Was It Beautiful? by Alison McGhee

Author:Alison McGhee [McGhee, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54903-7
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2003-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

RING.

William T. picked up the phone with his bad hand—-Jesus H. Christ—and dropped it immediately. With his left hand he picked it up off the floor and replaced it in the cradle.

Ring.

“William T.?”

“Sophie J.?

Silence.

“Sophie, I mean. Sophie.”

Don’t hang up. It was an honest mistake. Don’t hang up.

“Sophie? Sophie?”

“I’m here.”

His head swirled at the sound of her voice. He sat down in the chair, keeping his bad arm stiff in front of him, the other hand clutching the phone so that it would not go away.

“William T.?”

She sounded far away. William T. stared at the red lines beginning to crawl up his wrist and forearm. The arm had pulsed all night long. It would be a relief to lay it in a pan of snow, but there was no snow.

“William T. Can you hear me?”

At seventeen, Sophie had sat on William J.’s lap. She had brushed his hair off his forehead, smoothing and smoothing, back and back. There had been no talk of college. No talk of doing something with her life. They were doing with their lives what they wanted, which was being together.

“I can hear you, Sophie.”

William T. clutched the phone with his unhurt arm and stared out the window to his right. January and no snow. The frozen ground was unadorned, naked. The mountains rose low behind the Buchholzes’ farm, huddled themselves between the gunmetal sky and the fields. The fields with their stalky remains of harvested corn that should be covered with whiteness but were not. There had been a summer day when seventeen-year-old Sophie called from the middle of that same cornfield. William J.? Can you find me?

Cornfield hide-and-seek. William T. had stood on the porch and looked down at the sweet-corn field. It began where the lower driveway left off and was bordered by the topmost row of red spruce. Ally ally all’s in free. Their voices had risen above the corn and floated away into the twilight air.

“William T.?”

“Yes.”

“What are you thinking about?”

William T. stared out at the clouds. Ally ally all’s in free. In free, home free, which was it? He had listened to children calling that phrase all his life. He must have called it himself, as a child. Was it possible that he had never even known what he was saying?

It was possible.

“I’m thinking that I wish he’d had more time,” William T. said. “There’s a lot of things I never said to him, things I wish now I’d said way back then.”

Silence. He could hear her exhale on the other end of the line.

“Me, too,” she whispered. “Me, too.”

William T. curled the phone cord around his arm as far as it would go, until his wrist was locked tight against the phone receiver, and looked out at the beginnings of the Adirondacks. Above the Buchholzes’ barn they sat, shoulders shrugging the surface of the earth.

“I want peace,” Sophie was whispering now, into the phone. “If I could just find peace.”

“Sophie,” William T. said. “If I could give it to you, I would.

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