69. The Little Girl. In Cody’s next entry, he says that the crew has stopped at an Inn in Wales. While everyone was waiting for Sophie downstairs before dinner, Brian demanded that Dock tell everyone what happened to Sophie’s parents. Uncle Stew wants to know, too, and Brian says he still thinks that Sophie is lying about knowing Bompie. Dock then tries to answer them by telling a vague story about a little girl—different than Sophie’s “little kid”—meant to refer to Sophie, but Cody fills in Dock’s vague outline of the girl’s life with details he’s learned about the “little kid” of Sophie’s stories. Cody therefore brings out more details about Sophie’s life than Dock would have otherwise given: after Sophie’s parents died, she went to live with her grandfather, who also died, and then her aunt—but her aunt didn’t want her, and so she started going from foster home to foster home, until finally she was adopted. Because Sophie had lived in so many places, Cody concludes, she must have wanted so badly to actually feel wanted by her adoptive family that she forced herself to believe that they were actually her real family.
When Sophie arrives downstairs, everyone stops talking and stares at her. Then, the whole crew has dinner—and Cody writes that he could barely eat, because all he could do was look at Sophie, since she seemed like a totally new person. Everyone else, he said, is staring at her too; she finally says something, and asks why everyone is looking at her as if she were a ghost. Uncle Dock tells her that she just looked very special that evening, and Cody notices that Sophie sheds one lone tear.
Cody then writes that the crew just crossed the Severn River on a bridge, and has arrived in England. Both Mo and Dock cried, he says, and they explain that they feel sentimental about being where their father was born. Brian whispers to Cody, saying that he still wonders how Sophie knows Bompie’sstories—did she make them up? Cody says he doesn’t know, and then writes that he wants to know so many things about Sophie: how her parents died, whether they died at the same time or not, and how did Sophie think and feel about it? He ends his entry by saying that they’ll be at Bompie’s later that night.
At long last, Sophie gets to communicate with her parents. Having encountered the nearly fatal wave at sea, it’s a joy to communicate with them, and to reconnect after such a long time. Hearing thatBompie is ill prompts everyone to swiftly leave Dock’s friend’s house—even if this means postponing Dock’s reunion with Rosalie.
Brian persists in uncovering the truth of Sophie’s past, and Stew backs his son up on this. Unable to tolerate the mystery of how Sophie could possibly know Bompie, Brian’s rational and orderly nature demands an answer in order to make the Sophie’s worldview conform to his own understanding. Cody’s application of his knowledge of the little kid (from Sophie’s stories) to the story Dock tells shows how Cody knows that the little kid is, truly, Sophie herself. As Dock tells the story of Sophie’s process of moving from place to place and her eventual adoption, Cody is able to use his knowledge of the little kid to flesh out the psychological portrait of Sophie in more detail, coming to an understanding of how she must have felt incredibly rejected and exhausted from moving around from place to place.
Everyone, shocked by the truth of Sophie’s past, is suddenly somewhat in awe of Sophie; now they see this person in her that’s been there all along, but whom they never noticed. Sitting at dinner with her, they must feel like they are in the presence of a completely different person. By shedding a tear, it seems that Sophie can tell something is up—that they are seeing her in a new way.
Cody’s curiosity about Sophie’s past is even more intensified now that he’s gotten more of the story from Dock. What Dock provided was not enough; Cody wants to know how Sophie reacted to her parents’ death, and what it’s like to go through something like that. Finally, despite all of their struggles and conflicts, the crew is approaching Bompie’s—the goal of their entire trip across the Atlantic Ocean is approaching.