“I don’t think you should visit him,” Sylvie said. “Julia would hate that I’m doing it. We shouldn’t all have something to hide from her.”
Cecelia didn’t seem to be listening. She said, “Emmie’s been hammering me about how much pain William must have been in. She wants me to understand, even though it makes no sense to me.”
Emeline nodded in the back seat.
Sylvie said, “I’m glad you’re not mad at me. I couldn’t bear that.”
“That possibility’s not on the table,” Cecelia said, and Sylvie smiled, because she knew her sister meant it. Cecelia had certain nonnegotiables, and during this time of familial turbulence, she would bend in any necessary direction to support her sisters.
When Cecelia dropped Sylvie off at home, Ernie was waiting outside her apartment door. She hadn’t seen him since the night they’d slept together, and she’d thought of him only rarely, but it made sense that Ernie would appear now. Sylvie had started to tell the truth—at least some of it, to some people—which meant she could no longer avoid her previous self.
Who do I want to be now? Sylvie thought. Do I have a choice?
“It’s been a while,” Ernie said, and she agreed. They were both clearly nervous about how this would go. Ernie said that the front door of her building was broken and that she should tell her super. Sylvie said that the door been broken for a while now. Ernie was wearing jeans and a bowling shirt, and she noted—as if adding up numbers in a column—that he looked cute. Sylvie smiled, and he smiled back. She allowed him to take her into his arms and allowed him to kiss her neck.
Then she stepped back, her arms by her sides. There was a buzzing sensation in her body, a kind of warning signal. She told Ernie what had happened after she’d last seen him, and it turned out that Ernie had heard about the lake rescue on the radio. He said, “I can’t believe that was your brother-in-law.”
“Yes,” Sylvie said. “I’m busy helping him and my sister now, so I really don’t have any free time.” She paused. I don’t want you, she thought. I wish I did. I wish I was a normal girl who wanted to sleep with the handsome man in front of her.
“Oh…right,” he said, understanding on his face. They were still in the hallway.
“Maybe I’ll see you at the library?”
“Sure thing,” Ernie said, and then he was gone.
Sylvie leaned against the wall. Because she was clear about what she didn’t want, she was alone. She was no longer who she used to be, and she wasn’t yet whoever she was becoming. She was grateful that her father had prepared her for this type of hard, lonely ground. Because of him, Sylvie knew she could exist outside the boundaries of her past and future selves, for a little while, anyway. Even though it hurt. She understood now, though, why her father had tempered the brutal beauty of this kind of life—this kind of honesty—with alcohol, and why she had always been more comfortable in the library with books than in the world with people.
She was still in the hallway. She wanted to go inside her cozy studio; the scuffed walls and fluorescent lighting of the hall made the scratches of despair inside her deeper, but the discomfort felt necessary. There was a question she needed to ask herself—a question covered with pointy brambles.
What do you want?
Sylvie wouldn’t have asked this question before, because she would have been afraid of the answer, but she wanted to be deeply and truly herself and to experience the world in the deepest and truest way. She’d been compartmentalizing herself for a long time, certainly since her father had died. She was one person with Julia, a slightly more honest person with the twins, and she controlled her own thoughts and feelings, trying to battle herself onto paths she felt like she should be walking. There was only one person Sylvie felt fully herself with: William. She was all of herself with him and even felt there was room for her to become more. When he rested his eyes on her, it was without judgment or expectation, and in that space, Sylvie felt her potential: for bravery, brilliance, kindness, joy. All of these sails rested on the deck of her ship; they were hers, but she hadn’t seen them before. She hadn’t been aware of them prior to the many hours she’d spent in William’s hospital room. Her father’s love had said, Do everything. Be everything. She knew, when she was near William, that she had the capacity to raise these giant, beautiful sails and go.
She thought, I want to be with him, and had to catch her breath at the enormity of this desire. It felt like she’d been holding an umbrella to deny that it was raining, and now the umbrella was gone, and she was standing in a storm. Sylvie was awash in surprise, shame, and sadness because, of course, she couldn’t be with him. Not once he left the hospital, and not in any way that mattered.
* * *
—
One afternoon, Dr. Dembia stopped Sylvie in the hospital corridor. “I’m trying to piece something together, and you might be able to help. William said you’d been talking to him about basketball.”
Sylvie nodded, pleased that the doctor was asking for her assistance. “He likes to talk about it. He’s…happier when he’s talking about basketball.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Why do you think basketball is so important to him?”
“Well, he’s played it since he was a kid. He was on his college team.” Sylvie thought about this. “Have you asked Kent?”
“He said that basketball was William’s first language. That he dribbled a ball more than he spoke when he was a kid.”
“His first language,” Sylvie repeated. That made sense. She had stumbled into speaking William’s first language with him, perhaps the only language he spoke fluently. That was why his pilot light had turned on.
“I do think that’s part of it.” The doctor nodded at a patient walking by but kept her eyes on Sylvie.
“He told me once that his parents didn’t love him,” Sylvie said. “I think they barely spoke to him when he was young.” Hearing the sentence out loud shocked her a little. Rose and Charlie had never stopped speaking to their girls when they were children. Sylvie tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in a home with no affection or laughter and envisioned a cold, echoing space. She saw a little boy dribbling a basketball in order to make a comforting, repetitive sound. Sylvie had the sensation she often had when she was reading a good novel and the story came together suddenly inside her, accompanied by a new understanding.
She said, “Basketball was the first thing in William’s life that loved him back. The only thing that loved him, for a long time.”
“Yes,” Dr. Dembia said, her eyes bright. She was a scientist, and Sylvie had just handed her a useful part of an equation. “That’s it. Yes.”
* * *
—