73. The Story. Cody’s next entry begins a week after they’ve arrived at Bompie’s. On the second day there, Cody says that Sophie began telling Bompie his own stories. She told him the story about the car and the train bridge, but in both stories she adds a part he doesn’t remember—something about struggling in the water and fighting for breath every time he ended up in it. Then, Cody writes, Sophie tells Bompie a story that he doesn’t recognize at all: when he went sailing on the ocean with his parents, and a storm started brewing, and a giant wall of black water suddenly came over him, sweeping him away—and his parents didn’t survive. But Bompie doesn’t recognize the story at all, and Cody, reaching across the bed to touch Sophie’s hand, suggests that maybe the story is hers, not Bompie’s. Bompie then adds, “Sophie, he’s right. That’s your story, honey.”
After realizing that the story is her own, Sophie puts her head on Bompie’s chest and cries. Cody says he left them there together, and about an hour later, Sophie came to him and gave him a notebook full of twenty or thirty letters, with dates ranging over the past few years, from Bompie. The first one welcomed Sophie to the family, and in all of the other ones, he had written her a story about his life growing up. Cody says that it was strange reading some of the stories Sophie had told him, because they were very close to the way he wrote them—but she had always added the part about struggling in the water.
In the climax of the entire book, Sophie learns here that what she thought was Bompie’s story all along—that his parents died in an accident at sea—might actually be her own story, and that she’s confused it with Bompie’s. This is one reason why she’s identified with Bompie so much—she feels he shares something deeply important to her own life story. Further, she projects her own fear of water onto all of Bompie’s tales, reading him as struggling in the water every time he encounters it—butBompie doesn’t recognize this element of the stories at all. Sophie must feel a lot of pain here, realizing the truth she wants so much to forget.
At last we can finally understand how it is that Bompie knew Sophie, and that Sophie did not simply invent the stories she told about him, although she may have changed them by adding parts about Bompie struggling in the water. Further, we get the sense that Sophie must have pored over the stories Bompie sent her, in deep admiration of them, since she was able to recite them nearly word-for-word.