I am the victim, Julia thought. My sisters have given me up and given up Alice too. Forever. Sylvie and William had woven their lives together, and now Julia had to stay away from not only her ex-husband but her closest sister. When she did sleep, Julia had a recurrent nightmare in which an eight-or nine-year-old Alice asked if she could meet her father, and that meeting somehow happened. In the dream, Sylvie stood beside William in the doorway of a nice house, and little Alice ran into Sylvie’s open arms. The scene was so vivid it felt like a memory, and it made Julia want to throw up. The image was a perverse version of the life she’d run away from, with Sylvie standing in Julia’s place. Please, Alice said in the dream, can I go live with my dad and Aunt Sylvie? They’re a normal family, with a mom and a dad. I’d like to be with them.
Julia heard herself say, “I’m going to tell Alice that William’s dead.”
“What?” Rose almost choked on the word. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. He wants nothing to do with her, and I don’t want to tell her that. She’ll think there’s something wrong with her, and there obviously isn’t. She’s perfect. And he is dead, as far as I’m concerned. We’re not going back to Chicago, ever. This way everything will be cleaner.” This idea had occurred to Julia before, but it had seemed too extreme. Now it no longer did. It made sense. She and Alice would be safe in Manhattan, alone in their tiny family. No one would be able to hurt them again.
“William and Sylvie will probably break up. Sylvie’s like your father, which means she lacks follow-through. You should just live your life in New York for a little while, and let’s see where the cards fall.”
Julia knew her mother was unable to accept that William had revoked his parental privileges. Her brain couldn’t make sense of a parent giving up a baby. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Rose had said, and that was the end of the idea for her.
“I wouldn’t tell Alice now, obviously,” Julia said. “She’s not even two.”
“Good,” Rose said, with relief in her voice. “You’ll calm down in time. Everything will calm down. I love you, Julia.”
This was how Julia knew her mother felt bad for her. She very rarely said those words out loud. “I love you too,” she said, and they hung up.
Over the following weeks, Julia changed her approach to her job. She’d been so grateful to Professor Cooper for allowing her to join him in New York that she’d dedicated herself to simply being helpful to him. She processed the data he collected in stakeholder interviews and took notes during large meetings where new business processes were debated. She also made coffee runs and spent a lot of time at the Xerox machine. Julia had done everything possible to make sure that Professor Cooper didn’t regret hiring her.
Now, though, Julia recalled the future she’d dreamed about, in which she was behind a boss’s desk, wearing stiletto heels and an expensive suit. She didn’t know if that dream was achievable, but it might be. Sylvie dating William had been impossible, and yet it happened. Clearly, life was more alterable than Julia had thought.
Julia wanted to be promoted. She wanted to earn more money and make her and Alice’s life as stable—and untouchable—as possible. A month after Emeline left, Professor Cooper asked Julia to sit in on a meeting and take notes. She did, but she also interrupted the meeting to offer a few ideas. Julia enjoyed watching the men’s heads—it was always all men in these meetings—turn in surprise, because her ideas were smart. Six months later, Julia asked Professor Cooper if she could take the initial meeting with a new, smaller client, and he agreed. She prepared for weeks—learning everything about the electronics company that was looking to merge with a competitor, thus duplicating its own staff—and presented a plan to restructure the combined companies that was so elegant the client asked her to be in charge of the entire process. When this call came in, Professor Cooper toasted Julia with champagne. “I’m so proud of you,” he said, and Julia had to excuse herself to cry in a bathroom stall. They were happy tears, and she felt that Charlie was proud of her too, wherever he was. My rocket, he said, with wonder in his voice.
Julia became aware for the first time that men were making signals at her. She simply hadn’t noticed before. There was a nice-looking bearded man who always stood next to her in the office elevator in the mornings. She complimented his cuff links. He asked her out for a drink. While getting dressed for the date—putting on perfume and a darker eyeshadow than she would wear to the office, choosing a dress that showed off her curves—Julia laughed out loud, because she felt like she’d just remembered that she had a physical body for the first time since Alice was born. When she smoothed her hands over her hips, her entire body tingled, as if excited for a better future.
She told the bearded man the same thing she would tell every man she dated: that she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend or a husband, and she would never bring him home to her apartment. She just wanted to have some fun. She and the bearded man drank martinis at a rooftop bar in a rose-colored twilight and then made out on the street, pressed up against a city mailbox. They went on a second date the following weekend; he took her to a Yankees game and they had sex on the floor of his kitchen because they were unable to make it to the bedroom. It was fun, and Julia felt like she had optimized her life: She had a great job, a perfect daughter, and a sexual life on her own terms. Two years after Emeline’s visit, Professor Cooper announced that Julia would be in charge of the New York City branch of his business consultancy. He and Donny would travel back and forth between Chicago and New York, but Julia would run the New York office.
Julia told her mother and the twins the good news on postcards. She’d started to collect postcards featuring various New York City scenes to correspond with her family. She much preferred postcards to phone calls. There was only a small space to write, so she included one or two highlights from her and Alice’s life, wrote xoxoxo, and sent the card off. Rose hated the postcards and claimed that only a psychopath would communicate with her own mother that way. To appease Rose, Julia mailed her a few photos of Alice every couple of weeks, in addition to the cards. Cecelia and Emeline sent Chicago postcards in return, as if they were entering their city into a postcard competition, and Cecelia and Julia occasionally exchanged photos of Izzy and Alice. Julia and Sylvie never corresponded, in any way.
If Julia was with her daughter when she spotted a colorful postcard in the gray locked mailbox in the foyer of the building, she never let Alice see it. She tucked the postcard in her purse, and after she’d read it, she threw it away in a street garbage can. She threw away the photographs of her niece too. Julia read most of the postcards standing alone on a busy sidewalk, buses and taxis swooshing by. That was how she learned that Emeline, Josie, and Cecelia had moved into a new house together. That was how she found out Sylvie and William had gotten married, in a small ceremony in the back room of the Lozano Library.
William
OCTOBER 1984–SEPTEMBER 1988
ONCE EMELINE HAD RETURNED FROM New York City, exhausted and pale, William was careful not only with himself but with Sylvie and the twins too. He had an appreciation for living in the center of a hard truth. Kent had been right: William couldn’t do otherwise. During the months of total secrecy, when he and Sylvie had limited their love to his small room, William’s mind had grown confused, and he’d had to steer his thoughts to get through the days. It hadn’t resembled the final months of his marriage, because Sylvie made him soft with happiness, and in the tiny dorm room they shared everything with each other. But the friction between life inside that room and the outside made him feel like a record needle being dragged across the vinyl surface.