“We knew something was coming,” Emeline said, “because you’ve been acting weird.” She’d come from the daycare, which meant she looked slightly sticky with jelly and Play-Doh.
“Are you gay too?” Cecelia said with a smile. She sat down next to her sister at Sylvie’s small kitchen table.
Sylvie shook her head. She thought, I wish that was my news. “Would you like water? Or”—she tried to think what she had in her cupboards—“crackers?”
“Spill it,” Cecelia said. “Em has a class tonight and Mrs. Ceccione is watching Iz, so I need to get home soon.”
Sylvie took a deep, gathering breath, as if she were about to dive underwater, and told them the contents of her heart. She started with taking William’s hand by the side of the lake and explained that she was alive with him, a whole circle with him, her whole messy self with him. “When we hold hands…” she said, but she hadn’t been able to finish that sentence with William, and she couldn’t now. Sometimes words were like pebbles thrown against a window, and what she was reaching for was the window itself.
Her sisters were quiet when she was done. There was faint traffic noise from outside. The squealing brakes of a bus.
“Oh, Sylvie.” Cecelia looked tired from lack of sleep, from holding her world together by herself. Izzy had discovered the word no, and the toddler woke up in the morning yelling it from her crib.
Emeline looked away from Sylvie. “Pick any other man on earth, and I’ll be happy for you,” she said. “Any other man at all.”
“I know,” Sylvie said. She hadn’t expected her sisters to be pleased, but their sadness was palpable, and it pressed against her like a heavy blanket. “If I could, I would.”
Emeline’s eyes were pleading. Sylvie remembered sitting with Julia and Emeline at Rose’s dining room table, begging their mother not to move away. Sylvie was the one with the unwanted news now. She was the one her sisters wanted to hold back.
“Julia’s been through so much,” Emeline said. “Can’t you just be friends with him?”
“Could you just be friends with Josie?”
Emeline tightened her lips. Shook her head. It had occurred to Sylvie that she and Emeline had made choices with similar stakes. Sylvie was sitting here breaking her sisters’ hearts because she couldn’t imagine life without William, and William couldn’t survive inside a secret. Emeline had muzzled her sexuality—not admitting it even to herself—until she’d met Josie. “I had to tell her I loved her,” Emeline had said. “Even if it killed me. And I thought it might.” This resonated with Sylvie: This moment felt like life and death. She was breaking open, but still breaking.
“How do you know he’s not with you because he misses Julia?” Cecelia watched her sister while she spoke; she always wanted the truth. “You look like her, you know. It’s unhealthy, Sylvie, isn’t it? It’s like you’re getting in bed with her marriage.”
Sylvie had nothing to say to this. In the beginning she did wonder, when she took off her clothes, if William was disappointed that her breasts were smaller than Julia’s, her hips less curvaceous. Had Julia been a better lover? Sylvie never asked William if he had these thoughts, because she didn’t want to hear the answers.
She was surprised to find that she didn’t feel defensive in response to her sisters; she wasn’t inclined to argue. She thought of the woman Cecelia was painting onto the three-story wall a few blocks away and how the outline was slowly filling with color and detail. Sylvie was filling herself in, discovering and showing her own colors. She could feel the sorrow emanating from her younger sisters like heat off their skin. Sylvie had known this wouldn’t go well. She knew Cecelia and Emeline loved William like a brother; they’d known him since they were in ninth grade. But this was hard news, and they weren’t thinking about William. They were thinking about their personal versions of the gleaming bridge that existed between the three sisters in Chicago and Julia in New York. Sylvie knew that Emeline mailed Julia newspaper clippings about available apartments in Pilsen. Cecelia continued to paint Alice and Izzy together. She took photographs of the canvases and mailed them to Julia, asking her which one she would like. Julia hadn’t chosen one yet.
“But if you do this,” Emeline said, and then paused, as if she were about to dive underwater too, “Julia and Alice will never move back home.”
The sun sank behind a cloud or a building, and the three sisters were draped in shadows. The gleaming bridge was crumbling to dust at their feet. Sylvie thought of her childhood dream and how Julia had complained to Sylvie that the novels she cited as depictions of great love were all tragedies. Sylvie, in her innocence, had insisted that the tragedy part was avoidable. It wasn’t woven into the romance. But she had been wrong.
“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
—
EMELINE AND CECELIA DREW back from Sylvie after the news. She knew they were bruised and tender and needed time away from her. She worried they might need forever but pushed that terrible thought away. She felt bruised and tender too. Sylvie continued to visit the mural Cecelia was painting on Loomis but timed her visits for when her sister wasn’t there. The woman on the wall showed more of herself each day. Sylvie finally recognized her when Cecelia had finished painting the woman’s eyes. It wasn’t one of the Padavano sisters; it was St. Clare of Assisi—the saint Rose had made her daughter carry around as penance. But Cecelia—by painting her over and over again—had made St. Clare into her talisman.
The woman on the wall looked powerful. She didn’t look like a warning for how not to live. In fact, she radiated from the wall, like an example of the opposite. Studying her, Sylvie remembered that when the girls were little, Rose had used the saints as inspiring examples of accomplished women. She only started using them as warning systems and punishments when Sylvie and her sisters grew older—when sex and marriage and pregnancy were on the table. St. Clare took up three stories of the side of the building. She had bucked the expectations of her family and society by refusing to be a teenage bride, by refusing to give her life away before it had even started. She embodied bravery, and the woman painting her was certainly brave too. Perhaps, Sylvie considered, testing out the thought, all the Padavano sisters were brave. Cecelia had done the equivalent of running away at seventeen and was a single mother whose art was increasingly in demand. Emeline was in a relationship with Josie now and wasn’t hiding that fact. Mrs. Ceccione had almost had a heart attack when Emeline and Josie held hands in front of her, and Emeline had apologized for upsetting her—Cecelia cackling with laughter in the same room—but would not apologize for her love. Julia, when confronted with a husband who needed to be saved, had defied centuries of misogyny that demanded wives prioritize husbands and had chosen to save herself. And Sylvie thought maybe she was brave too, for allowing herself to inhabit a dream so extraordinary, she’d assumed it would pass her by.
Sylvie had believed she would stay single, and safe, with her sisters. Her heart had always belonged to them, after all. The four sisters had beat with one heart for most of their lives. Sylvie wondered, looking at the mural, if bravery was wedded to loss: You did the unthinkable thing and paid a price. Julia didn’t know Sylvie’s truth yet, but she would soon. Cecelia had said that she and Emeline would break the news; one of the twins would travel to New York to tell Julia in person. Sylvie had been relieved to hear this. The twins would tell Julia gently and try to protect her, while all Sylvie would be able to do was cause pain.