When Sylvie managed to say the words, the twins responded differently than she would have expected. Cecelia cried, while Emeline got mad.
“Absolutely not,” she said, her voice raised. “No way. That’s not right!”
William looked at Emeline. “Nothing about this situation is right,” he said.
Cecelia said, “You double-checked everything with Kent?”
Sylvie nodded. It was remarkable how deeply they all trusted Kent. He was a sports doctor—not even a general practitioner, and certainly not an oncologist—but they all called him when they had a bad fever or texted him a picture of a cut on the back of a hand to get his opinion on whether stitches were required. Doctor was an unshakable identity, and Sylvie and her family, and all of Kent’s many friends, showed him their wounds and symptoms with a look that said, Can you fix me?
Emeline paced around the kitchen. Cecelia wiped tears off her cheeks, and more came.
“It was supposed to be me,” Emeline said, in a hard voice.
Sylvie and Cecelia stared at her. “Why?” Cecelia said.
“I’m supposed to be Beth, out of all of us. Not you. I always knew I would die first.” Her voice grew quieter. “Beth and I even have the same personality,” she said. “I’m the quiet one, the homebody.”
Sylvie stared at her sister with wonder. Emeline had apparently written a narrative for her own life, and Sylvie had just erased the ending. Emeline must have thought this would be the case since they were little girls. She’d always mothered and protected her sisters, and that meant taking the pain for herself. If there was a bullet, Emeline wanted to step in front of it. She had planned to do so and hated that there could be any other result.
“Oh, Emmie,” Sylvie said. “I’m sorry.”
William said, in a hesitant tone, “Isn’t Beth a fictional character?”
“This is awful,” Cecelia said.
“We can’t bear it,” Emeline said.
A great weariness ran through Sylvie, as if her blood had grown heavy. She thought, We felt that way when Julia moved away. But we got used to her absence, which means you’ll get used to mine too.
* * *
—
LATER THAT NIGHT, SYLVIE sat in bed with a book open in her lap. She was too sleepy to read, but the proximity of the book was comforting. Telling her sisters had required more strength than she’d had, and she was relieved it was over. William was lying next to her; he’d gotten into bed without a book. If he didn’t have the attention span or desire to read, he wouldn’t pretend to. Sylvie had always admired this about her husband. She carried a book at all times—to read, yes, but also as a handy shield for when she wanted to deflect the attention of other people. She would position a book in front of her face and think, or simply hide. For William, a book was picked up only when he wanted to read the contents.
“You and your sisters have so many reference points, such a dense history,” William said. “I never get used to it.”
Sylvie studied his face. She saw something new there, a suggestion that he was considering a long-ago piece of his own history. A reference point of his own. She said, “Are you thinking about your sister?”
William gave his smallest smile. “How could you tell? I haven’t thought of her in…” He paused. “A very long time.”
Sylvie thought, I just knew. She was aware that she had recently begun to think instead of speaking out loud, as if the two were the same thing. As if both carried the same weight and crossed the same distance.
William seemed to hear her, though; he nodded. “I was remembering when I was in high school and I broke my leg. That’s the only time I remember thinking about Caroline when I was a kid. I couldn’t play basketball, and I wanted to be gone, like her. But I think…I think I wanted to be gone in part because I wanted to be with her. I didn’t like living in my house without her. It never occurred to me in so many words, but I missed her.” He paused. “I somehow miss her even though I never knew her. Isn’t that strange?”
Sylvie put her hand over his. They had both seen the raw pain on her sisters’ faces today, when Emeline and Cecelia were forced to consider life without Sylvie. It felt true that if one of the four Padavano sisters had died as a baby, the other three would have missed her—and been missing part of themselves—for the rest of their lives.
“It makes sense to me,” she said, and tightened her grip on William’s hand. She remembered holding his frozen hand in the ambulance, decades earlier. She wanted to hold on now, so tight that nothing could pull them apart.
William
OCTOBER 2008
THREE WEEKS PASSED AFTER WILLIAM had called Julia, and then four. It was the end of October. Was it possible that she wouldn’t come? Julia was the most stubborn and willful person that William had ever known, and his ex-wife certainly wasn’t going to appear in Chicago simply because he’d asked her to. Still, William woke up each morning thinking, Today might be the day. He hadn’t told anyone—not even Kent—about the phone call he’d made. When Sylvie got home from the library each evening, William studied his wife’s face to see if something had occurred. Sylvie had made Cecelia and Emeline swear that they wouldn’t tell Julia or Rose about her illness, so as far as she was aware, all roads to her older sister were blocked. Each evening, Sylvie looked the same, though: a little tired, and happy to see him. Part of William was relieved, despite his belief that Sylvie needed Julia. The idea of his ex-wife, which could also mean his daughter, in his city and life was impossible for him to wrap his mind around. He didn’t try, but the possibility—which he had unleashed—remained in his peripheral vision, as if Julia and Alice stood at the far edge of the horizon.
He’d made it this far because he almost never thought of Alice. He’d successfully closed off that part of his history. He had not allowed himself a daughter, so in his mind, he didn’t have one. This conviction had not been effortless. There were paintings of Alice that he’d had to avoid in Cecelia’s house, and Izzy had gone through a period when she was about ten where she tried to make him talk about his daughter. He’d always liked Izzy; she had no patience for small talk, and he was no good at it. But there had been a time in her childhood when she was painfully direct, and all the adults around her had been stung in one way or another. “You always eat more food than you need,” she’d said to Josie once, and the woman had flushed to her hairline, a forkful of chocolate mousse pie in her hand.
“Why don’t you drive to New York to see Alice?” Izzy had said. “Aren’t you curious what she’s like? What if she’s not okay because you’re not in her life?”
William had forced himself to stay still, to answer. If Izzy had been an adult, he would have left the room. He’d said, “You’re fine without your father.”
Izzy seemed to consider this. “Yes. But I have you and my whole family. Who does Alice have?”
“She has her mother.” This, for William, had always been the bottom line.
Everyone else—Kent, Sylvie, the twins—understood that if they had something to say about Julia or Alice, they said it out of his hearing. This new situation, waiting for a bomb William had lit to explode, or not, was exhausting. William showed up for his days—watched players play, ate lunch with Kent, ate dinner with Sylvie—and waited. He was no longer trying to be comfortable. He was engaged in the long-term project of eradicating the bullshit and secrets from his life and taking care of Sylvie in any way he could think of.