It was Rose who’d once mentioned, while her granddaughter was visiting, that her aunt Cecelia was an artist. Alice had tried to find her aunt’s paintings during high school, but she’d had no idea where to look. Cecelia’s work wasn’t in museums or art history books. Alice had also known that, while she was living at home, anything she did find would have to be hidden from her mother. She’d decided that she would renew the search in college, when her belongings and pastimes would be out of her mother’s purview. The promise of searching for Cecelia’s art and being able to display it was one of the carrots Alice had used to convince herself to look forward to life at college, and it had delivered; the wall above her desk was her favorite view. When Gloria went out to parties, Alice stayed in their room, reading or just gazing at the wall in front of her. The more images she was able to add, the more satisfied she felt.
“She’s gotten so good,” Julia murmured. She was leaning against the desk now, to get as close to the display as possible.
“Did you notice?” Alice could feel her heart beating in her chest. “You and I are in the murals.”
Julia gave her daughter a look that was difficult to read—there was incredulity and fear in it—and returned her attention to the images.
Most of the murals, and therefore most of Alice’s wall, were portraits of women. They were close-ups, painted with bright colors on brick walls. There was one particular woman’s face that appeared on a few buildings and on the underside of an overpass. In most of the paintings, her eyes were open; on one wall they were closed. There was something ancient about her face—she looked like she was from another time. The murals weren’t all individual portraits; there was one image that Rhoan had enlarged of a group of children, perhaps twenty in all. The caption said that the mural was located in a Chicago playground. The children were smiling; they looked like someone had just told them great news. In the back row of the group was a white girl with blond-brown hair that was unmistakably Alice, around the age of ten.
“I sent Cecelia pictures of you when you were little,” Julia said, again in a muffled voice, as if she weren’t speaking to the people in this room.
“There’s you,” Alice said, and pointed. The picture showed a wall that had been painted bright blue, overlaid with the outline of a woman’s face. Ferocious curls flooded the space around her. Her chin was held high. This portrait was different from the others—more spare. It was Julia, unquestionably, but only those who knew her intimately would ever know.
The room was quiet; Gloria was at a biology lab and would be gone until dinner. Julia looked pale, and Alice knew that if she touched her mother’s hand, it would be clammy. “Sit down if you feel faint,” she said.
“I’m not going to faint.”
“I just like her art,” Alice said. “I haven’t contacted her or anything. You don’t have to worry.”
Julia looked from the wall to her daughter. Her lipstick was bright against the pallor of her face. She looked like she was going to speak, but she didn’t. She nodded instead.
The mother and daughter walked quietly through the cold to a nearby Italian restaurant. Once they were seated, the restaurant buzzing around them, Julia started to revive. She seemed to remember who she was and why she was there. “I took on a client in Boston,” she said. “I met with them today. Of course”—she smiled at her daughter—“my decision was helped by the fact that this gives me a reason to come to Boston and see you. It’s lonely for me in New York.”
Alice missed her mother too. But she felt lonely right now at the table with her. She knew her mother was about to ask her if she’d decided on a major—she hadn’t—and if she had a boyfriend—she didn’t—and if she was having fun. But she also knew that a part of herself and a part of Julia were still standing side by side in front of the wall of images, looking at their own faces, as painted by a woman in another city, from Julia’s other life.
Alice remembered the time in middle school when she had passed her mother in height and realized that Julia was not a perfect superhero, that her mother was a human woman, which meant she had flaws and a past, which seemed to be at one with her wild hair. Alice had spent her life watching her mother try to harness both her hair and her past, wrapping them up, trying to impose her control on them every single day. Wishing she were back in her room, alone in front of the wall of pictures, Alice thought: She’s done the same with me.
Sylvie
September 2008
Sylvie left the library early. She told the assistant librarian that she had a headache. She walked home by her usual route, past Cecelia’s murals. Pilsen looked particularly colorful that late-September afternoon, and Sylvie was glad to be surrounded by her sister’s art. Whenever she visited the twins’ houses, Sylvie traveled the halls to see if any portraits had been added or removed. She was guaranteed to see all the women in her life: her sisters, her nieces, her mother, and herself. Part of Sylvie’s desire to go home early today was to visit the piece of Cecelia’s art that hung in her own living room: the landscape Cecelia had painted for William shortly after he left the hospital.
Sylvie let herself into the quiet apartment with her key. William wouldn’t be home for a few hours. She felt her shoulders relax. The space was peaceful and designed exactly to their liking. She and William rarely entertained here; big communal dinners happened at the super-duplex, and Kent was a foodie, so he always suggested they meet at restaurants he wanted to try. The apartment was where she and William didn’t have to mute their love or pay attention to anyone else. They liked to be in the same room, so Sylvie would read next to William while he watched basketball games with the volume off. When Sylvie cooked, she prepared meals she knew delighted her husband: any kind of pasta, any kind of stew. When William cooked, the recipe usually included chickpeas, because they were Sylvie’s favorite.
She leaned against the back of the couch and studied the painting of wind, rain, and light. The landscape had always looked like hope to her, and Sylvie needed some. She’d been to see her doctor the week before, because of an odd, recurring headache. Sylvie was able to see the pain when it arrived: It was lavender and emanated from somewhere near her right temple in concentric rings. Sylvie had drawn the headache on a piece of paper for the doctor, and he’d sent her to see a specialist. The specialist had run tests. Sylvie lay in an MRI machine, strangely proud of her ability to lie perfectly still, because it pleased the technician. Sylvie hadn’t mentioned her headaches to William or the twins, and she didn’t tell them she was going to the doctor. She’d assumed the headaches would turn out to be nothing, or perhaps a symptom of perimenopause. She was forty-seven years old, after all.
The specialist, a man who spoke at a fast clip—presumably because he was in so much demand and therefore had so little time—told her that there was a tumor in her brain. Sylvie nodded in response, to be polite. He talked about the location of the tumor and the size. He used the word terminal. Sylvie nodded again, listened some more, and then left his office. The building she exited was near Northwestern, and she decided to walk home. She didn’t pay any attention to her direction; she knew that, like a homing pigeon, her body would take itself to Pilsen.