William smiled; his thoughts were still on his estranged wife, and Julia wouldn’t have asked him this question in a million years. Julia had no interest in basketball and was always trying to shoo William and his attention away from his favorite game. She’d had her eye on who William would become, after the next job offer or once he had a PhD after his name. He didn’t blame his wife for this conditional acceptance; he’d grown up with parents who’d never accepted him at all.
“William?” Sylvie said, her head tipped to the side. “You all right? You look far away.”
“I’m here,” he said.
He knew, with his new awareness, that he should tell Sylvie to return to her sister for good. He should tell her that he would be okay without her visits. The nurse who patrolled the halls and peered into each room had just walked by and would walk by again in four minutes. William felt more grounded in his body. Kent would be here on Saturday. You should go, he thought. But he couldn’t make himself say the words.
* * *
—
SYLVIE WAS SITTING IN the chair, and William was pacing from one side of the room to the other. He’d been in the hospital for over two months. It was almost Halloween, and the nurses had taped posters of jack-o’-lanterns to the walls in the common room. William wasn’t able to open his window, but he could see that people outside were now wearing jackets or vests while they walked down the sidewalk.
“How many rings did Bill Russell win in total?” Sylvie said, after several minutes of watching him slowly ricochet from one wall to the other.
“Eleven in twelve years,” he said, and stopped walking. The warmth—that discomfort he felt when Kent gazed at him with his wide-open face—flared inside him. Sylvie shone affection at him too, and even though it was hard, he was trying to accept it. He’d smiled once, during Kent’s last visit, and his friend had slapped him on the back, delighted. Dr. Dembia had said to him, “Discomfort is just a feeling, William. It’s okay to let yourself feel your feelings.”
He said, “I know you bring up basketball to make me feel comfortable, Sylvie. It’s very nice of you.”
Sylvie raised her eyebrows, surprised by this.
“And I know you read my book.” Without stopping to think, William reached for the empty journal on his bedside table. “I have homework from the doctor. Maybe you could help me with it? I appreciate your visiting me. I should have said that before.”
“I’d like to help you,” Sylvie said, in a careful voice.
“Can you write down what I say, as a list? I’m supposed to write down the secrets I kept from…well, Julia.”
Sylvie reached out for the notebook. Like him, she’d grown up going to confession in church. Entering the dark booth and lowering herself to the kneeler. Confessing her sins to the screen that separated her from the priest. William thought of that sacrament now and felt bad for all the children who were forced to divide their ordinary lives into sins and not-sins so they would have something to say to a cassocked stranger.
“The first one is that I knew you read my book,” he said. “I never told Julia that I’d figured that out.” His manuscript was still on the top shelf of the closet in his apartment, unless his wife had thrown it out.
Sylvie wrote in the notebook, her head down.
He sat on the side of the bed, ready for his body to be still. “I never wanted to be a professor.” He paused to see if there was a reaction, then went on. “I never told Julia that I was eating lunch in the Northwestern gym every day and that I was helping Arash with the basketball players. She had no idea how much time I spent in the gym. I didn’t tell her how unhappy it made me that she read what I was writing. That it was more a journal, more for me, than a book.” His head dropped lower. “I didn’t want to have a child.” He closed his eyes, sank into the deepest part of himself. “I didn’t tell her I had a sister.”
There was a gasp. “You had a sister?” Sylvie whispered this, as if the words were sacred, too important to be uttered at volume.
“She died when I was a newborn. From the flu, or pneumonia, maybe. It destroyed my parents. I think they were never able to look at me without remembering her.”
“Oh, William.”
He and Sylvie sat in the same stunned silence. They sat in the unthinkable—William never thought of it—loss that preceded all the other losses. He had never told anyone about his sister, and something blossomed out of the confession. When William closed his eyes, the little girl sat beside him. He had given her substance by telling her story. He was confident that his parents never mentioned her because they couldn’t bear to. If only three people remembered her short story and never spoke it aloud, she was erased from history. William was in this hospital to try to inhabit his own body, his own history. His sister was part of that, but she was also a person in her own right.
“What was her name?”
“Caroline.” He’d never said her name out loud before.
William felt the little girl beaming because she was the subject of so much attention. He could also feel the bright red and yellow color of the leaves outside the window and the heightened emotion of the woman across from him. He’d never had this level of molecular awareness before, never felt so much in a single moment. William had always evaded the pointed spears that emotions threw at him and been quick to smother any uncomfortable sensations. He had a hard time believing that other people were able to stand being alive if it came at them with this intensity.
“I couldn’t have told this to anyone else,” William said. “I don’t know why, but I had to tell you.”
Sylvie looked at him, and he knew they were both remembering that night on the bench, under the stars. She said, “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“In your manuscript, in the footnotes, you said something like It should have been me, not her. Was the her your sister?”
William stared. “I don’t remember writing that.” How was he still surprised by the secrets inside him? But it was the truth; he’d always known that his parents would have preferred him to be the one who died. “I imagine I meant my sister, yes.”
He looked at Sylvie’s open face, and he knew that he could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge him. He had told her every terrible thing inside him, and she was still holding a pen, ready and willing to write down more.
“I think that’s all,” he said. “Maybe you should tell all of this to Emeline and Cecelia too. These shouldn’t be secrets anymore.” William paused to take a breath. “I don’t think there’s anything else to add to the list. I wasn’t a good husband to Julia. She deserved much better.”
Sylvie shimmered in front of him, and that was how he realized he was crying.
When she was leaving—looking as exhausted as William, as if they had just run a marathon together—Sylvie stopped in the doorway. “You said you didn’t want to be a professor. Did you want to be a professional basketball player?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t good enough, even before the injury.”
“That must have been terribly disappointing,” Sylvie said, and he nodded.