Sylvie spoke with certainty. “Mama doesn’t want me there.”
The next afternoon at the library, Sylvie saw her mother walk past the wide windows. Rose was still in black, though she no longer had the piece of lace on her head. She walked slowly, with an erect carriage. She didn’t look into the library, even though the chance of her daughter being there was always high. Sylvie didn’t run outside to speak with her either. She stayed frozen at the desk and watched as Rose walked the full length of the windows before she disappeared.
* * *
—
Julia developed a habit of climbing onto the couch with Sylvie in the middle of the night. Because Julia had a new curviness—she wasn’t visibly pregnant to strangers, but she’d had to buy larger bras—this involved Sylvie lying on her side on the very edge of the cushions. She had to wrap her arms around Julia to keep from falling off. The night pulsed around them, and Sylvie was grateful to be crushed against her sister. It was late November; several blurry weeks had passed since their father had died.
“What are we going to do?” Julia whispered.
With her eyes closed, Sylvie could pretend they were in their single beds, in their childhood room. They had, after all, talked back and forth in the darkness for as long as either of them could remember. She said, “You’re going to have a baby. I’m going to qualify for a higher paycheck soon, and I’ll find my own place.”
Sylvie had switched her college focus from English literature to library sciences, because she knew Head Librarian Elaine needed a new librarian and would hire her if she had the necessary qualifications. Every day, Sylvie looked at studio apartments in the classifieds, reassured that with the new job she would be able to afford a tiny studio.
Julia said, “I feel like Beth.”
Sylvie hugged her sister closer. While they were growing up, only Sylvie, Emeline, and Cecelia ever made that pronouncement. Julia had never said she was Beth before. When Julia was sick with the flu or a cold, she drank orange juice and sucked zinc tablets and ate salads, in order to fuel herself to get to the other side. Sickness or disappointment was simply something to be conquered. She wouldn’t even joke about surrendering.
But Julia’s eyes had looked panicked ever since Charlie’s death. Because Sylvie understood her older sister so well, she knew Julia was not only mourning him but reeling from the fact that he had died at all. Julia hadn’t planned for him to die, and that shock threatened her entire worldview. Their father’s absence was, after all, unfixable.
“We’ll figure it out,” Sylvie said. “You’ll come up with a new plan. You always do. It’s probably just hard to do that when you’re pregnant. Give yourself some time.”
“Was I wrong to try to fix everything?” Julia laid Sylvie’s hand on her abdomen. The baby’s movements had become discernible in just the last few days.
Sylvie went quiet, because when the baby did move, the sensation was delicate and impossible to catch unless you were still. She had the thought that Julia’s small bump felt like a drum, but the percussion was inside the instrument. Sylvie felt something and was thrilled: bubbles, perhaps the waving of a tiny hand. “No,” she said. “You weren’t wrong.”
There were moments of quiet, when one sister or the other would almost fall asleep. Only once had they both slept deeply, and William found them curled around each other in the morning. Usually they slid in and out of rest. Sylvie clung to her sister in part because she felt unmoored at night. She was swallowed up by the sky and her blanket and the paper bags holding her clothes. In the darkness, Charlie was missing, and Rose glared in Sylvie’s direction with an anger she didn’t understand but that made Sylvie’s body tighten with guilt nonetheless. Sylvie knew that Cecelia cried at each milestone Izzy reached because she’d lost both her parents and the world her little girl was supposed to grow up in. Rose, brutally silent, two houses away from Cecelia and her granddaughter, was descending deeper and deeper into stubborn grief. The last time Julia had been to see her, Rose sent her away.
Sylvie was almost asleep when her sister said, “After the funeral, William asked to be excused from his teaching-assistant job for the rest of the semester—he told the department that he needed time with me because my father died.”
“That was nice of him.”
“But we need the money. I was counting on it, and he didn’t ask me before talking to his adviser. I’d rather William taught, anyway—this makes a terrible first impression. The professors there are going to think he’s lazy, or soft.” Julia said the word soft as if it was the most damning criticism she could think of.
Sylvie considered this. Her brother-in-law limped around the apartment and smiled at Sylvie to let her know that he didn’t mind her being there, although of course he must. She didn’t feel in a position to criticize him. “Did you tell him any of this?” she said.
“It’s too late to change anything. Will you do me a favor?”
This didn’t need a response, so Sylvie simply waited.
“Will you read his book? He calls it a work in progress. I nagged him until he finally let me read it, and I don’t know what to make of it. At all.” Julia looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “I’ve been avoiding having conversations with him, because I don’t know what to say. You’re the reader—you’ll see what he’s trying to do. And if it has potential to help him? Get a job after graduate school?”
This many question marks from Julia were unusual. We’re all unstitched, Sylvie thought. How much longer can this continue?
“Of course. I’ll read it tomorrow at the library. Or today, depending on what time it is.”
Julia kissed her cheek. “Thank you so much. You can’t tell him you read it, obviously.”
Sylvie tried to read her watch in the dark, a bubble of panic threading up her middle. What time was it? Was it close to dawn? With no sleep, the days took on the emotional cast—and the loud losses—of the night.
* * *
—