When Cecelia visited next, Julia tried to explain her revelation while giving birth and how different she was now. She said, “Did you feel like an animal?”
Cecelia considered this. “Well, I don’t think I made the kind of noises you made or went quite as feral.” She grinned at her sister. “But I know what you mean, I think. If someone tried to hurt Izzy, I’d rip their face off.”
“You’re more powerful since you had Izzy.”
“Am I?” Cecelia said, with doubt in her voice. Izzy was on her lap. The baby could stand on her own now for a few wobbly moments, but she liked to pat Alice with great enthusiasm, so Cecelia stayed close.
“I convinced William to go to graduate school,” Julia said. “But I’m the one who should have gone. I could have gotten a PhD in organizational psychology or gone to business school. I could run a business, don’t you think?”
Cecelia kissed Izzy’s soft cheek. “I think you’ve got some powerful hormones in your body and you should enjoy them while they last.”
That night, in the shadows, Julia said, “I miss you, Daddy. I wish you could have seen me as a mother. It would have made you smile.”
* * *
—
Julia and William moved into the bigger apartment in July, when Alice was eleven weeks old. The apartment had two bedrooms and a new kitchen, but the living room windows looked out over other buildings instead of the sky and a peaceful quad. Alice woke up less frequently in the night, so Julia slept in bed with the bassinet beside her. Although Julia had wanted to move before Alice’s birth, she’d come to appreciate the timing. This was where she would start her new life. She’d decided, without talking to William, that she’d start working when Alice was six months old. Julia eyed her closet and designated half of it for the business suits she would soon buy. She walked from room to room in the apartment, thinking: When I’m making money, we’ll buy a new sofa to go there and a soft rug for Alice to crawl on.
William was gone for long hours, studying in the library, attending graduate classes, and teaching a summer course. By teaching and taking classes during the summer, he would earn his degree sooner, but he looked exhausted and glassy-eyed when he was home. Now that the baby was a little older, Julia’s sisters visited less often. Cecelia and Emeline had their own apartment—a basement space with a tiny backyard for Izzy—and Sylvie had rented a studio on the top floor of a small building near the Lozano Library. Her sisters were busy, and Julia was no longer their focus.
Once a week, Julia phoned Rose. The call sounded like the long distance it covered: Sometimes there was static, and Rose sat on her condo’s balcony, where she could see a sliver of ocean, so there was noise on her end too. Wind, occasional car honks, perhaps the sea.
“The air is different here,” Rose said. “Softer. Saltier too.”
“Alice can almost roll over,” Julia said. “Did you get the last set of photos? The ones I took in the park?”
“Yes,” Rose said. “She looks healthy. Did I tell you the ladies and I take turns cooking dinner?”
Julia looked down at Alice, who was lying in her lap. The baby was holding and inspecting one of her feet. What a marvel, Alice seemed to be thinking. Look at this craftsmanship. Julia smiled.
She heard her mother say, You have to let me go.
“What did you say?” Julia said.
“I made enchiladas for the first time. They weren’t bad either.”
Julia shook her head to clear it. She said, “Mama, did you feel different after having me? After becoming a mother?”
“What a question! I barely remember that time, Julia. By the time you were Alice’s age, I was pregnant with Sylvie, wasn’t I? I was far too busy to think about how I felt.”
Julia nodded. What had happened seemed to have happened only to her. “I have to go now, Mama. This call is expensive.”
When she hung up, Julia put Alice down for her nap. The baby was always amenable to the idea of sleeping. Each time she was laid in the bassinet, she seemed to set her mind to the task at hand. Alice closed her eyes, a small smile on her lips, and tried her best to sleep.
Julia pulled the shades and lay down on her own bed. She’d figured out why it was her father she’d yearned for since Alice was born. She wanted to explain to Charlie how she now saw the world, because he was the one who would understand. Her father had seen her power—understood its scope—before she had. When Julia told him that she and William were getting married, Charlie had looked disappointed for a split second. That reaction hadn’t made sense to Julia at the time, because she knew her father liked William. But Charlie had stopped calling her his rocket around the same time, and Julia realized now that her father had hoped for more for her. He’d seen her potential and wanted to watch her soar, not marry and make a home. “I can do both, Daddy,” she said now into the room softened with the sound of light baby snores. “I’ll figure out how to do both.”
Sylvie
February 1983–August 1983
There was a three-month gap between when Sylvie stopped sleeping at Julia and William’s apartment and when she got her own place. She’d told Julia that she had an apartment to stay in when she moved out. This wasn’t true, though. She didn’t have anywhere lined up. She’d simply known, the evening she’d forgotten her keys and spoken to William on the bench, that it was time for her to live somewhere else. That was the second time Sylvie had cried since her father’s death; the first was after she’d read William’s manuscript.
She’d been surprised to hear herself talk about how she missed Charlie, and surprised to talk about the stars, and surprised to start crying, and surprised to feel William’s sadness beside her too, as if in answer to her own. It felt like she’d tripped a switch and ended up in a place where she saw her brother-in-law’s true state, and he saw hers. William had recognized the loss she was carrying inside her and spoken it aloud. No one else in Sylvie’s life had identified the specific swirl of her pain; no one had understood her since her father died. That recognition had felt like drawing in giant mouthfuls of air after holding her breath for a long time.