On Christmas Day, when William surveyed every inch of her apartment except where Sylvie was standing, when his gaze surgically cut around her until she felt, again, like a ghost, she’d chased after him in the snow. She was angry. She planned—to the extent that she planned anything during the bus ride—to show up in his dorm and make him look at her. That’s all she intended to do. But in his presence, gazing at his sweet, sad face and the blue eyes that haunted her dreams, she wanted more. She wanted peace and the ability to lie in bed without feeling like she was going to explode. She wanted to speak the words manacled inside her. She wanted everything, because she could feel the walls they had both erected to hold back their desires, and she could sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls.
When they finally kissed, in the middle of William’s tiny living room with snow falling outside, the pressure within Sylvie disappeared. Her body light, she experienced a new kind of joy and meaning. Sylvie thought, This is why we live. She and William held each other and talked: Sylvie into William’s chest and he into her hair. In between sentences and sometimes words, they kissed. Sylvie ran her hands across his shoulders, through his hair. She’d been wanting to touch him for so long that the pleasure almost ached through her, and the closeness of their bodies made it hard for her to concentrate on their conversation. She wanted everything at once. She’d been lonely and fractured since Charlie died. She’d been lying to Julia since she moved out of her and William’s apartment. The evening on the bench had opened William and Sylvie to each other, and she’d tried to run away from that connection, but her efforts to escape had throttled her. In his arms, she was able to breathe deeply for the first time in almost a year.
Neither of them bothered with punctuation, and neither worried that they might offend the other. They simply shared their feelings, which, on some level, each already knew. Sylvie told William how she had felt seen on the bench and had seen him too, in his footnotes, and he told her that he felt an ease with her, a wholeness, that he’d never felt in his life. “We can’t tell anyone,” she whispered, and he agreed. Sylvie told herself that they weren’t breaking the terms of William’s mantra, because there were no secrets between them. Their love and honesty would have to stay inside this room, but this room felt enormous after the confines of Sylvie’s body.
Sylvie imagined her father smiling in approval as she and William sidestepped labels and held each other in the shadows. She returned to his small set of rooms the night after Christmas, and almost every night after that. With William, Sylvie felt free to unfurl. She showed him the scenes she’d written about her life with her family when she and her sisters were young. She told him about the conversation with Charlie behind the grocer’s shop. She delighted in the fact that she could show and tell William anything that came into her head without worrying that he would misunderstand or think her strange. She recited the terrible jokes a library patron—an old man with Coke-bottle glasses—shared with the librarians every afternoon, and some of them were so ridiculous that she and William laughed until they had tears in their eyes. Sylvie was everything with him: silly, sad, inspired, contented in every cell of her body.
“Our relationship doesn’t feel like a relationship to me, anyway,” she said one evening, while he was watching a Bulls game on his small television. She had been sitting next to him, dipping in and out of a novel. The game was turned low, and the door was double-locked, to give Sylvie time to hide in the bathroom if anyone knocked. She slept in William’s room a few nights a week, which involved leaving before dawn and being quiet so William wouldn’t get in trouble.
“What does it feel like?” he said, without looking away from the screen.
“Like all the walls have been knocked down. Like we’re past needing a roof or doors. They’re irrelevant.”
“So we’re outside.” He turned his head and smiled at her. It was his new smile, which had appeared after their first kiss. William used to smile rarely, and when he did, the smile looked obedient, like he knew the moment called for a smile and so his face pulled the correct levers to form one. Sylvie wanted to spend the rest of her life causing this new smile. William’s face looked alive, and grateful, and happy. Sylvie knew William was happy with her, knew he was grateful; he whispered his happiness into her skin at night.
He also wanted to keep their relationship secret forever, which to him meant until Sylvie came to her senses and broke up with him. William didn’t feel like this contradicted his mantra; this secrecy was actually just a delay tactic, a moment of stolen joy before they gathered the strength to walk away from each other. “I don’t deserve this,” he said almost daily, until Sylvie told him to please not say it anymore. But he said it again now, because he couldn’t help himself.
She said, “Do I deserve happiness and wholeness?”
“Of course.”
“Then do this for me.”
“Love you for you?” William stood to switch off the TV. Hung above the television was the painting Cecelia had recently dropped off. William had told Sylvie about how Cecelia was flustered when she showed it to him. “I always paint portraits,” she’d said. “But I like a challenge. I’m not sure what this is, but technically something about it works.” Sylvie thought the painting was beautiful. If she hadn’t known her sister painted it, she never would have guessed. It was part landscape, part exploration of light, and rain. Sylvie remembered Cecelia telling her sisters that she wanted to paint rain like Van Gogh painted stars. There was pelting water on the canvas, intermixed with faint light. It was the light that drew your eye.
“I’m going to love you no matter what,” William said. “But I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I couldn’t bear to hurt you, Sylvie. I’m supposed to be alone. What is your family going to say? What about Julia?” He grimaced as he said her name. “Those memories you’re writing down. Most of them are about you and her.”
“Well, of course. They’re about the four of us.”
William shook his head sadly. She could hear him thinking, No bullshit, no secrets. He said, “I can tell how much you miss your sister, when I read your writing.”
Sylvie was annoyed, enough to motivate her to close her book, push her nightgown and toothbrush back into her purse, and leave. She walked through the campus toward the bus stop, the cold air chilling her hot cheeks. She was annoyed at herself for overreacting to what William had said. She would phone him when she got back to her apartment. He was right, of course. For her, this was about Julia. William wanted them to stay secret so they could walk away from each other without anyone else being pulled into, or even knowing about, their orbit. Sylvie wanted to keep their love secret because of her older sister. When she tried to imagine what it would be like if Julia found out that she and William were in love, Sylvie had to shake her head hard to dispel the images of heartbreak. Julia would hate her; Sylvie was betraying her; the only solution was that no one could know.
It was March, and Julia and Alice had been gone for almost five months. Professor Cooper’s project had been extended, and Julia, without consulting anyone in the family, had decided to stay in New York. “For how long?” Cecelia had asked her on the phone. “We’ll see,” Julia said. “I miss you, but Alice and I are doing well here.” Sylvie had been relieved to hear about the delay. She and her older sister spoke twice a month after Alice was in bed at night; they traded off on initiating the expensive long-distance call. Neither she nor Julia mentioned the tension embedded in their goodbye; they both pretended that hadn’t happened. Julia was always tired from a long day of work, but she was excited too, about the city, about the smart people she worked with, about the clothes the women in New York wore. She sounded shiny, burnished by exhilaration, and more alive than she’d been in a long time. “Tell me about you,” Julia would say to Sylvie when she was done sharing her news. “I miss you. Tell me everything.” And Sylvie would talk about the fringes of her life—her job, the leaky sink in her studio, the last time she’d babysat Izzy—but leave out what mattered.