When Sylvie called Julia, she thought, each time, that this might be their last conversation. She didn’t know when Cecelia or Emeline would arrive in New York; she wasn’t privy to their plans. She listened to Julia describe Alice’s daycare and how the baby had said her first word: Mama. Julia told Sylvie how Professor Cooper had asked for her opinion after a meeting and how he valued her thoughts. Sylvie asked questions, to make the call last longer. She tried to memorize her sister’s voice and the sound of her love. Sylvie wouldn’t have believed, as a child, that anything could ever make her cleave her older sister from her life; now, knowing that an ax was about to fall and doing nothing to stop it felt like an exquisite torture. I love you, she thought, down the phone line. I’m sorry.
Resident advisers were required to sleep in the dorm every night, so Sylvie always traveled to Northwestern instead of William coming to Pilsen. She felt like she spent most of her life in the real world, bearing the silence of the twins, waiting for Julia to be told, while William was able to exist in a bubble at the university. She was glad he was in a bubble; she just wished she had one of her own. To her great relief, William had thawed after his initial terror. For a couple of weeks after Kent had found them out, William kept clearing his throat, as if he couldn’t trust his voice to speak. But as the days passed, the sky didn’t fall on him the way he’d anticipated. He told his therapist that he loved Sylvie, and the doctor—who had been urging him to make real connections with other people—deemed the news an overall positive. Kent informed Arash, and he—as predicted—was delighted. Arash thumped William on the back for a solid two minutes the first time he saw him after speaking to Kent. Cecelia and Emeline stopped visiting William, but their visits had never been regular, and he was more comfortable with the idea of their absence than their presence.
It was Sylvie who took deep breaths while she walked to the library, who held vigil with St. Clare on the sidewalk a few times a day, and who ate scrambled eggs alone in her studio apartment. She lived in a silence she’d created, and she felt herself deepening into it. She didn’t regret her choice; sometimes when she was with William her face ached, and she realized it was because she hadn’t stopped smiling for hours. She slept pressed against his warm skin at night, and when she jarred awake at four o’clock in the morning, she wrote down memories from her childhood.
Three months into the silence, Sylvie was in the library one August afternoon, pushing a cart of new releases out of the back room, when Emeline appeared by her side. Emeline didn’t speak, she just wrapped her arms around Sylvie. She pressed her head against Sylvie’s shoulder so their curls lay on top of each other. Sylvie held the only parts of Emeline she could reach: her hand, the top of her bent head. The two sisters stood like that for several minutes, in the back corner of the library. When they let go of each other, it felt like a new start. From a place where they were heartbroken and besotted and free.
Julia
OCTOBER 1984–SEPTEMBER 1988
EMELINE VISITED JULIA WHEN ALICE was eighteen months old and the mother and daughter had been living in New York for a year. The move had been intense for Julia. From the moment she and Alice boarded the flight to New York—the first of Julia’s life, and traveling alone with a baby—each day had felt challenging and brand-new. Not in a bad way, necessarily. New was a relief; Julia had rushed away from her home city because she needed new and different. Manhattan delivered, though, at a volume and scale that she couldn’t have anticipated. The city pounded with noise, and people rushed everywhere; Julia found herself speed-walking down sidewalks, trying to keep up, even when she wasn’t sure she was headed in the right direction.
She started her job with Professor Cooper—where every person and task she encountered was unfamiliar—and tried to make a temporary home with her baby. “Six months,” she sang to Alice, when she was trying to put the baby to sleep. “We can do this for six months.” She and Alice were staying in an apartment temporarily vacated by one of Rose’s Florida friends. In lieu of rent, all Julia had to do was water Mrs. Laven’s extensive collection of plants. She traveled the length of the apartment at the end of each day with a watering can in her hand and then collapsed into bed to sleep. Julia had never tried to conduct life, much less one with this many demands, on her own before. She’d always had the help of her sisters, her mother, or William. Now Julia carried a stroller in one arm and a baby in the other while she climbed steps up from the subway. She felt like she was always sweating and endeavoring to look presentable at the same time. She was responsible for everything: the daycare having enough diapers for Alice, paying bills, the presence of baby food and milk in the kitchen, and the laundry. Alice generated so much laundry. Still, Julia felt a deep gratitude to Manhattan, both for demanding all of her attention and for offering no reminders of her old life.
She had a brief respite when Rose bought tickets for Julia and Alice to visit her in Florida for Christmas. Julia was the first of Rose’s daughters to travel to Miami, and Rose showed off her daughter and granddaughter to her friends with visible pride. When Julia had declined to fight for her marriage, Rose was vocal with her disappointment, but now Rose seemed swept up in the excitement of Julia’s new life. “My daughter works for a very important business consultant in the center of Manhattan. My husband always said that Julia had brains and moxie. And isn’t her baby gorgeous?” Julia was struck by how her mother had rewritten the story of her eldest daughter and her own husband: Julia was no longer a failure, and Charlie’s opinion was to be respected. Still, it felt good to have her mother’s approval, and she was happy to open presents for the eight-month-old Alice beside Rose’s Christmas tree. In the afternoon, she and Rose phoned Sylvie’s apartment to wish the rest of the family a happy holiday. Izzy got on the phone and babbled importantly for several minutes, while the women listening in Florida and Chicago laughed.
When Professor Cooper’s project with the communications company was extended in the spring, he asked Julia if she wanted to return to Chicago. “I love working with you,” he said. “And I’m going to start taking on additional clients here, so I’ll be staying for a while. But I know you have family in Chicago. I completely understand if you want to go back.”
Julia took a deep breath at this news; it wasn’t a complete surprise, since she’d known the client was thrilled with Professor Cooper’s work and the project wasn’t finished, but she’d been living inside a six-month calendar ever since she moved. During difficult days, she missed her sisters terribly, missed being in a city that she could navigate without a second thought. She also wanted Alice to have the chance to play with her cousin and be doted on by her aunts. “Can I think about it overnight?” she asked, and Professor Cooper said of course.
She walked the thirty blocks from the office to Alice’s daycare that evening and knew her answer by the end of the commute. In Manhattan, Julia felt like she was on a path to fulfilling her potential; she was the clear-eyed, powerful woman who had emerged with her daughter’s birth. When Julia pictured herself back in Chicago, that version of herself was weighed down with worry. She had been a wife there; she had misunderstood her husband there; she had made bad decisions there. And it felt complicated to consider being back in the same city as her ex-husband. William had legally given Alice up, and the surname Waters had been removed from Julia’s and Alice’s official documents, but what if William came to a Chicago playground where the baby was, to watch her? What if Julia and Alice happened to walk past him on the street? What if he changed his mind?