William sat on the bench for a long time. He had a flash of anger at Cecelia for tricking him into taking in the visage of his daughter, but the anger was gone as fast as it had come. He made himself look at Alice and Caroline. He made himself look without wincing, without fear that he would extinguish their light and beauty with his gaze. This was the first time he’d ever given his daughter his full attention. Parents shaped their kids; he knew that better than anyone, and he realized now that he must have shaped Alice by his absence, by his silence, even though he’d intended to save her by the same means. This realization was a personal blow, and he said, “I’m sorry,” out loud. His premises had been wrong, and he wondered what else he’d been wrong about.
William knew already that he would visit this wall again, many times. He’d assumed that Cecelia would paint his sister alone, because she usually did individual portraits, but he was grateful that she’d placed his lost sister and lost daughter together. The two girls would exist for as long as this wall stood, in the same neighborhood William had wandered through when he was at his lowest point. The fact that he’d also seen Charlie in this neighborhood didn’t feel like a coincidence, either. Sylvie had written once about Emeline being stuck in a tree when she was a kid and refusing to come down until her father pointed his tractor beam of love at her. Charlie would have chosen this area of the city to haunt so that he could keep loving his family. He would spend his endless days in this playground, admiring his daughter’s art, reading poetry to the two little girls and lighting them up with his affection.
William shook his head, amazed that he could believe in children keeping each other company in a painting and a dead man locomoting through Chicago. As a younger man, he’d believed in very little, and without his noticing, that had changed. William also used to worry about what he did and did not deserve, but no one around him seemed to think in these terms, and it turned out that he no longer did either. He texted his sister-in-law Thank you, and she replied <3. William frowned at his phone, confused, before realizing that Cecelia had sent him back a heart.
Sylvie
November 2008
Sylvie and Julia walked down the sidewalk, past a rickety diner and a taqueria. This was Julia’s second visit, which took place only ten days after her first. She sighed and said, “I did something.”
Sylvie noticed that her sister still looked tired but also calmer, like a knot had unraveled under her skin. “That’s exciting,” she said.
“Sure,” Julia said in a dry tone. “Very exciting. I did something to try to fix the situation with Alice. I had to mess everything up, though, in order to do it, and now she’s angry at me. She might be too angry to ever forgive me.”
Sylvie said, “She knows you love her.”
“More than anything.”
“Then it will probably work out.”
Julia made a sour face. “I’ve always hated the word probably.” She looked upward, as if checking the street signs, then said, “I had everything under control while Alice was young. I mean it. Everything. It was beautiful. I wasn’t prepared for Alice to grow up, though. I don’t know why.”
Sylvie stopped walking. They were across the street from an old movie theater they’d frequented as children, where they’d seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Star Wars, and the Buster Keaton films their father had loved. “Hey, let’s see a movie,” she said.
Julia squinted at the list of titles on the marquee. “I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in years,” she said. “I never have time.”
The movie that was about to start was one neither of them had heard of, but they purchased two tickets anyway. They bought giant tubs of popcorn with extra butter and two massive sodas. Once they were settled in their plush seats, Sylvie looked down and wondered what the popcorn would taste like. Food and drink were beginning to switch up their flavor profiles in her mouth. A donut might taste bitter, even though it was glazed with sugar. Her coffee that morning had tasted like it was doused with maple syrup, even though she hadn’t added any sweetener. Sylvie placed one piece of popcorn in her mouth, tentatively, and was relieved to find that it tasted the same as it had her entire life. Salty and crunchy. This was because she was with Julia, she decided, in this time outside both their real lives. Sylvie’s headaches had recently become more frequent and intense, but she hadn’t had one with Julia by her side; it made sense that with her sister she would also briefly be allowed her normal taste buds.
Sylvie knew she should tell William that she had been reunited with Julia, and she would tell him, soon. These visits with Julia reminded her, though, of the weeks when Sylvie and William’s love had been confined to his dorm room, before Kent found them out. At that time, Sylvie and William had assured each other that what they were doing was less a secret than a delay—a few precious stolen moments—before real life, with its inherent complications, intervened. During those private weeks, she and William had breathed air dense with every molecule of their love and their joy at having found each other. Sylvie felt all of these emotions, this magical alchemy, with her sister now. Sylvie had experienced two great loves in her life, after all: her sisters first, and then William. Sylvie could feel something significant happening inside herself now: She was tying together who she’d been in the first half of her life with who she had become. She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole.
Next week, Sylvie thought. I’ll tell him next week. She knew this delay and her reasons were technically both bullshit and secrets by the terms of her husband’s mantra, but she told herself that the mantra was for the living. She was dying, which meant she could sit next to Julia right now and lie in William’s arms tonight.
The movie turned out to be about car racing and was clearly intended for teenagers. Sylvie laughed whenever a car was about to flip over, while the people around her gasped. She had the realization that she could respond to any stimulus however she wanted. If something sad happened, she didn’t have to cry. In the midst of a climactic scene involving a ten-car pileup, she reached over and held Julia’s hand. They hadn’t touched until now. They’d both been careful not to, because it felt like a parameter that kept them in this liminal place where they got to see each other without it counting. It was the bumpers on the strange bowling lane they were playing within. But Sylvie was running out of time, and she was no longer interested in parameters and rules—even the ones she’d made up.
She felt Julia stiffen for a split second, then relax. She didn’t pull away, and in the dark of the movie theater, the two sisters were ageless. They were ten, and thirteen, and in their forties. Julia was absolutely confident that she could design her own destiny, and Sylvie opened herself to books and the boys who came into the library. There were so many moments, piled on top of one another, and the long period when they had turned away from each other, for better and for worse.
Sylvie thought, This is worth dying for.
A driver with a firm jawline and shocking blue eyes drove in a neat figure eight to avoid an accident. The teenagers in the audience hooted, Sylvie smiled, and Julia held on to her hand. Sylvie thought of the novel she had just started—a classic she’d put off for years, but she no longer had time to put anything off—in which the main character fell asleep while reading, and when he woke, with his brain still foggy, he thought he was what he had been reading about: a horse, or the rivalry between two kings, or a chalet. Sylvie liked this idea, and since she’d read the line, she had been reimagining herself. She was Julia’s wild hair, she was the lake her husband had once been carried out of, and no matter what happened next, she was love.