“You know what Daddy would say when he saw Sylvie,” Julia said in a quiet voice.
Emeline and Izzy nodded, and Cecelia said, “Hello beautiful.”
* * *
—
AFTER A DINNER OF the sliced-up sub sandwich, potato chips, and wine, Julia put her hand on Alice’s arm. Alice was no longer angry at her mother. She no longer had space inside her for anger. Besides, if she’d felt like an astronaut in her aunts’ houses, she’d recognized that her mother did too. Each of them had been laboring through the rooms of these two homes, because whatever Julia had taken away from Alice for all these years, she’d taken away from herself as well. The mother and daughter had arrived here from the same place, and they were bound by a tight cord of love. For Alice, part of the strangeness of this new Chicago family was that they conducted a kind of love that seemed voluminous; it required talking over one another and living on top of one another, and it was a force that appeared to include people both present and absent, alive and dead. It was remarkable to Alice that the walls of her aunts’ houses were covered with portraits of the same women who walked its halls.
“The last time I saw Sylvie,” Julia said, “she asked me to give you something after she was gone. I thought she had time left, so I tried not to take it, but…” She shook her head slightly. “Let’s go over here, out of the way.”
The two women wove through the kitchen. It was hard to get out of the way. More people had arrived over the course of the afternoon. Izzy’s boyfriend—a stout, freckled young man—buzzed around the house, fulfilling tasks for the aunts. A grizzled man named Frank, who said he’d grown up on the same street as the Padavano sisters, sat in the armchair in the corner. Librarians who’d worked with Sylvie for years gathered by the coffee station in the kitchen, and more giant men had arrived, in such great numbers that it looked like the forty-eight-year-old William must be a member of several basketball teams. Some of the men were young and muscle-bound; others were middle-aged players with a stoop in their shoulders. Kent seemed to know them all, and he moved through the room embracing each man who arrived. It was an eclectic group, and when new platters of food were set out, Izzy shouted the news from the center of the room to get everyone’s attention.
Julia saw her daughter taking in the crowd and said, “It’s so silly, but I thought life here would have frozen when I left. That if I did come back, it would all be the same. But it’s not. It’s much bigger.”
“It’s loud too,” Alice said, because it was. She’d noticed, as the hours passed, that there was a hint of relief in the collective sadness over Sylvie. The people who loved her were glad she hadn’t suffered more; they were grateful she’d died without pain and that they’d been spared her final, ruining decline. The men and women present laughed occasionally, happy to have loved Sylvie and happy simply to have come together. The only person whose pain seemed too great for relief was William. He came inside once or twice, but he always stayed far away from his daughter and returned to the backyard within a few moments. Maybe he needed the open air, Alice thought. His friends continued to spend time outside with him, next to the vegetable garden or by the back fence. There was a bench near a small stone fountain, and occasionally William rested there with his head in his hands.
Julia held out a wrapped package tied with string. It was rectangular and solid-looking. “This is a book that Sylvie wrote about our family. I haven’t read it, but she said it’s about our childhood, and your grandfather, and everything that’s happened since he died. She said she’d been working on it for years and that it’s a mess.” Julia looked down at what she held. “Sylvie wanted me to tell you that it’s yours now and that you can do anything you want with it. Edit what’s here, publish it, or throw it away. She said she didn’t mind, but she wanted it to be yours.”
Alice took the package. The familiar weight of a manuscript in her hands was pleasing; she felt slightly dizzy at the prospect of this gift. “Did Sylvie know I’m a copy editor?”
“I told her. I told her all about you. She wanted to hear everything.”
Alice nodded. She couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift; these pages would give her all the stories and people she’d missed. Her own history was in this document. And, as a bonus, Sylvie had given her niece an excuse to hide from the noisy, affectionate world she’d entered into, or to take breaks from it, anyway. Alice had decided—she wasn’t sure when she’d made this decision exactly, somewhere in the commotion of the last twenty-four hours—that she would stay in Chicago for a little while. For how long, she wasn’t sure. Emeline and Cecelia had told her they hoped she would stay forever and that she could choose a bedroom in either of their houses. Alice had never taken a vacation from work, but she would give herself one now. She would find a quiet room and read.
Izzy had started telling Alice about the Padavano sisters’ childhood, and there was something mythic and epic in the tales she was now holding in her hands. The idea that this was a narrative Alice would find herself in by the end felt strangely exciting. The coming together and falling apart of her parents; her own birth. And what would Alice do in the pages that hadn’t yet been written? Where would she live? Whom and what would she love?
Julia looked toward the crowded room and then back at her daughter. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this”—she paused—“but I think you should go talk to your father.”
Alice had been startled repeatedly since she’d arrived, but this didn’t surprise her at all. It felt like what she’d been expecting to hear. Alice had always liked to keep things small so she could, if necessary, grab what mattered and run to higher ground. But there was no way for her to gather everything she’d found in Chicago—since that meal in the Greek restaurant, really—in her arms. The Padavanos had shown her a bigger kind of love. It was vast; it felt like everything. And now she sensed, through the same mysterious connection that had told her earlier that he needed distance, that the quiet man in the backyard would be able to bear her. William Waters was ready, and, unexpectedly, so was she.
She put the manuscript down on the table next to her and wrapped her arms around her mother. Julia squeezed Alice tight, the same way she’d squeezed her when Alice was a small girl and Julia wanted to show how much she loved her. Alice smiled and pressed her head on top of Julia’s, so her straight hair mixed with her mother’s curls. Izzy had talked about forgiveness, and in that moment Alice felt drenched with it. She forgave herself for locking herself away, and she forgave her parents for the bold choices they’d made to protect her. She forgave every mistake she would read about in the manuscript she’d just received. Earlier that afternoon, when Emeline had noticed Alice watching Rose’s dramatic tears, she’d whispered into her niece’s ear, “Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too. The mother and daughter held each other in the quiet hallway in a house thundering with life.
When they pulled apart, Alice said, “I’m scared.”