me the way you watch a horse that might spook — alert, gentle, ready to move but not wanting to be the thing that sets it off. My mother is worse. My mother is being pleasant. My mother is being so pleasant that it is like sitting across the table from a woman who has rehearsed being pleasant and is delivering every line exactly as she practiced it, and I want to throw something, but the china is Louisa's grandmother's and I was raised better than that.

Nobody mentions his name. Nobody mentions Danny's name either, which is worse. Danny has been dead for four months now, and nobody has mentioned him at dinner, and his memorial stone is out there in the orchard in the dark, and Louisa's roses around it are bare, and I wanted to walk out there after supper but I couldn't because everyone would know why I was going and it would become a thing, and I am so tired of things becoming things.

My father asked about school. I told him it was fine. My mother asked about Tessa. I told her Tessa was well. My father asked if I was riding. I told him I was. My mother asked if I had made any friends at the University. I told her I had, which is not entirely true but is easier than the truth, which is that I go to class and come home and ride the neighbor's horse and eat dinner with Tessa and go to my room and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep. This sounds like depression. I am told it might be. But it doesn't feel like depression, which I imagine as a heaviness, a weight. This feels more like an absence. Like someone reached inside me and removed something that was there before and left the space empty and clean, the way you'd clean out a cupboard, and now I am a cupboard with nothing in it, standing in a room that used to be full of things, and it is very tidy and very hollow and I don't know how to fill it back up.

After supper I helped Rufina with the dishes. Rufina does not ask questions. Rufina washes dishes and hands them to you and you dry them and there is nothing more to say. When the last plate was put away she looked at me and said, "Go walk, mija. The moon is up." And I went.

The orchard in November is bare branches against the sky. Danny's stone is there under the old apple tree, Louisa's roses pruned to stubs around it, waiting for spring. I stood there and looked at it and I couldn't think of the right thing to say to Danny, so I just said, "I miss you." Which is true and is also the simplest thing I have said in three months and the only thing that came out of my mouth today that wasn't a performance.

The moon was up, like Rufina said. Almost full. The mesas were silver and black under it, and the sky was enormous the way it only is in November when the air is cold and dry and everything feels farther away and closer at the same time, and I stood in the orchard and I missed everything, everything, not just him but everything about the summer, the whole of it, the life I was supposed to have that is not going to happen, and I cried, which I had not done since August, and the cold air burned my face where the tears were, and I let it.

Then I went inside and washed my face and went to bed and nobody asked me anything.

---