The measure of a life

When Mrs. Bedrosian died, she left Sophie her cat. Sophie wasn’t entirely sure if it was a gift or a punishment. They had not been especially close, although Sophie had always been friendly to her in the hallways, and on the stoop. She always tried to be a nice neighbor.

But Sophie hadn’t seen Mrs. B lately. And she certainly never expressed any interest in the cat, Petros. If anything, Sophie was irritated by the smell of his litter box wafting into the hallway. But Mrs. B was old, Sophie reminded herself. And she had been too busy to offer to help, anyway – new job, friends, a life.

Sophie did not learn of Mrs. B’s passing until her landlord Pavel knocked on her door early on a Sunday morning and unceremoniously dumped Petros in her arms. And in spite of her surprise and, honestly, annoyance, she had kept that small town habit of offering help when she doesn’t really mean it. And so now she had a cat she didn’t want and she was helping clean out Mrs. B’s apartment. “Keep anything you want,” Pavel said, “There’s nobody else.”

She didn’t want the brocaded tea cozy, but it reminded her of that time – she had first moved to the city – when Mrs. B invited her to dinner. Eggplant and lamb, unfortunately, Sophie remembered, but she was struck by the kindness. “Hospitality is very important in my country,” Mrs. B had told her.

She didn’t want the dusty books (in at least four languages, she noted with surprise), or the funny little clock on the mantel. The chair in the shower made her unexpectedly sad. So did the 2004 calendar still pinned up next to her phone (landline, mounted on the wall). It is terrible to stuff someone’s life into trash bags.

In the end Sophie took a small triptych, because it reminded her of the wonderful sweet breads Mrs. B would bring her every Easter morning. She would have missed the little black notebook entirely, but it slipped out of a stack of old TV Guides on the arm of a chair. Sophie slipped the notebook into her bag, wondering what Mrs. B had so scrupulously written in its pages. When Sophie got home, though, she had texts to answer, laundry to deal with, and a crabby cat. By the time she found the book again, in the bottom of her bag, Mrs. B’s apartment had been emptied, cleaned, and repainted, and she had a new neighbor.

The pages were filled with cramped, sloping writing. At first it seemed impossible to read, but Sophie’s eyes eventually adjusted to the strange loops and curves. It wasn’t a diary, exactly, more like a record. The first entry described the day Mrs. B become a US citizen. 1998. At first Sophie wondered if Mrs. B had been confused – celebrating the day she and her cat became Americans? But then she realized that the cat must be named after her late husband. Petros is a better name for a man than a cat, Sophie thought.

Sophie flipped through the pages until she caught sight of her own name. She flushed as she realized that she had barely registered the day she met Mrs. B, she and Pavel struggling to shove her futon mattress up the stairs, and yet here it was, laid out in careful detail. “A sweet girl,” Mrs. B had said. And another entry, many pages later, describing the meal they had shared together. “She’s lonely,” Mrs. B had written, “The city is too big for her.” There was the time they had played cribbage together on a winter afternoon, just like Sophie used to do with her grandmother. “She is a good girl,” Mrs. B had written. But Mrs. B didn’t know that Sophie had been watching the clock the whole time.

Sophie found she was the least interesting thing in Mrs. B’s book. She had never known about Mrs. B’s son, Daron, until she came to the proud announcement of his job with Doctors Without Borders, including a small clipping with his photo. Handsome, smiling. And much later in the book, another page, blank, except for the date and another clipping, describing the hospital bombing that killed Daron, and giving Mrs. B the first name Sophie had never known – Ohanna. There was the hip replacement Sophie never noticed. The political observations, peppered with profanity (which she had to look up in Google Translate), that made Sophie laugh. There was a recipe for a tuna casserole that was hastily crossed out in another color of ink.

At some point Sophie realized that there was a thin ribbon wedged tightly between two pages, bookmarking what at first seemed to be a page much like all the others. But then she noticed a word scribbled on the bottom of the page and underlined several times: “ashes.”

Was Mrs. B worried about her own ashes? Daron’s? Her husband’s? There was no way to know. But perhaps Sophie could take care of Mrs. B’s ashes, at least. Her landlord shrugged when she asked him, surprised, but after some digging in a closet Pavel produced a can and handed it to her – just like a coffee can, and lighter than Petros the cat. She had no idea what to do with it.

Mrs. B sat on top of Sophie’s fridge for a good six months, at first because Sophie thought that Petros wouldn’t be able to knock it over up there, and later because it slipped her mind. Work was busy, her love life was distracting. She begrudgingly enjoyed coming home to Petros and she emptied his litter box religiously.

And then one Saturday morning her eyes drifted up to the top of the fridge. Wok, pans, ashes. Sophie found the little black book in her couch cushions and mindlessly flipped through the pages.

An idea.

It was a beautiful spring day, sunny and fresh, and Sophie wondered why she didn’t take the ferry more often. She rarely saw the city from this angle. As the boat approached the Statue of Liberty, Sophie tried to shelter the can from the throng of tourists behind her, softly whispering “Ohanna Bedrosian” as she tossed the ashes into the ocean. They were whisked away and into the wake, disappearing into the spray.

On the return trip Sophie pulled the black notebook out of her bag and carefully added an entry on one of the few remaining blank pages, “Mrs. Bedrosian, scattered in New York Harbor, by her neighbor and friend, Sophie Robertson. April 20, 2019.” As she stared at the words on the page, the book slipped in her lap and once again opened to the page bookmarked by the worn ribbon. Sophie realized there was something else written, in the margin and at a different angle – initials and a street address. She immediately tapped it into her phone: Coney Island.

When the ferry landed, Sophie had already planned her trip – 5 train to the Q. She hadn’t been back to Coney Island since her first summer in New York, when she walked along the boardwalk wondering if she would ever make friends. But now those lonely thoughts didn’t cross her mind and she didn’t even notice the salty air, instead orienting herself to the grid of small, run-down houses, until she found the street she wanted, and the house.

The house needed paint, but there were daffodils popping up around an old anchor that Sophie supposed was decorative. Graffiti had been scrubbed off the garage door. What if this was family? Should she have brought the ashes here? Sophie panicked as she knocked the door. Now the ashes were gone and who was she to have decided?

A woman with brightly dyed red hair opened the door. “Yes?” she squinted at Sophie, who stuttered an introduction, one hand stuffed into her bag clutching the black notebook. A neighbor of Ohanna’s (she had never referred to her as ‘Ohanna’ before)… passed last Thanksgiving (condolences)… wrapping up her affairs…(was that true? could she say that?)

The woman warmed, admitting sadly that she had not heard the news, and nodded Sophie inside. Lace curtains sent filtered bits of light throughout the small room.

“I haven’t spoken to Ohanna lately,” the woman confessed. “We were close, when we first arrived in this country. Like sisters. We practiced our English with each other. My Mikhail is – was – the same age as Daron.” She paused, “That was such a terrible thing, what happened to Daron. Such a good boy.”

They sat in silence until the woman quickly cocked her head, “You said you are Sophie?” Sophie nodded and the woman continued, “Ah, yes! I know you. Ohanna told me about you. After Daron died… She thought of you like a daughter.” She smiled kindly.

Sophie opened her mouth, but she didn’t know what to say. “That can’t be me,” she finally said, confused. “I hardly knew Mrs. Bedrosian–“

The woman cut her off. “No, no, I remember. Sophie. She loved Sophie very much. She told me. And I have something for you.”

Sophie sat uncomfortably, studying the geranium on the side table and unsure what she should do. The woman returned from the back of the house with a small package wrapped in brown paper. “This was for Daron,” she said. “But now it is for you. Ohanna would have wanted it.”

“I – I can’t,” Sophie whispered. But the woman pushed the box into Sophie’s hands. She knew there had been some mistake; this wasn’t right. But she slowly pulled away the paper, anyway, revealing an old cigar box. She opened the lid.

Rolls of hundred-dollar bills, held together by dry, cracked rubber bands. It must be twenty thousand dollars, she thought, her memories drifting over the faded furniture and threadbare rugs in Mrs. Bedrosian’s apartment.

“There has been a mistake,” Sophie said, quickly shutting the box. “This isn’t for me – I barely knew her. You should have this.”

The woman held up her hands, refusing. “Take it. Ohanna would have wanted you to have it. We were like sisters, I told you. I know what she wanted.”

The woman abruptly stood and walked Sophie to the door. “Come and visit me again, okay, Sophie? Because if Ohanna loved you, I will love you, too. Next time come and we will eat. I am a lonely old woman just like Ohanna, but now we can be friends.” She squeezed Sophie’s hand. Sophie’s head was spinning.

“There is no one else. You take the money Ohanna saved for her child, for Daron,” she shook her head sadly. “But let us be happy that she found you. Everything happens for a reason,” the woman said with conviction. The sun was lower in the sky now and Sophie wished she had a sweater as she walked away from the house. She carefully settled the cigar box in the bottom of her bag and wondered what to do next.

As the sun fell, Sophie found herself on the boardwalk, braced against the bitter wind blowing in from the sea. She pulled out the book and found the next-to-last page. “Thank you, Mrs. Bedrosian,” she wrote. “I’m sorry.” She stared at the page and finally added, “I’m sorry I didn’t know you better.” The page flapped in the wind.

Embarrassed, remorseful, struck by a sorrow she couldn’t name, Sophie couldn’t even think about the money. Was this a gift or a punishment? She wondered about this mother she hadn’t realized was watching over her. She wondered how she – always polite but ever-distracted and busy – could have filled such a hole in this woman’s life.

She didn’t know what it meant, but she promised to do better. She promised herself, Mrs. B, the book, the ocean. She would do better.